(2020-12-10) Endangered Firefox The State Of Mozilla

Endangered Firefox: The state of Mozilla. First, Mozilla laid off some of its most senior staffers... Then, in August, Mozilla laid off almost a quarter of its staff.

Only days after the layoffs, however, news leaked that Mozilla and Google have extended their current search deal for another three years. This new deal will ensure Google remains the default search engine provider inside the Firefox browser until 2023 for an estimated $400 million to $450 million per year.

all of Mozilla's income, 92%, came from its 2017 Google ad deal

Mozilla is actually losing money. Indeed, it lost much more than it had in 2018. Mozilla's 2019 expenses came to $495.3 million, or almost $5 million more than revenue.

Software development, $304 million, made up most, 61% of Mozilla's expenses.

Firefox's market share has been shrinking for years. By July 2012, Firefox had begun its retreating from its all-time high mark of 23.75%.

As of December 9, 2020, only a few months later, Firefox's share was down to merely 3.4%.

Mitchell Baker had been talking up new revenue streams. In August, Baker said Mozilla would "ship new products faster and develop new revenue streams." These include its bookmarking app Pocket; its virtual rooms Hubs; and its $4.99-a-month Firefox VPN.

I didn't buy these as being enough to make a difference when they were proposed as significant revenue sources, and I don't buy it now.