Hi,
I've launched a new website that might be interesting to the Mozilla community: mozilla-insights.org. Its aim is nothing less than researching facts about Mozilla and presenting them in an understandable way—facts that aren't otherwise accessible in this form. Currently, the site consists of four modules.
1. Organizational Structure
In the public perception of many people, there's probably just "one Mozilla." Some may have already heard of the distinction between the non-profit Mozilla Foundation and the Mozilla Corporation, which among other things develops Firefox. That Thunderbird is developed by MZLA Technologies Corporation could almost count as specialist knowledge. In reality, though, Mozilla's organizational chart is even more complex, now comprising eight different Mozilla organizations.
So this first module is about mapping out the hierarchy of Mozilla organizations and explaining what each individual organization's tasks are.
2. Finances
Mozilla has published a new financial report every year since 2005, showing how much money Mozilla took in, how high expenses were, and what that means for the development of Mozilla's assets. While numerous IT media report on this year after year, it's hard to convey how the different figures compare to other years without appropriate visualization.
I offer two forms of presentation for this: a chart showing the trajectory of revenue, expenses, and assets, where each of these three graphs can be toggled on and off. Additionally, certain markers show in which years a new search engine deal was signed as the most important revenue source. The chart's start and end dates can also be freely adjusted if you're only interested in the development within a certain period.
For those who prefer tables, this form of presentation is also available. Here, the year-over-year change is shown as a percentage.
3. Investments and Acquisitions
Mozilla has invested in numerous companies in the past. Activity of this kind has increased sharply since the founding of Mozilla Ventures in late 2022. But finding information about which companies Mozilla has invested in is very difficult, especially since Mozilla itself only publicly communicates a small portion of its investments. As of today, my database includes 68 investments as well as five acquisitions since 2012—an overview of Mozilla's activities outside its own products this comprehensive doesn't exist anywhere else.
For each investment and acquisition, there's information about the timing, the type of company, and further details where known. This can include things like the funding round, the amount Mozilla paid for an acquisition, or whether the company even still exists. Users can filter by investment or acquisition, sort by date or alphabetically, and use a search function.
4. Discontinued Products
The fourth module is Mozilla's product graveyard. Mozilla has offered a number of products and services in the past that, for various reasons, no longer exist today. Listing absolutely everything Mozilla has ever developed would be too much—the focus of this listing is on things that had notable user relevance and are therefore especially worth mentioning. It's a space meant to pay tribute once more to former Mozilla products. As of today, 31 products are listed. A search function is available here as well.
Each discontinued product is displayed with its name, a category label, a description, and a representation of its lifespan. If other things emerged from a product, that's mentioned too.
Mozilla Insights is for people—but also for machines
Mozilla Insights was developed primarily for people interested in topics related to Mozilla. Accordingly, a strong focus was placed on an appealing presentation, intuitive interactions, and optimal performance—whether switching pages or switching between English and German, everything works instantly and without delays.
But especially in times of Artificial Intelligence (AI), it's all the more important to present content in a machine-readable way too. When users formulate a question about Mozilla in the search engine of their choice, Mozilla Insights should deliver the facts they're looking for. Through mechanisms like structured data as well as llms.txt and llms-full.txt in both German and English, automatically updated machine-readable data is provided with every new or updated entry via the custom-built CMS.
Mozilla Insights is also a community project
Mozilla Insights aims to be a reliable source on topics that are otherwise hard to access. And the community can help with that: the site offers a contact option that can be used at any time to flag errors or completely missing data. Suggestions can also be submitted this way—for example, if someone feels that a product is missing from the "Discontinued Products" section.
So far, the website covers four major topic areas. Suggestions for additional content that could find a place on Mozilla Insights in the future are also welcome via the form or in this thread on Mozilla Connect.
