http://calpaterson.com/mozilla.html

Starts with a comparison of #Firefox market share and the pay of #Mozilla's top executive

I did not search for it, but around the time they laid off 1/4 of their workforce, I thought I saw something about some pay reductions for their top management.

https://www.jwz.org/blog/2020/09/this-is-a-pretty-dire-assessment-of-mozilla/

My personal assessment is this: as the browser started picking up share, they also picked up a patron (Google) that seemed to provide unlimited funding. It was during this period that all the "privacy NGO" ideas started, because they had more than enough money for their main projects and decided they'd spend the rest "doing good".

I can't fault them for that. But I do think that Mozilla's current state is pretty closely related to having "grown up" with unlimited money to spend on tangentially related projects.

At some point, Google decided that their interests were better served with an owned-and-controlled browser, and the rest is history.

There's always the hope that Mozilla will open up more Firefox and #Thunderbird development to non-paid programmers and start asking its users to optionally contribute financially. This could help, but there still needs to be a soul-searching that asks whether they are a group that develops a browser and a mail client or some sort of generic web and privacy advocacy group that just happens to develop those applications.

Those are two different roads, and with a much more constrained income stream, they can't be both at once any more.