Just a week after Mozilla Corp. hired a new chief executive in an effort to steer the company in a different direction, it announced that 60 of its staff – about 5% of the total workforce – are being laid off.

Former Airbnb Inc. and eBay Inc. executive Laura Chambers took hold of the reins at Mozilla last week as Mitchell Baker, the company’s chief since 2020, slipped back into the role of executive chairman. The plan was to refocus on the future and reprioritize resources under the new leadership.

Over the years, Mozilla saw its flagship product, the Firefox browser, lose more and more market share. The plan was to focus on diversifying the company’s product range to stay afloat in times of ongoing troubles, but Mozilla now wants to scale back its multiproduct ambitions and focus again on Firefox – an AI-powered Firefox.

In 2020, Mozilla launched its virtual private network offering, the Mozilla VPN, just one of the products that will see cutbacks to its development, along with the Relay extension. The virtual reality chatroom tool Hubs, launched in 2018, will be shut down completely in response to an “unfavorable shift in demand.”

Surprisingly, the company also said it will scale back investment in the Online Footprint Scrubber, a paid service to manage pesky data brokers announced just a week ago. The Mastodon-based mozilla.social social media platform and will also be pared back, and instead, Mozilla will “participate in the Mastodon ecosystem” with a smaller team.

“We are reducing investment in market segments that competitors crowd and where it is challenging to deliver a differentiated offering,” Mozilla attempted to explain in the memo. The focus now will “sharpen,” with artificial intelligence forming the nexus of Mozilla’s ambitions.

“In 2023, generative AI began rapidly shifting the industry landscape,” the company wrote. “Mozilla seized an opportunity to bring trustworthy AI into Firefox, largely driven by the Fakespot acquisition and the product integration work that followed. Additionally, finding great content is still a critical use case for the internet. Therefore, as part of the changes today, we will be bringing together Pocket, Content, and the AI/ML teams supporting content with the Firefox Organization.”

Photo: Rubaitul Azad/Unsplash