The Mozilla Firefox laid off 70 people this past week right after the holidays. Mozilla is saying it’s a must to help them cut spending going forward. The company who employs about 1,000 people says the cuts are necessary in order to put money towards innovation going forward.
Firefox is in a tough spot with about 10% of the browser market worldwide and one of the only browsers not based on the open-source Chromium web browser. Firefox who has had a tough run trying to get traction on mobile is due to have products coming out like a VPN service for $4.99 which has not launched yet.
Firefox hit a wall back in 2017 after 7 years of working on the Firefox OS that was built entirely on Web technologies didn’t get significant traction from smartphone makers, and Mozilla ultimately abandoned it after development since 2010.
Firefox makes the majority of its money from Google paying hundreds of millions of dollars to be the default search engine in Firefox. Google has been Mozilla’s primary customer as of late but Mozilla has also had deals with Yahoo! And other search providers. These deals have accounted for more than 90 percent of Mozilla’s revenue.
Firefox while being a great browser has been steadily declining for at least a decade. But Firefox is not alone as Microsoft Edge and Internet Explorer have lost tremendous market share due to the popularity of Google Chrome. It’s important to realize as well that unlike a decade ago there are many more options in the browser market. Not only do you have Chrome, Edge, Safari and Firefox you have others edging their way into the market like Opera, Brave, AVG, Avast, and many others.
Mozilla is looking into other forms of revenue as being dependent on a single revenue stream is never good in business.