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.

I may be rapidly downvoted but what strikes me as an outsider (reading most of the comments in this thread) is the collective psyche in the US is viscerally against any entity rising to the top that does not have profit as its sole goal. What they want is for Mozilla to solely focus on Firefox, on the technicalities, and shut up about everything else. And yet no one will actually pay for it as a product.

The tragedy of Mozilla is a very human one, with special embellishments added by the prevailing culture in the US, its home...

What they want is for {product X} to solely focus on their needs {set Y}, disregarding everyone else's needs that conflict.

This selfishness is expressed for lots of things, not just Mozilla, but things like Ubuntu and Homebrew too.

I wonder what HN startups must think when they read HN comments and so very often see "my needs aren't met, I quit you".

> I wonder what HN startups must think when they read HN comments and so very often see "my needs aren't met, I quit you".

I know a couple of guys who posted their stuff here. They don't care about the complainers because the complainers don't have and don't offer to have skin in the game. They did the sensible thing, which is to be polite and respond noncommittally thanking them for the feedback or to ignore them.

Because you don't get information that will improve the product from them, they aren't potential customers, and they usually don't know what they're talking about anyway.

I don't think it's necessary or appropriate to assign an insulting stereotype label to that subset of customers, especially not on HN. People who behave in this manner can be readily found on HN in many discussions (for example, virtually all about telemetry), and while I don't understand them I don't condone insulting them either.