Mozilla lays off Dev Tool, Threat Management team, more

Following firing 70 people in January, Mozilla has launched another round of lay-offs, this time reducing their workforce by 250 staffers to 750 people.

The issue appears to be financial, with Mozilla CEO Mitchell Baker saying the coronavirus pandemic “significantly impacted our revenue,” and “as a result, our pre-COVID plan was no longer workable.”

Baker said Mozilla would focus on ventures which generate revenue, including includes focuses on building community, building new products that “mitigate harms” and “that people love and want” to use.

This includes products such as Pocket, its VPN service, its VR chatroom Hubs, and new “security and privacy” tools.

This also means less focus on other areas such a Dev tools, Baker confirmed.

Engineer Kat Marchan totted up the titles of  staff made redundant and found many other areas also deeply impacted.

So to summarize what we know so far, the following teams at Mozilla have been either eliminated or gutted to oblivion:

* Firefox devtools
* Firefox incident/threat management team (?!)
* Servo
* MDN
* WebXR/Firefox Reality
* DevRel/Community (???)

I guess they're giving up?

— Kat Marchán has permanently left this site (@zkat__) August 12, 2020

This included Mozilla’s Incident/Threat management team, which will not make Firefox users feel more secure about their data held by Mozilla, and most of the Mozilla Developer Network staff.

Mozilla is dependent on search engines to pay them to feature their service in their search bar, and with COVID-19 and Mozilla steadily losing market share it appears that business is not really sustainable.

“I desperately wish there was some other way to set Mozilla up for long term success in building a better internet,” Baker writes in her blog post. “But to go further, we must be organized to be able to think about a different world.”

It appears this will be a world with a much diminished Firefox browser.

via the verge