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.

You get flogged for things for-profit companies don't because Mozilla claims the moral high ground and then leaves something to be desired in its actions and results. The rather dodgy non-profit/for-profit hybrid while effective from a business standpoint, doesn't help your cause: while originally presented as the for-profit serving the non-profit, the reality appears to be the other way around.

> while originally presented as the for-profit serving the non-profit, the reality appears to be the other way around.

Would you care to elaborate?

IIRC, the stated purpose of the formation of the foundation and corporation was to primarily fund the development of the/a browser product. Over the last 10 years, the corporation has taken in several billion dollars which should have been enough to fund a sizeable fraction of annual cash needs in perpetuity (i.e. don't spend it as you get it, invest it as various endowments/trusts do so that you have an annual revenue stream to fund the project on an ongoing basis) anticipating that the large cash payments from search engines weren't going to last forever.

Unfortunately, rather than doing that, it appears most of the money has been spent on various misadventures and expanding staff to consume the funds taken in which now apparently has to be scaled back. So now we get to read this blog post which reads like any number of VC-backed startups needing to pivot to find a business model. Mozilla has one, if it would just stop spending money going off on all these tangents and focus on what I suspect the vast majority of us want from it: the best possible browser. If we get to a point where browsers are no longer relevant, then frankly neither is Mozilla. It's shown minimal aptitude for things other than browsers, and supporting tech, which it unfortunately doesn't seem terribly interested in focusing on.