My feelings about the Mozilla layoffs

Posted Wednesday, August 12th, 2020 

slice of life

I’m having a really bad moment regarding all the news about the recent Mozilla layoffs. Most of my friends there have been fired. I’m just waiting to learn from two of them, but since I already know their teams are gone, I expect them to be a part of the Mozilla Lifeboat now.

For the past seven years, Mozilla has been an important part of my life. I have been a Mozilla Rep, an employee, and a Mozilla TechSpeaker. It feels like Mozilla is this beautiful dream that is unfortunately plagued by incompetent managers. And even though they are to blame, so are we. Many in the web development love Mozilla but they don’t use Mozilla products, they think their love is enough. It is not. What we are seeing is the consequence of the market share of Firefox. Declining market share leads to less money, with less money you can’t maintain a multinational dream of a better web alive.

People are angry at Moz, I am angry at them too. But there is no other web browser vendor out there that cares for you. Apple, Google, Microsoft, none of them have the heart of Mozilla. Being angry and shouting: “I will migrate to Chrome!” is actually just conceding and making the problem worse. Without Mozilla, there is only corporate America shipping web browsers. Is this the world we want?

Mozilla has a heart, something that no other browser vendor has, but that heart is broken. Many of those teams were on the leading edge of tech and their work present on the day-to-day life of all web developers. Servo, DevTools, DevRel, all gone. All those people who spent years if not decades trying their best to make a “web for everyone and by everyone” will join ranks with startups, Google, Apple, and Microsoft. They’ll be better paid, and probably be safer from a career perspective. I have no doubt that such competent people will find fresh places to work. But the web, our dear web, will suffer.