Future of Firefox may be safe: Google likely to renew search deal

Yesterday Mozilla announced the firing of 250 employees and reduced future investment in developer tools, internal tooling, and platform feature development. The foundation is hit by the COVID-19 pandemic and an estimated 90 percent of Mozilla's income is generated via a search deal with Google. The latter expires later this year and up until yesterday there was no sign that Google would renew this, which raised doubts about the future of Firefox.

Fortunately, ZD Net now reports that Mozilla and Google are expected to extend the current deal for another three years. The site heard this from multiple sources. It will likely be made public in November, when Mozilla is scheduled to disclose its 2019 financial figures.

It's also reported that Mozilla is moving away from its current role of internet standard steward and its experimental approach -- to move to a more commercially-viable business model. The long-term plan is to build out more revenue streams, to reduce reliance on Google, which is in fact the biggest rival of the Firefox browser.

Yesterday's layoffs reflect this plan. Mozilla made cuts to its threat management security team, the developers working on the experimental Servo browser engine, the curators of the Mozilla Developer Network portal, and the team behind the Firefox developer tools.