There's some serious Mozilla Derangement Syndrome in online spaces, I see it on Reddit, too. A lot of people seem to want to hold them to standards they hold no other company to, some discontents seem to be driven into a frothing rage by some of CEOs uh.. traits? too.
I feel like I just want to keep a running list of the most egregious criticisms, or alternatively write an article along the lines of "Mozilla Criticisms, Ranked by Sanity".
Some are fair! But many aren't. But it may help temper MDS to put it all in one place.
I think a lot of the people who remember Phoenix and were part of the push to install Firefox and unseat IE are very sour about what the Mozilla Corporation is currently doing.
>about what the Mozilla Corporation is currently doing.
I don't know if you ever saw the movie Dark City, but one aspect of the plot was that everyone thought they knew the way to Shell Beach, but could never actually tell you how to get there if you asked [0]:
>Murdoch learns that he came from a coastal town called Shell Beach, which everyone knows, though no one remembers how to get there and Murdoch's attempts to visit fail.
And, look at this thread! 90% of the time it's young adults with no financial literacy misinterpreting non-profit filings.
Which, again, it's not to say there's no issues. Adtech is bad. CEO pay is bad-ish. But most of the time the best anyone can manage is sweet nothings like "you know... all the... stuff they're doing!" It's filed away in the Shell Beach part of their brains.
Are you implying that people are imagining that Mozilla strategy is awful?
Because I disagree. Mozilla has a shockingly long string of poor decisions: the mobile OS no one wanted, acquiring Pocket, parting with Servo, starting Lockwise, the whole VPN thing, the VR browser, the IoT gateway, the extension debacle with the Android version refactoring.
Honestly, there is plenty to criticise independently of the financial thing.
>Are you implying that people are imagining that Mozilla strategy is awful?
Yes! It's mostly embarrassingly wrong nonsense, full of confidently wrong Shell Beach-isms. It's frustrating to repeat myself but as I said already, look at all the mischaracterizations of Mozilla's finances in this thread. To be fair I don't think the average person should have to know how to interpret nonprofit filings, but you should if you're pointing to them to make an argument. That's the short version. But for the longer version...
ITT we've had people incorrectly claiming they "spent all their money" (not true, their endowment is the largest it's ever been), that they format the reports to "hide" true spending (obviously not true to anyone who's familiar with independent auditing process non-profit disclosures), that they aren't spending a "majority" on software development (even the most conservative estimate of their latest filing would put it at 52-53% but that's excluding important spending categories), that they're spending less than they used to (not true even after you adjust for inflation). And that's just from this thread!
So, I'm just going to pause and take a breath. In a reasonable conversation, those points would have registered. In a words-mean-things conversation, someone would read the above paragraph and say something like "goodness, that was a list of real examples of spurious criticisms, pertinent to this conversation." But it's a vibes and echo chambers based conversation, playing out in the backwaters of internet comment sections, losing signal and gaining confidence with every next regurgitation. Most people who make these points never read the financials until they already made up their mind that they could be used to prove a point.
Moreover, a lot of the complaints are "floaters" detached from any coherent unified narrative, or even openly contradictory. Depending on the day, the VPN was a problem because it's was losing gobs of money (sincerely argued not but true), or a good thing because it's diversifying revenue sources. Or the VPN is supposedly a distraction that caused loss in market share, which also isn't accurate because it gets history of market share wrong. The market share losses were from 2010-2015, they were not from the side-bets era of 2020-2025. Again, that would matter if this was a words-mean-things conversation.
Pocket, depending on the person, was a good decision because it broadened revenue streams (people lamenting not being able to donate to the corp directly would at least note you could get a pocket subscription), or a sky-is-falling failure. In truth it doesn't seem like it budged anything market share wise, and the cost to acquire and the revenue it raised was likely a modest lost or a wash in the grand scheme of things.
Depending on the day, the mobile OS was a good thing or not a good thing (a recent article from the Register criticizing Mozilla said the mobile OS was an example of a good bet, and I think an Android alternative would be great right about now with their forced developer certification coming.)
And generally speaking, if we treat the 2020-2025 era as the "side bets" era, they collectively have practically nothing to do with market share issues, which happened from 2010-2015 and was more about the rise of Chromium than Mozilla missteps.
It's not that nothing was wrong; again I repeat myself but I'd love to have Servo around still, and I don't love the CEO pay, or the rationalizations for ad-tech, but they are needles in a haystack of confidently misstated nonsense. And there's no pattern of accountability for the nonsense that's proportionate to the volume and the velocity at which it's expressed.
