A 15+ year Mozilla veteran shares a candid farewell post covering what went wrong at Mozilla. Key criticisms include leadership failing to understand Mozilla's niche, open-source nature; chasing DAU metrics by copying big browsers instead of doubling down on what made Firefox special; alienating the volunteer community that drove Firefox's growth; and pursuing moonshot projects while neglecting core browser quality. The author argues Mozilla's strength was always its abnormality and community-driven development, and offers concrete advice: be boring and stable for a while, fix tech debt, rebuild community contributions, stop abandoning successful projects like Rust and Servo, and focus on being a genuinely different browser rather than a Chrome clone.
