A Mozilla engineer of 15 years is leaving — and has a few things to say

An engineer who spent more than 15 years at Mozilla, known online as jr conlin, has announced that he is leaving the company. In a post on his personal blog, unitedHeroes.net, he says his last working day will be 21 July, with Friday 12 June as his final "real" day before he uses more than 200 hours of accumulated vacation time.

A farewell note on mentoring and community

The post reproduces the note he sent colleagues on departure. Its first point is mentoring: in a company full of fellow introverts, finding someone to talk to is uncomfortable, he writes, but it is one of the best things for a person and their career. He also reminds staff that they are "part of something far larger" — that many people wanted a browser able to stand toe-to-toe with ones built by far better funded competitors, and that those users are the community the organisation is obliged to listen to. "We run the very real risk of losing those people," he warns. His summary of the note: "Respect yourselves. Help each other out. Remember who you're working for."

A niche browser, not a small big one

The second half of the post is his own commentary. Mozilla, he argues, is "a niche browser that is lucky enough to get well funded", and its users are "deeply abnormal" — they seek Firefox out, ignore suggestions to stay on the default browser and skip ads pushing Chrome. He compares Mozilla to a family diner on a street filled with fast-food chains, and warns that Firefox grew in the past by giving its community what it wanted, not by copying the big browsers. Leadership, he writes, does not know how to handle that: "Mozilla survives in spite of its Leadership, not because of it" is a saying that, in his view, "rang true lately".

The DAU chase and the enterprise detour

Much of his criticism targets the pursuit of daily active users. Mozilla's DAU has fallen for years, he notes, and each new leadership team arrives with plans to raise it — plans that usually amount to copying the big browsers, offering features users already have. He points out that the organisation is 30 years old and "the polar opposite of a start-up", yet has spent 15 years "thinking like a start-up", ending up with its lowest DAU ever. He also describes friction around the push into enterprise sales, where ISO security attestations sit awkwardly with an organisation that publishes nearly all of its code and has long fixed critical bugs, often within 24 hours. He says he would have preferred to stay longer, but "things got to a point where it just wasn't fun anymore".