How could an organization that had its hand in so many world-changing technologies fail to thrive?
When the news broke that Mozilla was launching a new round of layoffs — its second in 2020 so far — reaction was swift. Developers noticed that Mozilla’s cuts ran straight through the corporate fat to the meat of the company. They were “reducing their investment” in the popular developer tools division. Disbanding their entire threat management team. Cutting the Servo team that was working on a next-generation Rust-powered browser engine. Vaporizing the MDN team. In total, the combined two rounds of layoffs added up to nearly a third of the company.
Considering that a significant portion of Firefox’s modest user base is programmers, shrinking its developer tools seems like a particularly short-sighted way to disappoint your most loyal users. But to people who are less familiar with the company, the Mozilla cuts seem like just another case of a competitor failing to succeed with a niche alternative. After all, it’s been years since Mozilla’s marquee product — the Firefox browser — had seriously challenged for market dominance. Surely this was just another dinosaur slowly going extinct?