Following the appointment of a new leader, Mozilla intends to lay off about 60 employees and change its product development strategy. Considering that, according to public reports, Mozilla employs from 500 to 1000 people, the layoffs will affect 5-10% of the staff. This is the fourth massive wave of layoffs - 2020 (320 + 250) workers were laid off in 70, and 2017 in 50.
Among the areas on which it is planned to focus attention, the use of AI technologies in Firefox is noted, for example, the integration of the developments of the recently acquired company Fakespot. In order to optimize work processes, it is planned to unite teams involved in the Pocket service, content preparation and artificial intelligence. The reduction will not affect MDN (Mozilla Developer Network), Mozilla Ads and Fakespot. There are also no changes planned in the departments involved in legal, financial, operational and marketing activities.
Among the products in which investments will be reduced are Mozilla VPN, the Firefox Relay anonymous email service, the Mozilla Monitor Plus personal data leak analyzer and the Mozilla.social social network. These services will not be closed, but the number of employees working on them will be reduced. Mozilla Hubs, a 3D chat system with virtual reality elements, is subject to complete closure.
For example, significant resources were initially allocated to promoting the Mozilla.social platform, but an analysis of the situation showed that these resources were redundant and a much smaller team could handle maintaining the platform by reducing the promotion of experimental features and focusing on core functionality.
It was decided to reduce investments in services related to confidentiality and security due to high competition in these market segments and the difficulty of creating a unique offer.
It was decided to shut down Mozilla Hubs, as recently there has been a loss of user interest in 3D virtual worlds in areas other than games and education.
Source: opennet.ru