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 don't hold Mozilla to higher standards. I just expect Mozilla to make a decent browser. Firefox is not a decent browser anymore compared to its competition. Its performance and security is lagging severely behind Chrome, and it doesn't really respect privacy any more than Chrome does in its default configuration. Pretty much the only two advantages it has right now are containers, and the fact that it's not Chrome. The former matters a lot less now that the newest version of Cookie AutoDelete can remove cache and indexedDB per-domain.

The one thing that could save it, Servo, doesn't seem to be a priority. Instead, Mozilla seems to be focusing on offering cloud services that nobody wants or cares about, which also don't really respect privacy any more than other cloud services. The only significant revenue stream Mozilla has is through Firefox, which keeps steadily losing users and market share.

And even that is almost entirely dependent on people using Google search with the browser. Given that Google is Mozilla's primary competitor who has intentionally broken their apps on Firefox and is pushing them down in search results, and that Firefox is marketing itself to privacy-conscious people who wouldn't use Google anyway, it doesn't seem wise or sustainable at all.

Unless things seriously change, I have no faith that they'll be able to turn this situation around. We may just have to live with a Blink/WebKit web monoculture until we get some serious anti-trust legislation.