Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products
Over the past decade, Mozilla has capitulated over and over again on critical issues. They failed their users and the ecosystem by not standing up to industry pressure for h.264 and EME. They also ended up following rather than leading on key privacy issues like third-party cookie behavior.<p>In every case, they defended these decisions by saying that they couldn&#x27;t risk losing users, arguing that these issues weren&#x27;t hills worth dying on. And now, because Mozilla didn&#x27;t choose a hill to die on, they are going to die on no hill at all.<p>When they aren&#x27;t the browser that is standing up for interoperability and the freedom and privacy of their users, they have no way to differentiate themselves. Firefox is just another browser, and it&#x27;s one that is architecturally dated and under-resourced compared to its rivals.<p>I had assumed that when Mozilla had nothing left to lose as Firefox marketshare crashed, they would go back to being the scrappy underdog who advocates for the right thing. The fact that they&#x27;ve chosen to focus on revenue instead says everything you need to know about how far Mozilla has fallen.