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.

For me, the feeling of getting kicked in the shins by a diva designer every-other update has risen dramatically in the past few years, as has the prominence of (at least the feeling of) 'closed wontfix dontagree' issues for common and longstanding gripes on the bug tracker and GitHub. The unfortunate nature of a bad feeling is that it will outweigh a positive feeling from another change of equal consequence.

I would not be surprised if it was the same for other users. It results in implicitly giving less benefit of the doubt when another potential controversy comes up.

Other application developers are held to a lower standard because they have already come out the other side - people already simply assume the worst about them. The paradoxical anger comes from the fact that they don't want to do the same with Mozilla, but feel more and more that they'll have to.

The 'closed wontfix dontagree' attitude, or letting important requests sit there open for over a decade -- some with tens of thousands of comments -- is what killed Firefox more than anything.

In the enterprise world, Firefox lacked a few, small, but critical features:

1) MSI Installers

2) Group Policy Administrative Templates

3) Proxy configuration from Windows

4) Enterprise PKI integration

Some of these are supported now, but for about a decade there was at least one person in Mozilla with a philosophical opposition to doing anything that is seen as helping an enterprise Windows network deployment.

I'm pretty certain that Firefox still doesn't work properly in a large corporate environment. At any rate, I've given up trying, as have millions of other administrators. We installed Chrome, which "just worked", and moved on.

The result of this is that enterprise web applications were written for Chrome, not IE or Firefox. Chrome became mandated and automatically pushed to every machine. It has become the new IE6, for better or worse.

Firefox missed that boat.

> MSI Installers

Why was that important? I was under the impression that exe and msi installer had no real difference between them. Obviously I am incorrect but I am wondering why.

True, there's a spectrum. There's the "download wizard" stub installers, then "interactive only" installers, then the ones with unattended command-line flags, and then there's native support for the operating package management format.

In Windows there are further nuances, such as installing per-user, per-machine, or both. Similarly, MSI support often implies support for transforms (MST files) and patches (MSP files) also, which is important on large networks. Back in the days of constrained bandwidths, MSPs were great for rolling out updates without killing the WAN, but few vendors would provide them.

Firefox tended to prefer the interactive install wizard installers and hence deploying it at scale was an enormous pain in the arse.

For example, the Enterprise CA thing actually interacted with the packaging. You had to crack open the Firefox files, download some obscure NSS command-line tool that they regularly moved around on their website to spite admins, and inject your corporate certificates into the Firefox-specific Root CA file. After this, everything had to be put back together in some way for deployment, typically by repackaging the files into an MSI.

Similarly, instead of ADM Templates that allow settings to be pushed out via Group Policy, you had to do hideous things to JavaScript files. These also changed regularly and had all sorts of limitations.

There was just no way anyone in their right mind would do this every few weeks to keep up with the Firefox release schedule. IT admins have other things to do, not just babysitting Firefox, the one special and unique flower that refuses to play nice with Windows.

The only other obstinately anti-admin products I can think of that were this bad were the Java Runtime and the Adobe suite of products. Even Adobe provided an ADM template at least, even though they published it as a PDF.