The Mozilla Foundation isn’t the Firefox Foundation. It’s a charity that happens to build a browser, not the other way around. That’s intentional, and has been the default setup for years.

When the foundation wants to start a new project, they’ll often spin up a new company they own so the company can hopefully make a profit and become self sufficient while the Mozilla Foundation themselves remain nonprofit. Most companies fail, and so do most of Mozillas’s attempts to stay financially independent.

I agree with many of the projects the Foundation does and I don’t think many others need to use Mozilla’s funding specifically. That doesn’t matter, though.

I think this approach is doomed. People only care about Mozilla because of Firefox and Firefox is falling behind again, no doubt coinciding with the mass layoffs and the ejection of the Servo engine. They’ve caught up with Chrome on most fronts a year or three ago when their reinvented CSS and layout engine was released, but they’re still on the back foot these days.

The Firefox dev team makes the money Mozilla uses for browser development, through Google’s generous donation (which isn’t even necessary anymore now that Firefox is at 3% market share and Webkit and Edge form actual competition; the “keep your opponent alive so we’re not a monopoly” strategy is no longer necessary). Cutting down on the dev team during hard times while maintaining the Foundation’s ideological policies and keeping upper management well paid shows a troubling direction.

Everyone who’s donated to Mozilla has either looked up what they’re doing with the money or were complete fools with more money than sense. Don’t throw your money at nice words, most well-known charities spend the majority of their donations on ads and extracting more donations.

I understand this may be upsetting to some right wing individuals who want Firefox to succeed but don’t care for the progressive nature of Mozilla, but this isn’t exactly news.