In a surprising turn of events, Mozilla has announced to be discontinuing the Firefox Send and Firefox Notes services soon. This decision was taken to focus more on its commercial services like the VPN and Firefox Monitor services, also the firing of staff who majorly worked for Firefox Send left no choice but to take down the services.
Decommissioning of Firefox Send and Firefox Notes
Mozilla is a nonprofit organization that’s only being paid by Google to have its search engine default, and use those funds to aid Firefox developers.
While it’s turning more privacy-focused lately, the maker of Firefox browser has yesterday announced that they’re planning to end support for Firefox Send and Firefox Notes services soon.
Firefox Send, a web-based file-sharing service from Mozilla will let users host and share files in an encrypted form. But, this has been abused by a few malware operators like REvil, FIN7, Dreambot, etc, who were hosting their malware and sending those links to targets via phishing emails. This can be a sophisticated practice since the malware is encrypted and evades detection.
Mozilla took down this service offline for a while after learning this abuse and said it’s temporary. But, it had laid off about 250 employees last month, where most of them were supposed to work for recreating the Firefox Send service.
This, along with Mozilla’s shift in focus to commercial products like Firefox Monitor, Mozilla VPN, and Firefox Private Network pushed Mozilla to drop the Send service altogether.
The shift in focus reason applies for the Firefox Notes service too, as Mozilla announced to discontinue that too. Firefox Notes will let users save files from the browser and sync them across Firefox devices.
The Android client of Firefox Notes will be discontinued in early November, whereas the browser extension lives but with no further support. Users are urged to export the content of their Notes.
