The search engine Mozilla recently had to lay off a quarter of its salaried workforce. The numbers are frightening, but the reasons for the abrupt layoffs are multifaceted, not the least of which is the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on this large company. Mozilla had also suffered financial losses from the pandemic.
However, the layoffs were also due to the fact that Mozilla had planned internal changes in the structural composition of its workforce. However, the financial issues were recently solved by a new deal with Google that could bring the company $400-450 million. That’s how much Google would pay to the Mozilla Foundation if the search engine remained as the default search engine in the Firefox browser. For Mozilla, this may have been exactly the deal they needed in the pandemic since the company draws its main income from search engine providers such as Google, Yandex, and Baidu.
The deal not only strengthens Google – Mozilla should not be underestimated either. According to Statcounter, the company still has a market share of 4.3 percent and has been the third most-used browser worldwide behind Google Chrome and Safari. The figures for Germany are even higher, with a market share of 13 percent for the Mozilla Foundation.
