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jr conlin's ink stained banana
2026-06-12 11:07:47 :: Leaving Mozilla
geek
While I have mostly enjoyed my time here, there are a few things I wish to say upon my departure:
You Are More Important Than You Think
I'm not referring to you The Corporate Entity or you the Collective Organization. I mean you. The person reading this right now. I have beat the drum for mentoring for quite some time. Mentoring is a lot of things, but essentially, it's finding someone else to talk to. In a company full of fellow introverts, I get that idea is uncomfortable and hard, but really, it's one of the best things for both you personally and your career. You're smart and can both learn and teach, no matter what your level of experience or background. Please try it.
You Are Part of Something Far Larger
If you're working here, you're one of the fortunate. There are a bunch of people who wanted to build a browser that could stand toe-to-toe with ones built by people with a lot of money. A browser that put their interests first. That worked how they wanted. We're the lucky, tiny portion that can get paid, but it comes with a price. It is our obligation to listen to the people who aren't lucky enough to get paid. The folk out there are our community. They're our peers. They are the ones who trust that we will continue to work for them, because if not, they'll find someone else who will.
We run the very real risk of losing those people.
We're also pretty small
It's too easy to think that we're big. We're not. We're a niche browser that is lucky enough to get well funded. We shouldn't try to be like the big browsers because that's not what our Community wants.
Think of it this way; imagine living somewhere filled with McDonald's, Burger King, and Wendy's. We're that cozy little Mom & Pop diner where customers say hi to each other, pour each other coffee, and clean up tables. It's the sort of place that folk meet up to chat at tables, have a pretty awesome sandwich, and ask the owner who runs the grill if he thought about having the pork chop come with rice instead of a baked potato.
People have to seek us out. They're doing that because they don't want to use the browser that they literally have at their fingertips. They also seek us out because they don't trust the other big browser that everyone insists that they should be using. The folk that don't care about that already use those big browsers. So, if people are looking for an experience that is absolutely not like the one they already have, why would we ever seek to emulate what those browsers are doing?
Looks like the styling got goofed up. Sorry about that, unless it's what you wanted. If this isn't what you were looking for, try force refreshing your page. You can do that by pressing Shift + F5, or holding Shift and clicking on the "reload" icon. (It's the weird circle arrow thing "⟳" just above this page, usually next to where it says https://blog.unitedheroes.net...)
jr conlin's ink stained banana
2026-06-12 11:07:47 :: Leaving Mozilla
geek
While I have mostly enjoyed my time here, there are a few things I wish to say upon my departure:
You Are More Important Than You Think
I'm not referring to you The Corporate Entity or you the Collective Organization. I mean you. The person reading this right now. I have beat the drum for mentoring for quite some time. Mentoring is a lot of things, but essentially, it's finding someone else to talk to. In a company full of fellow introverts, I get that idea is uncomfortable and hard, but really, it's one of the best things for both you personally and your career. You're smart and can both learn and teach, no matter what your level of experience or background. Please try it.
That doesn't mean we can't become big. We did this before. When we listened to our Community, gave them what they wanted, let them work with us to build something amazing, they told their friends. That was our growth phase, where we had ever increasing DAU (to use business terms). For regular folk, that's when they installed us on their uncle's laptop, their neighbor's phone, and their classmates' desktop, because their work was part of what made us special. They told their company about how we were a great alternative because they were proud to be part of what we were. That's something you can't build with just posters and stickers alone.
So, that's it. TL:DR;
Respect yourselves.
Help each other out.
Remember who you're working for.
If you want to stay in touch, I'm not that hard to find online, although I might spend a few days screaming at the ocean.
Right, so that's the note I sent when I left. Now I get to talk about all the things that bothered the hell out of me.
Mind you, I would have preferred to stay longer, but things got to a point where it just wasn't fun anymore. (Considering that my career has been supporting stuff that no one else wanted to deal with. When everyone else ran out of the room, I was the one that would sigh, raise his hand, and take on the task. This did not do wonders for my career, but it was honest, hard work and constantly challenging.)
My career generally has been weird, because I'm not the kind of person to jump ship after a year or two. That's about the point when I feel I actually understand not only what I was handed, but how it fit into the larger org, and I can actually improve things more holistically. Not all of those improvements radically changed things. I've heard it as “Keeping the campsite clean”, little changes and improvements that make everything else generally better.
I've had previous opportunities to “ride the rocket” with various companies and they've been moderately entertaining. Often the trajectory of that start-up rocket was “into the ground". In fact, the majority of companies I was with no longer exist, Netfix being the odd-duck out. It's often said that Mozilla survives in spite of it's Leadership, not because of it, and it absolutely rang true lately.
So, let's go over a few things that bothered me. These are all opinions from someone who worked in a trench there for 15+ years, but, the bonus was that I never got the chance to think that highly of myself.
I'm not kidding when I said that Firefox is a niche browser. Folk have to actively look to use it. They have to search it out, figure out how to download it, ignore all the warnings and “suggestions” that they should keep using whatever the native browser is, avoid all the ads for Chrome as the better replacement browser, ignore all the sites saying “Your browser is out of date” because they couldn't be arsed to test things in Firefox, etc. Firefox users are not normal. They are deeply abnormal, and frankly a lot of them are proud of that.
The problem is that Leadership doesn't know how to deal with that.
Mozilla, born of being niche, and started by a bunch of abnormal folk, is deeply abnormal. Mozilla is open source. Like, really open source. Pretty much every line of code they write is published somewhere. (There are some private repos of course, because they're not going to leave the keys under the doormat, and there are some repos that aren't public because the folk that wrote them are exec types that don't understand the power or motivation of Open Source, but they're weird and those projects don't last long anyway.)
Pretty much no other company in the Tech Industry is like Mozilla. So it's really hard to hire people with experience running traditional Tech Industry companies that have any clue about how to deal with being that level of open. They all come from worlds where The Black Turtlenecked God told you “Do Not Tell Anyone about Anything”. The idea that they literally give things away and are actually transparent as hell is like telling them Mozilla employees are martians. They smile, say polite things, then ignore our history and actions and do things that they know because the concept of anything alien is clearly evil.
This sort of thing manifests in weird ways. One of the more hilarious ones is the “Chase for the DAU” (Daily Active User). Mozilla's DAU count has been dropping for years. There's all sorts of reasons for that. I bet you can come up with a few yourself. Of course, New Leadership comes in with guns a'blazing and Big Ideas for how to make DAU go Up. Those proposals seldom work because those Big Ideas inevitably are “We should copy what the Big Browsers do!”. Remember when I said that our users are deeply abnormal? Yeah, they already have that feature in the browser that's already on their machine. If they wanted it that bad, they already have it.
I told someone once that imagine being in an area where every restaurant is McDonald's, Burger King, or Wendy's. Opening up another burger stand isn't really going to cut it. But if you open up a diner where folk know your name, and customers can pour coffee for other folk, or help clear dishes, or talk with the guy at the grill and try to convince him to add teriyaki spam and grilled cabbage on rice to the menu, you might wind up becoming the neighborhood hang-out that folk tell visitors about.
But, sure, if the DAU numbers are down, clearly New Thinking must be the answer! Maybe? I mean, thinking that's different than what was currently being done is probably a really good idea. The thing is that's also when the delusions set in. Every New Leader thinks “We've got to think like a Start Up!” I mean, they do know that most start-ups fail, right? Mozilla is a 30 year old company. They are the polar opposite of “start-up”. In fact, for the past 15 years, they've been "thinking like a Start-Up[1]" in various flavors and now they have the lowest DAU ever. Instead, I dunno, maybe look back at that 30 year history and see what they were doing when they had positive DAU and do that again?
I'll give them a hint because I was around then: It wasn't chasing the latest fads.
It was doing what they're good at, being deeply abnormal, and helping folk make what they really wanted.
Back then, not only were we publishing all of our code, we were working with folk to make a better browser, regardless of where they were or if they were part of our org chart. Doing that excites people. Knowing that what you're working on can go into a product used by others makes you faithful about that product. Knowing that your opinions and ideas can change the most complex application on your computer makes you want to share that application with others. Having a sense of ownership, no matter how small, makes you a member of a Community that advocates for that browser and makes you want to install it everywhere. That beats any clever marketing project, ever. I know this, because I saw it happen, repeatedly.
Of course Leadership doesn't get that. That's one of those “martian” things, that is clearly wrong and bad because it wasn't part of their MBA syllabus and Meta didn't do that. (I mean, the fact that Facebook is a community message board, and thus has more contributions from outside of the company than inside, may skip right by them, but whatever.)
Another fun example of “not clear on the idea” happened after Mozilla decided to chase the Enterprise dollar. Don't get me wrong, that's an incredibly rich seam to draw from. Short of getting government contracts, there's no better source of reliable income. Of course, getting that “enterprise” gold isn't easy, and comes with lots of strings and conditions, usually in the form of ISO standards. One of them is that you need to prove that your code and infrastructure are secure. (No bad guys getting in and doing bad guy things.) There are ways to address that sort of problem. One is to follow the guidance and install essentially spy-ware and locks on company issued devices to make sure that "noting bad happens". Basically, fortify the walls so that the Outside People don't get your valuable data.
Again, Mozilla is abnormal. Normal companies secure things because if bad people saw their code they could write exploits and do bad things. That works fine for others, but Mozilla publishes all of their code. Bad guys are already building exploits, and Mozilla has a stellar track record of fixing critical bugs, often within 24 hours. That's unheard of, and they've done that since day 1. That's like mandating you put a bar on the steering wheel of an armored tank, that's actively crewed, in the middle of a base, with half the population watching. Yeah, sometimes bad things happen, but it's not that often. You push back where it makes sense. Trust me, enterprise companies use curl, linux, and a slew of open source stuff written by random people who engage in all sorts of activities and will never fill out a cybersecurity attestation certificate. You make sure that the keys are properly locked and the build environments are secure, and that there's a clear audit path available with trusted signatories. You know, the thing they've been doing so long and well it's what the guys who run cybersecurity outfits modeled themselves after.
Another delusion comes about because of self-reinforcement. Say you're going to release some, controversial feature. Maybe it's browser based DRM, maybe it's AI, maybe it's Push Notifications. Listening to your users can be a bit challenging[2], because while some might tell you, most probably won't. They'll just leave. That means that your source of information will be the people that stick around, so you wind up getting artificially high approval rates for things. It's a bit like that bomber diagram meme. I'm willing to say that if you announce a feature or function and the number doesn't go up past the initial novelty bump, that's a pretty solid indicator that you guessed wrong, and maybe the folk complaining on Reddit might have a point. Folk are telling you, they're just not doing it directly in a focus group.
A final Community thing is that over the past five or so years, Mozilla has been turning away from it's powerhouse, the Community. I have no idea why, but I can say that it's a top down decision. At some point, some folk at a high level decided that Mozilla got to where it did on it's own. It did not. The thing I was beating a drum about was that the folk working there were the lucky ones who got a paycheck, but most of their peers were folk who didn't have a badge and a @mozilla.com email address. Leadership was convinced that the people in our Community were just customers, and maybe fans. This pissed off so, so many folk, and rightly so. They had given hours or years of effort and time without compensation, because they believed they were part of a larger effort. They felt betrayed because they were betrayed. I'm sure that someone probably had a reasonable argument about “how could we let all these outsiders have say?" or "I don't like that those folk hate the amazing work we're doing promoting lemony fresh bell bottoms (or whatever trend they were chasing)?" I dunno, boss, maybe the folk using your browser actually might have solid reasons of their own and might really appreciate things that don't show up on LinkedIn top takes?
@mozilla.com
For what it's worth, I'm not concerned for Mozilla isn't it running out of money. So long as Google or another large search engine exists, it can get cash. There are also a few other financial stability angles it can do which (frankly) would be better. I wish they had made a bigger deal about the privacy preserving (no, really) ad stuff that they were pioneering. Basically, think of it as regressing ads back to the model they were pre-internet, and you're not far off. There will be lots of money and new leaders who don't understand what made the company they're now in charge of only last for so long. There will be lots of people with their own Big Ideas who will come in, chase the chickens around, and leave once they've caused enough ruckus. I hope that it continues to collect nascent martians like myself, who know how big Tech works, hate the approach that those companies take and want to actually make things better, rather than just put a gold star on their resume.
So, what to make of Mozilla?
I will absolutely say that it is full of some of the smartest, kindest, most privacy obsessed people I ever had the honor to work with. I'm proud of the 15+ years I spent working there and look back at most of it fondly. I will probably continue to use firefox as my daily browser, while turning off the latest fad stuff. I will keep telemetry on because I know exactly how it was used and how the people are painful about keeping it private. (Privacy scales, and is cheap as hell, even if it makes your job so damn hard.) I will avoid the AI crap because it's not going to last. That said, there are other browsers I will probably screw around with more, like Servo and Vivaldi.
I also fully expect that this post will probably make the rounds on #moco and #cccc and it'll promptly be ignored in a month. That's fine by me. I don't expect anyone in Leadership to change, which will make me sad. Google's cash cannon will continue to feed Mozilla for quite some time, so expect the bad ideas to continue.
But let's say someone were to ask me the question I used to pose to folk in interviews. “Let's say that you stun us and we make you CEO, what are the things you'd push hardest to do?”
Be boring for a while. There's blood when you live on the cutting edge, but a lot of it is yours. Mozilla has tried building everything from a shopping nexus to a phone's operating system, and kept discovering that they're not great at it. They are, however, really good at building browsers. They should do that. Focus on shoring up core features that folk rely on. There's opportunities to innovate and improve, of course, but it's not a bad idea to let the high speed pasta cannon cool down a bit.
Cut back on the moonshots. As the saying goes: “Shoot for the moon! Because even if you miss, you quickly die of radiation poisoning and circle the sun for thousands of years before impacting something at thousands of kilometers an hour.” Firefox has been “a thing” for thirty years. Those fellow weirdos already know about Firefox, because they're so sick of their default that they want something different. Instead of trying to give them some new, fancy thing-a-ma-bob that gets abandon in a year, how about spending time fixing all the old bugs and tech-debt that's accumulated? Give customers something that just works better, is less annoying, and doesn't constantly scream about how awesome it is. Be the browser that realizes that maybe some people like radical change, but others REALLY don't and make things “opt-in” by default. (Also, remember that your customers are not your fans. They barely tolerate you. You have to work every day to convince them to stick around. That's not being negative, that's being realistic. Humility drives improvement and forces you to be more critical about radical changes.)
Build back your Community. Encourage outside contributions, to the point where they are part of the active conversation about what to do next. Not some focus group you cornered for an hour with the promise of Amazon gift cards, but the folk that helped fix a bug, land a feature, translate a page, or answered a ton of questions. Did you know that for a while Firefox was available in nearly every language? That was thanks to the team of volunteers that helped make sure that Firefox was fluent when no other browser or application was.
Don't get rid of the good stuff. Mozilla has a really terrible habit of trying to get rid of things that are successful. They hold Thunderbird at arms length, tossed out Rust (even though it could have been their cash cow), Servo may be what beats you. Yes, there have been a lot of really bad ideas and plenty of passion projects that went nowhere, but Mozilla often “cleaned house” for terrible reasons. Mozilla could still invite some of those orphaned projects back, you know. Or at least work with them to actually make things better. Maybe some face of Mozilla is the one that provides the “enterprise” aspect for Rust, and they split revenue with the project. Maybe they bring the Servo folk back to talk about improvements. Maybe they spend a few resources to improve bugzilla, the thing that got corrupted into the waking nightmare that is Jira, and give Atlassian a run for their copious money.
I do, honestly, wish that Mozilla would reconnect with their Community, though. I'd love if the abnormal little niche browser built by martians became popular. Not because of being just like the big browsers, but because it's nothing like them. You know, kind of like it was back in the 2000's when the DAU was way the hell higher. Firefox succeeds not by being the same, but by attracting folk that want something different and reflects their needs rather than someone's OKR. We grow not by making noise, but by being useful. Heck, we can become a significant portion of the market again just by being a browser and not whatever the hell the other companies are doing that's driving their customers nuts. Will we ever be #1? No. That shouldn't be our goal, either. We should be a significant part of a vibrant ecosystem, not the black hole that consumed everything. Hell, if I were Mozilla Leadership, I'd be watching Vivaldi closer than I would be watching Chrome or Edge.
For the past year or so, I've been asking myself a question. “Who am I doing this for?” Who am I working so hard, landing features and functions, ensuring that things are working, etc. It's pretty clear it's not the same folk that I was doing it for when I started. It's not the folk outside who wanted a browser that was theirs. The answer I kept coming back with was “I'm doing all this so that someone else can get a gold star on their resume for the next gig." I'm sorry, but I don't care about your career any more than you cared about mine. The people who go through the extraordinary effort to find Mozilla Connect, have told you the things that they want us to work on. Yeah, it's low traffic in the same way that Arthur Dent's home plans were public and well trafficked. (Yes, I'm well aware that “Suggest” is used by something else, but we've never let that stop us before.) Working overtime and killing myself because someone got a wild hair is not super compelling, and makes what I do more “a job” than something I'm actually interested in doing.
As for me? I dunno. I'm more burnt than the Christmas Roast you just remembered you had in the oven. I'm more done than a Trump casino. I've got some money stashed away and can live off of that for quite some time, but I'll probably be back doing tech stuff, probably open source stuff because it's a lovely way to fuck with the tech bros trying to ruin it. Who knows, maybe I'll grab a few old laptops, some controllers and set up a few MAME rigs at the local nursing homes because even old folk need a few FYB type games.
Heck, I might even fork Autopush and some of the WebPush libraries just so I can finally work through the backlog of crap.
[2] I will also add that there are some folk out there that are the absolute worst imaginable. They're terrible people who sling insults and insist that their brilliance is the only solution to any problem. These are the folk that make 4chan look like angels, and they're more than happy to pollute any discussion they can come across. Ignoring, banning, and otherwise dealing with those folk can be de-humanizing and soul crushing, because those folks do everything they can to make it that way. But, that's also part of the challenge. You don't let one person deal with it, you have lots of folk wade in and deal with it. You make the trolls small and uncomfortable because that's what they are, insiginficant mites there just to pester and ruin things. That's hard, and abnormal, and what makes a group stand out.
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You Are Part of Something Far Larger
If you're working here, you're one of the fortunate. There are a bunch of people who wanted to build a browser that could stand toe-to-toe with ones built by people with a lot of money. A browser that put their interests first. That worked how they wanted. We're the lucky, tiny portion that can get paid, but it comes with a price. It is our obligation to listen to the people who aren't lucky enough to get paid. The folk out there are our community. They're our peers. They are the ones who trust that we will continue to work for them, because if not, they'll find someone else who will.
We run the very real risk of losing those people.
We're also pretty small
It's too easy to think that we're big. We're not. We're a niche browser that is lucky enough to get well funded. We shouldn't try to be like the big browsers because that's not what our Community wants.
Think of it this way; imagine living somewhere filled with McDonald's, Burger King, and Wendy's. We're that cozy little Mom & Pop diner where customers say hi to each other, pour each other coffee, and clean up tables. It's the sort of place that folk meet up to chat at tables, have a pretty awesome sandwich, and ask the owner who runs the grill if he thought about having the pork chop come with rice instead of a baked potato.
People have to seek us out. They're doing that because they don't want to use the browser that they literally have at their fingertips. They also seek us out because they don't trust the other big browser that everyone insists that they should be using. The folk that don't care about that already use those big browsers. So, if people are looking for an experience that is absolutely not like the one they already have, why would we ever seek to emulate what those browsers are doing?
That doesn't mean we can't become big. We did this before. When we listened to our Community, gave them what they wanted, let them work with us to build something amazing, they told their friends. That was our growth phase, where we had ever increasing DAU (to use business terms). For regular folk, that's when they installed us on their uncle's laptop, their neighbor's phone, and their classmates' desktop, because their work was part of what made us special. They told their company about how we were a great alternative because they were proud to be part of what we were. That's something you can't build with just posters and stickers alone.
So, that's it. TL:DR;
Respect yourselves.
Help each other out.
Remember who you're working for.
If you want to stay in touch, I'm not that hard to find online, although I might spend a few days screaming at the ocean.
Right, so that's the note I sent when I left. Now I get to talk about all the things that bothered the hell out of me.
Mind you, I would have preferred to stay longer, but things got to a point where it just wasn't fun anymore. (Considering that my career has been supporting stuff that no one else wanted to deal with. When everyone else ran out of the room, I was the one that would sigh, raise his hand, and take on the task. This did not do wonders for my career, but it was honest, hard work and constantly challenging.)
My career generally has been weird, because I'm not the kind of person to jump ship after a year or two. That's about the point when I feel I actually understand not only what I was handed, but how it fit into the larger org, and I can actually improve things more holistically. Not all of those improvements radically changed things. I've heard it as “Keeping the campsite clean”, little changes and improvements that make everything else generally better.
I've had previous opportunities to “ride the rocket” with various companies and they've been moderately entertaining. Often the trajectory of that start-up rocket was “into the ground". In fact, the majority of companies I was with no longer exist, Netfix being the odd-duck out. It's often said that Mozilla survives in spite of it's Leadership, not because of it, and it absolutely rang true lately.
So, let's go over a few things that bothered me. These are all opinions from someone who worked in a trench there for 15+ years, but, the bonus was that I never got the chance to think that highly of myself.
I'm not kidding when I said that Firefox is a niche browser. Folk have to actively look to use it. They have to search it out, figure out how to download it, ignore all the warnings and “suggestions” that they should keep using whatever the native browser is, avoid all the ads for Chrome as the better replacement browser, ignore all the sites saying “Your browser is out of date” because they couldn't be arsed to test things in Firefox, etc. Firefox users are not normal. They are deeply abnormal, and frankly a lot of them are proud of that.
The problem is that Leadership doesn't know how to deal with that.
Mozilla, born of being niche, and started by a bunch of abnormal folk, is deeply abnormal. Mozilla is open source. Like, really open source. Pretty much every line of code they write is published somewhere. (There are some private repos of course, because they're not going to leave the keys under the doormat, and there are some repos that aren't public because the folk that wrote them are exec types that don't understand the power or motivation of Open Source, but they're weird and those projects don't last long anyway.)
Pretty much no other company in the Tech Industry is like Mozilla. So it's really hard to hire people with experience running traditional Tech Industry companies that have any clue about how to deal with being that level of open. They all come from worlds where The Black Turtlenecked God told you “Do Not Tell Anyone about Anything”. The idea that they literally give things away and are actually transparent as hell is like telling them Mozilla employees are martians. They smile, say polite things, then ignore our history and actions and do things that they know because the concept of anything alien is clearly evil.
This sort of thing manifests in weird ways. One of the more hilarious ones is the “Chase for the DAU” (Daily Active User). Mozilla's DAU count has been dropping for years. There's all sorts of reasons for that. I bet you can come up with a few yourself. Of course, New Leadership comes in with guns a'blazing and Big Ideas for how to make DAU go Up. Those proposals seldom work because those Big Ideas inevitably are “We should copy what the Big Browsers do!”. Remember when I said that our users are deeply abnormal? Yeah, they already have that feature in the browser that's already on their machine. If they wanted it that bad, they already have it.
I told someone once that imagine being in an area where every restaurant is McDonald's, Burger King, or Wendy's. Opening up another burger stand isn't really going to cut it. But if you open up a diner where folk know your name, and customers can pour coffee for other folk, or help clear dishes, or talk with the guy at the grill and try to convince him to add teriyaki spam and grilled cabbage on rice to the menu, you might wind up becoming the neighborhood hang-out that folk tell visitors about.
But, sure, if the DAU numbers are down, clearly New Thinking must be the answer! Maybe? I mean, thinking that's different than what was currently being done is probably a really good idea. The thing is that's also when the delusions set in. Every New Leader thinks “We've got to think like a Start Up!” I mean, they do know that most start-ups fail, right? Mozilla is a 30 year old company. They are the polar opposite of “start-up”. In fact, for the past 15 years, they've been "thinking like a Start-Up[1]" in various flavors and now they have the lowest DAU ever. Instead, I dunno, maybe look back at that 30 year history and see what they were doing when they had positive DAU and do that again?
I'll give them a hint because I was around then: It wasn't chasing the latest fads.
It was doing what they're good at, being deeply abnormal, and helping folk make what they really wanted.
Back then, not only were we publishing all of our code, we were working with folk to make a better browser, regardless of where they were or if they were part of our org chart. Doing that excites people. Knowing that what you're working on can go into a product used by others makes you faithful about that product. Knowing that your opinions and ideas can change the most complex application on your computer makes you want to share that application with others. Having a sense of ownership, no matter how small, makes you a member of a Community that advocates for that browser and makes you want to install it everywhere. That beats any clever marketing project, ever. I know this, because I saw it happen, repeatedly.
Of course Leadership doesn't get that. That's one of those “martian” things, that is clearly wrong and bad because it wasn't part of their MBA syllabus and Meta didn't do that. (I mean, the fact that Facebook is a community message board, and thus has more contributions from outside of the company than inside, may skip right by them, but whatever.)
Another fun example of “not clear on the idea” happened after Mozilla decided to chase the Enterprise dollar. Don't get me wrong, that's an incredibly rich seam to draw from. Short of getting government contracts, there's no better source of reliable income. Of course, getting that “enterprise” gold isn't easy, and comes with lots of strings and conditions, usually in the form of ISO standards. One of them is that you need to prove that your code and infrastructure are secure. (No bad guys getting in and doing bad guy things.) There are ways to address that sort of problem. One is to follow the guidance and install essentially spy-ware and locks on company issued devices to make sure that "noting bad happens". Basically, fortify the walls so that the Outside People don't get your valuable data.
Again, Mozilla is abnormal. Normal companies secure things because if bad people saw their code they could write exploits and do bad things. That works fine for others, but Mozilla publishes all of their code. Bad guys are already building exploits, and Mozilla has a stellar track record of fixing critical bugs, often within 24 hours. That's unheard of, and they've done that since day 1. That's like mandating you put a bar on the steering wheel of an armored tank, that's actively crewed, in the middle of a base, with half the population watching. Yeah, sometimes bad things happen, but it's not that often. You push back where it makes sense. Trust me, enterprise companies use curl, linux, and a slew of open source stuff written by random people who engage in all sorts of activities and will never fill out a cybersecurity attestation certificate. You make sure that the keys are properly locked and the build environments are secure, and that there's a clear audit path available with trusted signatories. You know, the thing they've been doing so long and well it's what the guys who run cybersecurity outfits modeled themselves after.
Another delusion comes about because of self-reinforcement. Say you're going to release some, controversial feature. Maybe it's browser based DRM, maybe it's AI, maybe it's Push Notifications. Listening to your users can be a bit challenging[2], because while some might tell you, most probably won't. They'll just leave. That means that your source of information will be the people that stick around, so you wind up getting artificially high approval rates for things. It's a bit like that bomber diagram meme. I'm willing to say that if you announce a feature or function and the number doesn't go up past the initial novelty bump, that's a pretty solid indicator that you guessed wrong, and maybe the folk complaining on Reddit might have a point. Folk are telling you, they're just not doing it directly in a focus group.
A final Community thing is that over the past five or so years, Mozilla has been turning away from it's powerhouse, the Community. I have no idea why, but I can say that it's a top down decision. At some point, some folk at a high level decided that Mozilla got to where it did on it's own. It did not. The thing I was beating a drum about was that the folk working there were the lucky ones who got a paycheck, but most of their peers were folk who didn't have a badge and a @mozilla.com email address. Leadership was convinced that the people in our Community were just customers, and maybe fans. This pissed off so, so many folk, and rightly so. They had given hours or years of effort and time without compensation, because they believed they were part of a larger effort. They felt betrayed because they were betrayed. I'm sure that someone probably had a reasonable argument about “how could we let all these outsiders have say?" or "I don't like that those folk hate the amazing work we're doing promoting lemony fresh bell bottoms (or whatever trend they were chasing)?" I dunno, boss, maybe the folk using your browser actually might have solid reasons of their own and might really appreciate things that don't show up on LinkedIn top takes?
@mozilla.com
For what it's worth, I'm not concerned for Mozilla isn't it running out of money. So long as Google or another large search engine exists, it can get cash. There are also a few other financial stability angles it can do which (frankly) would be better. I wish they had made a bigger deal about the privacy preserving (no, really) ad stuff that they were pioneering. Basically, think of it as regressing ads back to the model they were pre-internet, and you're not far off. There will be lots of money and new leaders who don't understand what made the company they're now in charge of only last for so long. There will be lots of people with their own Big Ideas who will come in, chase the chickens around, and leave once they've caused enough ruckus. I hope that it continues to collect nascent martians like myself, who know how big Tech works, hate the approach that those companies take and want to actually make things better, rather than just put a gold star on their resume.
So, what to make of Mozilla?
I will absolutely say that it is full of some of the smartest, kindest, most privacy obsessed people I ever had the honor to work with. I'm proud of the 15+ years I spent working there and look back at most of it fondly. I will probably continue to use firefox as my daily browser, while turning off the latest fad stuff. I will keep telemetry on because I know exactly how it was used and how the people are painful about keeping it private. (Privacy scales, and is cheap as hell, even if it makes your job so damn hard.) I will avoid the AI crap because it's not going to last. That said, there are other browsers I will probably screw around with more, like Servo and Vivaldi.
I also fully expect that this post will probably make the rounds on #moco and #cccc and it'll promptly be ignored in a month. That's fine by me. I don't expect anyone in Leadership to change, which will make me sad. Google's cash cannon will continue to feed Mozilla for quite some time, so expect the bad ideas to continue.
But let's say someone were to ask me the question I used to pose to folk in interviews. “Let's say that you stun us and we make you CEO, what are the things you'd push hardest to do?”
Be boring for a while. There's blood when you live on the cutting edge, but a lot of it is yours. Mozilla has tried building everything from a shopping nexus to a phone's operating system, and kept discovering that they're not great at it. They are, however, really good at building browsers. They should do that. Focus on shoring up core features that folk rely on. There's opportunities to innovate and improve, of course, but it's not a bad idea to let the high speed pasta cannon cool down a bit.
Cut back on the moonshots. As the saying goes: “Shoot for the moon! Because even if you miss, you quickly die of radiation poisoning and circle the sun for thousands of years before impacting something at thousands of kilometers an hour.” Firefox has been “a thing” for thirty years. Those fellow weirdos already know about Firefox, because they're so sick of their default that they want something different. Instead of trying to give them some new, fancy thing-a-ma-bob that gets abandon in a year, how about spending time fixing all the old bugs and tech-debt that's accumulated? Give customers something that just works better, is less annoying, and doesn't constantly scream about how awesome it is. Be the browser that realizes that maybe some people like radical change, but others REALLY don't and make things “opt-in” by default. (Also, remember that your customers are not your fans. They barely tolerate you. You have to work every day to convince them to stick around. That's not being negative, that's being realistic. Humility drives improvement and forces you to be more critical about radical changes.)
Build back your Community. Encourage outside contributions, to the point where they are part of the active conversation about what to do next. Not some focus group you cornered for an hour with the promise of Amazon gift cards, but the folk that helped fix a bug, land a feature, translate a page, or answered a ton of questions. Did you know that for a while Firefox was available in nearly every language? That was thanks to the team of volunteers that helped make sure that Firefox was fluent when no other browser or application was.
Don't get rid of the good stuff. Mozilla has a really terrible habit of trying to get rid of things that are successful. They hold Thunderbird at arms length, tossed out Rust (even though it could have been their cash cow), Servo may be what beats you. Yes, there have been a lot of really bad ideas and plenty of passion projects that went nowhere, but Mozilla often “cleaned house” for terrible reasons. Mozilla could still invite some of those orphaned projects back, you know. Or at least work with them to actually make things better. Maybe some face of Mozilla is the one that provides the “enterprise” aspect for Rust, and they split revenue with the project. Maybe they bring the Servo folk back to talk about improvements. Maybe they spend a few resources to improve bugzilla, the thing that got corrupted into the waking nightmare that is Jira, and give Atlassian a run for their copious money.
I do, honestly, wish that Mozilla would reconnect with their Community, though. I'd love if the abnormal little niche browser built by martians became popular. Not because of being just like the big browsers, but because it's nothing like them. You know, kind of like it was back in the 2000's when the DAU was way the hell higher. Firefox succeeds not by being the same, but by attracting folk that want something different and reflects their needs rather than someone's OKR. We grow not by making noise, but by being useful. Heck, we can become a significant portion of the market again just by being a browser and not whatever the hell the other companies are doing that's driving their customers nuts. Will we ever be #1? No. That shouldn't be our goal, either. We should be a significant part of a vibrant ecosystem, not the black hole that consumed everything. Hell, if I were Mozilla Leadership, I'd be watching Vivaldi closer than I would be watching Chrome or Edge.
For the past year or so, I've been asking myself a question. “Who am I doing this for?” Who am I working so hard, landing features and functions, ensuring that things are working, etc. It's pretty clear it's not the same folk that I was doing it for when I started. It's not the folk outside who wanted a browser that was theirs. The answer I kept coming back with was “I'm doing all this so that someone else can get a gold star on their resume for the next gig." I'm sorry, but I don't care about your career any more than you cared about mine. The people who go through the extraordinary effort to find Mozilla Connect, have told you the things that they want us to work on. Yeah, it's low traffic in the same way that Arthur Dent's home plans were public and well trafficked. (Yes, I'm well aware that “Suggest” is used by something else, but we've never let that stop us before.) Working overtime and killing myself because someone got a wild hair is not super compelling, and makes what I do more “a job” than something I'm actually interested in doing.
As for me? I dunno. I'm more burnt than the Christmas Roast you just remembered you had in the oven. I'm more done than a Trump casino. I've got some money stashed away and can live off of that for quite some time, but I'll probably be back doing tech stuff, probably open source stuff because it's a lovely way to fuck with the tech bros trying to ruin it. Who knows, maybe I'll grab a few old laptops, some controllers and set up a few MAME rigs at the local nursing homes because even old folk need a few FYB type games.
Heck, I might even fork Autopush and some of the WebPush libraries just so I can finally work through the backlog of crap.
[2] I will also add that there are some folk out there that are the absolute worst imaginable. They're terrible people who sling insults and insist that their brilliance is the only solution to any problem. These are the folk that make 4chan look like angels, and they're more than happy to pollute any discussion they can come across. Ignoring, banning, and otherwise dealing with those folk can be de-humanizing and soul crushing, because those folks do everything they can to make it that way. But, that's also part of the challenge. You don't let one person deal with it, you have lots of folk wade in and deal with it. You make the trolls small and uncomfortable because that's what they are, insiginficant mites there just to pester and ruin things. That's hard, and abnormal, and what makes a group stand out.