Firefox browser maker Mozilla Corp. today announced it’s laying off about 70 staff members in order to buy itself more time to start generating revenue from its newest products.

Mozilla Chairwoman and interim Chief Executive Officer Mitchell Baker made the announcement in a blog post, saying the layoffs were necessary in order for the nonprofit group to continue making “additional investments in innovation to improve the internet.”

“Mozilla has a strong line of sight on future revenue generation from our core business,” Baker wrote. “In some ways, this makes this action harder, and we are deeply distressed about the effect on our colleagues.”

Some fairly senior staff members have been affected, including Mozilla’s senior release manager Liz Henry:

Big layoffs at @Mozilla today. Anyone want a badass senior release manager, experienced in F/LOSS? Bay Area/Remote. I’m so proud of my work at Mozilla, shipping Firefox to hundreds of millions of people around the world. https://t.co/WoNGqwmmxk <3

— Liz Henry (@lizhenry) January 15, 2020

Mozilla’s problem is simple: It’s not making as much money as it used to. The group’s main source of revenue is derived from the Firefox browser. In 2011, for example, Mozilla signed a $300 million-a-year deal with Google LLC to make its search engine the default in Firefox.

But the browser’s declining popularity means that companies like Google aren’t willing to part with so much cash any more. In 2017 Firefox was used by 11% of all internet users, but that number has fallen to just 4%, according to statistics from the U.S. government’s Digital Analytics Program.

To make up for its declining revenue, Mozilla has been looking for way to generate cash outside search, but according to Baker, that didn’t happen.

“Our 2019 plan underestimated how long it would take to build and ship new, revenue-generating products,” Baker said. “Given that, and all we learned in 2019 about the pace of innovation, we decided to take a more conservative approach to projecting our revenue for 2020.”

Those new, revenue-generating products include Firefox Private Network, which is a Firefox-specific virtual private network service, a device-level VPN service that hasn’t yet launched and a password manager called Lockwise, which is currently available for free. Mozilla has also created a Firefox Monitor service that lets people check if their email address was part of a recent security breach.

Mozilla’s plan is eventually to offer all of these products as part of a larger subscription service.

“Digital Transformation is not kind to the losers and in this case it is the once high-flying Mozilla that has to adjust its cost structure to market realities,” said Constellation Research Inc. analyst Holger Mueller.

Still, Mueller said Mozilla has an opportunity to remain relevant in future. He told SiliconANGLE that standardization on Chromium as the underlying browser engine has led to greater feature innovation, and that Mozilla could still be a part of that.

“At the moment it’s more about innovative ideas than the number of developers in the browser market,” he said.

Photo: Franceso Lodolo/Flickr