Mozilla's financial declarations from 2020 said that despite the layoffs, it is in a healthy place, and it expects its financial results for 2021 to show revenue growth.

But Firefox’s problem is that fewer people are using its browser and Google seems to be King of the Internet. When Google launched its AMP publishing standard, websites jumped to implement it. Similar plans to replace third-party cookies in Chrome — a move that will impact millions of marketers and publishers — are shaped in Google's image.

The fear is that there is no longer any competition in the browser market and it is not reasonable for Firefox to expect to win back even any browser share.

Mozilla and Firefox acknowledge that for its long-term future it needs to diversify the ways it makes money. These efforts have ramped up since 2019. The company owns read-it-later service Pocket, which includes a paid premium subscription service. It has also launched two similar VPN-style products that people can subscribe to. And the company is pushing more into advertising as well, placing ads on new tabs that are opened in the Firefox browser.

Senior vice president of Firefox Selena Deckelmann said Firefox is likely to continue looking for ways to keep personalising people's online browsing.

"I'm not sure that what's going to come out of that is going to be what people traditionally expect from a browser, but the intention will always be to put people first", she said.
This week, Firefox announced a partnership with Disney — linked to a new Pixar film — that involves changing the color of the browser and ads to win subscriptions to Disney+.

Deckelmann said Firefox doesn't need to be as big as Chrome.

"All we really want is to be a viable choice, Because we think that this makes a better internet for everybody to have these different options."