Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products

[I am a Mozilla employee, and yes, I do recognize how my position influences my perspective.]

One thing that always frustrates me a bit whenever Mozilla comes up on HN or elsewhere is that we are always held to impossibly high standards. Yes, as a non-profit, we should be held to higher standards, but not impossible standards.

OTOH, sometimes it just seems unreasonable and absurd. Stuff like, to paraphrase, "Look at the corporate doublespeak in that press release. Fuck Mozilla, I'm switching to Chrome."

Really? That's what's got you bent out of shape?

Sure, Mozilla has made mistakes. Did we apologize? Did we learn anything? Did we work to prevent it happening again?

People want to continue flogging us for these things while giving other companies (who have made their own mistakes, often much more consequential than ours, would never be as open about it, and often learn nothing) a relatively free pass.

I'm certainly not the first person on the planet whose employer has been on the receiving end of vitriol. And if Mozilla doesn't make it through this next phase, I can always find another job. But what concerns me about this is that Mozilla is such an important voice in shaping the future of the internet. To see it wither away because of people angry with what are, in the grand scheme of things, minor mistakes, is a shame.

EDIT: And lest you think I am embellishing about trivial complaints, there was a rant last week on r/Firefox that Mozilla was allegedly conspiring to hide Gecko's source code because we self-host our primary repo and bug tracking instead of using GitHub, despite the fact that the Mozilla project predates GitHub by a decade.

To a large degree Mozilla is given equal treatment to other companies who is struggling financially. People are emotionally (and some economically) invested in Mozilla, and the announcement are clearly not calming those investors.

A common pattern I see when companies are struggling is that the refocus back on the core product. They cut side projects, they move away from what ever broad vision plan that got them into the current mess and refocus narrowly back to a handful profit earning core products.

The reaction to Mozillas announcement would likely look very different if instead of talking about go beyond the browser into a different world they would had done the opposite and refocused efforts exclusively to the handful of products that bring the core of users to Mozilla. Such announcement would clam people and make them hopeful that firefox would gain a strong competitive edge in a time where chrome only get older, slower, more privacy invasive and heavier practitioner of dark patterns. Some would naturally complain that their pet side project would be discontinued, and there would likely be people lamenting the loss of the advocacy work, but users would understand that sometimes a company need to go back to the core product in hard times.