Reminder that donations to Mozilla are not donations to Firefox development. The Mozilla Corp (makes Firefox) and Mozilla Foundation (gets donations) are mostly separate.

> Mozilla strikes me as an organisation with too many resources for its own good. They keep pursuing these random side gigs with limited unifying theme other than an excuse to spend money.

Why does this appear to be "random" to you? What is your definition of "random"?

Have you tried "putting on a Mozilla hat" and thinking about their priorities and goals? If you do, I think you'll likely see some connections. After you do this for a few minutes, I'm interested if perhaps you can see another point of view.

It makes me wonder about their management style occasionally, like taking over two decades to fix the issue with the accidental quit shortcut on desktop. People were celebrating that it was done, but I was wondering why it hadn't been fixed earlier if it was that important (I had accidentally triggered that shortcut myself at least ten times before).

Also reminds me that their mobile division seems painfully understaffed.[1] After using Firefox Mobile for a year there still isn't even a way to search your history, along with a dozen other pain points I put up with daily. And the most painful issues I bring up are either closed or never get addressed for months, or ever. It makes Chromium-based browsers even more tempting to me, and in cases I've had no choice but to use them for things like caching bugs with stale development assets, but Chrome is really all there's left if we lose Firefox.

I really, really hope that they do not sink the current iteration of mobile Firefox. When I see resources being used on projects like these, I just wish the more pressing issues were prioritized. Firefox is the face of Mozilla.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26107676

Additional reminder that Mozilla just recently had to go through a round of layoffs.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24120336

The fact they have significantly more than 250 employees in the first place is a bit mind boggling. As far as I can tell most of the spending is unrelated to Firefox. What do all of these people do and why are they needed?

>The fact they have significantly more than 250 employees in the first place is a bit mind boggling. As far as I can tell most of the spending is unrelated to Firefox. What do all of these people do and why are they needed?

I sometimes have the same reaction when learning the number of people employed for what I would have otherwise thought to be some meager thing. Then I get reminded about the folks over in external/internal support; marketing; design; IT/infrastructure; legal; compliance; etc.

Here's Mozilla's listing:

https://careers.mozilla.org/listings/

I understand there are a lot of roles needed for non-trivial organizations to function, but Mozilla has over 1000 employees and, in my opinion, does not deliver a corresponding level of value. I would actually donate if I could be sure my money is going to Firefox. I do not care about any of their other initiatives.

Without Mozilla documentation on web standards, there won’t be much of an open web left.

That’s the bulk of the team that got layed off, by the way. I think there was some last-ditch effort that was able to preserve the MDN efforts.