The Mozilla Foundation, the owner of the Mozilla Corporation subsidiary that develops the Firefox browser, laid off 30% of its staff and closed its advocacy department, saying it needed to focus on more pressing issues and develop a unified strategy throughout the organization due to the “relentless onslaught of change.”
Image source: blog.mozilla.org
As Mozilla Foundation head of communications Brandon Borrman confirmed in a message to TechCrunch, the organization was forced to take this step to increase its efficiency. “The Mozilla Foundation is reorganizing the team to accelerate efforts to ensure a more inclusive and equitable tech future for us all. “Unfortunately, this means that we are stopping some of our traditional projects and eliminating related positions to focus on more important tasks,” the statement said.
The company had 60 employees in 2022, according to annual tax filings. However, at the time of the cuts, the staff numbered about 120 people, which was confirmed by a source familiar with the situation. A Mozilla representative did not dispute these data, as well as the fact that this is the second reduction at Mozilla in a year. Previously, layoffs affected employees of the division developing the popular Firefox browser.
As a reminder, Mozilla is made up of several organizations, one of which is the Mozilla Corporation, which develops the Firefox browser and other services, and the other is its non-profit foundation, which oversees Mozilla’s corporate governance structure and sets Firefox’s policies, which have largely focused on protecting privacy and decentralization technologies, as well as on “creating a safer and more transparent online space for everyone.”
On October 30, Mozilla Foundation executive director Nabiha Syed confirmed in a letter to employees the elimination of two major divisions of the foundation – advocacy and the global program division. “Our mission at Mozilla is more important today than ever,” Syed writes. “We are under a constant onslaught of changes in technology and other areas, and the idea of putting people before profit seems increasingly radical to us.”
The changes are said to be aimed at creating a “unified, powerful narrative” on behalf of the foundation, including updating strategic communications and, as Borrman noted, “advocacy will continue to be a central part of the Mozilla Foundation’s work and will be integrated into other functional areas.”