by glenstein | 2025-10-26 00:56:25+00:00
>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.