To developers, Eich was definitely a force internally and externally and CTO as CEO means something. Switching to that then back is a change. As a founder Eich had immense input on direction. Maybe there is a vacuum now on the technology side in terms of upper management. I guess time will tell how this has truly impacted Mozilla. I am glad to hear Chris Beard has some engineering along with product/marketing.

Also Kovacs was there for a while (2010-recent) but was technology product focused, previous was John Lilly (2008-2010) who very much was technology focused, and then Baker who was a lawyer at the founding and you could argue technology and standards was the Mozilla main focus for a long time since inception. Hopefully it stays that way.