MDN statement a few hours ago: "MDN as a website isn't going anywhere right now. The team is smaller, but the site exists and isn't going away. We will be working with partners and community members to find the right ways to move it forward given our new structure at Mozilla." [0]
There are tech writers from Google and Microsoft that contribute full-time to MDN. (And it's a wiki, after all, anyone can edit it!)
But yes, very sadly, the Mozilla tech writers that maintain the docs, maintain them, and keep those browser compat tables running so smooth... were part of the layoffs.
You can be sure that the site will find a new home if Mozilla defunds it further. It certainly won't drop off the web.
This is mind blowing. Those docs are the gold standard for creating so much of the web. Does their management understand the gravitas (that word is warranted here) of what it means to lay-off parts of the team in charge of setting, keeping, and raising the bar for creating so much of the internet? This is truly alarming and saddening that some MBA exec who’s in the role because they’re “a people person” and “get tech” is deciding the fate of creating for the internet.
Of course. It's a necessary sacrifice. That money will go on to support the livelihoods of the most vulrenable and needy of the Mozilla team, namely the C-suite.
"She actually responded to my question about her salary in a q&a and said it was too much of a financial burden to ask of the c-suite to cut their salaries down to $500k“
Wow--read what she wrote here. As far as I know, before she worked at Mozilla, she reported to Netscape's General Counsel. That is not a super competitive position level.
"Executive compensation is a general topic -- are execs, esp CEOs paid too much? I'm of the camp that thinks the different between exec comp and other comp is high. So then i think, OK what should mozilla do about it? My answer is that we try to mitigate this, but we won't solve this general social problem on our own.
Here's what I mean by mitigate: we ask our executives to accept a discount from the market-based pay they could get elsewhere. But we don't ask for an 75-80% discount. I use that number because a few years ago when the then-ceo had our compensation structure examined, I learned that my pay was about an 80% discount to market. Meaning that competitive roles elsewhere were paying about 5 times as much. That's too big a discount to ask people and their families to commit to."
Yeah, I feel like the phrasing is just completely wack. It's one thing if the argument is that execs do bring value, and you need to pay that much to have good execs, but
>That's too big a discount to ask people and their families to commit to.
80% discount sounds like a lot... until you realize her salary is 2.5 million/year. I'm preeetttty sure most families will do just fine on 500k a year.
It is a lot of money in absolute terms, for sure. But why should a CEO accept “a lot of money”, if elsewhere they can get 5x as much? All this moralizing doesn’t help. You can call people greedy as much as you want, but you have to pay market rate or you can’t find a CEO at all. People have no obligation to accept a lower than market rate salary, they have hard power leverage in negotiations in the sense that they can easily walk away from deals where you offer such a “low” salary.
It's not moral grandstanding. I don't think the exec team earns their keep. It would be one thing if they were leading a growing non profit (that owns a for profit), but rather they're leading a quickly declining ship, all while their own salaries increase over time while they do a shitty job.
The ceo of MSF, who imo does a great job, is paid 120k a year.
Brian Chesky, AirBNB ceo, is paid $0 right now, because at least he can recognize how tone deaf talking about your companies financial struggles is whole you're still taking full comp.
Brian Chesky is not merely the CEO of AirBnB, he is also the cofounder with a networth of 4.1 billion dollars.
It is one thing for a literal billionaire, who owns the company to undergo 'hardship' in order to save the company they built over the past 10+ years.
It is a whole other thing for a mere employee to sacrifice their salary during a company downturn. To do so is an act of pure charity---which while it may be inline with ethos of a non-profit worker, isn't something that we as total 3rd parties should expect.
Mitchell Baker is just an "employee", despite her long years of service. She was even fired from Netscape during a round of layoffs, and served as a mere volunteer for years.
What I would like to know is how much of Mozilla's executive pay is linked to performance and how that performance is measured.
I don't think many would complain about their salaries if what they did actually worked. But Mozilla is being run into the ground before our eyes.
If the availability of people with a non-profit ethos affects competitive pay for non-profits, then that should be taken into a account.
Maybe such a person exists to lead Mozilla. But the primary goal should be to find someone who can turn the organisation around. I haven't seen anything that makes me believe that current management can do it.
I really think Brendan Eich would have done an excellent job had he been given a chance.
After all, as much as there are complaints about Brave, he managed to make a legitimately well known contender from scratch in a world that already has seen many other browser attempts go nowhere (and of course, he in some form created and grew Firefox).
Of course, "cancel culture" means you have to throw out someone from being CEO, even if that means the whole internet will suffer greatly, because he had a different opinion than whatever was woke.
Which is a shame, because the net loss to everyone is much much much greater than the $1000 dollars he gave as a donation, even if it is acceptable to destroy someone's life because they have a opinion that disagrees with yours.
What, Brendan Eich, did was comparable to opposing the fair housing act in 1966. At the time, he was a member of the majority vote, fighting to continue oppressing a minority group. While, he no doubt would find support, since he is part of the status quo, it’s still reasonable to protest his actions.
I don’t think his life was destroyed. He remained a multimillionaire, and immediately founded another competing company. The people whose lives were destroyed were the millions who didn’t have basic marriage rights for decades, and who were systematically humiliated merely for openly being in love.
Voting for and supporting the wrong side is part of the democratic process.
As far as we know Eich was never biased or prejudiced on on that topic as work, his co-workers in that minority never even realized that he held such political opinions, and there is no reason to think he thought lesser of them. He simply wished for the laws not to change.
Hate, prejudice, and discrimination are not valid political views. Slavery was once a political issue, and your comment would fit right in with that era also.
> My point is that there is no indication that hate and prejudice where ever part of Eich's views.
Can you explain to me how donating in support of Prop 8 (which would have banned gay marriage) isn't homophobic (and thus hateful, prejudicial, and discriminatory)? Can you explain it in such a way as it would make sense for LGBTQ people but not, say, people of color?
> I agree, in that era my comment would have supported people campaigning against slavery in racist states.
This isn't a good faith response. Being pro-slavery was never a valid political position. It was simply hateful and cruel. We cannot accept stances like this as civil discourse. Any debate over "well, does group of humans X get the same rights as group of humans Y" is done. The answer is always yes.
I am saying that we are conflating some terms. I agree with you that it is discriminatory to bar non-hetero couples from marriage. Given that there is no basis to conflate the intent to be hateful and prejudicial.
Based on the very little information we have this is a case of someone having wrong opinions but not being an actual danger to anyone.
> Can you explain it in such a way as it would make sense for LGBTQ people but not, say, people of color?
no, because I disagree with him and I don't really know of a good reasoning for it. (The only non-contradictory one (a low bar) being that the federal government should not be allowed to decide who can and cannot marry)
Regarding slavery it was a good faith response, also it was tongue-in-cheek response.
> Being pro-slavery was never a valid political position.
It was, it also no longer is, with progress we improve what is a valid position and what is not. Once upon a time in many places abolishing slavery was not a valid political position.
Ultimately these are moral decision that each of us needs to take responsibility for.
Do you mean they are not nice political views or tjat they don't fit in the category? Political thought generally has top level values and then more detailed plans drawing from the top level ideas. Discrimination and hate are examples of these high level political values.
It does seem that way at first, but (stipulating that it's a thing) cancel culture is based on someone's actions. Discrimination is based on someone's attributes that they cannot change, that are fundamental to who they are. This is why deplatforming someone who's being a racist (or a cop, or a Democrat) is not the same as deplatforming someone because they're LGBTQ.
You can go a little further with this into ascribed vs. achieved status [1][2]. I'm not saying achieved status discrimination is good or OK, nor am I saying it isn't. But it's not the same as ascribed status discrimination.
So you argument "cancel culture is based on someone's actions" and give not some action examples but unrelated achieved status - being a cop or a Democrat?
This stinks and the result is the Brandon Eich and Leni Riefenstahl who did not actually discriminate anyone are given same treatment as other people who were directly responsible for discrimination or genocide.
This is true, but on the other hand the justification for this compensation is that she is able to get much more elsewhere, so asking her to take less is a sacrifice. If that is true, then maybe she should go elsewhere rather than make the sacrifice. If it isn't true then maybe she is overpaid at present.
Just because accepting the sacrifice might not make sense for the current ceo and family doesn't mean that asking for it doesn't make sense for mozilla.
That’s just asking for Mozilla to fire her because the company did so poorly that other employees were laid off.
I don’t really understand why we should do that... we aren’t stockholders in Mozilla, nor are we customers of them, or even employees. Why should we demand that anyone is fired?
Are we forgetting that Mozilla was a non-profit and that the Corporation was spun off relatively recently to allegedly better support the non-profit's Foundation's mission? In the sense of that mission, all those interested in a decentralized, open web are stakeholders.
If Mozilla is turning around to be a simple, ordinary business, that is quite the shark jump and will in turn lead to a large loss in advocacy. I have no interest in supporting a company just looking to make a quick buck if I'm not compensated.
This is a rather typical structure of the non-profit world.
Mozilla Corporation is a sub of Mozilla Foundation. Mozilla Foundation controls Mozilla Corporation shares. Mozilla Foundation should based on the bylaws of Mozilla Corporation either have the board fire the C suite or replace the board of the Mozilla Corporation with those that will fire the C suite.
Mozilla Foundation is not doing that because it is not interested in changes. Running a large non-profit is a low effort, low risk, super lucrative job. The only way to affect Mozilla Corporation and Mozilla Foundation is for donors refuse to donate for Mozilla Foundation until it addresses the governance issues.
>The only way to affect Mozilla Corporation and Mozilla Foundation is for donors refuse to donate for Mozilla Foundation until it addresses the governance issues.
Un(?)fortunately, donations to the Mozilla Foundation are only a few million dollars a year--mostly because they don't do anything particularly interesting. (Seriously--look at https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/ )
Replacing the leadership of a failing company instead of firing the normal employees who had and have no influence on the decisions driving the companies would actually be a really good idea.
Instead they fired a whole bunch of people to better their finances in the short-term while damning the company in the long-term.
CEO what's-her-face and the other C-level parasites most likely are only trying to press as much money as they can from the company before either the company is completely run into the ground or they're fired.
Even though I (from my position of very little knowledge) have doubts that the current executive team are providing the right kind of value for a company in Mozilla's position, 'parasites' is strong language for a bunch of people who I'm sure are genuinely just trying to do a good job in a difficult suituation.
> we aren’t stockholders in Mozilla, nor are we customers of them, or even employees. Why should we demand that anyone is fired?
We are their revenue stream.
We are the users, and we are the ones that continue to evangelize Mozilla and Firefox, and we provide support to people looking to make the switch. without us as users of their software and services, where would they be?
Ah.. I don't know how much of a demand it is, but Mozilla being a non-profit and such a big presence in the Open source browser space, I think we all have the right to criticize and even start forks of it if we can afford the time.
Well sure, he owns a 15% share of a company whose current market cap is somewhere around $50 billion. IF, as CEO, he can raise the value of AirBNB by 1%, that's equivalent to a $75 million per year salary.
Developer here. I'd be very happy to take a paycut to work at Mozilla - until yesterday's announcement, that was actually my explicit medium-term career goal. I'd be there for the mission, and I would expect the same for the C-level.
I feel like the CEO is absolutely in the wrong here. If they're making 20x what a technical writer or tester is making, it absolute is a bad look not to take a paycut when you're sending 250 people into the street.
I don't get why we decided at some point you need someone anointed with CEO Fairy Dust to be CEO. I 100% guarantee the job is not so damn hard, subtle, or complex that practically no-one on Earth can do it. There are probably 20 people at Mozilla right now (haha, OK, maybe not anymore) who could step into the role and would gladly do so at $500,000/yr. Unless the responsibilities, procedures, and state of things at that level is so poorly understood and documented that someone else coming in would have to start from scratch, which seems like a massive organizational failure if that's the case.
It's. Just. A. Job.
I suspect this is yet another manifestation of the crippling, organizationally-irrational-but-individually-rational levels of risk avoidance we're operating under now.
The elevation of CSuite as magical makers of wealth, when most of that value is created by the organization, needs to stop. Good leadership is important, but CEO comp is completely atrocious and unsustainable. Especially if the alternative is to lay off a ton of employees just to maintain operations.
We can see it right here how it’s killing a value generation vehicle. The CEO won’t accept a pay cut, but is willing to shut down entire product lines. A similar story has played out across America.
I have a suspicion the supply side of this market equation is artificially constrained by people who have an interest (social and financial) in keeping it so, and that is part of why we've seen CEO pay go up so much in the last few decades.
There are plenty of people who could do well in the CEO job at most companies—no worse than the average we're getting now, anyway. There are far fewer "CEO types".
Why don't you ask Brendan Eich how much he was willing to be paid to be CEO?
Being CEO of Mozilla could attract highly qualified, passionate people, who are not primarily driven by "competitive compensation". You know; the same impulse that underlies the whole open source movement.
These are non-profit execs. They exist to fleece the donors and live off the spoils. It just happened that the non-profit in question has a mission appealing to the technologists.
The situation seems to create a paradox where any new CEO will expect that much or more to risk the career/reputation damage of not being able to save it if they take over.
There are many CEO that earn a lot less, especially in the non-profit sector. Market rate can be quite misleading when you are including widely different markets with very different goals.
If mozilla want to be more like EFF and focus on the advocacy aspect then maybe they should be similar paid. Even better, merge the two organizations and replace the leadership with the one in EFF. No need to go and look for a CEO willing to be paid 1/10th of current wages as there is already one available doing that now.
If you slightly expand your requirements for recruiting, instead of fighting over existing CEOs, you'll hit tons of qualified people that are not making millions and are not getting offers to make millions. And there's enough of them that if all companies did this the glut of supply would drop median CEO pay like a rock.
You will always find a person willing to be called CEO for $500,000. The question is: which skills do you get for that money? Would you find a person who doesn't fire the MDN team and still keeps Mozilla profitable?
> It is a lot of money in absolute terms, for sure. But why should a CEO accept “a lot of money”, if elsewhere they can get 5x as much? All this moralizing doesn’t help. You can call people greedy as much as you want, but you have to pay market rate or you can’t find a CEO at all. People have no obligation to accept a lower than market rate salary, they have hard power leverage in negotiations in the sense that they can easily walk away from deals where you offer such a “low” salary.
This is not about an abstract CEO. This is about a CEO who is a total utter failure that could only get this job in a non-profit/corp hybrid.
Yes but would they be the right people? You know. The right ones. Who are friends with members of the board, and are therefore already rich enough and socialized such that they can be friends with members of the board.
Would that be a bad thing? How? I'm sure somebody would step up to make decisions, and you never know, they might actually be competent. The odds don't seem markedly worse.
You seriously underestimate how important it is to have a good leader in a large organization. No, making everything flat won't magically make things work.
Github was leaderless for a long time. And during that period it was chaos. The company had no direction, employees were doing random, incoherent things. And multiple factions fought for power.
For every job, market rates are a thing. Yes, of course you will be able to fill just about any c-role at just about any rate. But, somehow, just as with any other job, the good people – those you will actually want to fill that role – want to be paid what the market tells them they are worth.
And yes, there are other factors at play. Mitchell Baker brings it up: The kind of work you do matters not only to you but also to c-level people and will be priced into the pay.
Who around here (who is also actually qualified enough, that mozilla would want them) would switch over, taking a 50% pay cut over their current pay, right now? Don't tell me you couldn't. Of course you could. Would it mean changing your life style? I am sure it would. But then again, that's a apparently cool to randomly ask of people who (I am assuming) earn a lot more than you do.
There are two reasonable options: You either come to terms with reality, or you change reality. The later means, in this particular case, enticing someone qualified (which includes a) being capable b) willing and c) in a social position to actually "apply" for the job) and to do it for less. Good luck.
> Yes, of course you will be able to fill just about any c-role at just about any rate. But, somehow, just as with any other job, the good people – those you will actually want to fill that role – want to be paid what the market tells them they are worth.
How do you measure how good a CEO is?
Is having to let go 25% of your staff, axing the security team and stopping new developments indicative of good performance?
It's all bullshit. There's almost no measure by which particular CEOs are better than the average/random. Much like investors: almost no investors can be said to be consistently better than the average, i.e. the distribution follows what you would expect if everyone is doing decisions at random. Despite that, we still believe there are objectively good CEOs or investors (apart from a very small minority) who therefore deserve their outrageous compensation for their leadership and decision skills.
Just look at the amount of CEOs who got international industry awards or recognition, who some years later tanked their companies or were found to be engaged in criminal practices.
Maybe that’s why c level employees should be compensated on reaching certain targets, rather than getting at least a million a year. Because, if you are the captain of a schip, you should drown with it if it capsized.
In context of mozillas goals, challenges that arise when leading a company, and limited influence on the movement of the world, maybe. I doubt that either of us is close enough to the ground to realistically be a judge of that.
> But, somehow, just as with any other job, the good people – those you will actually want to fill that role – want to be paid what the market tells them they are worth.
I would say that's a very naive view that idealizes the process (and I say that as someone who is very pro market), especially as you rise up in ranks and especially in this instance where a non-profit is failing to execute on their core mission.
I've seen people go from board advisors in relatively large companies to IKEA store workers or long term unemployment. It's more about who you know and how you play politics than your ability to provide value to the entity, a lot of politics gets played the higher you climb. The market value for these people could very well be higher this still has nothing to do with the value they provide in their current role - it could very well be that a less qualified (in general market terms) person could be a better fit for this unique organisation.
> Who around here (who is also actually qualified enough, that mozilla would want them) would switch over, taking a 50% pay cut over their current pay, right now?
I think among the engineers you'll find a bunch of qualified people for that job.
Speaking from some personal experience at another company (a small one, 20-30 people).
Execs good at giving a good impression, and making money for themselves.
Presidents good at winning the elections.
But that's a bit unrelated to being good for the company. Or the people in the country.
I think/guess that some altruistically motivated engineers could save Mozilla and Firefox if they got to replace the current execs.
In a world with 8 billion people nobody can claim to be worth that much money to a company, I would be surprised if there aren't at least 10.000 people in the US alone who would do her job just as well or maybe better and for less than 500K, those kind of salaries always seem result of people being able to set their own salaries or some other kind of poor management.
But it's ~hard to know if~ unlikely your CEO is this single person out of 8 billion, especially because you only considered searching in a pool of optimistically maybe 1 thousand candidates.
The graph for skilled people available for any given position with "skill" on the Y axis and "people" in the X axis is not shaped like a triangle like you are imaging, is shaped like a plateau. The only exception are extremely niche skills.
And how would you find one of those 10,000 out of a population of 330,000,000 that will accept less money than her? And how would you then know that they're better than she is? Surely if they're just as good as she is then the opportunities open to her would also be open to the 10,000 people.
> Surely if they're just as good as she is then the opportunities open to her would also be open to the 10,000 people.
No, and to be honest I find it hard to believe anyone believes so; a lot of those positions are picked due being friends with the right people, or coming from the same universities as the people already in executive positions, and other hundreds subjective factors that have little to nothing to do with the actual capabilities needed for the role.
On a second read, I see you wrote, "I would be surprised if ...". I don't remember seeing that the first time, but maybe I read too quickly. In that case, I'll turn it around: I'd be surprised if you could find anyone who can supply comparable evidence of competence who'd accept substantially less compensation.
"I think CEO pay is too high. See, I'm one of the good ones! What will I do about it? Well, a couple years back I learned I'm actually being being underpaid, so in a way I've already made a sacrifice. You're welcome!"
I'm certainly not getting paid what she is, but she isn't getting paid what she could get elsewhere.
If someone came along and offered me significantly more money than I make now I would take it, despite liking my current position well enough. My family would also want me to take it. And I believe that basically most of the people here complaining about her would do the same - move to a new job if they got offered more, not want to get a pay cut to stay in the job they are at.
I certainly wouldn't work most places for 5 times less than I make now, and if I did it would be because I expected to recoup that loss somehow.
She stated what is the normal way for most people - to try to maximize their gains - at a time when it is somewhat gauche to state that.
I think you're probably right about the "not much" but I'm not sure if the lack of success for Mozilla is not so much due to incompetence of the management as it is to the much stronger position of Google; some battles cannot be managed to win, only managed to decrease the loss.
I would agree up to perhaps £100k (or perhaps £150k in an expensive place like SF) but beyond that I think there are very diminishing returns to wealth and other things, like vision/purpose and relationships dominate decision-making. (Well obviously not for everyone, but for a lot of people.)
Which is a perfectly reasonable opinion, but in that case maybe it's time to move on to one of the other opportunities, and find someone else for this job.
There are lots of ceos of nonprofits or small companies being paid significantly less. I think the problem is who mozilla is comparing itself with.
> As far as I know, before she worked at Mozilla, she reported to Netscape's General Counsel. That is not a super competitive position level.
That's a bit of a harsh reading of her career. 26 years ago, she was one of the first legal hires at Netscape and reported to the Netscape CEO initially. Her reporting to the General Counsel was an artifact of scale after that - while reporting to the General Counsel, she also created and headed Netscape's tech-focused legal team. So it's not like she went from "mediocre legal position to Mozilla exec".
She's also been with Mozilla essentially since the beginning. When Netscape open sourced their software and formed Mozilla, she was put in charge as the general manager of it. After AOL bought Netscape and decided to stop their corporate stewardship of Mozilla, she's the one that formed the Foundation[1] to migrate all of the Mozilla assets to[2]. And she did that 17 years ago, when Firefox/Mozilla had very little market adoption and low single digit browser share.
A plausible alternate reality without her could have involved AOL cutting all support for Mozilla, the Mozilla projects going into a state of limbo (with no more corporate support and uncertainty of even legal usage of their existing names/logos), the dev community around those projects either fracturing or fizzling out as a result of the uncertainty, and Internet Explorer retaining 95+% of the browser market.
It's entirely possible someone else would have stepped up and performed the role she did. But in the end she's the one that did it, and her contributions in the early days of Mozilla certainly warrant her current executive position (and the associated salary that comes with it).
That's not to say she isn't overpaid - virtually all executives are overpaid. But she's at least contributed enough to Mozilla since the beginning to get to the point she's at now. That said, many companies are having their executives take pay haircuts to soften the blow of the current environment and mitigate the need or severity of layoffs. The fact that she chose not to do that for Mozilla is incredibly disappointing.
[2] This may not sound like much, but those assets were things like the legal rights to the branding of Mozilla and Mozilla projects. Without this, Firefox (et al) would have either had to completely rebrand and reset consumer mindshare, or keep using the Firefox name/logo and hope AOL (or a rando AOL exec) never decides to exert their power and kick up a fuss.
That wasn't my point--I know she has a long history with Mozilla. Rather, there is no evidence that should would otherwise be commanding "competitive" CEO pay commensurate with Mozilla's size otherwise. Her work history pre-Mozilla would not make her a strong recruiting choice for a $2.5 million dollar position, at least IMHO.
Just because she contributed significantly in some ways years ago does not make her a particularly plausible choice as CEO, much less such a highly paid one. I can say Blake Ross was just as important in making Firefox a success...doesn't mean he would be a good CEO candidate, nor that he should be paid a "market competitive" salary.
It's anecdotal I know--but she is not particularly popular within the ranks of Mozilla, nor has she shown any particular business acumen outside of striking search deals with Yahoo/Google which arguably are only a function of Firefox's market share...which has continued to decline. And speaking for myself, I'm not impressed with her work at the Foundation either....it comes off a very superficial, and "we don't know what we should spend the money we get on, so let's hand it out to "Fellows", put together conferences, and write reports" nobody reads.
> A plausible alternate reality without her could have involved AOL cutting all support for Mozilla, the Mozilla projects going into a state of limbo (with no more corporate support and uncertainty of even legal usage of their existing names/logos), the dev community around those projects either fracturing or fizzling out as a result of the uncertainty, and Internet Explorer retaining 95+% of the browser market.
Ummm...webkit? Also,it's somewhat ironic you point to the non-profit foundation as her success story, while she makes "market rate" pay by virtue of her being CEO of the "for-profit" side of things.
> That wasn't my point--I know she has a long history with Mozilla. Rather, there is no evidence that should would otherwise be commanding "competitive" CEO pay commensurate with Mozilla's size otherwise. Her work history pre-Mozilla would not make her a strong recruiting choice for a $2.5 million dollar position, at least IMHO.
Of course her work history prior to Mozilla wouldn't make her a strong recruiting choice for a $2.5m executive position. But that's a bit of a false premise, as the Mitchell of today has nearly two decades of executive experience that she did not have prior to Mozilla. If you include the totality of her career (inclusive of Mozilla), she very much does have the work history to be a strong candidate for market rate executive positions.
That being said, it does seem like she's just coasting on her prior momentum and is no longer materially contributing anything of value to Mozilla. In which case, Mozilla would be better served with her stepping down and someone else taking the reins. But that'd be true irrespective of whether she was paid market rate or below.
> Ummm...webkit?
I said it was a plausible alternative, not that it was the only one. Both KHTML (itself spurred by Mozilla's release[1]) and Webkit after Apple forked KHTML, could have also destabilized Microsoft's browser dominance. But I'm not very confident either of them would have done so - KHTML may not have had the resources to achieve what Firefox did, while Apple had the resources but Webkit at the time was only targeting Apple's Mac platform.
> Also,it's somewhat ironic you point to the non-profit foundation as her success story, while she makes "market rate" pay by virtue of her being CEO of the "for-profit" side of things.
In the context of her success story, you can't look at each side in a vacuum. The for-profit side only exists because the non-profit side created it as a wholly owned subsidiary. And the non-profit would never have been able to grow Mozilla to where it's at today without having created the for-profit. The hybrid structure thus optimized Mozilla's potential and has generated billions more in income than Mozilla otherwise would have, while also protecting those billions from being syphoned off by private owners or public shareholders, allowing it to be re-invested into Mozilla's mission. Taken as a whole, it's a point of success that bolsters her case for being a strong recruiting choice for a $2.5m executive role.
[1] KHTML's development wasn't predicated on Mozilla, but https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tldf1rT0Rn0 gives the impression that Mozilla's existence nudged it out of a development lull
You assume that the c-suite care about the mission, etc more than money. They have "enough".
Imagine that c-suite types may just work for the salary, too, like many of the fellow engineers among the readership of this site. They care about the mission, but they also care about making enough money to support their other obligations (like family and kids) and tend to choose a well-paying place when they can. They try to sell their skills and knowledge not very much below the market rate.
Let's say: hey engineers, how about cutting your salary to $60k? It's close to the US national average, it should be "enough". If you think $60k is too little, ask your colleagues from EU, from India, to say nothing of Africa.
I bet some very mission-driven engineers will remain. But a lot would eventually leave.
Same applies to a lot of values of x in CxO. And you do want highly qualified people there.
These are exceptional times. The original Mozilla posts mentioned the effects COVID19 had on their business.
CEOs of much larger companies, with much larger salaries, have cut or take no salary. Here's a short list of some
Lyft, Fiat Chrysler, GE, Delta, Alaska Airlines, United, Southwest, Jetblue, AirBnB, GE, NBA
How is it not incredibly tone deaf to cut 25% of the company and not at least in a token gesture temporarily eliminate your salary when you're literally a multimillionaire.
---
Also,
>And you do want highly qualified people there.
That would be one thing if Mozilla was in a period of great growth. But it's not; it's in steady decline. Yet c-suite salary has grown in inverse proportion. Highly qualified? Are they?
Those no salarie/$1 salarie CEOs sound oh so noble but they are usually compensated very well with stock options and so it's mostly just a facade of giving a
no it's not, unless you can point me at the CEOs receiving more options in lieu of their pay, otherwise it really is a pay cut, even if they're still getting rich, they're getting rich at a decreased rate and that is money they'll never see by taking $1 salary for the year.
> Imagine that c-suite types may just work for the salary, too
That's fine, and if people decided that, I would respect that decision. In which case they could resign, and Mozilla get people willing to work for $500,000.
> hey engineers, how about cutting your salary to $60k?
The problem is you might severely limit your talent pool, to a much greater extent than a cap of $500k would do.
> If you think $60k is too little, ask your colleagues from EU, from India, to say nothing of Africa.
Maybe Mozilla should hire more people in those places, if they need to do so to save money.
> In which case they could resign, and Mozilla get people willing to work for $500,000.
Exactly. Firing so many people means it's time to reconsider the structure and ambition of the company,and that includes considering whether to compensate the ceo at the level of charity ceos or at the level of successful tech ceos.
> Let's say: hey engineers, how about cutting your salary to $60k?
You can't make this comparison, as $60k are not even enough to survive in many areas of the US, while $500k would still be enough to live in luxury no matter where you live.
The marginal utility of a dollar decreases as the absolute number of dollars increases. The only way 2.5 million can provide significantly more utility than 500k (i.e not going towards a mansion in Atherton) is if the person making that much is giving it forward to a large network of friends, family and charities.
This is completely out of touch with the reality of life. 500k is enough to live in luxury anywhere, 60k won't be enough to survive in most tech areas.
I was only suggesting that GP's argument cannot be dismissed (i.e. still holds) by merely emphasizing that 500k is not 60k, with no further judgment or opinion.
If the result of Eich being in charge would have been Firefox being bundled with a cryptocurrency, as Brave is, then I think we dodged a fucking bullet there.
Brendan Eich was a decent CTO, as far as I could tell from the outside; while I disagreed with him on some technical details (e.g. single threaded everything didn't seem that great), at least he seemed to be able to justify his decisions. As a CEO of a very public company, though, I feel like he wasn't quite up for the job — mostly in that he couldn't respond to public criticism fast enough and let it build up instead.
I think things would worked out better for everybody if he had stayed as the CTO, but that's the power of hindsight. That and it was under his watch that they didn't invest into mobile early enough (I'm thinking of Minimo here, which would have been for Windows CE — not helpful in itself, but it would have helped slim down Gecko, probably).
I'm for gay marriage and downvoted you. How can you conflate the two aspects? Is it not possible for a person to hold backwards views about certain things and still be a good CEO?
But would he be a credible steward of gay employees if he doesn't even think they should engage in marriage, and by extension forge families? Credibility is the job of the CEO, including moral credibility.
Having a vision which encompasses society and life is part of the responsibility of a company which has been granted license to operate in society. What is Brandan Eich's vision of gay family life? One that should be banned by law, a cause which is serious enough to warrant his financial contribution? His actions as a man of experienced wisdom says Yes.
Any more than you can be a credible steward of Republican employees as a Democrat? It is possible to set aside your personal views of people on the job…
It's hardly ideal. But, to counter - you don't have to trust Brendan Eich that there's no anti-gay, anti-Uyghur, etc code in Firefox.
You do have to trust google, because of the telemetry. Trusting any powerful party based on public, virtuous statements is... "optimistic" is one word. "Reckless" is another.
You should start a business and when you need execs you could just pay them what you think is fair, and with the money you save you’ll dominate the competition. Maybe everyone in the world will notice the key to your success and exec pay will be reduced.
Mozilla Corporation is not a typical business and is wholly owned by a Non Profit, it should not be competitive with businesses .
Most non profits ( and investment funds) keep an eye on administrative and management overhead. A well run fund or NGO will keep their administrative overhead as low as possible, most donors/ investors look at this metric.
Legal Aid lawyers / social workers or any number of other professions do not / cannot expect a market competitive salary. why is open source development any different ?
if C-suite is only working at Mozilla because they are getting market competitive salary, perhaps they the wrong hire.
90% of Mozilla Corporation revenue comes from one deal, and this has been the case for 10+ years. All the fancy salaries has not prevented Firefox from losing market share, nothing management has been able to do change this, why should they be paid this much ?
If the management has failed to achieve success as is the case , should not also bear the cost ? or also get laid off/ replaced ?
>Airbnb has suspended all of its marketing in an attempt to save $800 million this year. Its founders will also not take any salary for the next six months, and top executives will take a 50 percent pay cut, according to Reuters.
It's one thing to pay market rate for execs who do an excellent job on a rising company for a for-profit, another for a non-profit in decline.
And it's a different thing entirely when it's in a global pandemic and recession. CEOs of FOR PROFIT companies with far more financial success have cut their pay if nothing else as good symbol for the rest of the company.
There are examples of this. Satoru Iwata comes to mind as a famous one.
Another one would be an ex exec I know personally (who was also a founder). Worked two years straight w/o pay to keep the company afloat.
Oh and there are also worker cooperatives. They are usually very stable and have a much smaller income gap.
> dominate the competition
The people/companies who operate like this usually don't have this as a goal. Quite the opposite. They are typically collaborative and opt for stability and sustainability over everything else.
Once it became successful the people at the top would organize together to raise their own salaries then maintain that even when economic times change, against the interests of the rest of the company.
You think you're making a point here, but there's a mistake in your reasoning. You're thinking that "fair" pay is whatever allows you to beat the market, and since if Mozilla only paid its c-suite $300k-$500k, it would not (you think) be able to compete with other companies with high paid execs, this proves that whatever they're paying the execs now must be fair.
But ... "fair" pay does not mean the same thing as "whatever is financially best for the company to pay its employees". Take the other end of that bargain: is it fair for Mozilla to pay their janitors a reproduction level wage? Most of us (except the hard core right-wing libertarians) say no, that's why we have a minimum wage (which many of us also think is too low).
The elision of the distinction between "fair" and "whatever the market rewards you for doing" isn't an argument, it's just crass market-worship.
Edit: this post is pretty clearly argued, and downvoting without even a comment is exactly the kind of ideological nonsense that this site simultaneously prides itself on not doing (contra Reddit), and yet hilariously symbolizes.
I wish the site would just get rid of downvotes. Your post is constructive and well-written, doesn't say anything egregiously offensive and isn't trolling and doesn't lack effort. The only reason why you're being downvoted is because some people don't agree on an ideological level. Which is bullshit. You can still respect people who don't share your views, and I wish the site cared to foster that kind of community, instead of promoting another echo chamber.
> The only reason why you're being downvoted is because some people don't agree on an ideological level.
It's a very frustrating thing about this site, because, ironically, most people here think of themselves as nearly perfectly rational and open to new ideas, but in fact the opposite is almost always the case. If I think of myself as perfectly rational, that ironically gives me a way to think that anyone who disagrees with me must be trolling or must be saying something obviously wrong, even if I don't take the time to work out what that might be.
I admittedly added that just to complain, expecting it to trigger another wave of downvotes - because frankly, I don't care about getting downvoted. What I care about is how often this site turns into an ideological echo chamber for one of two popular worldviews, and on some level I wanted to try to call attention to that.
And you're just as much a part of the problem. You're blindly punishing him for pointing out that the system is unfair und his post is not and was not deserving of downvotes. It has nothing to do with the content of his actual comment. You're not contributing positively in any way. You're just reinforcing that anybody who speaks out or has a different point of view isn't welcome here.
Downvoting complaints about downvotes is an attempt not to have to read complaints about downvotes. But here's another: please don't complain about downvotes!
Yes, indeed. If you refresh often enough, you will notice the downvotes for a reasonable post come closest to when it is posted, which makes the post fade and gives the impression that something must be wrong with it. I think there is a very good chance this comes from people wanting to suppress information that does not support their position.
On an individual level the thing to do would be to upvote downvoted posts if they make some sense, they don't have to be great to be upvoted.
Have my upvote. But be aware that the edit at the end will probably trigger the downvote reflex for a number of people here (it did on me too, I just consciously overruled it ;-)
Fair pay is whatever allows you to hire a competent c-suite that will allow the company to fulfill its mission. However, this comes with a whole host of problems. How do you identify those that are likely to be able to do the job? How do you keep them at your company? How do you maximize their effectiveness in their role?
This usually comes down to pay. People who get high compensation offers elsewhere are likely to be good at it, but that means you have to compete with other companies for them. Even if you somehow did manage to find somebody that accepts your below market compensation, what do you do if another company just offers them more? If you pay them near market rate then there's much less incentive for another company to poach them. You're also less likely to end up with somebody that can't do the job.
Many non-C-level job positions already have a maximum wage, in the form of salary scales. Although not government-mandated, they are all calibrated to the same market, so these scales are comparable between competing companies.
Minimum wage actually came out of maximum wage laws in England. After a plague there was a shortage of laborers, which increased the costs of hiring them. A law was instituted to discourage people paying too much for laborers.
To be fair, she could bring her salary to 0, and that still would only afford to bring back ~8 out of the 250 developers.
Yes, as a regular developer I think 2.5 mil is pretty crazy for a salary. But even if the C-suite "tightened their belts", that wouldn't bring the company around.
Maybe the company _would_ fall apart, as they say, or close enough. I don't know. If you followed the news by Mozilla over the years, you could notice the trouble they had with finding the next CEO, multiple times.
In the meantime, if MDN is the "gold standard" and so on, where were all the donations to Mozilla from developers around the world to keep the site running?
It's extremely self-serving to ask the employees of an essentially public good company to reduce their salaries to be able to produce the said public good.
Personally, I worry about the death of Servo the most. But if a more niche concern, apparently.
Why is the leadership still being paid handsomely even though the org is in decline?
Isn't it time for new leadership or at least cut the leadership salaries and provide a bonus once the org is growing again?
The 2million / year salary - but no results and getting rid of people who add real value - is like an insult to those people who support / donate and root for Mozilla.
Mozilla is a mission driven org and for the CEO not to take a paycut to save some of those job losses - just looks very bad from an outsider's perspective.
I don't see how a non profit ends up paying so much for a CEO?
People take huge pay cuts to work at a non profit. why should a CEO be different? Especially at a time like this?
Even a for profit company will freeze / cut executive pay when there business is doing bad . Look at airbnb recently for example .
If it was like any other for profit company , investors would have fired the management for losing market share and failing to diversify the revenues they make .
In Russia it’s called budget sawing. They got money revenue, they’re doing absolute minimum to keep it and distribute rest of money among few wealthy people.
This may have been the straw that broke the camel's back for me. It's looking more and more like trying to restructure and return to their mission the powers that be at mozilla are killing most of the things that make it great in hopes of a few remaining things will keep it afloat a while longer while they stuff their bank accounts as the nonprofit whithers on the vine.
> MDN as a website isn't going anywhere right now. The team is s̶m̶a̶l̶l̶e̶r̶gone, but the site exists and isn't going away. We will be working with partners and community members to find the right ways to move it forward given our new structure at Mozilla.
Fixed it.
Edit: Dug up the tweet, the author of it posted an update, doesn't acknowledge the statement about the team being "smaller". I suspect it's not exactly a team anymore. https://twitter.com/jasnell/status/1293524408628203523
Firefox Developer Edition is built from the branch as Firefox Beta with some different settings. AFAIK it just has a different theme and extra debug assertions enabled.
That would be one of the different settings. For running unlisted extensions, iirc it's actually pretty trivial to get one signed; back when they abandoned Shumway it didn't take me more than a few minutes with the command line to get a signed xpi that I then installed on several computers. I might be remembering wrong, though.
As raganwald put it on Twitter:
"MDN remaining while the team is let go is a little like a band firing all of its members, but putting out a press release that they will continue to record and tour under the same name."
As a previous contributor to MDN, I hope this change adds stability if nothing else. I stopped contributing after several ID/auth backend changes, thereby losing my credibility and contribution histories... repeatedly.
New people besides Wil would come in and have absolutely no respect for community contributions.
If the documents are only maintained by people working on WebKit/Chromium browsers chances are that’s going to solidify that engines status as the de facto standard even more, unfortunately.
In my opinion, MDN should be the first result of search engines when searching for web related stuff. No offense to w3schools, I'm sure they've improved their content a lot, but I hate that I have to add "mdn" on my search phrase.
I use a Firefox keyword to directly search MDN, simply so I can avoid W3Schools who always occupy the top spot in results.
For those who aren't aware, right click any search box and select 'Add a keyword for this search', set it to something short and then in your URL bar type: "<keyword> <search term>". So to search MDN for the span element I'd type "mdn span".
There are browser extensions to block w3schools (or any domain you choose) from google results. Some are built to only block w3schools, some will operate off a list of domains. It’s one of the first extensions I get on a new computer.
w3schools might not be the canonical and authoritative source for web technologies documentation but sometimes I find the most straightforward answer there.
They don’t deserve the hate they get. What people seem to hate from w3 is how light and loose they go about things, potentially opening some lanes for bad practices.
But they have improved a lot throughout the years. Also people don’t seem to acknowledge how hard is to create non-verbose documentation. I can’t imagine the amount of effort that it takes to trim all the fat and still produce something useful.
I almost get the feeling that people who hate w3schools, simply hate the concept of a resource that is trying to make easy what is by nature pretty hard.
I guess that’s how great singers feel about autotune.
It’s this idea that if you can’t consume the raw, hardcore documentation then you’re not worth it of using that technology.
Today, W3Schools has largely resolved these issues and addressed the majority of the undersigned developers' concerns. For many beginners, W3Schools has structured tutorials and playgrounds that offer a decent learning experience.
1f60c probably has, that message has been there for a while. The link was likely posted for the historical curiosity, not because (most of?) those complaints are particularly relevant anymore.
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
> It’s this idea that if you can’t consume the raw, hardcore documentation then you’re not worth it of using that technology.
I tend to avoid w3schools but this isn't at all the reason why. I don't believe that what w3schools provides is a made-easy resource for a hard concept. Actually I would say that's exactly what MDN is.
For the most part, I find that w3schools usually only provides a basic enumeration of the possible property values for an attribute or something like that with absolutely no additional insight whatsoever. I don't really believe that is helpful for beginners even in a pragmatic sense. Yet, somehow they continually peg the top of any HTML-related Google search.
MDN on the other hand almost surely details the most important caveats and practical aspects about whatever it is you're looking up. That I think is some of the most important information for beginners. It does not provide the same kind of "raw hardcore" documentation you'd get from reading the spec for example.
I agree, honestly I use w3schools more than MDN when I'm googling stuff. Most of the time I'm just looking for a quick example of whatever HTML/CSS I need to implement, and w3schools provides that perfectly while MDN is a bit more cluttered.
MDN is not a guide or tutorial. It is more like a manual or reference, searching a manual or reference, works only when you know what you are looking for. Reading it like a book is better way to use it until you are familiar with it. Yes it takes more time but it pays off.
Learning of the manual once you get used to it is better because, You get answers to questions that you did not know you had . It gives you a comprehensive understanding of the entire feature set, not just the stuff that looks important now .
Copy pasting a implementation of stackOverflow/ w3schools etc usually keeps us in search and copy loop, constantly searching for some snippet without fully understanding how or why. Many times we end up spending a lot of time in frustration when the full solution is hack from four different places and they don't seem to work together.
Thanks all - I am simultaneously heartened by the positive attitude for this often maligned site, as well as shocked at myself for supporting them myself :) Quite the rubber-band effect, but super nice to see a civil discussion about this topic on HN.
Indeed, the hate has gone too far on w3schools. MDN is the gold standard of comprehensive API reference, but w3 is nice for quick simple answers in an easy to read format.
I too feel a bit dirty saying this, but I actually really like a lot of the w3schools docs - terrible place to learn to code, but great for quickly remembering how do to something that you totally knew at some point but have just forgotten.
I actually prefer w3 schools to MDN. If I accidentally click on an MDN link it confuses me for a few seconds before I realize what happened and navigate back to w3.
By extension - the best SEO guide is almost certainly the first listing for 'SEO guide' on google.
Only if you can assume that they followed their own guide. I could see an SEO company posting a fake guide to make their own techniques more effective relative to any competition using that guide.
I wore my nerd badge for a while shitting on w3schools - mostly because very early on, it was filled with really wrong information, when it mattered.
I think over time, that wrong information was less detrimental to learning, while still being here and there.
I met too many people over the years who started with w3schools and continued on, so it became clear my sense about it was mostly dogma - if folks turned lemons into lemonade and think fondly of it, who am I to yuck that yum :)
Personally, this list would be far too big for me. Search query length is limited, and I run up against the limit semi regularly while trying to exclude domaine and irrelevant topics.
I see. Maybe a userscript to filter the results would work then? Though that's subject to how easy it is to walk Google's DOM which I don't know anything about + it might break.
The w3schools python docs aren’t bad. I was recently tutoring a family member in a level 1 compsci course that was being taught with python, and the w3schools documentation was waaaaaay easier to consume than the docs.python.org stuff.
This is one website that like Rust requires its own foundation much like what happened with the Thunderbird mail client. This would be a great chance for Microsoft / GitHub to swoop in and maintain one of the more invaluable resources on the internet. I treat MDN like gospel when looking up anything front-end web related because it is usually spot on and based on reality.
Maybe a subsidiary would better serve it and we can all put money directly towards MDN. I know there are people who don't trust Mozilla out there who might be more inclined to give to at least MDN.
> This would be a great chance for Microsoft / GitHub to swoop in and maintain one of the more invaluable resources on the internet
No, it wouldn't! I don't want yet another corp running MDN who might have their own agendas, or will be just as susceptible to reorgs and layoffs.
It would be great if Microsoft, Google, and Apple funded Mozilla to maintain and improve MDN. I like the idea of a "neutral" third party looking after MDN.
That is the alternative I'd also be glad to see, I only mention GitHub because it seems to be their goal to fund and maintain open source projects that are vital, like NPM, in this case MDN is definitely vital. Although I'd expect if anybody were to buy out MDN that they create a foundation for it and donate to that foundation in an effort to make it as independent as possible. I guess MDN can someday stand for MDN Developer Network if we're lucky.
webplatform.org was a vendor-neutral response to the increasing commercialisation of Mozilla, but it wasn't successful, even with the backing of those organizations and with Mozilla having pledged support, too.
I remember thinking that the "web platform" thing seemed like a good idea, and I knew it kind of petered out, but I go back there now and it says it was around for 3 years and just Pointer Events was "Done," and you go look at the "Not Ready" HTML section and it's kind of a mess and there's double copies of all the elements, one in Japanese... I'm sure there's actually been some rot there so it's probably actually worse than it once was, but still.
What they don't seem to have done is what I sort of assumed was going to happen: taken MDN, stripped the XUL stuff out of it and just airlifted it over, then make the now-duplicated MDN stuff just redirect to this new space and shifted their efforts there. I suppose the issue is getting consensus on doing that, a big move, from the MDN side but as Mozilla (at that time) was committing support to the new endeavor, I dunno, it just seems like the thing to do.
Instead they kind of had a weak period of double effort and nobody shifted over, and this just died.
Is there a reason why this can’t be a group of volunteers who run it, or even those developers spin off their own foundation who would take donations ?
it is wiki and they do welcome edit contributions. Until now there was no need, I don't think anyone thought Mozilla is not up to the task of maintaining it. I would happily donate to a foundation independent of Moz dedicated to maintaining MDN.
With the quality of content on MDN and detail, I can't imagine how much time is spent working on it from all sorts of angles. It's probably a full time job.
I know it's a bit pedantic, but it's disturbingly ironic that a site dedicated to show love to a free and open web development resource implores folks to express that love via a propritary comment platform (Disqus).
I realize it's an independent labor of love, and perhaps evidence of the broad appeal of MDN, but I am so disappointed with how the pendulum of web features has swung so heavily back towards centralization again.
How does Mitchell Baker, who has a BA in Chinese studies and a Law Degree, know which divisions to axe? Mozilla is a deeply technical company doing work on compilers to internet standards - does the CEO understand the company's core tech (not politics) well enough?
Mozilla was actually founded under similar circumstances. I hope engineers who work on the core product (and those who were let go) are talking about another reincarnation of Firefox - from the same code base but with different leadership.
She's been with Netscape since 1994 and remained a volunteer for Mozilla after the 2001 layoffs. She was one of the people who founded the Mozilla Foundation in 2003 and has been with them ever since. Meanwhile, the degree in Chinese studies is from before C++ or TCP/IP even existed, so I'm not sure what you expected her to learn in college instead that would have helped her run a company doing compiler development and internet standards.
There are valid criticisms you can make of Baker (see the compensation issue discussed elsewhere in these comments) but "She has the wrong degree" doesn't seem like one of them, unless you think that Mozilla engineers - the people doing the deeply technical work - must be required to have a CS degree.
My point is that since Mozilla is a technology product company, she will have to rely on advice (from within Mozilla) to make the most important strategic decisions for the company. As a CEO, that's a huge handicap.
Mozilla needs a CEO who can understand its technology and its partners (developers) at a very fundamental level. Mozilla needs a Lisa Su.
> She's been with Netscape since 1994 and remained a volunteer for Mozilla after the 2001 layoffs. She was one of the people who founded the Mozilla Foundation in 2003 and has been with them ever since.
That sounds like pretty solid technology industry experience for an exec, no?
President and founder of the Mozilla Foundation 2003 onwards, and also previously CEO of the Mozilla Corporation 2005-2008. Also she wrote the Mozilla Public License before that. I suspect she knows a little bit more than Word and Excel.
Seriously - go criticize her for her salary, or failure to execute, or for-profit vision, or something. There's lots of criticisms that can be actually substantiated. The hypothesis that she doesn't understand what Mozilla is requires significant evidence. It's entirely possible a Mozillian could show up and say that actually she's been a clueless and politically savvy leader, but outsiders speculating that she can't possibly be qualified need to provide more than speculation.
> Seriously - go criticize her for her salary, or failure to execute ...
I am well aware of her tenure and good work at Mozilla (from public sources). The argument I was making was that the failure to execute is correlated with not understanding technology well enough. Certainly not claiming that's the only factor, but it might play a part in it.
How will you make expensive long-term bets otherwise? The proof is in the execution, or the mis-execution.
1. Mozilla retired Firefox OS in 2016/17. And in a couple of years, a fork of it (KaiOS, which shares 95% of the same code) gets pre-installed on upwards of 80 million (probably more) units. It could have been a lot more if the OS was better; it really had a shot at low-end phones and TVs.
2. If the team says they need to commit tens of millions of dollars and half a decade or more to create a new, safe programming language for browsers and a prototype - will the CEO approve? And if yes, wouldn't it have been entirely based on advise from others in the room?
3. The world needs an efficient browser engine for multi-core devices coming with bundled GPUs. Requires nearly a decade to get right - how does one commit to that unless the complexity (and not just the rewards) are fully understood?
4. The failure to sell the Servo vision (safety, multi-core) to device manufacturers ultimately rests on the CEO. Instead, the Servo team got axed.
Every technology company needs a CEO who deeply understands the technology.
So unless I’m missing something he does not have a CS background or software engineering experience, and, presumably, was yet able to acquire at least some understanding of computing.
> The fact that MDN, Servo and Dev Tools team got the guillotine instead of execs and marketing speaks for itself.
That's my point. Let it speak for itself. It's entirely possible for someone to be an adequately qualified CEO and also just be bad at the job, that's an argument you can make.
But here's an example: Mozilla folded part of the Servo team into the Mixed Reality team earlier, and now they have been let go. Many people (incl me) thought that an efficient engine such as Servo will play a big role in the future of Mozilla, with devices going multi-core and apps with embedded browser engines (like Slack, Teams) becoming mainstream. And now, we're at a dead end. The quality of talent that was let go is stratospheric, as you can see from all the interest in hiring coming from various companies.
The whole thing has flopped and the browser has lost market share, and if I were Mitchell Baker I'd seriously question my ability to lead Mozilla. She can play senior roles in many companies including Mozilla, but not the CEO.
Subsets of MDN docs are archived for offline downloads monthly by Kapeli (the team behind the Dash docs browsing app): https://kapeli.com/mdn_offline
I'm not sure where this leaves Kuma (current)/Yari (future) frontend work, which makes a deeper mirroring of MDN difficult to figure. I'm not sure if there's an equivalent to, say, MediaWiki's XML dumps.
The CC-BY-SA content licensing can be an obstacle as well, because the attribution is "Mozilla Contributors" or "MDN Contributors" but links to the history... which is obviously complicated should MDN disappear completely.
Mozilla's announcement said, that the COVID-19 situation was responsible for them to restructure the company.
Can someone tell me how COVID situation explicitly affected Mozilla's revenue to such an extant? If anything, Internet companies were the least affected or in fact has been benefited from COVID situation.
Did the donors stop funding Mozilla or are they just using COVID-19 as as a scapegoat?
It has nothing to do with donors. The less people use Firefox to search Google and click ads on that, the less money Mozilla gets. 90% of the revenue depends on that. When nobody can even go to vacation destinations, they won't click those hotel/travel ads.
Doesn't Mozilla get paid for search traffic, rather than Ad-conversion from that traffic[1]?
Although Google's ad revenue has dropped 8.1% in Q2 2020 when compared to same period last year[2], I don't think people 'searched less' due to COVID-19 on Firefox, Google trends shows search has indeed increased, but rather these Search Engines might have cut down their deal value for search traffic.
Now that we know that Firefox is in danger (and by extension the open web), we as a community must now vote with our wallets - let Firefox fend for themselves and be overtaken by a monoculture, or support Mozilla financially.
I ask that Mozilla think about having the option for a monthly subscription model. No extra features for paying (e.g $5/month for Firefox), but at least as paying users we will know that it's helping to support the open web and the survival of Mozilla as a whole.
I would absolutely not donate a single cent to Mozilla, so that their CEO can keep the 2.5 million/yr salary. Because that's what the donation would be really.
First the CEO, and other executives, get 100% of their salary (millions $ per year). And if there isn't enough money to pay the developers then the community should pay them? No way. If there isn't enough money to run the company then there isn't enough money to pay such high salaries.
Donations do not go to the CEOs salary or anything Mozilla Corporation related. They go to the Mozilla Foundation and are used to work on global internet policy and education.
Me personally donating isn't going to make any difference, but put a "subscribe" UI as part of the regular interface so a big group of people pay each month, then I'm happy for them to take my money.
I am not going to financially support an organisation that redistributes its resources to political affiliated groups. Why would I support an organisation that encourages censorship and works together with the ADL to bring thought and information control to social media platforms?
Why would I support mozilla, when they make donations on my behalf to the OPSEC of the so called radical left through riseup.net (So called because all these groups work in the interrest of american corporatism).
When Mozilla goes bottom up, and something new springs from its rotten carcass, then I will consider contributing financially to a free and open internet.
I posted a message saying we should support Mozilla. I have read through this thread and now I am doubting the leadership of Mozilla. In particular, I am annoyed that I ever donated to Mozilla when the execs are taking home MILLIONS. Is there any browser to support or use that is not run by millionaires?
There are many many shallow forks of Firefox, Chromium or Webkit out there. Some prominent examples are SeaMonkey, Pale Moon, Basilisk, QuteBrowser, Falkon, Gnome Web, IceCat, Ungoogled-Chromium.
They're all superficial forks though. Without progress on the core engine etc upstream, they won't be able to keep up for long. On the other hand, there is little reason to think any of the three major engine efforts (Gecko, Webkit, Blink) are going to stumble any time soon.
qutebrowser, Falkon and Gnome Web aren't forks of anything, they use a well-defined and maintained API.
For qutebrowser and Falkon, that's QtWebEngine, which you could call a fork of Chromium I guess - but it's more of a stripped-down Chromium with a stable API on top and a couple of patches. QtWebEngine is maintained by multiple people employed full-time by the Qt Company: https://wiki.qt.io/QtWebEngine
For Gnome Web, that's WebKitGTK, which is an official WebKit port (i.e. part of the upstream WebKit repository maintained by Apple and others) and also has been actively maintained for the past 13 years or so.
MDN is fantastic. It has some of the best cross linking I’ve seen in documentation, with many of the specific APIs having excellent links to more general topics and class overviews. It makes it both a reference work, and source of learning too.
MDN’s low ranking on Google searches was part of my continuing breakup with Google. Boo! They should know better!
I'm over a decade into web development, and I still reference it every week. Last week I thought I should start a blog post about how, for me, it's the single best resource on the web. I sure hope it stays that way!
I tried to comment on the actual page but disqus is somehow broken for me. So I'm just gonna say it here:
MDN is such an important resource for me! I have never seen any documentation as detailed and helpful as MDN, not just for web development but in general. How does life without MDN even work??
..incredibly hard choice of continuing to pump money from the company into C-level pockets. It's time to cut the losses and let Mozilla die, and maybe learn something from this.
Mitchell Baker needs to be laid off as Mozilla survived without her quite well and the MDN team brought back. Just because she feels a 500k salary is beneath her is no excuse to ruin the most valuable Web technologies documentation on the Internet.
Currently, there are zero results when searching these comments for "specification". It's shocking how few programmers nowadays refer to the source material. During discussions on the CIWA newsgroups back in the 90s, everyone referred to specifications, DTDs and RFCs. On HN in 2020, regurgitations are considered the "gold standard", and conversations like this one include dozens of references to W3Schools and zero references to W3C. Sad.
It's like the difference between textbooks and primary literature when it comes to science. When you're researching something, you consult primary literature, but when you merely want to learn or refresh a subject, a good textbook is much more practical. The same relationship holds for MDN versus WHATWG specs. The latter are more useful when you're implementing parts of the web, or at least dig below the layer that one needs to know to just code websites.
They are not built for consumption by end users and it shows. They are mostly legal documents describing all the edge cases. They have ton of fluff. Near no usable example. Are super hard to know which browser has what.
And i could keep going. They are simply built for a different target. And it shows.
Among the many things MDN provides is really extensive and accurate information about what the browsers actually do, which the specifications could never tell you.
Hearkening back to the good old days is nice and all, but referencing the W3C is an interesting choice in a world where they've long since practically, and more recently officially, ceded HTML and the DOM to WHATWG.
Programming has grown enormously as a discipline since the 90s (not to mention the tools of the web themselves) and the specs are kind of a pain to read. I read them when I want an answer to an extremely specific question (what does the spec say about internal implementations of JavaScript objects?) but when I want things like API overviews it’s just faster to have high-quality secondary sources.
Back in the 90s it was assumed that specs would be written in a specification language, and we'd be able to prove our software by automated testing using the pre/post conditions.
We'd mainly spend our time writing UML and thinking back to the bad old days when writing software was using old fashioned text editors like vim and emacs, and we'd be wondering how those fools managed to get anything done.
W3C and WHATWG specs don't include any browser-specific information. They don't tell you what has actually been implemented, which browsers support what, etc. They're great as a reference for someone who really needs to know the spec but not good as an everyday lookup how to do something resource.
Pragmatically speaking, is there a comparable alternative to MDN right now, dealing with the same scope, breadth and authority? I don't think so. You would think the supergiant corporation which keeps saying they want an open, standards-compliant web would've created something like this by now, but it fell to a non-profit's lot to do the really valuable but under-appreciated work (writing & updating documentation).
MDN cannot be allowed to fail or million of Web devs will suddenly find their error rate increasing noticeably. If Mozilla corp can't spend on it, maybe they can spin it off into an independent foundation the community can donate to and keep running, like say the Linux or Apache foundation?
Who's behind this site? I don't see any credits in the footer or an about page, and the `whois` record is vague and scant on details: https://who.is/whois/ilovemdn.org
I would love to leave a comment in that page but sadly they decided to use Disqus. My issue is not even that it is proprietary (which is a big issue) or that it sells your data (which is again a big issue) but rather that it does not let me log-in.
Along with Firefox, Thunderbird, Rust, and Servo, MDN was one of the best projects from Mozilla, it is sad that they decided to fire people that worked on it.
So true, and I think it's important for developers to look up documentation on sites like MDN (consider it sites that are authorities on a subject) rather than blindly googling and ending up on sites that have a massive variety in quality. I see that all too much.
Man, I hope MDN never goes anywhere. I've pinned a tab of MDN on my web dev machine's default browser, next to npmjs.com. As far as I'm concerned, it is the documentation for the 3 main open web technologies, and I know many would agree.
No disqus account. So I’ll express myself here...
MDN is an invaluable source of information. Very clear, comprehensive articles with intuitive examples.
The web needs that.
>MDN Web Docs, previously Mozilla Developer Network and formerly Mozilla Developer Center, is the official Mozilla website for development documentation of web standards and Mozilla projects.
Essentially an online reference manual for HTML, JavaScript, the DOM, and other web-related stuff.
Having said that, I find the timing of this site very suspicious, as if it were part of a secret PR campaign for improving Mozilla public image, after the recents layoffs.
The timing is no coincidence, as the MDN docs team was part of those layoffs. It would be a cruel act to layoff the MDN team while also trying to improve the perception of MDN's value.
The timing is almost certainly related, but I interpret it as the community trying to voice how important MDN is to everyone in an effort to convince Mozilla that it deserves priority, or at least doesn't deserve further cuts.
There are tech writers from Google and Microsoft that contribute full-time to MDN. (And it's a wiki, after all, anyone can edit it!)
But yes, very sadly, the Mozilla tech writers that maintain the docs, maintain them, and keep those browser compat tables running so smooth... were part of the layoffs.
You can be sure that the site will find a new home if Mozilla defunds it further. It certainly won't drop off the web.
https://twitter.com/MozDevNet/status/1293647529268006912