Enlarge (credit: Arturo Martinez / Flickr )

Mozilla got a new "interim" CEO just a few days ago, and the first order of business appears to be layoffs. Bloomberg was the first to report that the company is cutting about 60 jobs, or 5 percent of its workforce. A TechCrunch report has a company memo that followed these layoffs, detailing one product shutdown and a "scaling back" of a few others.

Mozilla started as the open source browser/email company that rose from the ashes of Netscape. Firefox and Thunderbird have kept on trucking since then, but the mozilla.org/products page is a great example of what the strategy has been lately: "Firefox is just the beginning!" reads the very top of the page; it then goes on to detail a lot of projects that aren't in line with Mozilla's core work of making a browser. There's Mozilla Monitor (a data breach checker), Mozilla VPN, Pocket (a news reader app), Firefox Relay (for making burner email accounts), and Firefox Focus, a fork of Firefox with a privacy focus.

That's not even a comprehensive list of recent Mozilla products. From 2017–2020, there was "Firefox Send," an encrypted file transfer service, and a VR-focused " Firefox Reality " browser that lasted from 2018 to 2022. In 2022, Mozilla launched a $35 million venture capital fund called Mozilla Ventures . Not all Mozilla side-projects are losers—the memory-safe Rust programming language was spun out of Mozilla in 2020 and has seen rapid adoption in the Linux kernel and Android .

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images )

Apple is being forced to make major changes to iOS in Europe, thanks to the European Union's " Digital Markets Act ." The act cracks down on Big Tech "gatekeepers" with various interoperability, fairness, and privacy demands, and part of the changes demanded of Apple is to allow competing browser engines on iOS. The change, due in iOS 17.4, will mean rival browsers like Chrome and Firefox get to finally bring their own web rendering code to iPhones and iPads. Despite what sounds like a big improvement to the iOS browser situation, Google and Mozilla aren't happy with Apple's proposed changes.

Earlier, Mozilla spokesperson Damiano DeMonte gave a comment to The Verge on Apple's policy changes and took issue with the decision to limit the browser changes to the EU. “We are still reviewing the technical details but are extremely disappointed with Apple’s proposed plan to restrict the newly-announced BrowserEngineKit to EU-specific apps,” DeMonte said. “The effect of this would be to force an independent browser like Firefox to build and maintain two separate browser implementations—a burden Apple themselves will not have to bear.” DeMonte added: “Apple’s proposals fail to give consumers viable choices by making it as painful as possible for others to provide competitive alternatives to Safari. This is another example of Apple creating barriers to prevent true browser competition on iOS.”

Apple's framework that allows for alternative browser engines is called "BrowserEngineKit" and already has public documentation as part of the iOS 17.4 beta. Browser vendors will need to earn Apple's approval to use the framework in a production app, and like all iOS apps, that approval will come with several requirements . None of the requirements jump out as egregious: Apple wants browser vendors to have a certain level of web standards support, pledge to fix security vulnerabilities quickly and protect the user's privacy by showing the standard consent prompts for access to things like location. You're not allowed to "sync cookies and state between the browser and any other apps, even other apps of the developer," which seems aimed directly at Google and its preference to have all its iOS apps talk to each other. The big negative is that your BrowserEngineKit app is limited to the EU, because—surprise—the EU rules only apply to the EU.

Enlarge / Mitchell Baker, Mozilla CEO, at a conference in 2019. (credit: Horacio Villalobos / Contributor | Corbis News )

This week, Mozilla CEO Mitchell Baker rose as a key figure in Google's defense against the Justice Department's monopoly claims. Providing a video deposition for the landmark trial, Baker testified that Mozilla's popular browser Firefox tried to switch from using Google as a default search engine but reverted back after a "failed" bet on Yahoo made it clear that Google was Firefox users' preferred search engine.

According to Bloomberg , Mozilla's temporary switch to Yahoo is "the only situation in which a browser has switched the default search engine provider." This makes Baker's testimony potentially very powerful because it's a clear example that backs up Google's core argument that its search engine wins default status due to its quality, not due to anticompetitive behaviors.

"The evidence will show that the reasons behind Mozilla’s switch back to Google after selecting Yahoo as the default search engine for its Firefox browser confirms," Google's pre-trial brief said. "Google wins competitions that browser suppliers create for choosing their default search service by offering the best product at the best price. That is quintessential 'competition on the merits.'" In another court filing, Google argued , "there is no evidence of coercive conduct."

Enlarge / Some bugs are just perennially out of reach. (credit: Getty Images)

Back in June 2002, Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth was experiencing space for the first time, the Department of Justice's antitrust case against Microsoft was reaching its final arguments , and Adam Price, using what was then called Mozilla on a Mac, had an issue with persistent tooltips .

"If I mouseover a toolbar link, and wait for a second, a little yellow box with the description of the link appears. If I now use command-tab to move Mozilla to the background, the little yellow box stays there, in the foreground. The only way to get rid of it is to put mozilla in the foreground again, and move the mouse off the toolbar," Price wrote on June 2. There were a few other bugs related to this issue, but Price set down a reproducible issue, confirmed by many others in the weeks to come—and months to come, years to come, and more than two decades to come.

Firefox tooltip lingering over an Applications window in Mac OS X, captured 12 years ago. (credit: edrazaba / Mozilla )

Over the years, people would check in on the thread or mark other bugs as duplicates of this one issue. It would occasionally seem fixed, only for coders and commenters to discover that it was just a little different in different versions or that prior fixes were seemingly accidental. Sometimes it seemed to appear in Windows or Linux, too. One commenter, denis, noted that at the 21-year mark : "I'm kinda partial to let it be forever. It feels like a relic from the past."