Mozilla announced today that it is laying off 250 employees, the second time this year that it’s been forced to do so. The problem? Its flagship product, Firefox, is losing users and thus revenues at an alarming rate.
“Today we announced a significant restructuring of Mozilla Corporation,” Mozilla CEO Mitchell Baker writes in the announcement post. “This will strengthen our ability to build and invest in products and services that will give people alternatives to conventional Big Tech. Sadly, the changes also include a significant reduction in our workforce by approximately 250 people. These are individuals of exceptional professional and personal caliber who have made outstanding contributions to who we are today. To each of them, I extend my heartfelt thanks and deepest regrets that we have come to this point. This is a humbling recognition of the realities we face, and what is needed to overcome them.”
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According to Baker, Mozilla initially intended to make significant investments in Firefox, one of the few remaining Chromium holdouts in the browser space, in 2020. But with COVID ravaging the planet, the firm has had to step back and reassess its priorities. And face a new reality in which Firefox is struggling with single-digit usage share and Mozilla, as a company, is smaller.
“We’ll experiment more,” Baker writes. “We’ll adjust more quickly. We’ll join with allies outside of our organization more often and more effectively. We’ll meet people where they are. We’ll become great at expressing and building our core values into products and programs that speak to today’s issues. We’ll join and build with all those who seek openness, decency, empowerment and common good in online life.”
Of course, Mozilla’s fall has been a long time coming, and as recently as 2018, Firefox still had north of 10 percent usage share. But with Microsoft announcing that it would adopt the Chromium browser engine in late 2018, it appeared that Firefox would soon have a new foe to worry about, and as I argued at the time, Mozilla and Firefox are going to have to change to adapt to this reality. They have not done so quickly enough.
And so in August 2019, Mozilla’s CEO stepped down and was replaced by Baker, the former CEO. Then, in January 2020, the firm laid off 70 employees as the losses continued.
My advice remains the same: Mozilla needs to adopt Chromium and stop wasting resources trying to match the capabilities of the industry standard. Like Brave, Microsoft, Opera, Vivaldi, and the others that build browsers on top of Chromium, Mozilla can continue to add value to its own product, and it will save a lot of time and money doing so.
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<blockquote><em><a href="#560592">In reply to codymesh:</a></em></blockquote><p>Microsoft Edge can use up-to 25% less RAM using the "SegmentHeap" function, but only when on Windows 10 Version 2004 or later.</p><p><br></p><p>Google Chrome should also do this in a future major release, but for now has to be manually enabled via a flag, as it is still being tested</p>
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<blockquote><em><a href="#560598">In reply to codymesh:</a></em></blockquote><p>I still struggle to see the reason for using Firefox on a mobile-device or tablet thesedays.</p><p><br></p><p>On iOS the engine is WebKit, same as all browsers, so it's only worthwhile if you prefer the UI, or add-ons you can get for it.</p><p><br></p><p>And for Android the only two reasons I'd use it originally: (1) it still supported the Flash Player add-in, so sites with only Flash video would work — latest versions no-longer do; or (2) the add-on support meant I could use an ad-block — thesedays I just use Brave or Vivaldi instead, where this is built-in, or Opera Mini if travelling and really want to save data and not for any secure websites.</p>
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<blockquote><em><a href="#560702">In reply to CompUser:</a></em></blockquote><p>Technically if you use Firefox on any iOS device, then essentially they have there as all browsers have to use WebKit. (Maybe Apple will also enforce a similar restriction in the Apple Silicon version of macOS? Also, while never a final-release product, did the Windows 8 Metro UI version of Firefox have to use Trident?)</p><p><br></p><p>It might make-sense on Android at-least to use a Chromium-engine there, as Firefox is currently way-slower than any-other browser I use.</p>
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<p>Unless you're an IT Pro and have to use add-ons that only work in Firefox (or at-least work better) or want to customise every element of the browser UI, it's hard otherwise to see how to sell Firefox to the masses thesedays.</p><p><br></p><p>If you don't like Google, use Microsoft Edge instead — once it comes built-into Windows in the default install (in 20H2) many enterprises will. Or maybe something like Brave, Opera or Vivaldi. (Not Opera Mini: that uses either Opera's own site format, or the system WebView engine, depending on which site-compression setting you use).</p><p><br></p><p>If you're running an old version of macOS, the ESR release of Firefox will at-least provide security-updates, so it's an easy-recommend there, and after July 15, 2021, when Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge drop support for Windows 7, I'd imagine the ESR release will support it until at-least the ESU end-date (Jan 2023).</p><p><br></p><p>But "this browser still supports your legacy OS when none of the other big mainstream ones now do" is not a great selling-point…</p>