The recent layoffs in August of more than 250 Mozilla employees, a quarter of its workforce, left the company shaking and the community worried about the future of the Firefox maker.
The entire Servo team (A new browser engine in development since 2012), many developers working on MDN (Mozilla’s web development documentation portal) beside people working on various aspects of the company were laid off.
Yet, instead of being transparent on why these layoffs happened and based on what criteria, and what will be the new company’s strategy to increase its current 4% browser marketshare instead of losing it, we get a new initiative from Mozilla called “Unfck The Internet” (Yes, that’s the official name they chose), which as they say, aims to “stop companies like Facebook and YouTube from contributing to the disastrous spread of misinformation and political manipulation”.
But this isn’t just a one-time off initiative from Mozilla. Over the past few years Mozilla has been throwing tons of money and resources on similar social issues and projects of the Internet rather than developing their own main product, which is why they were here in the first place: Firefox.
As a background story one should know that there are two entities here: Mozilla Foundation and Mozilla Corporation. The corporation is the one developing Firefox (And hence collects money from search agreements, other services… etc) while the Foundation is the only one receiving donations, hence there’s no direct way of donating to Firefox development. But the Corporation also funds the Foundation. The donations you do to Mozilla Foundation are never used to develop Firefox, but rather, to projects that promote the Mozilla Manifesto.
This situation leaves the scene complex in terms of who to blame; Firefox browser (Controlled by the Corp) is the one generating the profit, but the profit goes to fund the Foundation as well. Yet, people get laid off because there’s no money, despite the “fellowships & awards” category at Mozilla’s blog showing an at least +$10 million spending (With help of other funds) on these social activities and other web projects just in the last two months.
In addition to these tremendous donations for these social issues, Mozilla’s chair was found to be getting a delicious $2.4 millions per year (Due to the CEO and chair roles together). The salary went up by 400% from 2010 despite the browser’s market share declining by 85% up to 2018. The 2019 and 2020 data are still not released yet to see how much they are affected.
What’s ironic is that in the blog post on laying off the 250 employees, Mozilla’s chair cited “economical difficulty due to Covid-19” as the main reason for the layoffs. But Mozilla’s chair response to a possible paycut to her own salary was that “it was too much” for her handle:
What’s more ironic is that last May, Mozilla was “helping others” through Covid-19 and distributed $150,000 on 3 open source projects related to Covid-19 fighting efforts. But looks like it forgot to help itself.
This type of spending isn’t news; The Mozilla Foundation donated $539,000 for various open source projects in 2017:
- $194,000 to Ushahidi; An open source crowd-funding platform for victims of governments political abuse.
- $125,000 to WebPack; An open source JavaScript module loader.
- $100,000 to RiseUp, a set of toolkits for activities in dictatorship countries.
- $50,000 to Phaser, an open source HTML5 game engine.
- $70,000 for mod_md, an Apache module which speaks ACME.
And one can’t also forget Mozilla’s $25 million acquisition of Pocket in 2017, a read-later service, just to include it by default inside Firefox.
All of this mismanaged spending comes in hard times where the browser is facing huge challenges and is almost ceasing to exist; Just 0.47% marketshare on the phones and less than 8.20% on the desktop. And the userbase keeps declining each day as more users report non-working websites, bugs and performance issues under Firefox, just like in IE and NetScape days.
Maybe Mozilla actually needs to hire more people to make Firefox better so that users may switch back to it, instead of firing a quarter of its workforce. Perhaps serious attention to the issues Firefox users are suffering from is more important than an AI-powered monitoring tool for political misinformation.
Google currently controls 95% of the web due to its Blink engine in Chromium, and hence has no issue in forcing its own standards and initiatives without thinking of other browsers. Google plans – for example – to introduce what’s known as Web Bundles, breaking all privacy efforts and ad-blocking capabilities in the last two decades. But if Mozilla is ever to compete, then it needs to fix all of this mess.
It could be helpful for Mozilla to:
- Find a direct way where people can directly donate to Firefox development.
- Invest more in services related directly to the web browser. Their Firefox VPN is a good start because an average user is expected to trust the Firefox browser maker way more than things like ExpressVPN or NordVPN, regardless of the actual features or pricing, but more services need to come forth in this direction.
- Detach the Mozilla Foundation spending from the Corp, so that the money coming from the browser stays in the browser, instead of going to some mickey-mouse festival somewhere.
But with the current situation and where things are going, it looks like Mozilla’s executives are “milking” the cow before finally giving up on it to slaughter. What’s better than filling a warm pocket with cash of a dying corp?
Perhaps it would be more beneficial for Mozilla to unfck itself from its current situation before trying to unfck US elections, misinformation online or YouTube recommendations algorithm.
Otherwise, your favorite Firefox browser is sadly expected to die soon.
Hanny is a computer science & engineering graduate with a master degree, and an open source software developer. He has created a lot of open source programs over the years, and maintains separate online platforms for promoting open source in his local communities.
Hanny is the founder of FOSS Post.
People reacted to this story.
Show comments Hide commentsAfter all these years I have a good reason to begin my search. The buck stops at the Top who thinks she is necessary and unreplaceable. Where to go and who will follow.
Mozilla is no longer a software company, they’re clearly a propaganda outlet now. This may sound like the outlandish claim of a crazy hater, but just read this article. They don’t even try to hide it. It’s all about politics now, what little software remains under their umbrella is nothing more than their vehicle for spreading the propaganda. They will keep pretending they care about software, but they don’t.
I want to thank you for your service in Vietnam…..
They also totally ignore their users with all the random “UI improvements” nobody asked them to do. Remember latest address-bar enlargement bs or forcing android users to switch to an underdeveloped browser for that? They clearly not about quality software anymore.
Mozilla ain’t what it used to be……
I wonder if embedding popular JS libraries inside the browser for accelerated SIMD parsing would be a viable idea.
I’ve been dedicated to Firefox since it’s first release. I stuck with Firefox even when it had its rough times (remember the memory leaks) despite the flaws, it was “good enough”, and I could customize my experience as I wanted with the add-ons. Most importantly I knew I was using the web browser that had my best interest at heart.
Then things started to changed. I didn’t even notice the changes. Life’s busy I have more to do then keep up with Mozilla. Finally I was rudely awaken with a single unwanted update to my mobile Firefox. How could they actually publish something so bad, much less as a replacement for the old version that was working fine. Unlike the flaws I live with before this was way different. Somethings you can’t live with. So with heavy heart I changed my mobile browser. I didn’t even know where to turn. I found Vadali and that what I’m using for now. I’m still hoping for Mozilla will get their stuff together. We need them. Yes, Mozilla is a champion of Internet freedom, but if they do not focus on their software they’ve lost the war.
You guys all seem to think that Mozilla was born out of an open source, people first mindset. It was not. It was born from Netscape. Read up on Netscape (if you were too young to have experienced the early internet). Netscape was interested in one thing… big bucks anyway it could find it. They went IPO, the considered lots of money making options. They sold to AOL for more money.
They weren’t interested in changing the world, they were interested in making money (I’m not saying this is a bad thing). You guys just really need to see the reality of this instead of creating a false fantasy.
When Netscape created Mozilla, the brain trust went with it. Part of Mozilla focus was open source, people first but it has always been guided by the Netscape culture. You need to understand this culture to understand Mozilla.
Every company has a personality: Google, Microsoft, Apple, etc… The old culture brings in new people, they train these newcomers to think and work like them… the personality persists. Understand Netscape (read wikipedia) and you’ll finally understand Mozilla.
The big difference between Mozilla and Netscape is the influence open source advocates have brought to the foundation. How much influence? Apparently… not enough since the browser continues to play second fiddle to the foundation and 250 lost their jobs while those “in the Netscape culture/personality” continued to rake in millions.
Why not fork without the same C-suite? Seriously, what keeps the developers from jointly forming to a new entity with a new brand? Or go on strike until they leave? So, there seem to be more people involved in milking the mutated, angry dinosaur than the C-suite, otherwise that would already have happened.