Like Opera, Firefox is Fading; Chrome in Command
We would just wake up one morning to learn that Firefox and its parent Mozilla are gone. Mozilla is laying off 70 staff. Not that many would notice since Google Chrome has emerged as the leading browser in the world. Even Opera which had good traction in some markets is now troubled as Chrome improves across boards. The pivot to subscription by Mozilla could be as challenging as the high-interest loans Opera units were trying to put across, as they look for sustained profitability. The summary is simple: in the age of Google, do not try to compete head-on with the tech giant.
Mozilla laid off about 70 employees today, TechCrunch has learned.
In an internal memo, Mozilla chairwoman and interim CEO Mitchell Baker specifically mentions the slow rollout of the organization’s new revenue-generating products as the reason for why it needed to take this action. The overall number may still be higher, though, as Mozilla is still looking into how this decision will affect workers in the U.K. and France. In 2018, Mozilla Corporation (as opposed to the much smaller Mozilla Foundation) said it had about 1,000 employees worldwide.
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“You may recall that we expected to be earning revenue in 2019 and 2020 from new subscription products as well as higher revenue from sources outside of search. This did not happen,” Baker writes in her memo.