According to reports by Steve Gibson in the latest Security Now! Podcast, it seems that things are changing at Mozilla.
- After cutting 70 staff in January, Mozilla have seemingly laid off another 250 staff, which is a quarter of their workforce. Most of these are developers working on a new browser engine and the team that investigates security reports and performs incident response.
- Their CEO has implied the business model needs to change, away from where everything is free.
- Perhaps this means there will be a new focus on Mozilla’s VPN, and although this is a crowded market perhaps Mozilla feel they will get market share as they are known as privacy rights advocates?
- Google provides Mozilla with almost all its revenue (it is the default search provider within Firebox) but there is no news yet that the contract, which expires later this year, has been renewed.
- Firefox Send has been offline for a while now, allegedly while Mozilla put controls in place to stop it being used for distributing malware. Nothing was compromised as far as we know, but I wonder if this free service will ever return?
As a confirmed Firefox user across multiple devices, this would be a real shame. Would I personally pay for Firefox … maybe.