[nonsequitarian]

While it's true that Mozilla pays its people well (necessary, to compete for high end tech talent) and we (I work for Mozilla) are in no way free from commercial concerns, I think you're missing a big piece of why being a nonprofit is a distinguishing factor: Mozilla doesn't have the insane pressure for growth that most startups and all publicly traded companies have to reckon with. Any company that has gone public, wants to go public, or wants to get acquired has a never ending pressure for user and/or revenue growth at all costs. Mozilla doesn't have that pressure for growth. Of course we need to maintain enough market share to stay relevant, and we'd love to have more and more and more users, but ultimately as long as we can make enough money to pay for our operations then we're golden. This gives us a lot more freedom of choice when making decisions about what and how to make money.

[moz23]

> This gives us a lot more freedom of choice when making decisions about what and how to make money.

I'd argue the opposite. Mozilla seem too scared to try anything substantial because they're scared of losing the money they do get (because they aren't actively going after other sources and not trying to grow into new revenue sources). Think of e.g. tracking protection - Apple are the ones actually making moves there, not Mozilla. I wonder why...

[ramblenode]

Mozilla created their own high performance programming language in order to build a faster web engine from scratch (all of which has been largely successful). They developed and shipped a mobile OS well into the reign of Android and iOS. You could argue about the placement of their priorities, but they have definitely thrown their weight behind ambitious projects.

[moz23]

Ambitious in a technical sense - yes. But not ambitious in a "protect the users" sense (see e.g. tracking protection/ad blocking), and also not ambitious in a business sense (i.e. try to do something beyond sell users/traffic to the highest bidding search engine).

(Perhaps they could have made money by selling devices with the OS, but that didn't seem to be the aim there, as far as devices being only sold by partners.)

This is very much the stereotypical engineer approach: trying to engineer your way into revenue. Yes you need strong technology to keep users, but there's a lot more to business than the tech stack and quality.