They seemingly spent the last 20 years actively figuring out ways not to make money. It's a terrible shame. They coast on the memories of yesteryear - a shell of their former selves.

They did create some things of lasting value though, like Rust.

And then proceeded to lay off the Rust team and force it out on its own. That probably worked out for the best in the end, but they don't get to claim credit for Rust's subsequent successes.

They absolutely can. The funded and drove all of the research and development that led to Rust, which would not have been created otherwise.

Bullshit. They made it. There is no Rust success without Mozilla, none. They can claim 100% credit for all of its successes, legitimately.

Just like you can claim 100% credit for all of your child's successes if you boot them out of the house without support as soon as they come of age?

Another missed opportunity in my opinion.

Why do I use a Microsoft product to develop in Rust? Mozilla could have built the best-in-class Rust developer experience, a la Jetbrains.

Just another mismanaged, incoherent side quest.

Development environments are a time and money sink, a total distraction from Mozilla's actual goals.

Perhaps - but Jetbrains pulled in over $400MM USD in revenue in 2021[1]. Jetbrains now even offers a Rust IDE.

Besides - what were Mozilla's actual goals? Find ways to not make money?

People would throw money at a competent, coherent, privacy-centric, non-Microsoft collaborative office suite. Mozilla had Thunderbird, messaging apps, file sharing apps, etc - and somehow never got organized enough to form a single coherent strategy that would make money. Instead they were all one-off half-baked products that were DOA.

It's dumbfounding. GSuite did so well because it's not Microsoft. Today we have many offerings, from Zimbra to Zoho and more - just imagine what someone with Mozilla's reputation and morals could have done for SMB's in this space, before anyone else moved?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JetBrains