Leaving Mozilla
emilykager.com
emilykager.com
The window into the internet shouldn’t be controlled by big companies. It’s a principle thing for me.
To the author, thanks for your efforts.
Firefox on Android on the other hand (the one the author worked on), IMHO, is simply an inferior product.
This is kinda understandable due to their small team size (and it looks like they're overworking too), but what I didn't get is why they kept revamping it. I don't have a clear timeline, but in my recent memory they at least did it twice.
Also, plenty of "great features" for some reason stay in beta/alpha/nightly forever. This is particularly obvious if you visit /r/Firefox on Reddit frequently; you see "oh for that, just use beta/nightly version!" as answers for help/feature request threads too often. It's like they never finish these features to push into release channel.
Anyway, it's getting harder and harder to stay using Firefox on Android. Especially after they essentially killed the extension ecosystem in Fenix.
The old version of Firefox for Android (Fennec) had several important features that never made it into the rewrite. I understand they wanted to address architectural issues and improve performance, but the net result was that one day you opened up an app you'd been using happily for years only to be presented with a buggy, more limited alternative that was barely recognizable.
Things are a little better now, but you still can't print, install arbitrary extensions, save offline in reader mode, and more.
As for ad block, I use DNS based blocker apps like adgarud on my phone.
Is Fenix even officially released? It's still called "Firefox Nightly" on Play Store AFAIK. This is kinda one of my point: when would they actually use it as Firefox proper if it's already mature?
Then there's the other weird issues. The bottom 5% of the page or so usually doesn't really render correctly (especially if it's a pop-up like a cookie consent box), but scrolling up and down a bit fixes it, usually, if you're fast enough to press whatever button you wanted to press there before it glitches out again.
I care about the open web, and ad blocking is still a killer feature to me, but if I were an average user there is no way I would accept a browser with so many major issues.
I think that bottom 5% issue is fixed now, not sure.
One annoying problem is that sometimes it jumps around the page when collapsing comments in sites like HN.
Another problem is occasional random crashes when private browsing. Only on android. Anyone else here have the same problem? 99% of times, I send crash report. Hope they fix it. Or maybe it's a problem with my phone?
Love Firefox though.
The Firefox address/omni bar seemed designed to lean 90% toward a search engine search, even if I had completely typed in the hostname of a previously visited page and hit "Enter". The cynic in me guessed this was deliberate to reap referral commissions from Big Search Engine. Pissed off, uninstall
But there is a setting to change this behavior: Options / Search / Show search suggestions ahead of browsing history in address bar results
The default for this should probably be off, not on.
Like for accessing abou:config sigh
I've been using as my main browser for years and it only gets better.
A long time Firefox user here, and I only feel it is getting better with time (both desktop and mobile)
This, specially after I found out that the directors at the company kept getting their wages increased was the nail in the coffin.
I just can't stand knowing these people are getting rewarded for such a shitty job, even worse now knowing that they have small teams (obviously not able to deliver the products we expect them to) and worse of all forcing these people to overwork.
Google is not a saint, but neither is Mozilla. I'll just stick to the browser that better fullfil my needs ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Vaguely recall some unsettledness when it was first announced.
Honestly the only reason I have interact with Google now is
* Work uses it for email but that's pro me not personal me * YouTube * Calendar automations
That's exactly why I stopped with Mozilla. They are just a proxy for corporate controlled interests. And it is heartbreaking.
Every single battle, they have folded. Nearly every decision they have made has aligned with corporate interests. And then they issue a paternalistic statement saying that selling out is in our best interest.
- They embraced EME web DRM. They didn't have to. They could have taken the position that if someone wants DRM they should do it via Flash or Silverlight, or some other external means. They could have just done nothing. They didn't have to legitimize it as a concept. It would have been so powerful if they had just done nothing.
- They killed off RSS support for no good reason. The cost to maintain it would have been less than their office carpet cleaning budget. They don't see RSS as an integral part of the web. They see it as a toy, not worth including by default. And thanks to their attitude, RSS is actually becoming that way.
- They killed off XUL based extensions, and embraced a much more limited extension system (but at least it is more compatible and less differentiated with Google!). The functionality that was lost has not been restored.
The job of Mozilla was to be an EXAMPLE, more than to be popular. And they have accomplished neither.
I was with them since the start. Firefox was amazing when it was NOT compatible with Internet Explorer 6, and not trying to be! I'm so glad that they had enough faith in their own vision of the web to risk turning off less technical users. And we were all better for it.
Mozilla has failed us, and the best outcome is for the Mozilla foundation to go bankrupt, so that maybe we can pick up the pieces.
They did not. They fought against it until it was clear they weren't going to win the fight.
> They didn't have to. They could have taken the position that if someone wants DRM they should do it via Flash or Silverlight, or some other external means.
That is not a reasonable position. Adobe was already in the process of killing Flash and Microsoft is the developer of Silverlight, and they were pro-EME. That's setting aside the multi-decade history of security disasters those plugins caused.
> They didn't have to legitimize it as a concept. It would have been so powerful if they had just done nothing.
It would not, it would have killed them overnight. 99% of the population doesn't give a shit, they just want to watch Netflix (etc.), and they'd stop using Firefox the day Netflix (etc.) stopped working. That's true even of most Linux users which is the only population that might would care whatsoever.
> They killed off XUL based extensions, and embraced a much more limited extension system (but at least it is more compatible and less differentiated with Google!). The functionality that was lost has not been restored.
XUL extensions were horrifically insecure and often caused terrible memory leaks that got blamed on Firefox - they also prevented proper sandboxing and multiprocess functionality from being implemented.
Although your defense of Flash and Silverlight leads me to believe you don't care much about security.
>the best outcome is for the Mozilla foundation to go bankrupt, so that maybe we can pick up the pieces.
You're delusional if you think that anything good would come of that. If that's how you feel, why wait? Go build something now.
What a losing attitude. Nobody forced them to do anything. They chose it.
I would argue that Firefox is what held back DRM from becoming more common. Even if 20% of users were not supported, that was significant. Even if it was inevitable, they should have done the right thing and refused to directly support DRM at all. It's not like there was any economic pressure on them. The whole point of non profit organizations is that they can afford to be principled. That was their one job. And instead they stabbed us in the back, over some hypothetical userbase that didn't exist.
> It would not, it would have killed them overnight. 99% of the population doesn't give a shit, they just want to watch Netflix (etc.), and they'd stop using Firefox the day Netflix (etc.) stopped working. That's true even of most Linux users which is the only population that might would care whatsoever.
That is your problem. You are hyperfocused on people who don't care what browser they use, and just want to watch TV. That is a terrible strategy.
You will never ever win those people over. Ever.
I don't think it is worth ruining everything that makes you special just to be popular.
I'm so glad they didn't try to out Microsoft Microsoft in 2006.
They are completely ceding to these corporations and letting them make the rules. How can any headway be made like that?
> XUL extensions were horrifically insecure and often caused terrible memory leaks that got blamed on Firefox - they also prevented proper sandboxing and multiprocess functionality from being implemented.
The lost functionality from removing XUL has not been restored. Firefox remains less useful than it was.
Blamed? Why are you so concerned about branding?? What world are you living in?
And again, on a macro level, the UX is worse now because it is less functional. Am I supposed to care that Tree Style Tabs is gone, but at least it performs better? That's not an upgrade. Instead, effort should have been diverted to improving the existing model.
There was a lot of room for compromise that they didn't use.
> Although your defense of Flash and Silverlight leads me to believe you don't care much about security.
No, I have using sandboxing in one form or another for over a decade. Are you? Maybe Mozilla should have focused on making sandboxing more accessible.
It isn't exactly hard on Linux.
> You're delusional if you think that anything good would come of that. If that's how you feel, why wait? Go build something now.
Proud supporter. It actually has a future.
Defund Mozilla.
> Working too much during the week for the last 2 years was normal for me
We need to stop normalizing working beyond a 40 hour work week. I can accomplish far more and with greater clarity of purpose, mental acuity and motivation in an actual 40 hours, than I could if I attempt to push myself to 10-12 hours a day.
https://www.welcometothejungle.com/fr/articles/travailler-4-...
Just to complete the story at some point we were referring to this project as the 'cursed project'. The project manager (who made the original estimates) went 2 months to the hospital with a serious depression at the beginning (he had priors). The surrogate acting project manager was at some point on the verge of psychological breakdown and became a heavy smoker. I (lead dev) broke my foot on my first day of summer vacation. One business analyst was hit by a car (survived but multiple fractures). Another dev had an unexplained swollen feet problem (2 weeks off, probably stress). Another dev, external contractor, was terminated because 'he lost the sparkles in his eyes'. And due to the insade delivery rate, sometimes 2 delivery in production per day, one of the ops got burnt out and eventually resigned.
You, as a software engineer, work 35h / week? I thought it was mostly less qualified jobs. I don't know the law exactly, but none of my friends working in Paris work 35h / week.
Is it needed to hit deadlines or to successfully do your duties as lead?
Because it might not be required, but it ends up being expected.
However the difference is compensated by extra holidays (RTT).
Seems like a good indication to push back the "deadlines" [1]. If the release is a month/quarter/semester/year later, literally no-one actually cares. If the release ends up being totally unsupported after v1 because all the developers got burnt out and left, people care.
[1] A term I hate - no-one dies if the software is late. Management just gets "upset", while continuing to take $$$$ bonuses.
But normalizing any number is problematic. It depends on the job, and the specific individual. A warehouse packer or a burger flipper are unlikely to accomplish more by working less. So lets say each person can be productive for X hours per week. This number might be the same throughout the year, or it might go up/down, etc. It might be co-related to other things (pandemic, life events, etc). And then you have some people that can be productive for 80 hours / week. (I want to explicitly make a distinction between warming a chair for 80 hours versus actually producing something valuable.)
The tricky question is, what is the threshold below which you are considered a poor performer? And the corollary - If you are one of those outliers who can be productive 80hrs/week - Should you be compensated more than your peers? I know that if I was one of those outliers (I'm not), I would expect to get rewarded for being more productive.
I don't think productivity is the right way to frame things. This makes it sound like a human is nothing more than a tool. The reason people should work fewer hours is so that they can enjoy life outside of work, remain healthy, spend time with family and friends, etc. Not to maximize productivity for the stockholders.
Even if some person is capable of being productive working 80 hours a week, it's not clear that this is good for the person, either in the short run or the long run. Workaholism can be a bad habit.
If Michael Jordan wasn't such a workaholic would he still have become 'The' Michael Jordan. No data, but I find it unlikely. (No, I'm not comparing myself to Jordan)
1) Michael Jordan retired from the Chicago Bulls (for the second time) at age 36. I suppose in tech with rampant age discrimination, that's also when you're expected to retire after burning yourself out...
2) Michael Jordan made enough money that he could have retired even earlier. No employer was forcing him to work. He did it "for the love of the game".
3) None of us here are or ever will be Michael Jordan. Either in talent — arguably the greatest of all time — or in financial security — one of the highest compensated athletes ever.
You say you're not comparing yourself to Jordan, but why even bring him up? He's not only the world's greatest basketball player but also the world's worst analogy for comparing with normal people working at a job.
If you're in control of your own destiny, then by all means, do whatever you like. But a lot of people are busting their butts just for their current employer, and eventually you're going to find out that you actually mean very little to your employer, who will drop you at the drop of a hat and not give a damn about your fate. Your family and friends are the only ones who will stick with you and care for you in the long run.
If one worker finds that they can achieve a competitive advantage by working more hours, then other workers will copy that strategy. They may have to copy that strategy whether they want to or not, just to get jobs. Suddenly, working overtime is no longer the exception, it's now the norm, expected. And in that situation, the workers don't benefit, only the employers benefit from the expected overtime work. And then you have a culture of overwork and burnout in the industry. Employers may not care, because they can exploit you for a few years, until you burn out and are incapable of working any more, at which point you quit or get fired, and the employer moves on to the next employee. This situation is not to your long-term benefit at all, because you have to take a lot of time post-burnout making no money.
This is why all workers need to take a stand and not allow employers to exploit them, not to agree to work unreasonable hours. Your career — indeed your whole life — is a marathon, not a sprint. Trying to run a marathon in a series of sprints is not an effective strategy.
>This is why all workers need to take a stand and not allow employers to exploit them, not to agree to work unreasonable hours.
As with anything leverage will change based on the situation. To get to this point of leverage a lot of things need to change. Not just locally, but globally.
Yes, from your employer's perspective, you are. In fact they will replace you with a literal tool as soon as possible. That might be a burger flipping robot, or a CRUD app producing bot one day, whatever. Tools
Unreasonable expectations usually starts with management though. I had a "boss" who was very much my senior as far as age but had zero management experience and his benchmark for value was Lines of Code and Cards Completed instead of better value metrics like features delivered, velocity, bugs reported, etc. Needless to say, I didn't stay very long.
> but the release just felt like a blip in our planned schedule before jumping into more sprints and fires and thinking about the next iteration.
and this
> On the negative side, it has become increasingly hard for me to separate work from not work. I found myself “contributing” (read - working) at all hours of the day. Replying to issues, emails, and public chats when I was in bed at midnight, when I just woke up at 7am, in the car on the way to go hiking on the weekend, and then while ON the hike.
There have been times where I've worked and it was extremely clear what needed to be done at every stage and I worked 80 hours and wasn't burnt out at all.
TLDR: Spinning the wheel mindlessly is bad and I think accelerates burnout, in general it's not necessary to work more than 40 hours a week.
I think everyone remembers the time when they learned it's not worth it to work insane hours to make some sort of launch just so you get to do it all over again in 6 months.
I worked 22 straight days to meet an insane deadline. I delivered my stuff 4am the morning of only to be told that every other team was late and the inflexible due date that couldn't be changed, got pushed back 6 months.
What keeps me from being jaded (I think anyways) is being able to recognize when an extra push is all that the project needs and when a project is so doomed that not even a heroic effort of a small team will cause it to hit the target.
I also worked with a CEO who purposely gave tight deadlines just to get engineering to finish the work. He said if he gave us more time, we'd just ask him for more. Counterintuitively, I enjoyed that. It was certainly a lot more honest, and you knew the expectation wasn't perfection, it was to release something.
Thats lovely.
https://web.archive.org/web/20200801082154/https://twitter.c...
Despite maintaining two of the handful of extensions currently available for Firefox for Android and developing for the beta versions of Fenix leading up the release, I had a very hard time finding my footing as a user in the new browser, and I ended up switching to Samsung Internet.
I'm not familiar with the harassment she has suffered, and it's saddening if people have singled her out, though I can see how people might have overreacted to her nonchalant attitude about the workflows of millions of users being thrown belly up.
The team was understaffed so the OP took up the slack by working massive overtime to push out a half baked release. Users complained about the half baked release, the OP gives the users the finger, and neither party seemed happy with the outcome.
I'm glad to see that the OP has identified that work-life balance is important; it isn't worth burning yourself out for a job.
Refreshing to read this, compared to the "it was all so much better before"
Today most people are on FB & social medias under their real name & with their real face and everything is stored & will hunt you for the rest of your life. With fingerprinting, facial recognition, surveillance, etc. there is now no way to speech freely without having your identity tied to it.
Some people claim this is great because you say less crap when they're forced to put their name on it, I think this is a very poor argumentation when we look at what we're losing in exchange. There is a reason why in most democracies voting is anonymous.
Erm. Really? Aren't you a bit exagerating?
You can still post anonymous in lots of places. Like right here, for example.
But there are plenty of places left, where you can literaly say anything.
Just like in the beginning. Btw. some IRC clients or forums from the old days still run today.
> It is not their duty to ensure that you can say anything here.
I'm not saying it's their duty. I am saying you can't at the same time claim anonymity is alive and well and say nobody actually will protect your anonymity once push comes to shove. If that's the case, then anonymity essentially does not exist where it counts. Nobody cares that you can anonymously praise the Dear Leader. Anonymity is only important when somebody has real reasons to want to break it. It's like with free speech - nobody worries about speech that everybody likes being free. You only need free speech protections when somebody actually wants to censor, otherwise it's just vacuous.
That's funny, because going through old usenet posts from the 90s I got precisely the opposite impression – noticeably more people posting under their full names than you'd find a decade or two later in comparable forums.
I've also made the same observation for the online community of a long running simulation game I frequent: A lot of the old-time members dating back to twenty years ago or so are posting under their full names, whereas with newer members abbreviated (last) names or outright pseudonyms are clearly predominating.
There is a reddit thread that links to deleted tweets that appears like it might be related: https://www.reddit.com/r/browsers/comments/i8nuyb
And why does Mozilla have a "small team" working on Firefox Android? Their flagship product on the operating system with the largest install base.
But Android is also the most casual install base, and it comes with Chrome by default. It's probably the hardest market to gain marketshare in.
It's an eye-opener for me that people would do that. I can't even name a single developer for any software I use, let alone find and harass them on social media.
It also happens more when people decide someone doesn’t belong in the field: if you’re visibly a white male your odds are pretty low. I’ve heard more a few accounts of how the tone changes from “I found a bug” or “I don’t like this change” to “who told you that you were good enough to be a developer”.
Context for those who don't use Firefox on Android: the "whining" was people complaining that Mozilla had replaced a stable working product with what was clearly an inferior version, with less functionality (no addons) and less stability (this is the first version of Firefox to repeatedly crash on Android, in about a decade). Framing it as "different decisions than they wanted" is disingenuous and misleading. (I'd been a regular Firefox user for about a decade on Android, but have had to mostly switch to Brave because of this update. That's how bad it is.)
We still see the same dynamic on most desktop Firefox release threads here where someone will be very angry that Mozilla doesn’t let them direct development and will go strangely silent when asked how they’d deal with that problems which lead to those decisions in the first place.
> Harassing someone because one doesn't like an update to a piece of software
Harassment is probably never okay butneither is directing obscene gestures at people.
Thank you for your contributions to open source software. Many web users, myself included, rely on free and open source projects for our work and recreation and these products would not exist without the generous contributions of kind and skilled persons such as yourself.
I hope you recover from your burnout and find a fulfilling role somewhere that respects your mental health and values your contributions.
But as someone who is still using Firefox despite Mozilla management (not the devs) ignoring us, belittling us when we voice our concerns and destroy the software we fell in love with more than a decade ago over "ux" I can understand why people are frustrated:
Firefox was in another league.
Someone wrote about Pale Moon the other day, I can sadly not recommend using it as the main browser, I'm not in a position to vouch for the security, but if anyone wonders they could try to create a few ugly modern apps or open a few known safe websites and have a look :
it feels snappy, even years after Firefox diverged! And it looks so good with all the old extensions.
A real shame even I don't really dare to use it, but the web is a harsh environment.
Thank you for your work!
That said, I do appreciate all the work FireFox devs put in to give us a Chrome alternative. Misfires happen. I hope FF for Android keeps getting better with time.
re: addons, a lot of people were understandably upset about this, myself included for a while. With that said, in the months after release every extension which had been disabled by the upgrade started coming back online as the extension API was slowly added back after the rewrite. I can certainly sympathize with the maintenaince headache of trying to maintain one old decrepit piece of software while simultaneously trying to get the one one out the door, since that's exactly what I've spent the last 4 years of my life doing.
Many extensions, including some major ones are still broken on Firefox desktop and I think people are afraid this will happen on mobile as well :-/
Due to this, it initially shipped with no support for extensions except uBlock Origin, (which was a deal breaker for many long-time users; it now supports a handful of manually vetted extensions, but still not all AFAICT), plus of course when you rewrite from scratch, there will be some rough edges. Shipping without extensions was a sure way to enrage users, but having an app in development for 2+ years to ship "perfect v1" had its drawbacks too, so it was a tough call for Mozilla.
Despite that, and some edge-case UX polish need, I find new Firefox Android pretty ok and as a 2021 "degooglify myself" resolution, I've been using it for a few weeks now. So far so good, even if some aspects of it work differently that Chrome (for example, it's more aggressive in garbage collecting inactive tabs). When the small issues are resolved, it will be a very good browser.
As I've grown as a developer, I've become less personally attached to the products I work on. I still care that it's a quality product, and that it's stable, tested, etc. But I don't attach it to my personality or my self-worth. Ultimately what happens to it is out of your control, (assuming it's not a 100% solo project) so it's dangerous to have that attachment. I'm not sure that caring deeply about a project actually improves it in a meaningful way.
Also, this is a nice post. Sharing real stories about burnout and helping others understand it is great.
That said, working on something that I care about is also one of the aspects of my job I love the most. I think the trick is to carefully pick a few things that you care about and focus on that, but then also to have a far more hands-off approach for pretty much everything else, and let others shape those things to their visions.
And thank you for Firefox on Android!
My dad always said it’s good to have at least 3 or 4 legs on your stool instead of 1. Family, friends, health, hobbies, faith, etc. That way if one of the legs fails the others can still support it.
Don’t put all your eggs in one basket...
This is because mozilla is an open source aberration. The actual developers are super humans, but they are being led by people with the wrong incentives. This is what cause "rude emails from users". the opposite would have gotten you a nice balance of polite and rude patches/reports from contributors.
Open source organizations should focus on fostering the community and educating users. Not trying to champion new versions and rewrites themselves.
Mozilla at first focused on selling the default search spot (and spent that money on exec salary and moonshot projects not related to the browser at all). Now they are focusing on getting mobile users in order to sell their attached products.
When you pay for developers, and make your projects even more closed, you call that on yourself. You are now a company competing on the freemium market.
Case in point, i was an early contributor to Gaia (the mozilla phone OS). I could build and change the browser with ease. I would send in detailed bug reports. Now on android, I can barely get a decent build with the google libraries baked in, let alone make meaningful changes. I just hold off updates and hope somebody else do the work for me (for a while f-droid folks did :)
And I will not even get into my worse petty peeve which is the recent android addons non-techcnical-totally-political-whitelist. sigh. or the changes on every revision to the bookmarks. keywords, folders, etc. can't keep my data consistent for a while now :(
But to close in a good note: mozilla is not representative of opensource! it is much better elsewhere. thank you!
> the opposite would have gotten you a nice balance of polite and rude
You are transferring some or all of the responsibility of "choose not to be rude to strangers on the Internet" onto the recipient, who received rudeness only once others had already made that choice. How dare you say that we can blame the recipient of abuse for the choices of others to be abusive. You have no right.
If you choose to be rude to someone else on the Internet, you alone are fully responsible, without regard for any extenuating circumstances whatsoever. If you are having a medical event, seek in-reality medical attention and prepare an apology when your medical treatment has progressed far enough. If you didn't mean to be abusive, apologize, and then demonstrate over time that you're becoming less accidentally abusive. If you thought that the shield of anonymity on Twitter would protect you from being caught, you're no different than someone who throws bricks into people's windshields on the highway. No circumstance whatsoever sets aside your personal responsibility for the words you produced on the Internet.
It doesn't matter what they did, what their employer did, what their software did. It doesn't matter if they could be perceived as being abusive to you. None of that matters at all. There is absolutely no room for blame-sharing or blame-transfer here. There are no excuses for choosing to be abusive in this way. You simply cannot transfer one iota of responsibility here. That decision terminates at you, and you alone.
ps. I don't know if you're abusive or not, and I honestly don't care. This isn't about you, whoever you are. This is about your attempt to transfer the responsibility for abuse in part or in full from the abusers to the recipient of their abuse. That attempt, and my detailed refutal, is the sole focus of my comment. The English word "generic individual target within a plural set" is, unhappily, "you". Some confusion may occur, and I don't have the English skills to mitigate that at this time. No doubt someone will chime in with a better way to phrase this. I endorse whatever corrections are necessary to resolve the tense difficulty here.
And arguing about actively offensive people, i agree is moot and not the point of my comment. But those will exist regardless if your project is big enough, unfortunatelly.
My comment is about people disliking (in a sociably manner) the work made by open source corporation like mozilla, and that demotivating the paid coders. That is totaly on mozilla.
;-(
It's disappointing but unsurprising that Mozilla apparently seems to facilitate a burnout work culture like every other tech company:
New/college hire -> work like mad with no life -> burn out -> quit -> repeat process for the next sucker in line.
I really can't understand the hate against people putting so much effort in creating nice user experiences. If you're not happy with Firefox, just use something else, but don't threaten the developers!
Is it that easy to become an intern at Mozilla?
Give Brave a try; awesome experience, so far.
Welcome to agile? I know the feeling, honestly, but in software engineering there's always more bugs to fix, more features to develop, more needs of the users that require your attention. Cutting a release should feel like letting go, and indeed at places it does, but ultimately once the release is out in the wild it's done. The only thing to do then is to move forward with the next iteration, the next sprint, the next release.
Sorry, but are there examples or cites for this harassment from the users? Was it fallout from the layoffs? I feel like I need a bit more context.
Sorry to single out the parent comment. I don't know what the true intent was, but there's a trend on HN of commenters demanding to know private details they don't have an actual need to know. It's nice when the author answers questions but we should be happy with what we're given.
[1] and that's probably OK. We don't need to feel empathy for everyone who feels dissatisfaction in the world. That would probably be debilitating, honestly, seeing as how so many people are dissatisfied.
I'd not have the gall to demand evidence and pass judgement on the life experience of others.
This person owes us nothing, and if anything, we should thank her for sharing her story, and no more.
Agile is not essential to software development. IMO Agile should be thrown in the trash heap of technology history ASAP. Does Firefox even need a "release schedule"? Why? There's rarely a good reason for fixed software schedules.
It's funny, Google had a pretty tight software schedule... until it came time to publish their App Store privacy details, and then they decided they didn't need a release schedule after all. Except it backfired because their software just assumed there would be frequent updates, and now the apps are showing warnings because they haven't been updated.
Death to schedules. Yes, there's always work to be done, but it doesn't have to be done by an arbitrary deadline.
Speak for yourself. They provided a candid perspective about their career at Mozilla. I wouldn't demand additional context if they didn't already feel it relevant to provide.
Cater to them at your own risk.