this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2026
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Good to know that the people in Mozilla are actually capable of leaving. What I don't understand is why they don't all leave together and get themselves leaders who actually care about Firefox instead of the dollars. I bet that if there was a big push by Mozilla employees to a new browser on top of Servo (as was originally the plan?), they joined whatever foundation Servo has, and they made a lot of noise about it, many people would be itching to move their donations over from Mozilla to OpenCollective.
Firefox lost users not only because Big Goo threw thousands of engineers at their own browser, but because they actively fucked up nearly everywhere they could. Sure, FF got faster and more stable and and and, but it also introduced a ton of crap nobody asked for. They also had random projects that had absolutely nothing to do with Firefox which just wasted their time and money.
Donations to Servo (or Mozilla, for that matter) don't come anywhere near the income from selling the default search engine spot in a browser used by hundreds of millions of people.
There are hundreds of millions of Firefox users? That can't be right.
And Big Goo pays well, but at what cost? Has it really made Firefox better?
It's a bit hard to tell, since not every Firefox install necessarily corresponds to a single user, but it's probably in that ballpark: the number of active installs is hovering around 200 million.
Don't underestimate the size of the browser market. A small share of a market of a couple of billion users is still a lot of people.
And presumably, like everywhere, not every dollar automatically makes things better, but having to pay people to do stuff like this isn't cheap.
Mozilla took big money and lost users due to focusing on money and keeping the status quo. Money is necessary, that is undeniable, but too much money is bad and I think the evidence is quite clear that this is one of those cases.