The Mozilla Foundation has reportedly laid off 30% of its staff and eliminated two divisions, citing “a relentless onslaught of change.”

Mozilla is best known for the Firefox web browser and Thunderbird email client. The Mozilla Foundation is the non-profit corporation that “supports the existing Mozilla community and oversees Mozilla’s governance structure.” In contrast, the Mozilla Corporation is owned by the Mozilla Foundation and is responsible for developing Firefox and other Mozilla software.

In an email seen by TechCrunch, Mozilla Foundation’s executive director Nabiha Syed informed the staff of the layoffs and said the advocacy and global programs divisions were “no longer a part of our structure.”

The organization’s communication chief, Brandon Borrman, confirmed the details to TechCrunch.

“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.

Borrman also made clear that the Mozilla Foundation is not abandoning its advocacy, but integrating it throughout the organization. Borrman said, “advocacy is still a central tenet of Mozilla Foundation’s work and will be embedded in all the other functional areas.”

Syed’s email made clear how important Mozilla’s mission is, and why the layoffs were necessary.

“Our mission at Mozilla is more high-stakes than ever,” Syed wrote. “We find ourselves in a relentless onslaught of change in the technology (and broader) world, and the idea of putting people before profit feels increasingly radical.”

“Navigating this topsy-turvy, distracting time requires laser focus — and sometimes saying goodbye to the excellent work that has gotten us this far because it won’t get us to the next peak. Lofty goals demand hard choices,” Syed added.

Why Mozilla Matters

Once one of the most popular web browsers on the market, Firefox single-handled broke Microsoft Internet Explorer’s dominance, and opened the door for a more diverse web browser market. Unfortunately, Google Chrome arrived on the scene shortly after and went on to supplant Firefox and Microsoft’s browser as the dominant option. Firefox’s share of the market has dropped precipitously, but the independent browser is more important than ever.

Despite Chrome’s status as the world’s most popular web browser, the fact remains that it’s a web browser that users should be very wary of using. At its core, Google is an advertising company, and one that has a horrible track record of using, abusing, and trampling on user privacy.

One only has to look at the company’s court loss in early 2024 over Chrome’s Incognito mode, in which the court found that the company continued to collect data on users even when Incognito mode was activate. Google was ultimately ordered to destroy billions of records from its illegal data collection.

That case illustrated that Google executives were fully aware that Chrome’s Icognito mode was not truly private, yet the company continued to market it as such.

“Make Incognito Mode truly private,” marketing chief Lorraine Twohill wrote in an email to CEO Sundar Pichai. “We are limited in how strongly we can market Incognito because it’s not truly private, thus requiring really fuzzy, hedging language that is almost more damaging.”

It wouldn’t be wise to buy an anti-virus program from the hacking group responsible for release the bulk of the world’s malware. Similarly, it’s simply unwise to have a reasonable expection of privacy when using a web browser from a company that makes its money from selling user data.

Beyond the privacy issues, Google’s dominance in the search and advertising markets gives it an oversized influence on the direction of the web in general. Add the fact that it has the most popular web browser, and the company can easily push protocols and agendas that benefit its business model, all the while ignoring what’s best for consumers or smaller competitors.

As user data continues to be a commodity that companies exploit for their own profit, organizations like Mozilla are more important than ever, providing viable software and options for privacy-conscious users. While layoffs are never desired, hopefully the organization’s latest round of layoffs help it streamline its focus and strengthen its efforts to better protect consumers.