Mozilla to lay off 250 people, new plans focus on making money

Mozilla has announced in a blog post that it is laying off 250 people, that’s a quarter of its workforce. Going forward, the company spokesperson said that they will be operating with about 750 employees and plan to refocus some of its teams on projects to make money.

Mozilla CEO Mitchell Baker wrote on the blog post that the global pandemic has significantly impacted their revenue and as a result the pre-Covid work plan in not longer workable.

“So going forward we will be smaller. We’ll also be organizing ourselves very differently, acting more quickly and nimbly. We’ll experiment more. We’ll adjust more quickly,” Baker wrote.

The company’s Taipei operations have been closed due to these layoffs. Mozilla has not mentioned which teams will be impacted by these departures though. This is not the first time Mozilla has laid off people this year, the company fired 70 employees in January blaming the slow rollout of new revenue products.

Baker laid out a series of new areas that Mozilla is going to focus on to set a stronger course for the company and this includes building a community, and new products that can mitigate harms and those that people will love and want to use. Most crucially, though, the plan is to build out new revenue streams.

Mozilla makes the most money from companies that pay to make their search engine “the default in Firefox”. This includes deals with Baidu (China), Yandex (Russia) and Google (the US and the rest of the world). The company also makes money from royalties, advertising and subscriptions but that’s not a majority of its revenue.

Baker wrote in the blog that Mozilla will initially focus on products like Pocket, its VPN service, VR chatroom Hubs and new security and privacy tools. Mozilla started launching paid services over the past year along with news subscriptions and access to a VPN directly from the browser.

Firefox is also going to focus more strongly on user growth through “differentiated user experiences”. This indicates that Mozilla plans to reduce investments on other areas like building developer tools.

With Firefox’s market share dwindling and attempts to create bigger projects like Firefox OS for phones falling through, it’s been a rough decade for Mozilla. Baker’s post indicates that she recognises that Mozilla needs to listen to people and build products they would want to use on platforms they already have.