Things don't seem to be going well for Mozilla and is that due to the problems caused for the Covid-19 pandemic and in addition to the major problems it faces in terms of ability to maintain certain projects on his mantle, this has hindered the economy within the company.
The main problem with Firefox is its inability to generate income and its reliance on search engine partnerships, led by Google.
In 2018, 91% of Mozilla's revenue came from these associations, as it must be said that it is difficult in these conditions to fight Chrome.
Especially since its open source version, Chromium, is used as the foundation for virtually every other web browser today, including Microsoft Edge.
With the economic problem, Mozilla has decided to reduce its workforce worldwide in a quarter. And it is also necessary to remember that a few weeks ago (on August 11) the news of the Mozilla staff cut was released in which it fired 250 of its employees.
Among the divisions affected are:
MDN WebDocs (formerly Mozilla Developer Center or MDC, then Mozilla Developer Network or MDN) although Rina Jensen stated that, “First of all, we want to be clear, MDN will not go away. The core engineering team will continue to manage the MDN site and Mozilla will continue to develop the platform.
However, due to the Mozilla restructuring, we had to reduce our overall investment in outreach to developers, including MDN. As a result, we will discontinue support for DevRel Sponsorship, Blog Hacks, and Tech Speakers. Other areas where we have had to reduce staffing and programs include: Mozilla Developer Programs, Developer Events and Promotion, and our MDN technical writing.
In his farewell letter to Mozilla, an engineer tells a bit about his background and points out that The entire team responsible for Servo development has been fired.
Servo is an experimental web browser rendering engine whose prototype aims to create an environment that optimizes energy efficiency while maximizing parallelism, in which the components are managed in isolated tasks.
Developed by Mozilla and Samsung, the latest version (Servo 0.22.0) dates from December 2019. It is developed in Rust.
“I am Paul Rouget. If you hacked HTML5 ten years ago, maybe my name will tell you something.
“This is the end of my 17-year adventure at Mozilla, during which I spent 5 years as a volunteer and 12 as an employee. At Mozilla, I fought for HTML5, worked on Firefox, created our first generation of developer tools, managed large teams, and directed products.
Finally, contributing to Servo, integrating our new generation Rust-based web engine on most platforms (Android and all three major desktop platforms). In particular, I built and shipped a Servo browser for Microsoft (UWP / ARM AR browser for HoloLens 2) as a member of the Mozilla research team.
“Mozilla laid off many employees last August, and I am one of those affected, along with all the servo engineers. No more morning bugzilla and GitHub sorting. More email paul@mozilla.com. More discussions on how to make things fast, secure, compatible, and easy to use. It is almost half of my life that I leave behind.
“Working with Rust, on the incredibly talented team of hackers, I grew up as an engineer.
“My school was Mozilla. I learned everything I know there. There I met most of my friends. And Mozilla has allowed me to make a significant impact on the web, of which I am proud.
But now the world has changed. The market is different. I don't know what my next battle will be. Mozilla is after me now. Let's see what the future is made of.
“There are too many employees, former employees and collaborators that I want to thank. My life would not be the same without your trust and your wise words.
" Thank you all ".
Source: https://paulrouget.com
Everything is not at all for the worse, how sad! : /