Mozilla Foundation lays off 30% staff, drops advocacy division

[alach11]

This is largely in anticipation of the devastating drop in revenue if Google can no longer pay them to be the default search engine. That's where they get 86% of their revenue [0].

[0] https://fortune.com/2024/08/05/mozilla-firefox-biggest-poten...

[jowea]

I wonder if Firefox will even survive this. Maybe the main FOSS browser will be a Chromium fork so it's cheaper to maintain?

[eigenspace]

Wouldn't that affect their for-profit company arm, not the non-profit Mozilla Foundation?

Or does the for-profit arm fund the non-profit?

[TheRealPomax]

The foundation is not funded from the google money, you're thinking of the corporation.

[deburo]

> ruled that the tech giant has illegally maintained a monopoly through the billions of dollars in annual payments it makes to partners

Wow. Are they serious? that’s illegal?

[b3ing]

Not surprising as the CEO and board prevented the should=be-CEO from having the position because that person was recovering from cancer treatment.

[Onavo]

He should go start a competitor. I have a company name suggestion for him, maybe he can call it "Courage", it's a very cool hipster name for a browser startup.

[pjmlp]

All they had to do was to focus on doing the best browser, and email client.

[minimaxir]

Unfortunately in the world of OSS, neither of those are enough to pay the bills unless you have a lucrative partnership (i.e. Google paying to be the default search engine in Firefox, which is now no longer the case).

[lancesells]

I don't know why they chase other products when they could take both of those and have some sort of premium additions to charge for. I pay for my mail clients, my calendar clients, and would pay for a browser with extra features / extensions.

Focus on the things people are using and not on becoming a VPN provider.

That said I like, and use, Firefox for all of my work related tasks. And I have nothing against them having "too many employees". A non-profit providing jobs is not a bad thing and feels like the best of both worlds.

[mmooss]

Why would that define their mission? It never has; they've always been a leading adovcate for freedom, privacy, and openness on the Internet.

[TheRealPomax]

Lots of people confusing the Mozilla Foundation, the non-profit that "steers" the Mozilla mission, with the Mozilla Corporation, which is the for-profit that makes Firefox. They're two different organizations: the Foundation has literally nothing to do with Firefox.

The Foundation is a tiny org that until yesterday I'd have described as "working on living the Mozilla manifesto through advocacy and programs". How it's going to stay relevant without its advocacy staff is a complete mystery to me.

[nulbyte]

The Foundation has lots to do with Firefox; it literally owns the corporation that develops it.

That said, agreed, I'm not sure what's left for the foundation to do without advocacy staff.

[mmooss]

How sad. Who will pickup the baton for the advocacy that Mozilla is abandoning, Internet Archive may have to forfeit ...

Why are all these projects having problems at the same time, as the economy booms?

> “Navigating this topsy-turvy, distracting time requires laser focus — and sometimes saying goodbye to the excellent work that has gotten us this far because it won’t get us to the next peak,” wrote Syed

What is topsy-turvy for Mozilla?

[_xiaz]

I'd say the electronic frontier foundation is the best candidate. They have been exclusively doing advocacy since forever

[andrewinardeer]

They opened up Mozilla VPN to Australians overnight. 50% off opening special so only AUD7.50 per month on the annual plan...

[jeroenhd]

Brave, the people that took Chromium and shoved it full of cryptocurrency ads and a few other open source projects?

You can have whatever preference you want, but I don't believe there's that much of a difference between Firefox and Blockchain Firefox, other than that Firefox actually maintains its own engine at least.

[bdjsiqoocwk]

The fascinating thing about Brave is how fanatical their fanbase is.