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 think the issue is multifold, but basically from what I've seen (including having multiple friends at Mozilla and visited their HQ multiple times), Mozilla is run exactly like any other Silicon Valley company.

Sure, there is no shareholders so there is this freedom, but people working there were basically hired after working in other tech companies, and they just work as they did in other tech companies. The fact that Mozilla Corporation is owned by a non-profit seems to be completely lost. Basically people are paid to improve metrics, whether it's the number of users, the ARPU, the "engagement" on whatever features they decided was important...

Add to that the fact that Firefox lagged technically behind Chrome for many years (it only recently cought up with Quantum) and UX wise also Firefox was stuck on the "IE6 but with tabs" look and feel and waited many years before accepting that the UX introduced by Chrome when it was released was superior.

As a result, now that casual users are on Chrome and the Firefox user base is mostly made of users who choose Firefox not because of its technical merits but because it's Open Source, supported by a non-profit, etc. There is a disconnect between that user base and the Mozilla Corporation who just thinks like any other SV company.