According to a tweet from one of the organization's employees (Chris Hartjes), Mozilla recently laid off 70 workers (out of a total of 1000), including all the lead designers of Mozilla Quality Assurance, whose main tasks are testing new features and fixing bugs.
In response, the laid-off employees launched the hashtag #MozillaLifeboat on Twitter, allowing them to share details and interested parties to offer job vacancies.
Previously, Mozilla had already reported suspended public events Testday and Bugday, which were part of Mozilla QA. On January 15, 2020, an official blog post titled article "Preparing for the Future at Mozilla" was published, outlining the organization's plan to focus on adopting new technologies:
Working on the creation of new products that would allow us to influence the future of the Internet requires us to change our current approach, including allocating funds for these purposes. We are making a significant contribution to maintaining innovation. To approach this responsibly, we were forced to make some tough decisions, leading to the reduction of roles at Mozilla, which we informed our employees about today.
Mozilla has a clear vision of future revenue from our core business. In some sense, this complicates the situation, and we are very concerned about how this has affected our colleagues. However, to responsibly expand investments in innovations that can improve the Internet, we can and must focus on current financial constraints.
Let me remind you, the main source of revenue for Mozilla today comes from partnerships with search engines such as Google, Yandex, Baidu, etc., which are set as defaults in the Mozilla Firefox browser. However, recently the organization has been seriously concerned about diversifying its revenue, which would reduce dependence on third-party companies and help mitigate revenue declines caused by the decrease in Mozilla Firefox's market share.
Source: linux.org.ru
