Specifically, Mozilla plans to scale back its investment in a number of products, including its VPN, Relay and its Online Footprint Scrubber. Mozilla will also shut down Hubs, the 3D virtual world it launched back in 2018, and scale back its investment in its mozilla.social Mastodon instance. The layoffs will affect roughly 60 employees. Bloomberg previously reported the layoffs.
Going forward, the company said in an internal memo, Mozilla will focus on bringing “trustworthy AI into Firefox”. To do so, it will bring together the teams that work on Pocket, Content and AI/Ml.
Frederic Lardinois
It’s frankly astounding how much time and resources Mozilla has squandered over the years chasing the latest tech hype instead of investing in its one successful product. Public tech giants can easily afford various wasteful side-projects and course corrections, and examples abound: from Google’s countless aborted social media attempts and messaging products to the perpetually work-in-progress self-driving cars, to Meta’s exorbitant VR ambitions, and most recently, Apple’s failed electric car project. But a non-profit, existing at the goodwill of donors alone, should be more focused and disciplined. Who can forget the time when Mozilla attempted to build an entire mobile OS, a feat even Microsoft failed at?
The bit about scaling back Mozilla’s Mastodon instance is quite telling for the lack of success of this distributed alternative to Twitter. The launch and massive initial interest in Threads has likely attracted most of the target audience for this type of product, with the rest remaining on Twitter or forming alternative communities on Bluesky.
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