I love Firefox but feel little pity for Mozilla which receives $400+ million a year on search placement in their browser but spends only a tiny fraction on its development. The rest is wasted on greedy management and frivolous projects to give that same management an excuse to give themselves multi-million dollar payouts.

Everyone's only in it for the money. There are no good or bad people anymore, only...unfortunates. (that last line I stole from The Equalizer 2).

HN is incredibly inconsistent and spastic about which Mozilla side projects are "frivolous" and which ought to be defended to the death.

Rust was a side project, asm.js was a side project that turned into WASM, IIRC LetsEncrypt was a side project (or at least a side project of some Mozilla engineers, if not official), significant parts of the initial R&D for AV1 and Opus came out of Mozilla, Servo was largely a side project at the point that it got cancelled (the parts that had been largely successful had already been merged into Firefox, the rest was either nowhere near ready or being completely rewritten or both).

But you don't see people complaining about those things, which largely didn't make Mozilla any money, you see them complaining about things that do make Mozilla money, like the branded VPN service. Or projects like FirefoxOS, which ultimately failed but still resulted in a lot of improvements to Firefox and web standards. And it wasn't a bad idea either, it just put the cart (mobile OS) before the horse (the web APIs that are needed to make a browser-based mobile OS successful, like access to GPS and IMU hardware, which didn't exist at the time).

It seems like people define "frivolous side projects" as "anything Mozilla did that didn't end up being incredibly successful" and anything that did become incredibly successful gets ignored or taken for granted.

They also could have used those payments to build up an endowment that makes them not dependent on others.