Mozilla is best known for its free and open-source Firefox, one ofmany great browsers out there. In a world where Firefox’s market share is steadily shrinking and hinges on Google’s money to stay afloat, the company has long been looking to diversify its income with other side projects like Pocket or Firefox Monitor. With a new interim CEO at the helm, Mozilla decided to change its strategy again and hone in on what it’s best at: focusing on Firefox, and sprinkling in some AI along the way.
The new focus on Firefox comes along an internal restructuring that will make about 60 employees lose their jobs, according to an internal memopublished by TechCrunch. Since bringing “trustworthy AI into Firefox” is a big part of the plan, Mozilla will merge the teams responsible for Pocket, Content, and AI/MI. It’s not entirely clear what AI features we will see in the browser, though, and how they would stand out from the crowd.
Projects that take the biggest hits at Mozilla include the company’s own Mastodon instancemozilla.social, its VPN, Relay, and Online Footprint Scrubber projects, and its Metaverse-style 3D worlds efforts. This big pivot in strategy comes just a week after Mozilla’s previous CEO, Mitchell Baker, left her post. She is replaced by Laura Chambers, a board member who has taken the role of interim CEO.
Firefox may have continually lost market share over the past years, so a newfound focus on it makes sense. It isn’t clear how Mozilla can reliably monetize the browser without its surrounding, partially paid services, though. Mozilla is mostly kept alive thanks to big payments from Google for making it the default search engine. Beyond that, Mozilla has been trying to use its services to be less dependent on Google.
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The new-found focus on the browser may still mean good news for Firefox fans. Some projects, like bringing back full extension support to Firefox on Android, took a lot longer than many people anticipated after Mozilla fully rewrote the mobile browser’s code back in 2020. This may mean that projects like a tablet interface for Firefox on Android may come to fruition much faster than that. However, with Google and Microsoft adding a ton of AI features to their respective browsers, the question arises if Firefox’s pivot to the same strategy may end up being too little, too late.
