A longtime Mozilla developer is leaving the company after more than 15 years and he has plenty to say about why Firefox keeps losing ground.

JR Conlin posted the news on his personal blog last week. His last real day on the job was June 12 and he plans to burn through more than 200 hours of vacation before officially exiting on July 21. In the note he sent to colleagues he kept things short. Respect yourselves. Help each other out. Remember who you are working for.

He then laid out what had been bothering him. Firefox is a niche browser, he wrote. Users have to go out of their way to find and install it while ignoring every prompt to stick with whatever came on their device. “Firefox users are not normal. They are deeply abnormal, and frankly a lot of them are proud of that.”

The problem is that leadership does not know how to deal with that.

He pointed to the constant push for more daily active users as a clear example. New leaders arrive with big plans to grow those numbers. The ideas usually involve adding features that people already have in Chrome or Edge. When the changes do not move the needle or drive users away, the response has been more of the same rather than looking at what actually worked in the past.

Conlin said earlier growth came because the company listened to its community, let outsiders help build the browser, and gave people a sense of ownership. That turned users into advocates who installed Firefox on family machines and talked about it at work. He believes that kind of pride cannot be manufactured with marketing campaigns or stickers.

The post also described other frustrations that built up over time. Mozilla’s deep open source approach is unusual in tech, yet some leaders come from companies that treat transparency as a risk. Efforts to win enterprise deals sometimes clash with how the project actually operates, since the code is already public and serious bugs tend to get fixed quickly anyway. Feedback can get skewed because unhappy users often just leave instead of filing complaints through official channels. Over the past five years or so he watched the company pull back from the outside contributors who helped make Firefox what it was. Many of those people felt “betrayed,” he said.

Conlin was clear that he still respects the people he worked with. He called them some of the smartest and most privacy-focused engineers he has met. He plans to keep Firefox as his daily browser but will turn off the newer experimental features. He expects to try other projects more, including Servo and Vivaldi.

If someone had asked him what he would do as CEO, he had a short list. “Be boring for a while.” Focus on fixing the core browser instead of chasing moonshots. Clean up old bugs and tech debt. Make big changes opt in by default. Rebuild real ties with the community instead of treating contributors like customers or fans. Stop abandoning projects that succeeded just because they do not fit the current plan. He mentioned Rust, Servo and even Thunderbird as examples of things that got pushed away too quickly.

Conlin’s exit exposes a clear rift between Mozilla’s veteran engineers and its executive suite. That said, this also arrives at a time where Mozilla just published its official Firefox roadmap to outline exactly what the company plans to build next.

The new roadmap pushes forward with the exact trends Conlin criticized. Mozilla is prepping a massive user interface redesign dubbed Project Nova. The company is also heavily promoting new AI features like a Smart Window and Quick Answers. These updates look exactly like the feature-chasing the veteran developer just complained about.

We’ll be diving into the roadmap very soon. So stay tuned to our Firefox coverage for more details.

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