Remember in the spring of 2014, when Mozilla chose Brendan Eich as its CEO, only to force him to resign over a $1,000 donation to the Proposition 8 effort, a 2008 ballot initiative a majority of Californians supported? Perhaps making it even more egregious, Mr. Eich was a Mozilla founder, and their technology chief.
There were many people who stopped using Firefox (Mozilla’s primary product) because of the company’s treatment of Eich; basically terminating his employment because his political beliefs were not “politically correct”. I was one of those people.
Now Mozilla is in trouble, possibly because of the boycott and the loss of Eich’s leadership skills.
Mozilla Is Flailing When the Internet Needs It the Most:
The Mozilla Corp. historically has made most of its money through a a contract making Google the default search engine on Firefox. But last year, instead of renewing that contract, Mozilla signed agreements with less popular search engines. Yahoo is now the default in the US, Yandex in Russia, and Baidu in China. Mozilla hasn’t revealed the terms of those deals and the report gives no indication of how much revenue the new contracts will generate, but there’s reason for concern.
While Mozilla spins the change as a way of being less dependent on a single company, it’s not clear whether Mozilla or Google pulled the plug. Regardless, it shifts Mozilla’s dependence from a web giant that has historically left Firefox developers alone to Yahoo, a struggling company that may be for sale.
What’s more, Firefox’s share of the browser market is declining rapidly, according to multiple measures. W3Counter says Firefox’s share has decreased from 21.3 percent of browser usage in November 2012 to 11.5 percent this month. Given that its shrinking user base can easily change Firefox’s default search engine from Yahoo to Google or the privacy-centric DuckDuckGo anyway, it’s not even clear that Yahoo will benefit from the deal. And at this point, a shakier Yahoo would suggest a shakier Mozilla.
While Mozilla is far from being a failing company, it is clear that the loss of Eich as their CEO has had a negative influence. 2014 turned out to be a good year for Mozilla financially, but it isn’t at all clear that 2015 will continue that trend.
Read much more at Wired.com
Stella's Place 
I don’t tend to read much tech industry gossip anymore. Once it came out in the late 90’s that many writers were paid by competing companies to spread FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt) in efforts to influence market direction, I started paying more attention to what clients real world experiences were. What I see now is that as younger people are increasingly in purchase decision/authority roles the less they question the source of the article. They accept the contents at face value and make decisions accordingly. I’ve seen hundreds of thousands of dollars go down the drain without a single person being fired.
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I note that when I’ve signed into a computer that still uses Mozilla, a blegging page pops up.
I shall continue to cheer their demise. Playing high stakes politics can get expensive.
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Ditto.
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