Comment by bastawhiz

> The browser, MDN, and certificate trust auditing work need more money than the foundation is getting.

I don't believe this to be based on any facts, and it's certainly ignoring that MoCo makes money that doesn't come from the foundation. In 2023 Mozilla had over $650M in revenue and only $260M was spent on software development expenses.

Having a paid offering doesn't take away from search deals. Nor is it ideologically orthogonal.

Here's the thing: Mozilla is addicted to blowing cash on non-software projects. It's addicted to blowing cash on software that is far outside its core offering. It's a graveyard of projects that it buys or builds in earnest, gets the userbased hyped for (sometimes with resistance) and then kills the damn thing in a few years.

Other than Firefox and its various flavors like Firefox Focus, what actually even still exists? A HIBP front end, Thunderbird (again?), Bugzilla, Firefox Relay, MDN, and Mozilla VPN. No, SeaMonkey doesn't count.

The trail of bodies behind Moz as it lumbers on is worse than Google's discontinued products when you compare based on the size of the org. We joke about Google launching new projects, but Mozilla projects are almost certain to be killed. Possibly the single most valuable thing to come out of Mozilla in 20 years was Rust (and by proxy, Servo) and they've managed to not just let it slip through their fingers, but to yeet it as far away as they could muster.

You don't need an MBA to understand that this isn't how to run a software company. It's not about money! If they picked literally any one thing and whole-assed it and made sure users actually a) cared and b) liked it, we wouldn't be having this conversation.