![]() It's also shutting down "Mozilla Hubs," which was a 3D virtual world it launched in 2018-that's right, there was also a metaverse project! The memo says that "demand has moved away from 3D virtual worlds" and that "this is impacting all industry players." The company is also cutting jobs at "MozProd," its infrastructure team. Mozilla has a "mozilla.social" Mastodon instance that the memo says originally intended to "effectively shape the future of social media," but the company now says the social group will get a "much smaller team." Mozilla says it will also "reduce our investments" in Mozilla VPN, Firefox Relay, and something the memo calls "Online Footprint Scrubber" (that sounds like Mozilla Monitor?). ![]() TechCrunch managed to get an internal company memo that details a few "strategic corrections" for the myriad Mozilla products. These non-browser projects could be seen as a search for a less vulnerable revenue stream, but none have put a huge dent in the bottom line. The Mozilla Corporation gets about 80 percent of its revenue from Google-also its primary browser competitor-via a search deal, so Mozilla isn't exactly a healthy company. So you would think focusing on Firefox would be a priority, but the company continually struggles with focus. It's also very important to the web as a whole, as Firefox is the only browser that can't trace its lineage back to Apple and WebKit (Chrome's Blink engine is a WebKit fork. Mozilla is a tiny company that competes with some of the biggest tech companies in the world-Apple, Google, and Microsoft. Not all Mozilla side-projects are losers-the memory-safe Rust programming language was spun out of Mozilla in 2020 and has seen rapid adoption in the Linux kernel and Android. In 2022, Mozilla launched a $35 million venture capital fund called Mozilla Ventures. From 2017–2020, there was "Firefox Send," an encrypted file transfer service, and a VR-focused " Firefox Reality" browser that lasted from 2018 to 2022. That's not even a comprehensive list of recent Mozilla products. There's Mozilla Monitor (a data breach checker), Mozilla VPN, Pocket (a news reader app), Firefox Relay (for making burner email accounts), and Firefox Focus, a fork of Firefox with a privacy focus. Firefox and Thunderbird have kept on trucking since then, but the /products page is a great example of what the strategy has been lately: "Firefox is just the beginning!" reads the very top of the page it then goes on to detail a lot of projects that aren't in line with Mozilla's core work of making a browser. Mozilla started as the open source browser/email company that rose from the ashes of Netscape. A TechCrunch report has a company memo that followed these layoffs, detailing one product shutdown and a "scaling back" of a few others. Bloomberg was the first to report that the company is cutting about 60 jobs, or 5 percent of its workforce. Mozilla got a new "interim" CEO just a few days ago, and the first order of business appears to be layoffs. Arturo Martinez / Flickr reader comments 198
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