Mitchell Baker, chairwoman of the nonprofit foundation that owns Mozilla Corp., where she is interim CEO, wrote that the operation needed to operate within its means.
The Mountain View, Calif., company makes the Firefox web browser as well as other digital applications. It also has a large San Francisco presence and other offices around the world.
A Mozilla spokeswoman declined to say how many employees would be affected, where their jobs were based, or what they did for the company. Brendan Eich, a former top Mozilla executive who briefly served as CEO in 2014, tweeted Wednesday that the company had laid off 70 employees. Eich now runs Brave, the maker of a rival web browser.
Baker wrote that the company needs to “excel at our current work, while we innovate in the areas most likely to impact the state of the internet and internet life.”
She wrote that the company has a role to play in areas like security and privacy, surveillance and artificial intelligence, and other areas key to the future of the internet. Mozilla has struggled to extend its browser products to mobile phones, where Google and Apple favor their own built-in browsers.
“Creating the new products we need to change the future requires us to do things differently, including allocating resources for this purpose,” Baker wrote. “We’re making a significant investment to fund innovation. In order to do that responsibly, we’ve also had to make some difficult choices which led to the elimination of roles at Mozilla which we announced internally today.”
In its 2018 annual report, Mozilla said its corporate arm had $435.7 million in revenue, down from $542 million in 2017. Mozilla makes money from royalties, subscriptions and advertising; its annual report said it makes the majority of its revenue from search partnerships, including one with Google, which makes the competing Chrome browser.
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