[dimal]

Betrayal has that effect. They're supposed to be the good side. They abandoned that, and now they're just like any other unsuccessful tech company, desperately clinging to relevance while discarding all the ideals that made some of us support them.

[Seattle3503]

How would you run Firefox? How would you challenge Google and keep the web open?

[dimal]

Ok, I'll bite. Off the top of my head:

Fire 80% of the C-level employees (make them justify their positions, DOGE-style); investigate and publicize the internal decision-making processes that lead to Mozilla becoming a de facto subsidiary of Google; do a full auditing of the financials and determine how much money the organization really needs to fund browser development (Servo and Ladybird seem to be getting shit done with a lot less money than Mozilla. How is that possible?); do an auditing of all non-browser related initiatives (stuff like MDN is worthwhile, but what other BS is sucking up money and time?); talk to the existing development staff about what's working and what's not and what opportunities exist that an outsider wouldn't know about. I would listen to the developers. Developers are often an underutilized business resource.

This would give me a basis to start thinking about revenue. Once it's clear what fat can be cut (and I think the cuts would be huge), then it'd be clearer exactly what revenue model might work.

At this point, it's worth going for broke. Mozilla is effectively dead, so there's nothing to lose. If it fails, that's still better than the status quo.

[johnnyanmac]

It's a bit futile with the current structure. But if you really gave me the keys, I'd make sure we cut out Firefox to the properly nonprofit side of Mozilla. And then I'd probably have to fire a lot of people. Anything that isn't laser focused on improving the browser is slashed. No vpn services, no privacy services. It's a browser, with docs to maintain to keep a browser running. There's still too many problems to solve to branch out to more.

Monetization definitely isn't easy. It'd be a mix of donations, fundraising, and corporate deals that align with the mission. With a very lean team it should be sustainable, though. The goal is to become an objectively better experience than any other browser, and there's still a lot of jank to work on to achieve that.

[nativeit]

I missed the part where the parent commenter applied for the job.