And as Firefox's popularity has waned, that has become a problem. But the first and fifth changes are new, somewhat overdue, and require a big shift inside the organization: a new focus on product, and a new focus on economics.įor many years, Mozilla's main - and for all intents and purposes only - product has been Firefox.

Many are classic Mozilla, focusing on community and pushing change out into the world. Today these changes become real.'īaker laid out five changes Mozilla plans to make in order to more successfully move forward. 'We have talked about the need for change - including the likelihood of layoffs - since the spring. 'Our pre-COVID plan is no longer workable,' Baker wrote in an email to Mozilla staff. Baker announced on Tuesday that Mozilla is laying off about 250 people, closing its operations in Taipei, and moving another 60 or so people between teams.

'The issue, of course, is that they're hard to find.' In a COVID-ravaged world, Mozilla's runway to find those other ways appears to have shortened. 'We are looking for other ways of generating revenue,' CEO Mitchell Baker told me last year. There's writing on the wall, too: Google and Mozilla haven't renewed that deal, which expires this year, and search-default deals in general are suddenly under serious antitrust scrutiny.

As Mozilla started to fight for a privacy-first, less-invasive (and thus frequently less Google-y) future of the internet, that didn't sit right anymore. For a couple of reasons, starting with the fact that most of Mozilla's revenue came from Google as part of a deal to make Google the default search engine in Firefox. Mitchell Baker and the team at Mozilla have known for a long time that the company's business needed to change.

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