Mozilla's corporate structure has the same problem OpenAI had. Because Mozilla is not a for-profit entity, management isn't accountable to shareholders with a financial stake. Because Mozilla isn't a charity, management isn't accountable to donors. Who is Mozilla management accountable to? A board; mostly made up Baker's associates. It is an incestuous arrangement. If Mozilla were serious, they would change the way management is held accountable. Baker needs someone who will actually hold her feet to the flames.
Mozilla is entirely unimaginative, but is self sustaining as long as it keeps its advertisers. Mozilla is a shambling corpse that will continue to shuffle forward until it is no longer favorable for Google to buy search placement.
The fact that Firefox usability and perfromance is improving, better addons support for android, unique useful features like containers and easy to configure network proxy/DoH/web protection levels, etc.. is already a big improvment.
How do people expect the market share to grow if the user isn't #1 priority.
Not disagreeing with your other points but keep in mind that "better addons support for android" was a self-inflicted problem and an arbitrary restriction. Addons worked to begin with if they weren't restricted to a small whitelist.
Firefox is in fact better in terms of privacy than rivals with higher market share, the home page of firefox addons store has uBlock Origin with "Recommended" label placed by Mozilla team.
It is important to recognize that the web is also used by grandma and grandpa who won't master any tech more recent than fax and installing uBlock origin by default will harm FF market share even more as usability will be impacted.
Safari works around that nicely - if you refresh a page it prompts you whether you want to reduce privacy protections (assuming you are refreshing because of something broken). Either way, the functionality can always be optional so people who are impacted can disable blocking.
> will harm FF market share even more as usability will be impacted.
The only people who currently use FF are those who also use uBlock Origin - if you don't there is really no point using it compared to Chrome.
Firefox marketshare will improve because there will finally be an actual selling point for it.
These numbers may not be representative as anyone who installs uBlock Origin is unlikely to leave telemetry enabled.
Either way my point stands - what's the selling point of using Firefox over Chrome for a non-technical user (who doesn't know what add-ons are and this won't install any)? uBlock Origin bundled by default would be an instant selling point.
Say "install this browser for instant ad-free browsing" and you've sold it to all non-technical users. Say "install this browser, dismiss 5 nag screens, navigate to the add-on store, find ublock origin, install it, tick 'enable in private browsing'" and your non-technical users would've ran away before you even finished that sentence.
What non-advertising revenue model would pay for both Firefox development, and timely repairs and improvements to advertising blocks? It’d have to be a recurring or subscription model — one-time payments aren’t viable for recurring updates — with no free option (like there is today), as otherwise no one would pay for it (just like today). Solve this and perhaps they’ll make you the next CEO.
> What non-advertising revenue model would pay for both Firefox development
The Enterprise pays a fortune for often dubious security products - the browser, being at the forefront of many security threats would be a great place to put some security features alongside things like centralized management, DLP, etc. Use that to subsidize the free version of the browser.
> timely repairs and improvements to advertising blocks
Volunteers that maintain uBlock Origin lists do that just fine already, but if they really wanted to fund it, they could just redirect the donations they currently piss away to the maintainers of filter lists and use that money for something useful.
> Solve this and perhaps they’ll make you the next CEO.
The reason this isn't "solved" isn't because it's some hard problem, it's because converting into a company making an actual paid product requires taking on risk, responsibility and actually doing something. Freeloading off the Google money while puffing hot air every so often about how much they care about privacy requires much less risk and effort, so why change anything?
> Use that to subsidize the free version of the browser.
Google and Microsoft, and to some extent Apple, already offer an enterprise-capable browser for $0; so I don’t agree that enterprise support is a viable funding model here. I can’t find any traces remaining of the Enterprise paid support plan that the Firefox team launched in 2019, so I suspect they reached the same conclusion and shut it down.
> use that money for something useful.
Such as?
> converting into a company making an actual paid product
To clarify, do you mean converting the Firefox browser into shareware/IAP, or free-trial/paywalled, or do you mean another product in the style of Pocket or Relay; or..?
Check the play store you can see their score is gamed. Most reviews are 1-3 stars and all have the same complaints for years.
It's been a steady downward trend since google started financing them to have someone to point at and say 'see we have competition, no monopoly here!'.
They removed almost all addons and are barley (like 10+ years later!) bringing some of them back.
Pocket spam. Collections. The list is ridiculous and getting to Google levels bad.
I especially love the part where she laid off hella employees and gave herself a 1/5 raise.
People need to pay some inconvenience for the better cause of web usability, privacy, software freedom, etc..
Everybody knows that Linux started with low funding a tiny userbase that had to accept the inconvenience over the year to avoid the project death, now Linux is irreplaceable technology that we rely on more than most popular software, it wouldn't reach that point if users quickly got annoyed and gave up on freedom of software.
I can get behind this sentiment for something like haiku os. I actually make an annual contribution to because they’ve been clear about using it to pay developers/contributors.
The fact that the ceo of Mozilla gets paid handsomely doesn’t inconvenience me, but it makes it harder for me to justify donating to or supporting them like I would for haiku.
The analogy doesn't apply to Firefox though because it is very far from "low funding" as the CEO pay reflects. Not to mention, Firefox was good and was at one point irreplaceable before mismanagement ruined it and continues to ruin it.
Not sure about the terms of the deal with Google, but it may be that she is trying to extract as much personal gain as she can before the termination date.
Perhaps Google will not continue to fund Mozilla and she will have to go looking for another Sugar Daddy.
Not to sound like snark, but where does the money even come from? I feel like you've ruled out either donors or investors, which really makes me confused over what's left.
A significant part is default search engines sharing revenue - primarily Google at the moment. There are also regular customers, for products like Mozilla VPN or Firefox Relay. And there are donors for the non-profit entity as well, as well as for the entity managing Thunderbird.
But the big money maker is Google's revenue share.
In 2020, after returning to the position of CEO,
her salary had risen to over $3 million
2021, her salary rose again to over $5 million,
2022 her salary rose again to nearly $7 million
In August of the same year the Mozilla Corporation laid off approximately 250 employees due to shrinking revenues,
After previously laying off roughly 70 in January (prior to the pandemic). B
Baker blamed this on the COVID-19 pandemic, despite revenue rising to record highs in 2019, and market share shrinking.
This is the correct answer here. The CEO blood-boilingly doesn't make sense, if looking at the organization as a technological steward of Firefox and maybe related technologies. But the CEO and Firefox are just there, year after year. So maybe it's not the organization that's wrong, but rather the way of looking at them.
So, as you say, if one shifts the perspective, to look at Google, using what's pocket change to them to keep a competitor alive, in order to keep them out of anti-trust and continue to let them dictate how the web is shaped, it suddenly makes sense.
* ..her salary had risen to over $3 million 2021, her salary rose again to over $5 million, 2022 her salary rose again to nearly $7 million .. In August of the same year the Mozilla Corporation laid off approximately 250 employees due to shrinking revenues *
This is the plague that is currently overtaking all large corporations, and I can't help but think the workers are going to revolt, and they're going to do it soon.
The UAW strike seemed very tame compared to what is to come.
They should revolt and this management "culture" of severely inflated compensation is decadent to the core. Especially since a CEO doesn't really create value at a company like Mozilla, nor are executive decisions too relevant.
Not saying Mozilla is in an easy position, but everyone could do her job without significantly influencing business results.
If literally everyone stopped going to work for even a month things would drastically change. The workers hold a lot more power than they realize, if only they would organize and untie in the common goal.
If everyone could even just afford to not work for a month things would already be much better, but that's why they keep the masses living paycheck to paycheck and why the very idea of UBI and freely accessible healthcare terrifies companies.
I'm not 100% convinced UBI is viable or even desirable, but I know that companies really don't want people to be free to quit jobs they hate and companies don't want workers being secure and comfortable while they look for a new job that better meets their needs.
In companies actively developing or making products, sure.
In the case of Mozilla? Everyone can leave for months and nothing would look amiss - the occasional marketing puff piece about privacy can be ChatGPT'd and critical browser issues outsourced to contractors.
So, people were stuck at their homes, with no other things to do than engaging electronically with the rest of the world, but this, somehow created problems for Mozilla, a company that builds a fucking web browser?
Genuine question: can anyone explain CEO pay to me? I fail to understand why it is commonly accepted that one or a few people can earn n times more than the average worker actually responsible for creating value. It doesn't seem meritocratic at all...
Even in software engineering where we are arguably spoiled to be able to do interesting work possibly from home for upwards of 100k a year, what is the incentive to actually want to do work, if someone else can unjustifiably make 7m a year?
So how is it possible that we as humans collectively just accept this, also psychologically speaking?
What usually happens here is the board of a company say to themselves "Let's hire a professional CEO", the next answer then is how, you don't see these jobs advertised on LinkedIn, so they get a talent recruitment agency. For C level management positions there are usually 2 options that control the most of the market, these 2 options have rosters of people from well known business schools with experience ready to step in.
Because the supply is constrained by these companies the CEO pay increases well beyond market rates, as each CEO will earn X% more than the one before it by faking competitiveness, then the former CEOs will complain (as the Mozilla CEO did here) about relative market rates of other CEOs, even though the market rates are set by the cartel that proposed them in the first place.
The board not wanting to rock the boat for the shareholders will generally agree to this extortion for optics, and round and round the merry go round goes.
They get paid what they get paid and that is by definition market rates.
The supply constraint is not due to recruitment companies somehow cornering the CEO market - the very idea is absurd.
It’s because large companies need someone with incredibly deep and broad experience to do a job that has a 50/50 chance of going well, a 100% chance of being blamed when things go wrong, a 1% of getting due credit when it’s due, and a 100% chance of copping flak from legions of armchair critics like you.
This makes no sense. There are too many companies and too many boards that could just hire any old MBA off the street for non-CEO-cartel prices and get the job done.
There is no constrained supply of people willing to be the Mozilla CEO for, say, $2M/year.
They won’t for optics reasons, it looks incredibly foolish to shareholders to pluck any random MBA and call them a CEO. You have financial due diligence to uphold and this protects you, it shows you are conforming to industry practices.
It is a form of "corruption signalling", compared to "virtue signalling". By blatantly hiring a corrupt or incompetent CEO, the board members are advertising to the world (of finance) that they are corrupt and ready to play ball. This way they might be able to get some nice gigs for themselves.
Although I generally think most CEOs are overpaid, remember: they are legally accountable for the behavior of the organization. For example, David Drummond, who was Chief Legal Officer at Google (until it turned out he was impregnating people who reported to him) was convicted in a lawsuit in Italy, sentenced to prison, and there was a warrant for his arrest if he entered. This was over a video on a part of google that David had no real oversight on, where Google removed a video within only minutes of the issue being reported.
I figure legal responsibility is about $1-2M in pay right there.
The CEO also plays a critical role (with the CFO) in finalizing the earnings reports, with severe penalties for mistakes. They make strategic decisions that many employees aren't even aware of, that can have $billion+ repercussions for the company.
Taken all together, it's not completely surprising that a CEO of a trillion dollar company makes $10M/year (or receives stock of that value).
No, it's not truly meritocratic. I keep coming back to a lesson I was taught as a kid: life's not fair, but you can use your brain to make it a little less unfair.
How many other examples do you have? I've yet to see anyone or anything even close to legally accountable for their behavior. Corporations get caught doing things all the time, and the most I can see is a fine that is typically much smaller than the laws they broke.
There's no reason for the compensation between executives and workers to be so great. It's rigged and you can see it right here in this article.
>Taken all together, it's not completely surprising that a CEO of a trillion dollar company makes $10M/year (or receives stock of that value).
I mean, sure. a trillion dollar company, 10m dollar salary, that's not even 1 hundredth of a percent of the company.
Apparently the Mozilla foundation is around 2 billion in revenue a year. But how is that worth 70% of the above salary (I won't count stocks, it makes sense that if a company makes more money, shareholders make more money)? $we're already well beyond retirement levels of funding in a few years and they double it in 2 years.
> average worker actually responsible for creating value
CEOs actually are generally responsible for creating a lot of value, but most importantly, enabling a lot of value to be created by many others. When there is a causal link from you to a lot of created value, you tend to be paid proportionally well.
To believe that value is only actually created by average workers, and not the organizers of this work such as leaders or business owners, is quite short sighted. There are strong ideologies pushing this belief which I hope is not influencing your thought process.
Yes, there are bad CEOs out there, but they are not generally all bad.
>Yes, there are bad CEOs out there, but they are not generally all bad.
most of the Fortune 500 don't seem to have much good to talk about. Let alone what justifies 8 figure compensation.
I guess we'll never truly know, but it does make one wonder how much change it'd be for those to be run by CEOs for a tenth of the compensation (which mind you, is still 7 figures).
If your company makes $1bln per year now and pays a CEO $1 mln, and then someone comes along who has much better ideas, better work ethic, and more experience and you (the board) are convinced they can add 5% of revenue as pure profit to your company per year. They will add $50 mln in value per year. If that person asks $5 mln as compensation would it be responsible to say no?
Or to take a more concrete example, if Elon Musk decided to quit Tesla in a huff and focus entirely on X and stop dealing with the annoyance of public markets, the stock's would probably lose $75 bln in value overnight. If your legal goal is to maximize the company's value and it takes $500 mln pay per year to keep that from loss happening, it seems like it's probably a good deal to just pay the $500. As another example, Steve Jobs received hundreds of millions in stock options, and that was probably an excellent deal for Apple, though they probably could've hired someone cheaper.
I agree there are many cases where a more expensive CEO is actually worse. But I think it is very very easy to imagine cases where it makes a ton of sense to pay a large amount for an expensive CEO if they are the right person for the job and will add 10x more value than their pay.
This isn't a fair comparison to most companies as Musk has made Tesla largely about him, can you think of many other companies where if the CEO left a 75 billion dollar stock drop would happen?
More responsibility. CEOs will be responsible for decisions that could make or break the company. Regular employees generally don't have to worry that something they do might cause the entire company to go out of business and lose everyone's jobs. If the company screws up and causes a scandal of some sort, the rank and file employees are not going to be called to testify before Congress about what went wrong and have the entire media shitting on them for weeks afterwards.
The board of directors is willing to pay more for someone who will first, hopefully avoid such screw-ups and second, be able to deal with them if they happen.
Having the leverage to negotiate high compensation means you also have the leverage to negotiate limited downside. If they were the kind of person who wasn't savvy enough to negotiate well for themselves, would you want them negotiating on behalf of the company?
There's a difference between negotiating well and being extremely greedy. The latter is not something you'd want at a company with a respectable image.
Nobody cares about being "extremely greedy" if the company succeeds. If the "extremely greedy" CEO negotiates hard on the company's behalf and gets price concessions from vendors and drives high profits, nobody is going to be lamenting about how it's not "respectable" when they're cashing their fat bonus checks.
On the other hand if the CEO leaves money on the table and doesn't negotiate hard because he's afraid randos on the Internet will call him "greedy" and subsequently profits fall and the company has to lay off thousands of people, nobody is going to pat him on the back and commend him on being "not greedy" and "respectable".
It seems perfectly meritocratic to me. I mean it’s consistent with how the word “meritocratic” is always used.
I have never seen a system that was actually based on skill or effort be described as meritocratic.
Likewise I have never seen a system described as meritocratic that was actually based on skill or effort.
The way meritocratic is usually used is to describe systems that could appear to be based on skill or effort at the surface, but is not actually if you look just a little deeper.
Here’s a different way to think about it. Each level up makes 25-50% above the level below it. Maybe at director or VP the jump is a bit bigger.
If senior engineers in the valley are making $500K TC, directors might clear $1M and VP’s $2M.
Above that it goes bonkers where you’ll see an SVP make $10M and a CEO $20M+.
Why do senior engineers make $500K? Well, they may be 2-5X more efficient than a junior, or you can look at how much value they are bringing in to the company.
> Why do Realtors earn 2.5% of a house they sell? Because sellers are nervous it'll cost them more not to pay.
That's debatable.
Where I live realtors are seen as slimy as used car salesmen. It's an open secret that realtors will steer their clients away from low commission or independently listed properties.
There’s a huge downside to hiring a bad CEO (or a bad realtor, or even a bad plumber), so people want the best.
Also, shareholders should be free to pay whatever they want, the same as homeowners.
If you tried to tell me what rate I should be paying my plumber based on some moral reasoning I’d nod and ignore you, and as a shareholder I likely don’t want your opinion either.
CEO pay is similar to other payments, where everyone is trying to claw themselves as much as they can, to certain personal limits. Powerful roles attract people who want power, and so, the higher up you go in a hierarchy, the more "dark"[0] traits you find, which equates to lessening personal limits to power / money gain. If you think of the ability, willingness and perseverance of one to further one's personal power as merit, then this is a meritocracy after all.
With regards to accepting that, culture plays a big role. Governments effectively groom people into accepting the status quo, some stronger than others. They build on features of the human psyche that otherwise support this too, for example, in many cultures it's taboo to question elders, and also, many cultures observe different classes of people, where the different classes wield different levels of power by default. If you're interested in the psychology of this, I would suggest to look into how societies are organized over the recorded history of humankind.
The charisma and image of the well-off leaders also plays a part in making people accept, and support their advantage. This is also something that people are much cleverer about than in the past - the art that is currently called public relations. The idea here is that whatever people perceive, must make sense in their mind, somehow. If it makes sense, then it's accepted much easier, and if it doesn't, it's bothersome and makes people think about a story where it makes sense after all. So, one aspect of public relations is and making certain things observable, others obscured, and crafting a narrative about the observable things. This game is "history written by victors", but a bit backwards - whoever sells the most compelling narrative, comes out as the victor.
At the end of the day, the question is "what are you going to do about it?". Certain things just are because we're not doing anything about it. Doing about it is a ton of effort, might not be possible, might not worth it at all because the effort outweighs the results, might not worth it because the side effects are greater than the potential gains. Or maybe people care about other things. And because all of these concerns exist in all humans, those in power can exploit these too, in order to keep or further their power.
For all the valid criticism of the Wikipedia Foundation, their combined salaries of all "officers, directors,
trustees, and key employees" (aka board and C suite) was $4.2 million in 2021
This is because Jimmy Wales is still around and even though he dont control wikimedia directly he is actually a public figure with massive recognition and authority. And certainly have more following and trust than majority of FAANG CEOs.
Unfortunately Mozilla never had benevolent dictator to begin with and now there is not a single person who can call the bullshit loud enough.
"Chief product officer Steve Teixeira notes in the report the rapid growth of AI and social networks, although warns that Mozilla.social is unlikely to move beyond the experimentation phase in 2024. He says that Mozilla would be "exploring ways to better integrate advertising while adhering to our focus on privacy and choice," including web browsing."
Also the part where they need data for AI, so turbocharge the telemetry engines...
(but am I wrong, downvoters? :))) what the hell bone do you have to pick with a fact? "As well as Teixeira's comments regarding advertising, Baker notes: "We need to be faster in prototyping, launching, learning, and iterating ... This requires rich data, and so we will be moving in that direction, but in a very Mozilla way."")
Downvoting for complaining that downvoters think you're wrong, when downvoters just as likely think your comment is low effort. Even your defense of your comment is "I'm just regurgitating a sentence from the article and adding nothing".
HN doesn't like some facts. Those disliked facts change over time. Don't overthink it. Downvotes in everything you post should be worrying, an ocasional downvote here and there is actually a good sign that you're not a part of a hive-mind.
If the CEO is being rewarded for declining revenue and users, then that's what the CEO was hired to do. Can't understand why the board wants lower revenue and user share.
The board knows the ship is sinking. You and I would work hard to keep it afloat. They’re working hard to loot the hold of everything they can cart off and sell before it sinks.
You might be downvoted, but "looting" matches my impression with regards to Mozilla and its current CEO. If I were to guess, they'll stay until it's this profitable, and when the Google money finally goes away, they will too, onto the next victim.
I use Firefox and I have 0 intention of going back to chrome at all, I have adopted a strategy of Firefox by default with chrome as mere backup for what Firefox won't run.
The way I understand it they upset the free speech abolutist, but to be honest I don't really care, I like the roadmap and what the devs have been doing to firefox lately, I also don't mind being in the minority. I like it here, i'm not one of the ones that's going to switch browsers unless some major shoe drops that slows firefox to a crawl.
All good things must come to an end...maybe it's just time that we accept that Mozilla is not an exception to the rule.
I firmly believe we need a strong nonprofit guiding standards and leading innovation in cross-platform technology, but is Mozilla still filling those shoes?
What truly innovative things have Mozilla done lately? They have been playing catch-up/follow-the-leader with various consumer-focused things like federated social networks, VPNs, VR, etc. Firefox is treading water but still slowly sinking every year. Firefox is great browser - it's not a technical reason why Mozilla is "losing" - it's cultural/hype/marketing/something else entirely. Bugzilla hasn't had a major release in 5+ years and has lost the battle of bug tracking to things like GitHub Issues. Thunderbird is back in active development and has had good improvements but has a very niche market. There's Rust, but Rust has it's own foundation now and extends far beyond Mozilla.
The MDN web docs are great, but wasn't that one of the teams hit hardest by "COVID Layoffs" in 2020?
> it's not a technical reason why Mozilla is "losing"
I think it is - Firefox no longer has any selling points now that the competition has not only caught up but overtaken it. There are easy features they can add to make the browser appealing out-of-the-box to non-technical users but those would require courage and taking on some actual risk.
Every other product is useless - we don't need yet another VPN, or yet another password manager. Both those markets are already saturated by both shitty and good products, there is nothing Mozilla can bring to the table.
Let them burn their cash, who cares? None of us is paying them. They're never going to die, their true masters will just keep them afloat so nobody can cry monopoly. It's not an accident that most of their money comes from their biggest competitor.
Guys. Mozilla set out to make the web standards compliant. Firefox was the tool they used. They won. It's done. The web is universally standards compliant.
Massive success to the org. Right after the rebranding from Phoenix, things took off. Super BD effort to get standardization going. Huge community management effort to get all sorts of random people installing Firefox everywhere.
This is the biggest success story ever. And this is why everyone has to always be growing. It's not enough to do what you set out to do. You have to always grow. If you're a for-profit corp this is your partners or shareholders who care. If you're a non-profit it's the general public.
But whoever that person is, the moment you stop growing you're in trouble. Oh they'll say "unchecked growth is cancer" and so on but what they want is to say that while nonetheless you grow.
Growth is survival. Even reaching your objective (as a non-profit) is death.
It was originally successful simply because it brought features to the table that were lacking in IE6, and those were written by engineers, not business people.
No. It was successful because of a massive business development and community building effort in addition to the product. Firefox was less compatible than IE because IE was what people built for.
Konqueror's KHTML engine was actually more feature-complete for much of the time but there was no organization backing it until Safari based early Webkit on it. And Apple didn't back KHTML so much as just base Webkit on it. Epiphany was a Webkit-based fully open browser but didn't actually get as popular as Firefox.
The whole Firefox thing was a huge success. When they turned Mozilla (the browser) into this it was a feat. And then to coordinate the complex efforts to beat IE. It was amazing stuff.
> Firefox was the tool they used. They won. It's done. The web is universally standards compliant.
sure, when there's only 2 standards (down from 3 10 years ago. Probably down from 5 20 years ago), it's very easy to be compliant to the standards of 2.
But yeah, sad reality. What I want isn't necessarily what is most profitable. I'm tired of having to care about how much money my tools make to justify/chastise their ability to function.
> We need to be faster in prototyping, launching, learning, and iterating... This requires rich data, and so we will be moving in that direction
This is a debiliating disease of the software industry. People need software mostly as predictable tools, not some mystery magic entity that shapeshifts with each new profit incentive. To make it better, you can just ask them.
Mozilla continues to let its users down on privacy by relying on Google's money (>80% of its entire revenue) after the CEO promised that they would move away from them 15 years ago. [0] That did not happen.
Nothing has changed other than declining usage and revenue. But give the CEO another bonus over poor user usage, shrinking market share and destroying the browser, all done by themselves and now are being kept on life support by Google.
Here's an idea: provide a donations bucket that gives a guarantee that they'll be earmarked exclusively for Firefox development. Nothing off the top for CEO salaries, nothing siphoned off for random side projects—this bucket should be guaranteed to pay the salaries of Firefox developers.
It might not make millions, but I'd donate in a heartbeat if I knew that my money would actually go to Firefox and not to one of the dozens of random side quests that Mozilla keeps picking up.
That'd work just as well for me. I just want a way to give Mozilla a clear signal that I pay them for Firefox, not for Pocket or a VPN or for whatever the flavor of the month is for the nonprofit. As is, there is no way for me to send them that signal, and I'm not prepared to endorse any of the non-Firefox projects Mozilla's put out.
You're correct, and this is a general problem with earmarking—there's nothing to stop the organization from just shifting unrestricted funds out of that bucket to compensate. I still would donate in this scenario, because the main point is that I want to be explicit about which activities Mozilla is engaging in that I find valuable. Donating to Mozilla right now would send the wrong message.
I mean, isn't that the problem? They made 500m this quarter so a <1m donation box won't shift things. Hell, it may not even pay for more than a few devs given the compensation I've seen.
There simply isn't enough goodwill to maintain the living of even a single person operation without some sort of incentive (which ceases to be a "donation", but a subscription with a fancy coat).
Many (most?) non-Firefox endeavors of the Mozilla Foundation have been half-hearted flops for which they deserve chiding. I struggle to name any non-Firefox Mozilla project that has been successful and which they've continued to support.
For starters that'd be a reason to cut cost and allocate an increasing proportion of current revenue into a diversified investment portfolio to eventually gradually shift towards being able to at a minimum know they can cost-cut and survive of that investment return should they need to.
If I was aiming to set up a company like Mozilla, I'd want all earnings to go into such a fund, and all costs to come out of buffered investment returns... Yes, significantly slows down the rate you can spend, but it also significantly increases the odds of longevity and independence.
Of course that presumes the goal is to build the organization, not to get personally rich off it.
Because they're harebrained ideas. I don't want to pay Mozilla for a limited version of mullvad when I can get the full mullvad for less.
I don't think they actually ever expected any of these ideas to work. In the meantime you can't even donate to firefox if you want to, only to the foundation.
I mean, I give money to KDE every month and they manage to build a whole desktop environment. Why can't I do that with Mozilla? Oh wait, how much money does KDE waste on a CEO?
Here's an idea: an enterprise/power-user focused browser. The market for productivity tools is huge, and likewise for enterprise security snake oil. The browser, being at the front of most security threats would be a great place to implement security features that might not be entirely snake oil, and The Enterprise will gobble it up and pay up.
This might be poor framing. Maybe its for a job well done. A big reason for google funding is fears of monopoly lawsuits. From this perspective a firefox fewer people use is a good thing.
I'm pretty sure they are doing, it's just that there is a big disconnect behind Mozilla's actual objectives and their claimed objective.
Mozilla's actual objective is to provide an antitrust shield to Google by pretending to develop a good browser and get paid handsomely for this service.
Mozilla's objective is not to actually develop a good browser - that's not only an unnecessary expense but would also bite the hand that feeds.
It's not that the board sets CEO compensation that's bad, it's the personal connections they have and the observation that they appear to set compensation more based those personal connections with the CEO, not based on any measure of performance or anything..
I was assuming that was hyperbole since if the public actually had evidence of the board violated its fiduciary responsibilities they would be in legal hot water.
Fiduciary responsibilities can be construed very broadly, and as long as they can point to CEOs with similar salaries and haven't recorded themselves basically admitting to some illegal arrangement it's extremely hard to do anything about it unless you'd been a shareholder.
That may be true, but i also think its pretty unfair to claim, even just on the internet, that the board is inapropriately setting compensation based on a conflict of interest without some evidence its true or at least some evidence that said compensation is unusual.
Most tech startups spend years and sometimes decades in net losses while CEO get raises because revenue isn't the one and only performance and potential indicator.
I cannot find any benefit of the articles bashing Mozilla with hot claims - that aren't necessarily false but used in misleading contexts - other than Google, Microsoft and Apple.
I have used firefox for years because I believe in FOSS and privacy despite the shrinking market share and the poor addons market.
I am not going to leave Firefox after the recent and significant improvments in the weakness points for some conspiracy theories based on completely normal facts
Well that's the thing. Mozilla is not a private for profit corporation, the money isn't from investors, and the goal isn't to make a profit at the end of the day. Non profit CEOs always have a much smaller salary, and much smaller increases. That's just how it usually works because the money they have is supposed to go into fulfilling their objective, not make people rich. Why does Mozilla get a pass for this? It's so weird to see this defensiveness whenever the subject is brought up, because you can clearly like and support Mozilla and still disagree with a non profit paying 1% of what it earns to an underperforming ceo. That sum would be weird even if Mozilla was doing well.
I'm just using it because the alternative is even more hostile towards me. I don't care about the drama, I just want to use an adblocker on all my browsers' devices.
That said, FF mobile is still far from parity with its old version from 3 years ago when it did its big break, so it becomes hard to sympathize when a CEO salary doubles and I'm arguably getting a worse experience despite that.
Mozilla seems to be in a lose-lose situation with HN crowd.
When they attempt to diversify their revenue with VPN, email tokenization, etc, (things not tied to Google revenue) … HN crowd ridicules them for not being focused on gaining browser share.
When it comes to Firefox, it seems few have even given it a fair try anytime recently.
(How can they gain share when HN doesn’t give them a try)
Irony is, HN loves Rust. And Rust was created at Mozilla.
Note: I have no ties to Mozilla and am a Safari user.
You're talking as though HN is a monolithic entity with a single opinion.
There are some HNers (myself included) who hate the direction that Mozilla is going under Baker. I want Mozilla to give me an option to put money into a bucket that will directly pay for browser development, the way that restaurants have a tip jar that goes directly to the employees. I want that because I use Firefox as a daily driver and want it to survive, and the way Mozilla spends the donations they get to the org as a whole isn't helpful to that end.
Separately, there are other HNers who still think of Firefox as the slow dinosaur that Chrome unseated. These HNers likely don't have a strong opinion about Mitchell Baker because they have no skin in the game.
And even more separately there are other HNers who love Rust. That Rust originally came from Mozilla may or may not even matter to these HNers. They probably do remember the day that Mitchell Baker laid off the whole Rust team, though.
I’m way closer to paying for Kagi than I am to paying for Firefox. Sure “apples to oranges” and all that, but if Kagi slapped a coat of paint on a shitty electron app, gave me bookmarks, profiles (for dev testing a la containers in Firefox), and asked me to cough up $10-$15 / month for it? Done. Paid. Maybe even a tip on top.
What the hell does Firefox bring to the table? Sure they’re open source and “competition” to Google but come on… surely we can all see those aren’t features, they aren’t products, they’re bullet points.
Well I use Firefox but I hate their harebrained monetisation schemes. And anyone with any idea of business knows they'll never pull in the money they need. Whatever the answer is, this isn't it.
We are where we are today because of people on this very forum. Especially ironic when it's the more lefty types that have helped kill the non-profit open source browser and many are themselves solely using the for-profit Chrome ran by a capitalistic advertising panopticon. Great job, much appreciated /s
Uhhh no, sorry. Getting Eich to leave was one thing. Getting a completely incompetent replacement hired is not on those people.
Unless Eich was the one and only possible savior of Mozilla (as Steve Jobs arguably was to 1999's Apple - it does happen), these are two very different things.
You don't fold your principles just because you risk rocking the boat. And Mozilla is a pretty progressive organisation. You can't have a figurehead that isn't aligned with that.
I'm a co-founder of mozilla.org (unlike Mitchell Baker).
You projecting your own or others' politics onto it raises an acute historical question: if I'm a co-founder but not "progressive", yet I was not driven out at founding or for 16+ years, then what changed, when?
No "society" cop-out answers. Mozilla was a global project from early days and we made it a point not to litmus-test politics or religion as conditions for taking on any role, while we were growing.
I have my own answers, but I'm interested in yours.
This is the timeline we're on. Ousting Eich directly led to our current Mozilla situation. He's not the only who could've ran it successfully. But we are where we are because people wanted him ousted and instead were ok with Mitchell Baker types. From a realist perspective that cares about actual outcomes, we are in the worse timeline with an incompetent Mozilla vs. whatever small negative affects Eich would affect in the grand scheme of Prop 8 related issues.
If I were working at Mozilla it wouldn't affect how I'd act in the future though. Yes this turned out very poorly. But you can't predict these things. And principles are worthwhile to speak out for. And we don't even know if he'd have done a better job (though this is admittedly not hard)
Eich wouldn't have made a change to prop 8, no. But the culture at and image of Mozilla would have changed.
Ok so we have the benefit of hindsight, but I say, let's predict these things better. Principles are worthwhile to speak out for, but if we have better predictions on getting better outcomes, we should lean towards those better outcomes and not certainly dig our own grave by latching onto what may be a misguided principled stance. I'm quite sure that most of the people, that care about an independent successful Firefox and celebrated Eich's ouster, now regret that. We need to change our mindset when what happens is viciously descending on someone, years after the fact, for donating to what was a majority opinion in a liberal state. And yet ignoring or giving a pass to the years of continued actual malfeasance running Firefox thereafter. If it means actually accomplishing good things in the world, an independent web, I'm willing to give people leeway, nowhere close to what they're giving current Mozilla. The problem is people never gave a single thought to what possible futures ousting the technical CEO of Mozilla means, and unfortunately we now have to live it.
Regardless of what happened with him, there's literally no reason to believe that he wouldn't have had the same massive salary if he was still the CEO. Him being technical has nothing to do with taking a massive salary or not, the issue is cultural. Especially when you see the exact same thought process all over this thread, of thinking "But they are a CEO in tech! They deserve it!" instead of keeping in mind the completely different dynamics that apply to non profits. I don't think it has much to do with the CEO themselves
The CEO's "massive salary" isn't the issue. It's the "revenue declining" part. No one would care much about a salary like this for Baker or Eich is Mozilla was actually flourishing. But it certainly is not.
While Firefox market share and revenue is declining, Eich was able to a 200 person browser company from the ground up (based on Chromium). Huge difference between CEO caliber here.
I think we'd all be better off if those efforts would've been combined to making a strong 3rd browser contender, instead of Chrome, Safari, and the peanuts sprinkled across Firefox and Brave separately.
Here's proof salary isn't the issue: not only did I not stay and say whatever it took to give Google antitrust cover while hiking my salary (Mitchell would have been chair, would have had to approve, might have done so provided hers went up too; she always earned a bit more than I did while we were partners from early days), I didn't go to a Big Tech company that pays seven figure salaries to people at my level. I founded a startup and still make a modest (16x smaller than Mitchell's, to be precise) salary.
If I'd stayed at Mozilla, turned around Firefox, spawned other revenue lines, then of course the salary would be high -- it would have to be very high, without any equity upside. This remains a problem for comp at Mozilla from when I was there: we can't compete with Big Tech on RSUs, or even on cash, so we overpay a bit and have a "mission-based" ethos that, over time, tolerated politicking and goldbricking.
Mitchell Baker is frankly a moron, surrounding herself with even bigger morons who have taken Firefox every direction except a good direction. Frankly, it's impressive how much they've missed and how far they've shifted from their original mission. Yet her salary has more than quadrupled since she took her position.
Don't forget this phenomenal Baker quote from a few years ago:
>In 2018 she received a total of $2,458,350 in compensation from Mozilla, which represents a 400% payrise since 2008. On the same period, Firefox marketshare was down 85%. When asked about her salary she stated "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." [0]
I wonder whether Eich manages to turn around the Firefox decline if he hadn't been given the boot. It started under him, but his latest venture (Brave) is growing steadily - 65 million monthly active users [1].
Mozilla needs to be at the very heart of the free an open web. They need to have the biggest Mastodon instance that you can actually depend on. They need to have the biggest Matrix server. They need to have the biggest free blogging platform. They need to hire a few full time community managers to spearhead putting together a clear set of community guidelines and organizing volunteer moderators. People all the way up the chain, accountability and responsiveness all the way up the chain. The anti-big tech. They could easily afford this, too. If it's free and open on the internet, Mozilla needs to be there. But instead they take half-hearted stabs, abandon them, let Firefox linger, and pay their CEO millions upon millions of dollars.
I can't edit this one anymore, but in light of being reminded of the community guidelines, I will offer instead that Mitchell is not a moron, but is making decisions that are extremely questionable in light of the stated goals of the Mozilla foundation, and has failed to execute well enough and quickly enough to the point that it calls into question her competence.
Honestly, Mitchell is making about 16x what I make, so she's not stupid. Staying at Mozilla, hiking my own salary, pandering to politically powerful factions... I am glad I didn't stay to face those temptations. But as I've written elsewhere, I could not have done what needed doing at Mozilla.
Please don't post personal attacks to HN, and please follow the site guidelines in general, including the one about not calling names, and also the one about not fulminating:
p.s. I have zero opinion about this person or this organization, just in case anyone is worried about that. I just care about preserving HN for curious conversation, which is what the guidelines are written to convey.
I'm pretty surprised to be seeing this comment because I don't think this is a particularly personal attack since it's a public figure with measurable performance, and I feel as though I frequently see similar comments about Musk, Bezos, etc. Is it acceptable to change it to "is behaving like a moron" and "surrounded herself with people who make moronic decisions"?
It's hard to see how this is anything other than arbitrarily silencing a popular opinion. I can understand things getting out of hand and becoming the proverbial "two minutes of hate" may be worth quashing but it is frankly offensive to have my honest account of leaving Mozilla represented as contributing to "mob dynamics."
>It's hard to see how this is anything other than arbitrarily silencing a popular opinion
I mean, I've seen what Reddit turned into (it was always there, but I saw it spread outside of the meme subs). I saw how 4chan started. I saw how Twitter started and somehow managed to keep lowering the bar.
People chastised "tone policing" in the 00's and I was a part of that. But I've seen enough trainwrecks in real time to accept it as a necessary step to stop history from repeating itself and lowering the quality of the discussion.
And honestly, it's never necessary: Does calling someone an idiot really advance the conversation in a way that a detailed criticism of the subject wouldn't?
From @dang's other reply[0], you have nothing to apologize for. Your insult might've been a bit childish, but it's only being used as a flimsy excuse to silence "mob dynamics" (popular opinion going in a way that isn't approved).
> When asked about her salary she stated "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."
I was working at Mozilla when she made this comment -- shortly after laying off ~25% of the fucking company -- and it was the final straw for me. I can't speak to whether it was the final straw for others as well, but I can say that in the span of about 8-9 months after those layoffs every single person on my team, many who had been there 5+ years, quit and took "normal" tech industry jobs that typically paid 2-2.5x more than Mozilla. Apparently in Baker's mind it's OK to ask the people doing the actual work to take a massive discount to their compensation for ideological reasons, but when it interferes with her lavish lifestyle it's suddenly unthinkable.
She is truly an anchor around Mozilla's neck, and at this point I've just sort of grudgingly accepted that she'll only leave once she's drained every last drop of blood she can get from the company and from the well-meaning and dedicated people trying to make a genuinely independent web browser. All I can hope is that some sort of phoenix (get it?) manages to arise from the ashes when that finally happens.
This is a really interesting possibility. A crippled competitor is ideal--keeps Chrome ahead, but still have a multi platform competitor to point at when the DoJ comes knocking.
Hey, I guess if Google stopped shoveling money into Mozilla then they wouldn't have any money to pay her and she might leave then.
I guess we can blame Google then!
Is there anyway we could blame Google also for the unrest in the middle east?
Firefox was originally Phoenix until Phoenix Tech. made a stink over trademark. Hence why the fox has a flaming tail and the e-mail client is a thunderbird.
I think he could have turned it around, but I'm glad Brave exists.
People hate BAT for reasons, but the idea of controlling the ad stream at the software level is a winning one to me. I can't think of any other platform where ads were given such free reign. Could you imagine watching TV, then a commercial comes on that either a) crashes the tv, or b) changes the channel multiple times so you can't get back, or c) installs malware onto the tv, or d) clones itself 20 times over the content you were watching, or any other fun stuff web ads have been known to do.
Eich was CTO of the Mozilla Corporation since its founding in 2005 until 2014, during which Firefox market share slid from its peak at 30% to 13%.
What would Eich have done as CEO to turn around Firefox that he wasn’t able to do as CTO for nine years? That said, Brave has innovated and had some VC-fueled success. I just don’t see him as the Firefox savior some people do.
As a lieutenant, I don't get to just go do whatever. I advise, I provide options, I make calls that don't to up to the CEO level.
I pick tech stacks, I pick how to do the things we decide to do. But the final call on what we are doing is the captain's. Especially about the fundamental direction like how to acquire users, markets we target, and how to acquire revenue.
Brave is not "VC-fueled". Small seed funding which we transcended long ago. But if we were, you'd be practicing a variation on the Genetic Fallacy. Do better.
I know a few HN haters fixate on me as cause of all problems at Mozilla, but if they were playing fair, they'd give me some credit for growing Brave to ~60M MAU or (better metric) 24.5M DAU. A lot of these users came from Firefox. So I can grow a browser, I've done it three times at least. But elsewhere I've written that Mozilla wouldn't have let me do what was needed, in my speculative opinion.
Brave doesn't advertise itself in the User-Agent: header, so statcounter lumps us in with Chrome.
Also, I was at Mozilla from founding in 1997 (yes, I'm a co-founder -- unlike Mitchell Baker), official news in 1998, and spinout as 501c3 in 2003.
What you cherry-pick as my CTO role from 2005-2014, as if I were some new hire in 2005 who had nothing to do with Mozilla before then or from inception, nevertheless covers a lot of Firefox growth -- we peaked in 2010 or 2011.
So blaming me for decline vs. Chrome is grossly unfair, but I sense an irrational animus on your part.
But Firefox can control the ad stream very well with ublock origin. Don't need bat tokens for that.
The advertising industry will never take that as an option anyway. They're addicted to big data now. They have to sell a hell of a lot of less-annoying non-data-mined BAT ads to compensate, or do with less profit. They're not going to be on board.
And these tokens don't really solve the issue. People hate ads. Trading their ads for slightly less annoying ones when they can do without them altogether is not going to work. How many of those 65M brave users actually opt in to the BAT ads?
It's just a non-starter and will always be that. Sorry. It's just another fairytale spun to dig into VC money pools.
People hate ads but they hate paying for content even more. There are startups that offer a pay per article integration for publishers but it never really caught on. Monthly subscriptions to one publisher work decently but people are tired of that too.
Ad revenue adds so much juice to the profit margins, just look at Netflix/amazon prime/etc. None of them could resist the ad tier.
I think about this a lot because I dislike the ad tech industry and would like to leave it (even though I currently work in it) but I honestly don’t know what the solution is besides ads.
I know, but BAT isn't going to transform the ad industry. It has nothing to offer to them that they don't have now and will only make things harder for them.
The only thing that will do that is a legal framework that forbids tracking so untracked ads are worth more because they no longer have to compete with the tracked ones. After all there will be no retargeting etc. It will have to be purely contextual.
The EU unfortunately stopped short of doing that and created the cookiewall plague in the process. For which they are rightfully blamed.
Ps I don't really hate paying for content but the "sign up for a recurring $20 monthly subscription just to read this one article" like most sites are doing now is complete BS too of course. Of course nobody wants that unless they are already a regular reader.
Mitchell Baker is a bloody genius, this is a woman who heads both the foundation and the corporation to make literally several millions while ostensibly claiming to champion the right to freedom of information and communications.
What she is doing is unethical and suspect as hell, but so long as she can keep getting away with it she is absolutely not a moron.
As the old saying goes: If it's stupid but it works, it ain't stupid.
Note that "works" here does not mean furthering Mozilla's mission, it means securing a fat paycheck off her fiefdom.
Not being able to create a success and instead making personal wealth by siphoning money through someone else's creation while it rots is not a quality I would label as genius.
Look, if I can make seven million god damn greenbacks while claiming to be the leader of the free peoples but actually doing nothing or maybe even something to subvert them, I will call myself a genius.
Sorry man, but I loathe people who think that way. Particularly since I've ( and many others) found a way to make a living without resorting to that sort of schemes.
To be clear: I don't support nor even agree with what she is doing. She is a key part of the disease Mozilla is suffering from.
But with that said, I am also willing to at least respect the fact someone is making an absolute killing of a living for next to nothing. Think about it: $7,000,000.00 for doing next to nothing at bare minimum. Most people would kill for that kind of income to work ratio.
Mitchell Baker is a woman who figured out how to game the system she's in and win big (bigly?), I can and will respect that even if I otherwise vehemently detest her. The first step to addressing a problem is figuring out the problem.
Hmm, me in particular I'd be extremely pissed (and am) to even know that such a person exists.
I'm not the absolute moral authority but I believe a great deal of what's keeping us back from being absolutely great as "humanity" has to do with those parasites and their negative influence.
> a great deal of what's keeping us back from being absolutely great as "humanity" has to do with those parasites and their negative influence.
that's called the human condition. You would've done the exact same, when put in the same situation in all likelihood.
People are inherently greedy, and selfish. There's no changing it, as this is an evolutionary advantage. Those altruists would've died out, since they would've given way to those who are greedier (otherwise, how are they altruists?).
that is Machiavellian or Ten Rules of Power or whatever; it is not clear that the position is being gamed, but that the results with the current players are certainly out of constructive balance
Someone who was a genius wouldn't strangle their cash cow just to have a steak dinner. She's ruthless, conniving, and short sighted. Perhaps she knows she's incapable of improving the business, in which case stealing more money from it before it goes under makes sense.
It’s not her cash cow, she’s just sucking on it. She’s not risking on getting the cow bigger and healthier and profit later as that window of opportunity may close.
It’s horrible destructive behavior if you ask me but why is she allowed to do it in the first place?
That doesn't make a person a genius. It makes them a sociopath. What they are doing is not intellectually difficult and actually requires low emotional intelligence usually.
I can't speak toward her specifically in all honesty. I would need to research it further. But a policy of reward/praising all the con-men (using that phrase loosely) in America is a bad policy.
Mozilla doesn't need any Mastadon instance. They need to stop pretending to be a social media company and focus all their resources on browser development.
Their only reason for being involved in social media in the first place is because it gives them a plaything for their forays into censorship and narrative engineering. This is one aspect of the cancer Mitchell Baker has been cultivating in Mozilla
Firefox engineering is in a pretty good spot. What they need now is clout and market share to bring in income and brand awareness. I'm not sure how else to achieve that? They need people to associate them with being the good stewards. Best way to do that is to be a good steward.
> They need people to associate them with being the good stewards
nobody cares about good web stewardship.
Actual people care about performance, ease of use, integration, and capability. And chrome is already good enough now-a-days, which means it takes a huge improvement to firefox for people to switch (not to mention an advertising drive when those improvements come about).
There's a reason why Dvorak keyboard isn't more popular than qwerty, even tho Dvorak is slightly better.
Firefox would be better off if it was technically a worse browser but more relevant. The function (and central marketing claim) of Mozilla and Firefox is that it is an alternative to big tech controlling the entire internet. It has completely failed at that mission. At one point, it was failing because engineering. 10 years later they've finally corrected that, about 8 years to late, and at the cost of tying themselves to Google and losing all their relevance. Again, this is a zero sum game. Firefox only has value as an alternative to big tech if it has enough relevance to prevent Google and Microsoft from abandoning standards. And it has failed spectacularly in that arena. It spent all its relevance, has failed to recoup it, and is now reliant on Google to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars solely to pay the bills. Mitchell has been at the helm for nothing short of an unmitigated disaster.
I don't understand this oft-regurgitated opinion that Mozilla needs to "focus all their resources on browser development." Mozilla does focus a large portion of their resources on browser development. Firefox is fast enough and has an interface that's largely similar to its main competitors. It works pretty well. This is a browser we're talking about. What special features do you think Mozilla could build that'll magically allow Firefox to claw back huge chunks of market share? And why do you think that Mozilla isn't building those features due to lack of focus - surely they build browser features and do other things simultaneously? In my opinion, building a killer non-browser thing might be one of the only ways to save Firefox - after all, the history of browsers shows us that successful ones typically piggyback off of successful non-browser things (Windows, Google, iPhone, etc.)
They removed XUL without providing an API to replace it, even for some very popular use cases (TabMixPlus comes to mind). I lost a few (to me) important extensions and had a hard time finding replacements. For me, extensions were the major thing that differentiated Firefox from other browsers, as I could customize it exactly as I liked.
Firefox as a browser is doomed no matter what Mozilla does. People installed Firefox because the default browser sucked. Now the default browser doesn’t suck.
Chrome still isn't the default on any major desktop OS (ChromeOS is far from major) and only on one of the two mobile platforms.
Yet people go out of their way to install it even over edge on windows which is kinda the same thing. Sorry this argument doesn't fly. Firefox really lost mainstream appeal.
I believe Firefox is a decent browser in spite of the CEO of the organisation.
It's 100% rational to hold the positions that the CEO has performed poorly and doesn't deserve anything like the salary they are paid (and should probably be removed), at the same time as believing that the people working on Firefox have managed to do a quite good job in spite of the terrible leadership.
>Interesting contrast to the "everyone should use firefox in 2024" #1 article from a few days ago
Firefox is an unqualified good to the world. Mozilla (as the nonprofit we once all knew and trusted) ceased to really exist years ago.
Just another zombie corp bumbling along into discount acquistion/liquidation at this point. Once Google stops paying the bills, it'll be stripped for parts and join Netscape in heaven.
Is there some secret FAANG-driven effort to just mess with the Mozilla CEO every couple years? They’re a seemingly worthless company to attract so much heat for their executives.
>That doesn’t seem like a good situation to me. So I don’t want Firefox to die even though it’s not my daily browser.
...so make it your daily browser?
Seriously, there's no reason at all to still be using Chrome. There was a dip in the mid/late 2010s where FF was a joke in comparison, but they're more or less identical in performance at this point.
I don’t use Chrome. I use Safari. It is and has always been my choice since it was released.
But I still think it’s better if Firefox exists.
——
My experience has been kind of odd compared to most. I switched to the Mac before Chrome or Safari came out. When Safari arrived it was vastly faster than anything else at the time. So it became my browser.
People on Windows or Linux couldn’t use Safari (I tried the Windows version, let’s not talk about that, ouch). So when Chrome came out, and they left IE/FF, they got the same giant performance jump that I liked so much but associated it with a different product. I’m sure I would’ve done the same thing if I was still on Windows.
Firefox eventually got way better, becoming what it is today. But almost everyone had already moved to Chrome.
I’m left with this sort of weird view of the world. When I did try Chrome it wasn’t noticeably faster than Safari because it was using the same rendering engine at the time, but it had a really different UI design that I didn’t like.
So a huge amount of people really love Chrome because of their experiences, and I hate it for the same reason. All because of the order I ended up using browsers in.
>Firefox and Safari are the only two things keeping Chrome from total dominance.
Safari yes, but truthfully nobody gives a damn about Firefox at this point.
>A lot of people don’t like Safari because it’s from Apple, the priorities they choose, or the fact that is not fully open source like Firefox is.
"A lot" meaning a minority of a minority of people. Lest we forget, iOS is superior to Android in at least the US and Japan, and MacOS continues to gain market share at the cost of Windows.
I agree. FF is a distant third. But it’s the only credible third I know of. Brave, Edge, and friends are just Chromium so they’re the same rendering engine as Chrome.
On the Safari topic I was going by the general sentiment I see on HN. The general public couldn’t care less what is or is not open source.
Over the years I’ve noticed a weird (to me) contingent here on HN who appeared to think the best thing for the Internet would be for Safari to be killed so everyone would be forced to use Chrome.
Apple could release it for other platforms (let’s not talk about the original Windows release). Or others could build a browser on the engine.
You’re right most people couldn’t switch tomorrow. Right now Firefox is the only credible non-Chromium browser I’m aware of for Windows/Linux.
Honestly that comment was mostly there to try to forestall the people I expected would come out of the woodwork with vehement Apple hate. And if someone did in one of the replies below my comment.
Chrome and Edge use the Blink rendering engine (except on iOS). Safari uses WebKit. Firefox uses Gecko.
(Edge used to use its own engine, EdgeHTML, but switched to Blink and EdgeHTML is no longer developed. EdgeHTML was derived from the Trident/MSHTML engine, which is also no longer developed.)
Blink and WebKit can both trace their history to khtml, but that was a very long time ago.
Chrome used to use WebKit (before Edge existed). Blink was forked from WebKit and they diverged about 10 years ago. They are now considered distinct rendering engines with different behaviours.
So the big three rendering engines today are: Blink, WebKit and Gecko.
All browsers in wide use today use one of those three.
On iOS, all browsers use WebKit due to OS policy restrictions. Chrome and Firefox use WebKit on iOS. This works, and different browsers continue to have their own respective featureson top.
It is widely thought that if Apple loses the power to limit the rendering engine on iOS due to changes in law, so many web devs will drop testing with WebKit browsers that they will pressure users to install Chrome on iOS instead: "Best viewed in Chrome. Some site features may not work using other browsers...". The same way many web devs already dropped testing on Firefox/Gecko. Those site features may become critical, such as abitiy to sign in or view some kinds of data. Apps will ship with parts of Chrome/Blink directly in the app, saving users the decision.
This is what people mean when they say Apple's rendering engine policy on iOS may be all that's preventing most of the web shifting to Chrome/Blink-only dominance, that you won't be able to avoid if you need essential services online.
I thought EdgeHTML was a clean sheet. I know they had a way to continue to run the old Trident engine under the hood for compatibility, but I didn’t think EdgeHTML was based on it.
Excellent description of the situation. I both think people should get to choose their own browser on iOS, and don’t want them to get to choose their own browser for the reason you stated.
Oh people are still working on it? I know FF wasn’t working on it anymore but I had thought development was basically stopped completely. It’s good to hear it’s still moving forward.
I think they're counting Webkit (Safari) and Blink (Chrome) as two separate engines. Given that it's been 10 years since Blink forked from Webkit, I think that's fair.
I was. Things have shifted enough (it’s been 10 years? Wow!) I think it’s fair to consider them separate. They also use completely different JS backends.
Nothing is stopping alternate rendering engines from being created, but if the alternates are not better and not worth integrating with a browser the resources might be better spent being invested in the most popular one that way it improves the web for the most people.
> but if the alternates are not better and not worth integrating with a browser
This is the problem. There is a MASSIVE sunk cost to get a modern browser off the ground compared to a static target.
Even if you could do it, Chrome is going to keep moving forward. And they have enough power to change things in incompatible ways that everyone will follow because they have the vast majority of the market.
Microsoft made a new modern browser engine. They gave it up because it was too hard to compete with Chrome.
When Apple is forced to let people replace Safari, I fear we’re going to get into an IE6 situation.
It doesn’t matter how good Chrome is, IE6 was great too. But when the company lets it stagnate for years because there’s no reason to invest, or decides to use it to push their advertising business to new heights, we are all screwed until a new competitor comes around.
Firefox only exists because it was built from the Netscape code base. And ‘a modern browser’ was a WAY easier target 20 years ago. What if no group/company can muster enough effort to dethrone a stagnate Chrome?
The web is in trouble. Even tagging along in 3rd place, Firefox is a good browser that could step up in such a situation. But only if development continues. If Firefox dies next year and Chrome stagnates five years from now we’ll be screwed.
Firefox was not the only competition back then. Opera was also around with its own engine, and it was very popular in Europe. But, yeah, this is when HTML and associated standards were a lot simpler.
>There is a MASSIVE sunk cost to get a modern browser off the ground compared to a static target.
You can incrementally improve the browser. Blink was not created from scratch.
>But when the company lets it stagnate for years because there’s no reason to invest
There are 2 big differences. The first is that what the web is and how platforms work is better understood. Google continues to invest in Chrome despite their dominance. The second is that chromium is open source. This means that if Google stops investing heavily in Chrome then others can still contribute and improve the browser.
>or decides to use it to push their advertising business to new heights, we are all screwed until a new competitor comes around.
If Google does something bad enough to make users stop using the browser that hurts them. Even taking that to be the case making a Chromium fork without that stuff would be possible given the demand for an alternative. You do not need a whole new browser engine just so you can make a policy change.
>What if no group/company can muster enough effort to dethrone a stagnate Chrome?
They can build off of Chromium instead. There is no need to start from some basic browser and put in a ton of resources to modernize it.
>If Firefox dies next year and Chrome stagnates five years from now we’ll be screwed.
If Chrome stagnates then competitor browsers will surpass them.
I was there, I was an IE user and proponent. It was a great browser. I think it was considered one of the best when it was released in 2001.
IE 7 came out in… 2006. So IE 6 just sat there for 5 years. And it’s not like ever upgraded to 7 immediately. Lots of corporate PCs kept 6 for many years longer.
That’s why it has the reputation it does. By 2006 IE 6 was horribly behind FF by every measure. Tons of security bugs had been found. By 2010 it was a total joke but developers were still having to make the modern web work on it, somehow.
If it had been replaced in 2003 or 2004 and MS never paused development no one would remember IE 6 as a dumpster fire.
But once you get a total stranglehold on the market, you can do stuff like that.
You are right in that it was way ahead of its competitors (mainly Netscape) when it launched. It had more features, much better performance, and it looked great in comparison.
But it also had an insanely huge amount of bugs, half-broken features and “I’ll just do it my way” stuff. This was also true already at launch.
Sure, if Microsoft had replaced it in 2003 or 2004, nobody would have such “fond” memories of it even today. But the bad reputation does not come only from the fact that it was not updated for a long time; it also comes from its many problems and issues.
Quite true. That’s one of the reasons that having to continue to support it for so long was so horrible. If it behaved nicely even if it had been stagnant it would’ve been quite as bad.
I guess I’m sort of assuming that if they kept new releases coming those bugs would’ve been fixed anyway in time. Which is certainly not a safe assumption.
I felt so bad for them. They worked hard and made a really good engine. They got out the door, started to see usage, and were then told by management one day “never mind we don’t care”.
None of the forks are required to accept every change Google makes or make their browsers a perfect clone. Edge, Brave, and Opera are all in control of their own destinies in making the best product they can.
I think many people here probably use Firefox to some degree and are concerned at the sustainability of the entity that makes it, especially since it seems to follow a for-profit trend of higher executive pay even though it's non-profit and not on the most stable, defensible grounds compared to competing software.
That’s the bit that really burns for me. I don’t know if they can make enough money for Firefox to survive.
But over the years they’ve spent money on an email client basically no one uses, trying to make a social network, trying to make a phone operating system, and who knows what else. Just huge amounts of money going to what often looks like a complete fools errand. I understand Thunderbird but a phone OS?
Money that could’ve gone to either make Firefox better or to advertise/promote it.
If FF was doing great in the market and they had millions of spare dollars, pursuing other things that match their goals would make sense. But that really doesn’t seem like where they are.
Instead it feels a lot more like if private equity bought an open source project.
> But over the years they’ve spent money on an email client basically no one uses, trying to make a social network, trying to make a phone operating system, and who knows what else. Just huge amounts of money going to what often looks like a complete fools errand. I understand Thunderbird but a phone OS?
Keep in mind that both Firefox and Thunderbird started life as an evolution of the original “Mozilla Suite” which itself was an evolution of Netscape Communicator, which included a browser and an email client. So originally both were part of the core mission of Mozilla.
Thunderbird failed to gain much traction though and it was later spun off — it is now developed by a separate company (a Mozilla subsidiary).
Honestly I don’t expect that Thunderbird ever cost too much when they were still developing it, but even at the time I’m not sure it would’ve been worth it.
The other stuff is just me-too insanity from what I can tell. And now of course they’re talking about AI.
I think it makes perfect sense that money would be flowing from powerful entities in a way that cripples Mozilla. The CEO is getting rewarded for their lack of performance as a competitor to Google Chrome. Controlled opposition and so on.
It's not worthless; many people still want to like the product and would like the company to improve. Alas it seems to be a lost cause given what's discussed over the years, better move on and use the energy to support a browser focused on user experience that actually has a future.
And how does that raise compare with other CEOs of similar organizations?
Not that I think CEOs are worth their ludicrous salaries. It's just that the anti-diversity crowd loves to attack any organization they set their sights on for being "too progressive". So it's relevant to know whether this really is extraordinary.
The hate for Mozilla on HN has very little to do with diversity and almost everything to do with people who want Firefox to keep Chrome at bay and are frustrated at Mozilla's paying attention to everything but Firefox.
Mozilla feels the need to jump on every new tech fad instead of focusing their efforts on making a really great, sustainable browser, which is what I personally wish was their core mission.
While you’re right about that, the fact that they seem to have been trending downward for a very long time suggests they need someone new, whoever it is, and at a minimum should not be encouraging the current CEO with a raise.
FF seems to be in serious trouble. The money mostly seems to go to a lot of different things that keep changing that are not the one thing that people use and want.
Mozilla deserves a lot of criticism. It doesn't need the anti diversity crowd for that. It's its own worst enemy right now (and it really starts with Baker). Diversity (which I really support) has nothing to do with it.
What they have to do is put firefox back on the map. They deserve criticism for not doing that and for failing at their mission of an open web.
Siding with a millionaire CEO to own the anti wokes is quite a take. Also, even if her peers were just as well paid, it's well known and normal for not for profits to pay a lot less than "private" for profit businesses. Expecting non profit CEOs to have a salary that trends similarly to those in big/mid tech is a bit weird, why not just go work for big tech if she is on the same level as her well paid peers? Also even for a non profit, it's a bit... brazen to still keep increasing the already massive salary even when clearly the organization is doing a lot worse in terms of meeting its own objectives than before.
For all the valid criticism of the Wikipedia Foundation, their combined salaries of all "officers, directors,
trustees, and key employees" (aka board and C suite) was $4.2 million in 2021
Mozilla is two different entities - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38819284 - Dec 2023 (25 comments)
Mozilla 2023 annual report: CEO pay skyrockets, Firefox market share nosedives - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38795308 - Dec 2023 (331 comments)