The nonprofit arm of Mozilla, maker of the web browser Firefox, has laid off 30% of its staff and wound up its advocacy division. The news was broken by Zack Whittaker at TechCrunch, who reports that the foundation had close to 120 people working for it at the time of the layoffs.
When reached by TechCrunch, Mozilla Foundation's communications chief Brandon Borrman confirmed the layoffs in an email. "The Mozilla Foundation is reorganizing teams to increase agility and impact as we accelerate our work to ensure a more open and equitable technical future for us all. That unfortunately means ending some of the work we have historically pursued and eliminating associated roles to bring more focus going forward," read the statement shared with TechCrunch.
This doesn't affect staffing at the larger, profit-making Mozilla Corporation which develops the software, but reflects a big expected change in how much revenue it makes from its key partner, Google. Google was found to have monopolized search through illegal deals earlier this year, with search engine defaults in apps among the behaviors targeted.
Fortune's Jason Del Ray reported then that "the biggest loser in the Google search ruling could be Mozilla."
You can be sure that critics of the judge's ruling will highlight the potentially devastating impact on Mozilla to make the case that the antitrust ruling will have unintended consequences on smaller tech industry players. Others might argue that Mozilla hasn't done enough with those spoils to differentiate its Firefox browser, or that it could cut a deal with another search engine like Bing if its Google deal goes away completely. Either way, Google will appeal the suit so a long battle may ensue. And there's another big domino to fall: the judge will rule on the remedy or remedies — essentially, the business-model penalties — that Google will face.
If it seems ironic that the anti-trust ruling may make it harder to offer alternative web browsers to Google's, it also highlights the fact that alternatives are already funded by it.
Among the revelations in the Department of Justice's long-running lawsuit was that Google pays Apple $20bn a year to be the default search engine in Safari on iOS. Apple, though, has many sources of income: Mozilla is almost entirely dependent on its own deal with the search giant.
Previously:
• Firefox is getting more browser fingerprinting protection courtesy of Tor Browser's 'letterboxing' technique
• Former Mozilla CTO was detained at US border and told he had no right to a lawyer
• Mozilla updates its 'Privacy Not Included' gift guide for 2019
