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posted by chromas on Thursday August 13 2020, @05:55AM   Printer-friendly
from the here-today,-gone-tomorrow dept.

Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products

The Mozilla Corporation announced today it was laying off approximately 250 staff members in a move to shore up the organization's financial future.

The layoffs were publicly announced in a blog post today. Employees were notified hours before, earlier this morning, via an email [PDF] sent by Mitchell Baker, Mozilla Corporation CEO and Mozilla Foundation Chairwoman.

Baker's message cited the organization's need to adapt its finances to a post-COVID-19 world and re-focus the organization on new commercial services.

[...] In 2018, the Mozilla Corporation said it had around 1,000 full-time employees worldwide. Mozilla previously laid off 70 employees in January. Several sources have told ZDNet that the recent layoffs accounted for nearly a quarter of the organization's workforce.

Main casualties of today's layoffs were the developers working on the company's experimental Servo browser engine and Mozilla's threat management security team. The latter is the security team that investigates security reports and performs incident response. The security team that fixes bugs in Mozilla products is still in place, according to sources and a Mozilla spokesperson.

Changing World, Changing Mozilla

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Also at TechCrunch and The Verge.


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  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 13 2020, @12:39PM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 13 2020, @12:39PM (#1036101)
    1. When Chrome came out, between the money Google poured into development and the money Google poured into promoting it, Firefox started losing millions or even tens of millions of users per month. So continuing to develop the same features and same UI they had before was not working. Maybe chasing Chrome UI and extensions API was the wrong move, but they had to do something because business as usual was going to kill them. Everyone bashing Mozilla for screwing up seems to be asserting they would be better off if they hadn't changed a thing. They tried that first, it didn't work.
    2. Do you really think the money they spent on a fucking diversity program could fund 250 full time employees? What exactly do you think they're doing, buying Ferraris for a hundred black women? Mozilla's participation in Outreachy covers 20 people working six months total each year, and while those people in the program are paid, they're not collecting senior staff salaries.

    "They hired 20 people that aren't white cis men for six months! Reverse discrimination!!!!!! It's ruining Mozilla!!!!!" Mozilla Foundation demographics before the layoffs was 75% male, 75% white, 15% Asian-descent. It's not like they've turned white cis men into an oppressed minority. But keep being a crybaby about it, I'm sure your opinion is very important.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 14 2020, @07:56AM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 14 2020, @07:56AM (#1036462)

    You know what? There are times when it's best to stay calm and don't panic. We have a clear proof that what Mozilla did was not the right move and a bunch of dedicated users complaining about Mozilla having ruined a great browser. When a giant monopoly jumps in, with an even greater position than that of your previous foe, it will naturally show a huge change on the numbers. What gained Firefox usage in the war against IE was crowsourced advertising, not an attempt to copy IE. The reason people started using Chrome was not because it was better, they were being spoonfed Chrome through Google's market dominance. Now it's too late to use the old trick of community advertising, because the browser now suck compared to Chrome.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 14 2020, @11:46AM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 14 2020, @11:46AM (#1036505)

      Firefox was much faster and more stable than IE. That's one of the reasons everyone switched. Chrome was dramatically faster than Firefox until Firefox 57, which is relatively recent, and even then the gap only narrowed but did not go away. That's one of the reasons, though not the only one, that people switched to Chrome.

      And the people complaining about changes? All available evidence it's a vocal minority, because more than a hundred people switched to Chrome before Firefox changed anything.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 14 2020, @09:33PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 14 2020, @09:33PM (#1036769)

        Are you a satisfied Firefox user?