Before we get going, let's restate the thesis of this two-part essay so it's fresh: Mozilla is pursuing its primary objective, which is the survival of Mozilla. Its mission statement is more than broad enough to accommodate that, and Firefox is not a real priority. The community should accept that and stop waiting for Mozilla to be the hero they deserve.
I was listening to my favorite Linux podcast the other night, putting away dishes, as is my evening ritual. Podcasts make light work of chores, don't they? As they lamented the current direction of Mozilla, one of the hosts exclaimed, "Why can't Mozilla just focus on what we care about?"
Mozilla moves away from Firefox, we respond with anger. They move again, we respond again. This is the Mozilla Cycle, but it doesn't have to keep being this way.
The people who care about Mozilla actually care about something vastly different than Mozilla itself. If you're reading this, I expect you, too, care about Mozilla. And what comes to mind when you think of Mozilla?
If you said anything other than Firefox, you're lying. It's Firefox. It's Firefox. Just Firefox. And maybe the MDN, but that's a distant, distant second.
That's what you care about. What about Mozilla? Let's hear them in their own words, from their 2024 Annual Report, and an article explaining their rebrand:
For years Mozilla has been incorrectly thought of by many as "the Firefox company." This perception left too much of our great work in the shadows.
Oh, okay. And what great work is that, exactly? Let's hear from Mark Surman, then-President and now Chair of the Leadership Council:
Part of this work is reinventing how we want to interact with the internet — and each other — in the AI era. Asking questions like: what comes after the browser? How do we want that to work? Another is creating public interest alternatives to the AI being built by the big commercial players, just like public broadcasting was an alternative to the major networks in the television era. A third — and possibly the most important — part of this work is making sure that open source wins. Open source and open standards played a central role in shifting power dynamics on the web 20 years ago. While the power map is much more complex today with AI, it is critical that open source wins again.
Oh, so AI. Open source, sure, but AI nonetheless. That is what Mozilla is about now. We, those who "care about Mozilla," don't really get to decide that. Surman goes on to describe the organization's goal.
We’ve started to become something closer to a Mozilla.org for the current era — grounded in our roots, but with a growing mosaic of companies, programs, and projects doing for AI what we did for the web. We’ve faced challenges. We don’t yet have a real product — or a meaningful enough foothold — in the AI space. There are tensions between how we’ve always done things (e.g., minimize the use of data) and the things we urgently need to do now (e.g., work with data as a building block of new tech and new products). And, there is not yet a clear path to an economic model for this next era.
Emphasis mine. To summarize, then: Firefox is an afterthought (seriously; it's mentioned only as a past-tense or "legacy" component), and the future is AI—except whoopsie, we have no idea how to monetize, except by compromising our principles.
Of course, compromising their principles is the only option. How could it be otherwise? The foundations of "AI," more precisely, the generative transformers currently driving data center construction and GPU sales, is a technology designed by and for rapacious capitalism, requiring constant growth for profit, and delivering on none of its promises.
Mozilla, the vanguard of an ethical internet, has staked its future on an inherently unethical technology. But this is the course they've chosen. We do not get to decide for them what to care about. We can only decide whether we'll be surprised and outraged.
Non-profits are not, by some inherent property, ethical organizations. Indeed, many times they are more insidious than for-profit corporations, who at least acknowledge that the money is the goal. "Non-profit" is a tax exemption, not a moral code. A non-profit's Board has a primary function of raising funding for the organization. Over time, the survival of the organization becomes the "true" mission that everyone strives for, regardless of means. And heaven forbid a wealthy enough donor join the board, or an obvious funding source make itself apparent: the unprincipled non-profit will motivate their reasoning right over any scruples that would otherwise discourage a distasteful decision in service of the org's survival.
And for Mozilla, this is an existential question. Per their own financial outlook, the losses in 2023 meant that a realignment was necessary for their survival. And while Firefox development is ongoing, that development is directly blamed for increased operating costs that resulted in poor financial performance in 2023.
That was the outlook when the 2024 report was published. Since then, the Department of Justice's antitrust case against Google—you know, Mozilla's primary revenue stream—has ended with severe proposed remedies by the government. There was some hypothesizing that the Trump regime would drop this case, but it looks like they hate Google more than they like corporate corruption. Their revised remedies as of March 2025 still require Google to stop making search deals with partners. If these remedies are adopted in the final ruling in April, that could very well be a mortal blow to Mozilla.
Mozilla knows it. Just today, they published a responseto the DOJ remedies that makes the situation clear:
The DOJ’s proposal to bar search payments to independent browser developers would put Mozilla’s ability to develop and maintain Gecko at risk. If Mozilla is unable to sustain our browser engine, it would severely impact browser engine competition and mean the death of the open web as we know it—essentially, creating a web where dominant players like Google and Apple, have even more control, not less.
Staring down that particular future, it's no wonder that Mozilla has decided to restructure. It was that or accept an ignoble death, done in by over-reliance on the largess of the company whose browser they would hope to compete against.
To paraphrase Dr. Ian Malcolm: capital, uh, finds a way.
