I worked at Mozilla back in 2012, as we were pivoting to FirefoxOS (a mobile OS). I was very low in the company, but for some reason sent Mitchell an email detailing why I thought it was a bad idea.
She not only responded in a very gracious way, but also followed up months later to check if my feelings had changed. While they had not, she didn't owe me anything and I really appreciated her attentiveness. Mitchell really cares about Mozilla and its community.
Mitchell was a great community leader. That doesn't always translate to being a good CEO or leader of a business, however Mitchell is a huge reason (if not THE reason) why we have Firefox today – and, even if you don't currently use Firefox, a huge reason why we have the web we have today.
So, while I haven't been the biggest fan of Mozilla's decisions the past few years, I do want to give credit to Mitchell for everything she did for the open web and open source. She was a supporter before anyone really cared, and played a huge part in getting is to where we are now over the past 20+ years.
(I am glad this is the direction they have chosen! Here's a 2015 post where I write about how I think Mozilla should focus on data privacy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10698997)
It's interesting to hear this, because from the outside Mitchell's tenure has seemed to be a disaster, with a complete inability to stay focused on one thing for long enough to make a difference.
Mozilla in recent memory has reminded me more than anything of the dogs in Pixar's Up ("squirrel!"), constantly chasing after the latest shiny tech fad while neglecting the fundamentals. They've been a follower on everything and have failed to lead on anything. Mitchell's justification for stepping down as CEO seems to me to follow this same pattern: she's stepping down in order to focus on AI and internet safety.
It's good to know that she's a decent person and was good to Mozilla employees, but it's hard to square the picture you paint with the complete lack of direction I've seen during her tenure. Maybe Mozilla was in a much worse situation than I thought at the time she took the position?
I agree with everything you said. All I can say in response is that being a great community leader and open web advocate doesn't always square with someone who has to make a profit for hundreds or thousands of employees.
I have no inside information, but here's my guess at what happened. John Lilly was a great CEO. When he left, there was a gigantic void. They hired Gary Kovacs, who started the "squirrel!"-ing. He wasn't well-liked, and used Mozilla as a stepping stone. So going forward they only hired from the Mozilla community, which is a small pool – both of people who could do it and people who wanted to do it. I'm not sure if Mitchell wanted it or not, but I don't think there was a lot of competition.
Being the CEO of Mozilla is not a good job, and I imagine it's really hard to fill. There's a ton of pressure, relatively low salary, no equity, no exit.
But if you're a CEO good enough to turn Mozilla around given the constraints... you could make a lot more elsewhere. If nothing else, you'd get stock, which would correlate with your performance.
This line is trotted out all the time... but her salary also was going up as revenues and earnings kept going up. From 2005 to 2022 revenues grew more than 10 fold, from 52M$ to 593M$.
In recent years, the proportion coming from Google has also been coming down (even if slowly, from 90+% to just above 80%), and considerable cash reserves have been built up.
Her compensation is ahead of the median for companies in the 0.1-1 billion revenue range, but in line with the median CEO compensation for a company with 1-5 billion in revenues:
So if you accept that this is an unusually complex CEO role, then it does not seems disproportionate (when judged relative to the absurd disproportionate growth of CEO compensation overall).
Her salary began increasing in the late 2010s, when the annual revenue was already around 500 million. Her salary did not grow in step with revenue, her salary grew after revenue stopped increasing & market share had long been declining. I'm not sure if you're being disingenuous by citing growth since 2005.
> In recent years, the proportion coming from Google has also been coming down (even if slowly, from 90+% to just above 80%), and considerable cash reserves have been built up.
Instead of building cash reserves and laying off engineers, Mozilla could have invested that money in Firefox. Could it have successfully turned around? Maybe not, but we'll never know.
It's basically a question of whether you believe Mozilla's mission is best served by building Firefox or by continuing to exist once Firefox no longer exists, and whether its appropriate then for the foundation chair & CEO to be pulling a 7 figure compensation out of a declining non profit. It's obvious the leadership believes the Mozilla Foundation needs to outlive Firefox, but from my perspective the Mozilla Foundation's influence and significance will be nil without browser marketshare.
2005 is when the Wikipedia table starts. The premise of your "they should have invested in Firefox" is just flawed. They are spending by far the most money on Firefox, always have. And Firefox has always been a perfectly fine browser. They were behind Chrome on some metrics for some years, but have long since caught up. Quantum launched towards the end of 2017, more than 6 years ago.
The idea that the lack of quality of Firefox is the dominant reason behind the declining marketshare just is not plausible to me, and I have seen no evidence posted for it. It's wishful thinking. Firefox and Internet Explorer both started declining when Chrome started eating the world. The speed of the decline does not in any way seem to relate to the gap in tech between the browsers.
They laid off hundreds of staff while they were massively in the black. If your thesis is that Firefox was doomed whatever Mozilla did, and so it's fine to lay off staff and build a warchest to support a post-browser advocacy foundation which pays its leadership 7 figure salaries, that's certainly a position - indeed, it seems to be the position of Mozilla leadership. But to me it is at odds with the thesis of change in which Mozilla keeps the web open by having enough market share to matter in the standards decision making. What is the point of Mozilla without Firefox except to pay the leadership massive salaries?
That’s irrelevant. People were starting to see alarm bells ringing when her salary had quadrupled to $2.5m (this is in 2018 or 2019 I think?) while market share was dropping, it should have stayed basically around there until she turned things around with an increase as an incentive.
Instead it doubled and then increased again (wasn’t it more like $7m by the end?)
And someone said yes to that. Think about that for a second.
The product's global importance is now a tiny fraction of what it was 15 years ago, and the person during whose tenure this happened was recently making 10x as much as back then. TEN TIMES.
And whoever approved that obscene compensation thought this was a good idea.
Mozilla is also making 10x as much revenue as 15 years ago, has massively increased cash reserves, and is finally starting to diversify its income streams.
And it's absurd to put the fault for the declining market share purely at the feet of Mozillas leadership. Not to say they were blameless, but when Google threw its weight behind Chrome, including massive ad campaigns on billboards, pushing it on its web properties, and regularly breaking Firefox on their own websites for no technical reasons, you can't reasonably expect Firefox to just magically maintain their market share. That said, at the upper end you could look at Germany, where Firefox is still between 10-20% (depending on the estimate you look at), as what could have been achievable more broadly.
It's basically based on what other similarly-sized tech start-ups pay. Which is ridiculous to me as Mozilla is basically a Google-funded open source project.
Also, who was on the nominating committee when Laura Chambers was nominated to the Mozilla Corporation in the first place? Baker. With one other member of the compensation committee, and another person.
This seems also to be a conflict of interest to me.
It’s almost parasitic, suck the host of it’s resources and dump it when it’s near death for the next host...
I used to be a big Firefox fan, but the last 10 years made me abandon it, I don’t even check if my sites work on it anymore because the market share it has is so tiny. My time is better spent making sure it works with Safari...
If Firefox is destined for a market share of 2%, may as well get there quickly. A few years of decline vs a few months makes little difference in the long term.
To be honest, market share shouldn't ever have been Baker's goal and losing it isn't necessarily a black mark against her. Firefox should have a vision of what it wants a browser and the internet to look like and be working to make software that supports that. Firefox seems to just be following along as Chrome with some minor tweaks [0] and that is the real problem. Google's vision of the internet is not what Firefox should be working to implement. There are deep strategic issues here that go far beyond market share. I'm personally happy to use niche software, I don't care what other people are using (Linux reached my desktop a long time ago). But it is hard to see what even Mozilla thinks the point of Firefox is.
One of the things that makes Brave interesting to me is that it sees a web where middle men get cut out through the use of cryptocurrency. Is that going to work? Probably not. But it is a different take on what the internet could be. We need competitors like that. Even for privacy; it is hard to tell who Mozilla thinks the internet should look like. I'd hazard little change from now except without 3rd party cookies. That isn't a very impressive vision.
Mozilla positioned Firefox in part as a reference for how web standards should behave (*), particularly for ones where Chrome/IE/Safari diverged with competing non-standard implementations.
But for that to work in the real world, not just at W3C debates, you need major websites to care if they function correctly on your browser. And for them to care, enough people have to be using your browser that these companies see a business case for spending money to add your browser to project plans and QA test matrixes as a compatibility target.
That decision is heavily informed by market share, whether global or as a percentage of the site’s own access records. In particular, double digits is a rough threshold for that, and that was pretty much Mozilla’s target. 50% would be wonderful but 10%+ let them assert standards in the ecosystem via the implicit threat of users leaving a site if Firefox didn’t work.
As a test professional at the time, one of the most discouraging things I saw after leaving Mozilla was Firefox dropping off all the test plans I knew about when they hit single digits. I’d poke at that decision where I had influence, and would basically get back a response that “Firefox is dead, just look at the numbers.”
(*) I’m pointedly ignoring some of the more aggressive introductions of things like device-interface APIs crucial to making a browser engine act like a phone OS, etc. Ultimately, someone has to build a working implementation before it’ll become a standard, anyway. There’s a race aspect for new ground and Mozilla was part of that.
But generally speaking, where there was an actual recognized standard, Firefox used it and not some homegrown alternative. So websites also had to develop to that standard to function correctly for a significant percentage of users.
> If Firefox is destined for a market share of 2%, may as well get there quickly. A few years of decline vs a few months makes little difference in the long term.
How does that play into your decision to use Firefox or any other browser? I'm a Firefox user and I care nothing about market share. I get annoyed if I stumble upon a page managed by incompetent devteams and thus only runs on Chrome, but that's a quick in-and-out.
Why do you care about share? Why do you feel it's relevant, specially if people are pushed to use Chrome or Edge through unethical means?
> I get annoyed if I stumble upon a page managed by incompetent devteams and thus only runs on Chrome, but that's a quick in-and-out.
I read this kind of comment all the time, and it's something I almost never experience.
The only feature that I want in Firefox that I need to use Chromium for is Web Bluetooth, and that's because I use a Bangle.js smartwatch, which is even more niche than using Firefox is.
It's very hard for me to understand why so many people think they routinely encounter websites that don't work in Firefox.
> I read this kind of comment all the time, and it's something I almost never experience.
I agree, fortunately that's somewhat rare. It still stings if you come across a broken site that you need to use frequently. I'm concerned that Google's "extend" phase is just ramping up, with incompetent devteams confusing "Chrome has a large market share" with "it's ok to publish a broken site if it works with Chrome".
As a developer the lower the market share the less incentive there is to supporting it. I have stopped testing to see if my sites work on firefox and just focus on chromium and safari.
A few years ago Firefox was my main browser and I got sick of the constant changes and just use chrome, brave and safari now. I never missed FF for one moment.
I remember when Firefox was the faster leaner version of the mozilla browser and now they have bloated it up and forgotten its foundational principles.
> As a developer the lower the market share the less incentive there is to supporting it. I have stopped testing to see if my sites work on firefox and just focus on chromium and safari.
It's one thing to claim to not include Firefox in your list of supported browsers.
It's an entirely different thing to claim you only support Chrome and Safari.
If you are a developer and only target browsers from Apple and Google, this is a personal decision you're making to purposely ignore around 25% of your whole market share. This is not Firefox's or Microsoft's Opera's problem. This is your problem.
Do you not see the causal connection between 2% and pages that runs only on Chrome? Those same incompetent devs would make it run on Firefox with a higher % without annoying you
There are also plenty of other direct-to-user benefits
Firefox isn't the default browser on any of the popular consumer operating systems, so people don't need a reason to switch from it, they need a reason to switch to it.
Which Mozilla could provide if they'd spend more resources on Firefox and less on random tangents.
But now Google is doing their work for them by making Chrome worse:
Google ad campaigns, some years where Chrome genuinely felt snappier, Google pushing Chrome everywhere, Google sabotaging Firefox on their own websites.
Generally speaking, we have seen that people are okay with handing over the web and all their data to Google, if a button press registers 20ms faster.
I think this whole discussion of market share smacks a little too much of evaluating a president by the country’s GDP. Useful for a pithy remark, but doing any sort of detailed analysis seems doomed. I think the factors you listed are far more relevant
I know nothing of this person or Mozilla internals, but I could imagine a company heading towards bankruptcy, that was avoided while still losing market-share. In this situation the role of CEO could become more important as market-share decreases and the situation becomes more precarious.
Now if that person caused the downward slide to begin with, that's a different conversation. Again, I don't know the internals of Mozilla well enough to make an educated argument one way or the other.
> For a company that has a declining marketshare like Mozilla it's really way too high IMO.
Everyone talks a lot about market share but I never saw the breakdown of the market in terms of what is actually reporting the user agent. For example, both Chrome and Edge provide embeddable webviews used by applications to put together their GUIs, while Firefox doesn't. Other competitors such as Microsoft also pushes Edge very aggressively in a way that to me seems ethically questionable. Chrome leverages Google's control over some apps and features to be pretty much the only browser that is able to render some pages.
To me, Firefox is undoubtedly the best browser out there, and the only reason I see people use any other browser is inertia and not having control over their OS to change defaults. So what's the argument on market share?
I mean, being a succesful ceo at a declining company is much harder than being one at a growing company. At a growing company you just have to not screw up, and a declining company you have to actually turn things around. It doesn't seem totally unreasonable to get higher pay doing a harder job (presuming she is actually good at her job)
Given that nothing has turned around, it's hard to point to any evidence that she's doing a good job. The best she can claim is that had anyone else been CEO things would have declined even faster, and that's not something anyone can prove.
What more do people want at this time? She’s quitting. Now we can see how the next CEO somehow manages to defeat the multiple massive anti-competitive behemoths Mozilla is up against.
I'd like to see her donate half the salary she took back to Mozilla, since she obviously didn't earn it. She doubled her pay several times. Did the engineers doing the work get their pay doubled? No. The only person who did that was the one who was failing in her role. It's actually quite disgusting, just a blatant money grab because no one would stop her.
I'm no great fan of his (anymore), but Tesla's market share or at least market size did do very well during that period, not to mention the stock price going nuts. And this was all before he took a sharp turn at the corner of alt and right.
The controversy is not over whether or not he performed his duties effectively as CEO, it's over the disguised self-dealing that produced the comp package in the first place.
The milestones were reasonable, the rewards were not.
The rewards were reasonable when they were agreed to. I think the shares were only worth $50 million total. The fact it increased in value so much is the result of him meeting those milestones.
Please correct me if my understanding is wrong here, but isn't the current situation after the judge nullified his comp package now that he has done a phenomenal job growing the company, has taken $0 in salary for the last 5 years, and is now receiving no stock compensation either?
Sure $50bn+ is unreasonably large, but isn't $0 unreasonably small?
He negotiated the $0, that sounds like his problem.
If any regular person negotiated an underpaid salary at their job the past 5 years, and then demanded to be paid extra, that would get laughed out of the room.
Yes, but he didn't negotiate $0 in a vacuum, I assume he was factoring in the performance-based stock compensation too, in agreeing to take $0, no?
He agreed to forgo one type of compensation in favor of another type, that was later yanked away from him under the reasoning that his compensation package was deemed retroactively excessive.
I imagine a scenario where I take a slightly lower base pay for a higher number of RSUs, that are only unlocked if I meet my performance goals. I then proceed to meet or exceed these performance goals, as the contractual agreement specified. And then the government, acting on behalf of a shareholder who used to hold 8 shares total, complains that my compensation package was retroactively excessive, even though he hadn't raised this concern earlier.
I'd feel unfairly cheated in that scenario, and I can't help but figure Elon probably feels the same way. I know he isn't going to starve to death or anything, but it seems bizarre and worrying to me that it's just perfectly fine to invalidate what was a perfectly fine and legal contract 5 years after it was signed because a minor stakeholder of one party to the contract didn't like the terms.
Does this undermine the trustworthiness and stability of executive compensation contracts, or really any compensation contract, broadly in the US? Do I ever need to be worried about getting rug-pulled the way Elon was?
I fear this precedent may be abused against "the little guy" / the working class in the future.
Can he? How can he know whether the new one will or will not be retroactively invalidated 5 years from now? Do all executives need to get permission from a sitting judge before signing a contract now to be sure it's not going to be retroactively invalidated in the future?
> Do all executives need to get permission from a sitting judge before signing a contract now to be sure it's not going to be retroactively invalidated in the future?
All public company executives need to get their pay package approved by a real board that can actually tell them no (or at least sound like it in the minutes), not a handful of fawning sycophants. Or, if their board is actually a handful of fawning sycophants, they need to not lie about that when describing the pay deal to shareholders. Or they can take their chances on what a judge may think in the future. Doesn't seem unreasonable.
Up to a point. Tesla has a staggered board, which is well-known as a technique for making it hard for shareholders to control the board, and in general it's very rare for shareholders to vote board members out even in companies with more shareholder-friendly charters. Support for Tesla's directors in their most recent election was well below the median, partly because ISS had recommended voting against them (which is again unusual), but didn't reach the level of removing them.
> How can he know whether the new one will or will not be retroactively invalidated 5 years from now?
Get a real board to negotiate and approve the package. Boards and CEOs are already buddy buddy, but this is so far beyond even that. Heck, one of the members is Musk's brother - not even trying to appear objective. Musk's hubris bites him again.
> But if you're a CEO good enough to turn Mozilla around given the constraints... you could make a lot more elsewhere.
Why? Why does pointing mozilla in the right direction require such rare skills?
Or is this because we're only looking at existing CEOs for hiring?
If the rareness is about having the right industry knowledge and vision in a CEO, I bet you can get better results by hiring a company aimer and separate managerial co-CEO and using the money you save for 20 more devs and 5 more marketers.
Now imagine your market share is down a ton (and decreasing), and there's no clear way to change that trajectory.
Then imagine that despite being CEO, you're owned by a non-profit. So, you have a boss, and your boss has different goals than you do.
Then imagine attracting and retaining top talent, while not being able to give out equity.
Then imagine that your product is free. You can't charge more for it; you give (almost) everything away for free and there's no clear path to monetization.
And then imagine that almost all of your money comes from your biggest competitor, and your only lever is to negotiate (from a position of weakness, because they're much bigger) a deal every 3 years in order to keep paying your employees.
I think that the "it's paid a lot because it's super hard" is generally a bad excuse. Many things are super hard, many people make a lot of sacrifices to be among the bests at what they do. Yet they don't earn that much.
When the thing you are good at is being a CEO (as opposed to, say, being a teacher), then you are very lucky. Because other CEOs before you managed to make it acceptable to earn an indecent salary for just doing a job. Ok, let's say they don't sleep at all, so they can work 2-3x as much as the average people. Are they paid 2-3x more? No! They're paid orders of magnitudes more. That's indecent.
To the problem of human beings receiving way too much money for the time they spend doing their job?
Easy: crazy taxes. If the company really wants to increase the salary up to some limit, knowing that 95% of that increase will go into taxes, then good for them. Otherwise they can do something else, like increasing other salaries or hiring people.
Also if you ask me, there should be laws for the difference between the lowest and the highest salary in a company. I.e. "the highest salary cannot be more than X times the lowest salary". Which means that if the CEO wants to earn more, they need to raise the lowest salaries.
> I'm not sure how increasing CEO taxes helps Mozilla's position at all.
Who said it would? Though I may argue that it is not clear at all if you really get the best person for the job when you make them rich just by getting the job. Not saying that all the CEOs are here "just for the money", but... well if they are not here for the money, why do they get that kind of salaries?
> I feel like something has taken a left turn in this thread.
I feel like when people are talking about the salary of a CEO and whether they "earned it" or not, I am entitled to say that no human being can ever deserve that kind of salary. Just like a liberal could say "they don't deserve it because they did not please the shareholders that much".
You’re entitled to free speech in the U.S. (if that’s where you reside) of course, however that doesn’t mean you’re right. To the contrary, the market, represented by millions of individuals’ actions, disagrees with you about who “deserves” what compensation.
Are you implying that because "the market" (with the laws that govern it) ends up in a situation where some people get that kind of salary, then I must be wrong in thinking that no human being deserves that kind of compensation?
Because if that's the case, I think it is completely stupid. You don't get to make up rules and then say that I am objectively wrong because your made-up rules disagree with me.
To a first order approximation you’re advocating for communism over capitalism in that you believe the will of the State (funded by “crazy taxes”) takes precedence over the will of the People, represented by local decisions made in a free market.
Consider that you could attempt to solve your perceived problem in multiple ways within the existing structure. 1) Garner public support and lead a campaign to change our laws to be more inline with the thoughts you have around increasing taxes; 2) Exploit the market opportunity you’ve identified (of paying CEO’s less to pay others more) by starting companies that follow this ethos, attract talent, and deliver value to consumers; 3) Attain a leadership position as CEO or in the Board of Directors for a company where you can take responsibility and change these perceived compensation problems; so on and so forth.
The responsibility lies with you to bring the change you seek.
> there should be laws for the difference between the lowest and the highest salary in a company
I'd imagine that at a place like Mozilla (effectively a high-tech nonprofit primarily staffed by white-collar workers), this difference in compensation is actually not that big, compared to, say, a business that hires hourly workers.
> your only lever is to negotiate (from a position of weakness, because they're much bigger) a deal every 3 years in order to keep paying your employees.
It's entirely possible that Mitchell Baker was responsible for getting hundreds of millions of dollars extra for Firefox when they switched search provider and then back, invoking a clause in their agreement with Yahoo.
Which seems like some pretty skilful playing of a bad hand.
Imagine being both the CEO of the corp and the chairwoman of the non profit. Damn!
Remember Mitchell killed FirefoxOS (I know you were likely happy about that @gkoberger), and now Mozilla is complaining about not getting level playing access to other OSes. Guess what, when you have no platform, you'll be forever a second class citizen.
Baker is a good motivational speaker, but should never have been allowed to made any operational decision.
Technically FirefoxOS is still around: https://www.kaiostech.com/ . It's now an OS for feature phones. It's no longer owned by Mozilla but they did have a lasting impact, that's what I mean. And many of their throwaway projects have gone that way. For example Firefox VR browser is now Wolvic. https://wolvic.com/en/ . It's the great thing about open source, the work is not lost.
But Mozilla had no chance in the real smartphone market. If Microsoft couldn't manage to attract developers with their billions and dedicated hardware, Firefox supplying only the OS and no hardware just had zero chance to make it mainstream. It would have been relegated to the same position as Sailfish: A cool curiosity but not interesting enough for anyone but some hobbyists to develop for.
I don't think it was a bad idea trying: At that time the duopoly in the smartphone market was not as firmly established and there were other open projects like Ubuntu as well. They might have attracted a huge party like Samsung (after all, they did go for Tizen in the end!) and things might have worked out differently. But the choice to drop it was inevitable at that point.
I use Kaios every day and I'm happy it exists but I'd have been even happier if it had just been stock Ubuntu with some phone specific bits thrown in. I actually bought a phone like that but it eventually stopped being serviced. But that was the best phone I ever had, this one is a distant 3rd after all my previous Nokias.
FxOS failed commercially because it tried to be a "me too" product, with the same distribution strategy as Android that relies a lot on carriers. For that to work you need to get support from key apps in the carriers markets, and FxOS never managed to get Whatsapp on board.
KaiOS got Whatsapp support thanks to shipping in India with a single carrier (Jio) that has a very large user base. Deployment in the rest of the world has been a struggle and the company is not in great shape.
All that to say that Mozilla could have kept the lights on for a couple more years and get access to large markets. Hard to predict what would have happened but we certainly would have more diversity in the OS space.
The only path to FirefoxOS success would have been if someone like Samsung hitched their wagon to it.
Which would have been because they thought they could make more money using it than Android.
Which probably wouldn't have bode well for user-friendly changes to the base image.
Android's value prop to manufacturers was "Was to sell a lot of mobile phones, but not have to pay for most of the development? And get a working Maps solution? Here you go." Which Google could afford to torch money on.
I think you're wrong but we'll never know :) What is true is that some of the interest from carriers for alternative OSes was indeed that they didn't like to be handcuffed to Android and iOS.
Are we using carrier and manufacturer differently?
And I'd imagine carriers don't, as they'd no doubt love to go back to the feature-phone days, but they're all (individually) too weak to do anything about it.
Only aggregated can they offer the resources to support an alternative.
No, I'm not happy. I was gobsmacked by how smart the people working on it were (you included), and was so proud to work a few desks away from such amazing engineers.
My thoughts that FirefoxOS was mismanaged from an executive level are in no way a reflection of the work I saw coming out of your team, and I took no pleasure in it shutting down. I felt the executive team got caught up too much with things like presenting at Mobile World Congress, at the cost of a ton of focus.
FirefoxOS was a moon shot. The sort of project a profit making company burns a few 10s of million on in the hope it somehow works out.
Mozilla should have been focusing on the one thing anyone cared about, the browser. Rust and Servo were the correct risks to take. But I know, hindsight is 20/20.
Even if Mozilla reallocated all their resources and dedicated themselves 100% to building a mobile OS, I’d personally be surprised if they were able to secure any meaningful market share. Talk about playing against a stacked deck.
The necessary skills are not rare, but the roles are rare so people start to think the skills are rare. I get a lot of grief for this opinion but I think most HN'ers could do the job of "CEO of whatever company they currently work for". It's not rocket science. We have this mythology around CEOs that they are such outlier smart, special, hardworking people, but really it's just that the top of the pyramids contain few people.
> I wouldn't want that job, and I'm not sure I could do it.
There are many jobs that I wouldn't want and that are not paid 6M a year. There are some things that I can do that not everybody can do, and still I am not paid 6M.
You can try reverting it: a CEO earning 6M a year could not necessarily be a firefighter. Yet firefighters are not paid 6M a year. And they actually risk their life.
IMHO, the stronger argument against CEO compensation is that the delta (in company performance) between a great CEO and a midling CEO isn't equal to their compensation.
If a firefighter sucks at their job... someone dies. But (unfortunately, if we're being honest) that's worth less than +/-1% of large company performance.
(Personally, I think public safety, medical non-doctors, and teachers should all be paid a lot better)
Definitely wanting the job is separate from can do the job, although to be honest, I would be happy to get paid $6+ million for the job "Fail to turn around Mozilla". Heck, I'd be willing to do it for 10% of that compensation.
> I wouldn't want that job. However, with the right team I AM sure I could do it.
Remember as a tech lead, if you are heroically writing a lot of code burning the midnight oil, banging out tickets and completing sprints by yourself, you are failing. As a CEO, the more you are doing the more you are failing. This is probably why it is so hard for people like us to he leaders. It is very difficult to delegate and not meddle with things. It is easy to say let go but very hard to actually do so.
Remember that even Steve Jobs delegated all operations and supply chain stuff to tim cook. And that's Steve Jobs! We are not Steve Jobs.
There is no reason why my manager should make more money than me.
> And lots of people do really hard jobs for much much much less money.
I would consider most min wage jobs harder than what i (computer programmer) do. Compensation is often inversely correlated with how shitty the job is.
I don’t either! But apparently they’re rare. One pays dearly when trying to go cheap, or broaden the pool in seemingly innocuous ways, in executive recruiting.
> lots of people do really hard jobs
Fortitude is necessary, but by itself insufficient.
> I don’t either! But apparently they’re rare. One pays dearly when trying to go cheap, or broaden the pool in seemingly innocuous ways, in executive recruiting.
Do we have good evidence for that, or is it just what the people that hire CEOs tend to think?
When I think of disastrous CEOs that I've managed to hear about, they weren't cheap. They got paid huge amounts to cause their disasters.
There is the problem. There is evidence a great CEO can make a difference. And if a great CEO wants millions they are worth it. However nobody knows how to tell a great CEO from bad.
That sounds like the old advertising idiom, “Half of all advertising works, but you will never be certain which half,” or something similar anyway. I think there is a very distinct “lightning in a bottle” component to great and/or successful companies. Combinations of effective teams, aligned motivations, good timing, a leader who can identify and leverage all of those elements to great effect, and some X factors that are simply unknowable. That may be just a slightly more nuanced way of saying they’re lucky, but also good fortune in externally changing scenarios is certainly one of those unknown factors.
I think the ability to recognize, organize, and effectively leverage all of the elements such that a company is well-positioned if/when the external factors line up in their favor is what defines a great CEO. I think that ability is akin to naturally talented musicians. Most people can, with enough time and effort, learn to play a guitar very well. They still won’t be Jimi Hendrix.
The downside is, you can’t force it or fake it (at least not for very long). I think of parallels with the difference between the British and American versions of the TV show “Top Gear” that was being produced in the mid ‘00s. The original British show was the lightning in a bottle, and became one of the most successful TV series on the planet. The lifeless copy they attempted in the US followed the recipe meticulously, and was cringeworthy.
> "I think there is a very distinct “lightning in a bottle” component to great and/or successful companies."
Watching The Grand Tour[1] season 1 it feels stilted, awkward, like they are reciting their lines for some forced humor while Amazon showers cash and flashy cars all around trying too hard. If it was like this with three unknown people I wouldn't bother - I'm only watching on the hope that the lightning in a bottle sparks up again as they settle in, because the highs of Top Gear were good - friends messing about for a laugh, daring bold ideas, beautiful filming and settings.
> Do we have good evidence for that, or is it just what the people that hire CEOs tend to think?
I think so, and it’s largely in the attrition of start-ups due to executive leadership breaking down. Start-up founders are already a rarefied group; that so many break down or flip out or can’t handle all the balls in the air is telling. (There is plenty of academia on the topic. It doesn’t support massive paydays. But certainly single-digit millions, i.e. life-changing money for someone who may already be rich.)
> got paid huge amounts to cause their disasters
Look at the state of the company they took over. Golden parachutes are often required to woo top talent to a trash pile because top talent knows the world is stochastic.
Not really. A Non profit ceo will always take a pay cut. You can't expect big tech salaries in a non profit, and if they can truly get a better salary elsewhere that's probably what they should do if they want that type of revenue. The thing is, they usually can't. A non profit ceo is not typically very well suited to be a big corp executive, and vice versa.
I’ll do it! At this point I’d like to see some actual data to back up this so-often-repeated claim of “being a CEO is super hard, there’s only a few people in the country smart enough to do it well, so they need to be paid millions of dollars a year”
That sounds… plausible, at this point. I wouldn’t say probable. Especially with tech making everything so interconnected. I loved the kind note at the root of this thread, but the idea that the CEO is some market visionary who is carefully keeping the whole company afloat seems rotten.
On the other hand, if you work elsewhere, your not turning around Mozilla.
I worked in academia, now government, in HPC/data-sciency positions, so the overlap/competition with finance and big tech is large (and a lot of people move there and back again). Let's just say, we have far more interesting problems ;)
I suspect a ceo could have asked for a pay package of massive bonuses correlated with marketshare. My understanding is the board has pretty wide discretion to set pay, and following years of steep marketshare losses, who would question such an arrangement?
They've been dropping long enough that a pay package almost entirely based on increasing market share would have gotten a lot less objection from me at least.
I think people are mostly questioning her quite large pay packages when measured against the abject failure on every metric except for the cash-paid-by-google-to-disguise-their-monopoly metric.
At the last company I started, a b2b saas, as of 5 years in, there were under 10 logged-in pageviews from Firefox. Ever. It's dead; the coyote is 50 feet past the cliff; and we're just waiting for gravity to appear.
Mozilla has also clearly given up on Firefox, though people get mad on here when you point that out. I just don't know why they're operating under the delusion that anyone will listen to Mozilla about privacy when everyone realizes they no longer build a browser that matters.
I honestly can't fathom caring about the difference between 6.2m a year and anything higher than that. Once my salary gets that high all I'm caring about is whether or not I'm doing interesting things.
Leaving aside small business, are there (m)any larger organizations where the CEO makes >1% of revenue?
Mitchell making $6.9M in cash compensation of a $600M revenue company is the equivalent of:
- Chuck Robbins of Cisco making $655M/year
- Mark Benioff of Salesforce making $360M/year
Maybe let's look smaller:
- Fidji Simo of Instacart making $29M/year
- Patrick Collison of Stripe making $166M/year
When you look at it like that, Baker's compensation is quite absurd.
(And for more comedic value than anything serious, similar to Tim Apple making $4.4B/year...)
The real question is: will the new CEO start promoting Firefox as it should have been since the beginning, or Google money is too important to piss off them with actual competition?
It’s a lot of money, but it’s not a lot of money for a highly visible tech CEO. It’s a similar problem many non-profits have when hiring tech in general.
Satya Nadella became CEO of Microsoft in 2014, since then MSFT share price has 10x'ed, from $300Bn to $3.3Tn, making it the most valuable company in the world. He turned it around from a 30% drop in value under Steve Ballmer. Global cloud marketshare has Amazon AWS at 31% and dropping down from 34%, Microsoft Azure at 24% and climbing and Google GCP at 11%. Microsoft has transformed their business offering from "Office in your datacenter" to cloud-backed Office apps accessible from any device, Office apps in a browser, in Teams. Microsoft took Teams from 20M users in November 2019 to 1.4Bn users in October 2022, used by 91 of the Fortune 100. Microsoft got the jump on Google with OpenAI and integrated it promptly into Bing, Edge and M365 offerings.
If that isn't company leadership worth paying for, nothing is.
> "Hey, at least Firefox stayed in the game"
Not according to other people in this thread:
- "As a test professional at the time, one of the most discouraging things I saw after leaving Mozilla was Firefox dropping off all the test plans I knew about when [FireFox market share] hit single digits. I’d poke at that decision where I had influence, and would basically get back a response that “Firefox is dead, just look at the numbers.”" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39309843
- "At the last company I started, a b2b saas, as of 5 years in, there were under 10 logged-in pageviews from Firefox. Ever. It's dead; the coyote is 50 feet past the cliff; and we're just waiting for gravity to appear." - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39309564
(and I'm typing this from FireFox, although on my work machine I'm moving to Edge because it's good. Click a link in Outlook, the link opens with Edge and the sidebar opens with web Outlook open showing the email I clicked on to reference, for one example. Vertical tabs for another, I stopped running TreeStyle Tabs in FireFox years ago, though I no longer remember why).
Maybe relatively low salary for a typical CEO (no comment)...
But doesn't seem like Mozilla is a typical company; not built around selling a product... so maybe that merits a different type of CEO with different skills not normally desired by the companies paying 10s of millions to their CEOs.
I'm no business person, so I could be completely wrong about what's needed at the C-level to keep Mozilla afloat. My view my be warped by assuming the vast majority of companies do not make money the way Mozilla does; but maybe there are more Mozillas than I know about.
I think the "squirrel!" behavior has to do with getting revenue in the door.
I'm not following extremely close, but it seems like Mozilla is chasing what can be turned into a product. Things that involve setting up a monthly subscription, whether it's VPNs, keeping your name out of certain tracking databases, etc.
I wonder how Mozilla used to be funded vs how it's now funded?
The web is a better place with a non-profit-driven group like Mozilla in it... but is Mozilla Corporation becoming more money-driven than it used to be, even if it can't turn a profit? Or can it turn a profit, because it's not the Mozilla Foundation [1]?
Or is that backwards? Revenue comes in the door, and we must spend it, because empires must be built. No longer 100 developers working on a browser, but thousands working on all sorts of unrelated things and all the support staff. Whereas the alternative would be staying small and focused, sticking that money in the bank, and become financially independent. A new CEO could even do that. Conservatively invest one year's 600M revenue, rake off 20M per year, and the nestegg would still grow with inflation. And that is enough to develop a web browser provided you don't do it in silicon valley. Two or three years revenue and you can even market it.
I think we see this a lot, with companies pulling in too much money from IPOs or venture capital, pissing it away on unfocused growth, and if they are lucky back where they started. Or unlucky and bankrupt.
I think people remember a Mozilla that never was. Mozilla was saved by Firebox which Mozilla the organization would have successfully blocked if their institutional processes were not the reason their community was frustrated.
I don't think their processes have ever been better, they got initial and later injections of code from outside. Rust/servo was the moment when I thought they might turn it around, but their bus has always gone in the direction of the same cliff.
> Rust/servo was the moment when I thought they might turn it around.
Because greenfield parallel rewrites of giant production codebases have such a fantastic track record, that we might as well add "in a novel programming language we're inventing while we're at it" just to make it interesting?
But Rust is actually a successful language, and the idea of writing a web browser in it is actually a good one.
Security is a huge concern for something like a web browser, which is a thing that keeps on increasing more and more in complexity. So far it seems Java is dead in the desktop space, and .NET has a very minimal impact, so it seems a compiled language is the way to go.
And Rust's excellent support for multithreading is also a big boon since now multicore CPUs are a standard and keep on getting more and more cores.
Overall the idea of building a very safe and performant browser seems like a great one.
They had decades to ship next and they didn't want to be bug for bug backwards compatible. Local optimums in hell don't have a path to heaven.
I think demise by drastic jump stories work because the examples are few and notable. Most projects accumulate experts in moving around the wrong optimum who then block plans of getting free that aren't too conservative to possibly work.
I was there through all of it and you couldn't be more wrong. If you're not just making things up, you're clearly too out of the loop to have anything to offer.
I also worked for Mozilla in that time period (I left just before they canceled FxOS) and found Mitchell to be an inspiring leader. OTOH, the track record over the last few years suggests she's not as great an executor.
It was an impossible situation. Chrome can be funded and promoted by some of the most dominant web properties in the world. Even Microsoft is struggling to get a foothold with Edge, and that's after turning it into a Chrome reskin.
Not saying the comp package was justified. But it was a job doomed to fail.
> "Even Microsoft is struggling to get a foothold with Edge, and that's after turning it into a Chrome reskin."
New Edge was released in January 2020 with Chrome around 70% of the browser market. By May 2022 new Edge was the second most popular at like 10%. Safari gained and took second in 2023, Edge reached record high browser share 11% last month, with Safari also growing leading second place. Chrome is down to 65%. Yes Edge hasn't crushed Chrome, but it's going toe-to-toe with Apple, and is far ahead of any other contender (FireFox, Opera, Brave, and the rest).
Microsoft has started aggressive tactics like opening links in Edge even when it's not the default browser [I'm observing, not defending that] and it results in things like this on Reddit[1]: "When did everyone switch to Microsoft Edge, and why? I work in cybersecurity for a software vendor and over the last 3-6 months have noticed Edge has completely dominated my customers' web browsing choices. [...] the last six or so months it's been nearly 100% Edge."
Chrome grew by being better, faster, and signing in with your Google account to sync state between devices, and with ChromeBooks. Today, Apple is knocking it out of the park and Microsoft can underhandedly force many businesses over to Edge and is jumping on the hype with "your AI powered browser enhanced with GPT-4" and "prioritises your privacy with adblock and tracking prevention". What's Google doing which could push Chrome back up or stop it sliding down by tempting people away from Apple/Microsoft?
I personally tend to think if Moz had focused on desktop browser development rather than thrashing around on mobile versions on restricted platforms where they’d always be second-class citizens, smartphone OS moonshots well after that was very likely to succeed, Pocket at a time OSes were introducing their own reading lists, etc. that they could have at least sustained the open web standards goal Firefox used to achieve.
Instead they freaked out about overall browser usage going to mobile, and threw shit against the wall trying to make some kind of mobile strategy stick no matter how late they were to the table. But I personally still use desktop universally at work, and sometimes browse that way at home too. Maybe Moz could have maintained significant market share in just that space and still be more relevant today.
To be fair, that was more Gary Kovacs and immediate successors as CEOs than Mitchell. But Mitchell had a lot of influence on direction even then, and could have decided to pivot back to core competencies once she did take the reins directly. Servo looked pretty promising to me. At least we got Rust’s success out of it. Maybe she could have leveraged that more.
Fabrice seems pretty convinced that embracing feature phones would have made the difference, and KaiOS shows that the FxOS platform certainly is more well-suited for that than for smartphones. She was involved in the decision-making around killing FxOS right as Mozilla started exploring pivoting to feature. Whether that would’ve helped drive Mozilla’s higher-level goals of browser synergy and making sure the web stayed open, I don’t know, but you’d at least still know their name as a thriving organization.
Or if data privacy is the way to go, maybe pivoting to that focus years ago would have been successful. I guess we’ll see how much potential it has, but I bet it would be even more if Mozilla and Firefox still commanded the respect they used to.
I just think Mozilla had way more routes to success than the routes they picked. Almost everything they tried either struck me as too late, too unlikely, or something nobody really wanted. That’s what I meant by questionable execution.
By the time FirefoxOS first demise was announced in the Florida all hands Telefonica, ZTE, Sony and every other partner said they were pulling funding. I don't see what else the board could do.
The OS folks tried to spin it into a few different things. Shipped a Firefox TV OS but that only lasted for a year or so. In parallel there was the IoT plans that never really took off.
Don’t take my words as being too critical of the Android version FWIW, at least the Gecko one. I think that’s been one of the few mobile successes. But what I personally perceived as discounting desktop as a viable strategy was a gross mistake IMO.
Yeah, I agree FxOS was largely a dead end for Moz by the time it was killed and there wasn’t much choice there. My take was partners pretty much lost faith when it became obvious we’d never have performance parity with Android even if feature parity were reached.
But I’m not sure what they—or Moz—expected. FxOS was running core apps on multiple layers of browser stack. Even a Dalvik-based app was going to be faster than that for having a JIT optimized to that purpose, much less native core system utilities. WebAssembly could possibly have mitigated some of that, but partners were universally putting FxOS on the lowest of low end smartphones since cheap was the selling point for them.
I also think the split personality it put on development of Gecko was a huge detriment to Mozilla’s momentum. The browser-focused devs plainly didn’t appreciate the pressures FxOS put on the stack. Then there was the bit where a zero-day in the browser would have been unfixable without potentially compromising all the phones that wouldn’t be able to update for weeks or months later across a disjointed ecosystem.
I left largely over my dissatisfaction with how Mozilla handled that whole period of time and particularly the FxOS effort. It really damaged my impression of Moz as an effective org, primarily due to the leadership and execution issues and what struck me as extreme tunnel vision.
I hear you that after being on that path, Moz was pretty much forced to fold when partners walked away, but maybe some unrealistic expectations were set in the first place. And maybe there wasn’t enough consideration for how that half-pivot would divide the org and drag on Gecko.
I do think the opportunity for feature phones could have panned out technically, though the way reorgs played out may still have gutted it. But when I said I don’t know if it would have advanced browser synergy or the open web (i.e. pushed market share back to full-featured Firefox) I’m saying I’m deeply skeptical it would have been anything other than a purely business success.
KaiOS isn’t a mission-based product and just needs to succeed in being adopted. Moz would have needed to make it mean something. Plus I’m just not sure the audience for feature phones and the audience for web-standards-requiring websites are the same. That’s why I think brand recognition and cash influx were the only real potential gains there.
I think IOT played out well after I was gone, but another comment on here suggests it was never a serious effort so much as a tactical positioning.
Re: TV OS, if you mean Panasonic I’m not sure exactly how much of Mozilla’s code actually survived into that product. I’m pretty sure I’d heard that there was a lot of work done on under the hood on Panasonic’s part to make it viable, while keeping the look and feel plus the FxOS brand on the label.
Maybe that was exaggerated or Moz took a more active role in it after I left, but I didn’t get the impression we had many people in the org dedicated to it when the first implementation happened.
Yeah, to the extent that I’d criticize her it’s for not calling more for antitrust enforcement and since that’s basically asking Google to cut the lifeline, I don’t see how that could have worked in the current climate.
Mozilla sold defaults to a variety of vendors, most notably Yahoo, and others outside the US. Arguably they should have refused Google money from the jump.
The thing is, they’re in a really expensive place and almost everyone on the web has been trained to think of browsers as free. I don’t know what alternatives they could have picked at the time.
Or that making money and increasing market share while building an open-source browser for people who don’t like ads, don’t spend money on software, and think they always know better than you… is damn near impossible.
They did lead on with some very cool ideas like panorama (now tab groups, still a Firefox exclusive feature!), Ubiquity, ...
The problem is that they killed them with the rest (and got the good people behind to leave).
With regards to be a good "community leader", it sounds like it might be true for the devs, but it is completely false with regards to its user base. Pocket and other commercial moves were made in a very underhanded way that angered many, for good reasons, and they repeated these types of mistakes many times over.
Since a very long time the worst enemy of Firefox has been Mozilla, let's hope it changes.
>was good to Mozilla employees, but it's hard to square the picture you paint with the complete lack of direction
Isn't there a fundamental tension between "be good to employees" and "strong sense of direction"? If you are focused as CEO, then you must neglect a fraction of your employees at any point in time. This is a side-effect of focusing on one direction, while maintaining capability to go in other directions in the future. If you don't neglect some of your employees and project, then you come off as being distracted and without a strong sense of direction. Is there some way to square this circle?
I would think you could have a company focused on one thing; e.g., "making the people's browser" (with more explanation so the goal is clear). Hire people who believe in that goal. Make it relatively easy for people to leave so they're not tied to their job; e.g., generous severance, active help networking with other prestigious tech companies. Maybe even force people to take a break and work elsewhere for a couple years every N years before coming back, to keep people from getting stuck in a rut. Keep the company relatively small so that it _has_ a primary direction.
Many serial killers are said to have gentle, gracious personalities. Except while doing all the killing anyway.
It’s not hard to train oneself to act empathic, socially normal, but lack vision, ideas of your own. OP described how little it actually takes to make such a lasting impression; two conversations.
In 2015 some colleagues and myself were invited to pitch an idea for an Instagram clone. The financier was recently widowed woman who was all kinds of generous with us. But she also mentioned she feels there’s plenty of nobodies in the world, Zuckerberg can share. They can peddle products on her platform as her husband wasn’t that rich.
It's pretty straight forward to me.
"$CORPO_STOOGE does all the things that make you a great leader and talks in platitudes that seem genuine! That makes them a decent person!"
Nah. I have a quote that I think about often on this topic, from none other than Bojack Horseman[1]:
Bojack, "Well, do you think I'm a good person... deep down?"
Diane, "That's the thing, I don't think I believe in deep down. I kind of think that all you are is the things that you do"
$CORPO_STOOGE is just a sociopath who follow the suggestions of "Lean In" as a behavioral guide of motions to follow. That doesn't make them a good person, just maybe a more pleasant manipulator.
The most psychotic person ive ever known started his leadership by saving someones job after they made a mistake. Everyone assumed he would be a great leader, my skepticism proved right.
It is very nice to see your inside view. For me as an outsider: Mozilla is FireFox and that that doesn't seem to have registered with Mozilla management is irritating me beyond measure because it means that (1) I don't have a way to sponsor just FF and not the rest of Mozilla and (2) that quite frequently FireFox suffers because of resource depletion or crazy experiments that benefit Mozilla but harm FF.
To me that speaks volumes about the quality of management, and much as I'm sympathetic to your feelings I wonder what FF would have been like today if Mozilla had not been eternally distracted. I suspect that without FF Mozilla funding would dry up overnight and that alone is something they should respect.
Back when I worked there (2010-2012), a lot of people thought Google wouldn't renew the deal. So there was a scramble to figure out how to make enough money to avoid layoffs.
Basically, how do you make another ~$100M/yr in case Google money goes away?
It's 2024, and Google still pays (more like ~$500M/yr from Google now) and Mozilla still exists. But it was hovering over people's heads back then, and still is.
I guess that makes sense but for me the equation would be a different one: since Mozilla is for me synonymous with Firefox I'd allocate all of the resources to FireFox and that would result in (1) a much more secure future for FireFox, (2) reduced loss of marketshare (so a better negotiation position vis-a-vis Google) and (3) a much lower per annum expense to keep that mission alive. By burning a ton of money on unrelated things FireFox is now actively at risk of disappearing. Google can point at Edge now and say they're not a monopoly, they may not need FireFox for much longer.
Yeah you'd think if FireFox is their golden advertising goose they'd, you know, make it embeddable and add the ability to fully style scrollbars so it'd be suitable across the board for modern development. And you'd think 500m a year would be enough to do this.
But here we are. And with FireFox fading I'm wondering how they plan on having a real impact with their mission.
FWIW, my take back in 2010-2015 when I was at Moz wasn’t quite that cynical. I’m sure that was at least some of it, at least after Chrome started really gaining users, but Mozilla and Google had a good relationship for a long time before Chrome was popular.
Mozilla used to actually have their offices on Google campus (even though I started after the HQ had moved out, I was still given a Google badge for their cafeteria) and I believe the early Chrome team already had ex-Moz people on it. Goals around standards, etc, were relatively aligned, at least early on.
When Mozilla decided to go rapid release, Google was the one who walked them through how to do it (then Mozilla bungled it by diving into a very accelerated schedule and not considering how it affected add-ons, but that’s another story). It was all pretty friendly.
I’m also pretty sure Bing offered similar incentives for referrals, just without the flat-fee contract Moz had with Google, and they didn’t have the same antitrust issue in that particular space. Referrals and default search provider status have always been part of the financial model between browsers and search engines. Dealing that value back to themselves is one of the reasons search providers publish browsers.
I was pretty surprised when there was such a huge backlash against Apple for that recently since it had been SOP in the business for a long time.
To your point though, given the current market share of Firefox, $500M has to be about more than that if that’s an accurate number.
Yes, quite literally. And the answer is, Chrome is the better product, the users continue to choose the better option, if the government wants to consider that Chrome acts monopolistic, then the government is acting in extreme bad faith.
The statement or existence of "monopoly" is not one way direction to being "bad for the economy", the government knows this and speaks out the side of their mouth declaring it always is the case, and does not care, so Google is funding the opposition, as they must.
Is Chrome the better product? IMHO Firefox provides much better tools for ad blocking and privacy. Those are both very important to me and areas I think Chrome is weak.
So why doesn't the government get in and break apart that monopoly that is Chrome, today?
Chrome has the highest market share of internet browsers ~this side of the great firewall~ worldwide (just checked, still is the case in China today, assumed it changed)! Far worse has been done to companies with less control over their respective markets.
I am being a bit facetious when it comes to features though, fully admit, FF is better in getting a few of those, and don't deny history especially with Firebug.
For the same reason the government hasn't broken up anything since Bell System in 1983: those 500 million that Google pays Mozilla is higher than FTC's entire yearly budget (430 million in 2023). It takes years to build a strong case, and companies can easily throw more resources at a problem than that. Monopolies don't even need to win the case, just drag the whole process on until the next election cycle, when all of a sudden the next administration is far less interested in following through. Rinse and repeat indefinitely.
Technically even Bell didn't lose a case, it broke up "voluntarily" before that happened.
> So why doesn't the government get in and break apart that monopoly that is Chrome, today?
Wake me up when the government finds the gumption to break up any of the monopolies that are begging for it. Google is but one of dozens that should have been broken up before now.
Regulators are usually underpowered, overworked and short of funds. Any attempt to regulate the likes of Google effectively would be faced with such opposition that it would swamp the officials. Check out what happened when DOJ had an ironclad anti-trust case against Microsoft and how it all ended up in the longer term.
Pretty sure it popped up to closer to $300M/yr around the time you left, at least based on the internal rumor mill around the value of the three-year Google contract immediately prior to the Y! debacle.
That said, since it was MoCo and not MoFo, I think the specific numbers were never divulged. Take the rumor mill and my recollection with a grain of salt.
Wouldn't someone else step in? It was Yahoo for a while. Firefox market share is pretty pitiful these days but the default search engine is still worth something.
You can honestly just tell every single person at the top there would love to still be making the money they are without having to support a browser. Their actual product passions lie in VPN subscriptions and other low effort shams, very little passion from the top towards building and maintaining actual technology.
> however Mitchell is a huge reason (if not THE reason) why we have Firefox today – and, even if you don't currently use Firefox, a huge reason why we have the web we have today.
IMHO, this is far too stretched. Give me a single project or initiative she pushed successfully that became a part of "the web we have today".
Mozilla was originally the Netscape browser, which was a paid browser. All browsers were paid at the time, until IE came along and was bundled for free with Windows. Firefox broke that chokehold, and make an open web possible.
Mitchell was a lawyer at Netscape, and used those two things to (with others) spin Firefox off into a non-profit (controlling a for-profit). No, she didn't write any code, but she is directly responsible for forming a company that enabled Firefox to be free and open source.
I never paid for Netscape and I used every single version of it.
From the Wikipedia page [1]
> The first few releases of the product were made available in "commercial" and "evaluation" versions; for example, version "1.0" and version "1.0N". The "N" evaluation versions were identical to the commercial versions; the letter was intended as a reminder to people to pay for the browser once they felt they had tried it long enough and were satisfied with it. This distinction was formally dropped within a year of the initial release, and the full version of the browser continued to be made available for free online [...]
Maybe the misunderstanding is because (from the same page) the original plan was to have a free version only for academic and non-profit organizations and make everybody else pay. That wouldn't have had a chance even ~30 years ago especially because building a browser was much easier than now. The features were so much more limited in 1995. No JavaScript, no CSS, the only one that mattered was loading and displaying text and images on the page without blocking until everything was downloaded. The Mosaic browser was blocking. Minutes staring at a white page waiting for something to appear...
Netscape was never open source during that phase though, I think that's the point. Moving to firefox was a huge improvement for the internet community.
> Netscape Navigator was not free to the general public until January 1998
so either I don't remember well (maybe my company had actually bought some licenses) or nobody was paying no matter what. I remember everybody else and I downloaded Navigator from Netscape's site without having to go through any authorization process.
That's right, I won't link here but one of jwz's earliest blog posts describes putting Mozilla 0.9 on an FTP server in '94 and hundreds of thousands of people were downloading it. I assume this violated some commercial license and I know my employer (UC) did buy their server product but I don't recall anybody even remotely considering licensing Netscape Navigator itself.
I always used Navigator/Communicator for free personally but a lot of companies (especially big companies) bought licences. I'm sure many companies did not pay for a license but there was more than enough that did to make Netscape a viable and growing business.
There was a brief time where Netscape Communicator filled the role that Outlook fills now.
As a 30 years user, it's just so sad to see Firefox going down down down. No innovation, no progress since the introduction of tabs. At least the sell-customer-data-for-marketing-experiments phase is done. And at least it's not unusable slow like it was for some years, so the bare minimum works. And it somehow survived the XUL/extension debacle. But it's 2024 and I'm through my 10th vertical tab extension (Tab Center Reborn for now) since using FF. How is FF supposed to work with >20 tabs open? The only reason to use it for me is it's open source and not owned by M$ or Google. Would there be another open source browser with traction, I'd be gone in a second.
Every thread about Firefox there's a comment like this and I truly don't know if we're using the same browsers. Firefox keeps getting better and faster, while chrome is getting more bloated and aggravating.
What does better mean? What is better in the last 10 years? And I'm not trolling, I'm interested in what 10 things FF got better for you in the last 10 years.
Say, I have been buying on Amazon 10 years ago using FF.
In which ways has FF made that better or easier for me as a user? Can't think of anything with Amazon.
The only things I can think of: More secure when misclicking somewhere and better video on Youtube.
Multi-account containers are a feature I use tirelessly. Standardized add-ons are great too, so people can release one add-on and hit multiple browsers. I also really like Firefox sync for sending bookmarks/tabs between devices. Firefox is also extremely fast nwadays, and comparatively easy on system memory.
These are things that have improved in the last decade. I also like the fact that FF isn't owned by an Ad company that pushes binaries supposedly built from an open-source project controlled by an Ad company.
Containers and first-party isolation in FF are my killer features. Echoing your comments to the GP post, that didn't exist a decade ago and is genuinely one of the best improvements they've made in that time.
I just wish they made vertical tabs built-in. Or at least made enough UI hooks that extensions could do it properly (instead of duplicating the tab bar via side panels).
Yes, that's a major irritation. Or at least allow me to switch off the built in tabs when I have an extension that provides that functionality. It would be absolutely trivial to do so.
Firefox's built in password manager is pretty good, ten years ago you had to install a separate extension for that.
The synchronization of browser tabs and history across devices is also very good nowadays, so if you look at some product on Amazon with your phone on the way home, you can continue the same browsing session on your regular PC right away.
There are also multiple profiles. That helps in case you have multiple Amazon accounts like one for shopping, one to mooch off your cousin's prime video subscription, and one to work with the AWS console for your workplace. I think you couldn't do that out of the box 10 years ago.
Good points, I concede for some users and perhaps the majority there is progress.
(For me - and probably many others - though I use 1password since the beginning, have 50 tabs open so sync is a challenge and never understood to use the profiles, perhaps I'm too stupid or the UI is bad)
When it came out I thought profiles was a good idea, eager to use it, but it's often difficult to say what is in what profile. AWS is clear, and banking, but reading some articles? For me to work the UI would need to be smooth so I don't need to switch profiles just because something is in the other. Perhaps I'm not focused enough ;-) It then was too complicated for me to use and switch and I dropped it.
Writing this in FF, where would I need to click to switch profiles? I have a drop down on the right (it's not in there), I have a drop down on the left (also no profiles), I have a menu at the top(can't find it there) and a drop down in my sidebar (no profiles in there).
Sync has no problem with lots of tabs - I routinely have multiple hundred open on multiple devices and firefox sync just does it's thing without complaining.
Go to about:profiles. From there, you can create and switch between profiles. This is not as convenient as it perhaps should be, but I did find one add-on that claims to simplify the process [1].
It is an extension for Firefox, but one created by Mozilla. It's official in that sense, but it does seem a little strange it's not included by default.
How do you work with 5501 synced tabs on your phone? I didn't mean technically but UI? I have a 38" on my desktop which is 30x (?) larger than my phone?
On my phone, I'll just open a new tab and not even bother trying to get to the other tabs. The syncing is more phone -> computer than the other way around. And, beyond that, syncing is more useful for me for between computers.
In Brave one can press command-shift-a to get a search bar for your open tabs. Otherwise I periodically consolidate similar tabs into same windows. It would be nice to have an ontological browser for tabs but search is normally sufficient.
On a phone iOS Safari has “tab groups” that effectively act as windows in a desktop browser. It also has a tab search feature.
* sync of tabs and passwords across devices __that always works__
* multi account containers
* better implementation of standards than chrome (i swear to god chrome date pickers...)
* cool privacy features like blocking facebook properties, email relays, etc
* smaller memory footprint than competitors
to your point about things being worse than they were 10 years ago, in part i agree. the web as a whole has gotten much more bloated and frustrating than it was a decade ago. pages take gobs of bandwidth and memory, everything is in a walled garden or infected with facebook's tentacles. in terms of experience, imo it's really hard to separate the browser from the browsed because the end result is that the experience of using the web in 2024 is downright unpleasant, where it wasn't really before, but i just don't see that as mozilla's fault. i think without mozilla it would be even worse, and it can always get worse...
The FF I used a decade ago was far more embedded and matched to my workflow than the present day one, including more efficient use of screen real estate and far more powerful plug ins. As far as I'm concerned it's been a slow and steady slide backwards. Yes, it's more secure (probably) and it is faster (but I don't notice that all that much because I very aggressively block bloat on the sites I visit).
I miss session manager, tab mix plus, a few others.
I really miss having a gesture extension that runs at the GUI level, so it doesn't stop working while pages are loading and lag all the time and not work in certain places. And that one isn't even about XUL, they simply refuse to implement the mouse callback in the new system.
For a long time, chrome has had significantly better memory use. I really tried firefox again 2 or 3 years ago. If you have to keep jira open all day for work, it was unusable.
Regardless, your comment illustrates why Baker should have been fired for cause. Browsers are not really evaluated on technical merits past a minimal quality threshold. Rather, browser marketshare is built on distribution -- like any business.
And firefox was incompetent at that. Google has effectively used search; Microsoft effectively uses their OS; Apple effectively uses their OS, etc. And all products work this way: this is the reason Slack sold to Salesforce, ie Microsoft was using Office's distribution to effectively clobber Slack with Teams. The same reason that Google pays billions of dollars to Mozilla and Apple to be the default search engine.
What could have been done here? I dunno, but focusing on technical measures is not the right lens. BD is and was the necessary component, and that could have started with companies that don't want to see Chrome be the sole browser in the world. What could you have done to get eg Facebook or other companies with large web properties to ask their users to use Firefox? What partnership could have been forged with Microsoft when they were broadly uninterested in browsers? What could you have done to make Firefox a better browser for technical users specifically? etc.
Firefox could have build a niche, e.g. be clearly the best browser for developers - like native autoreload API support. Or the most secure one. Or be the best browser for power users. Or or or. But you need a vision for that.
Apple started their comeback with developers who liked the combination of a slick UI, commercial software and a unix shell (Got a G4 Cube around 2002 or so, then a Macbook). Dominating that niche made them hip and then everyone wanted one. The rest is history.
Everyone uses Linux, even if MS did everything to push MS on servers. And don't forget Apple spend millions (billions?) on pushing OSX to the server two (I had some XServe and XSans). But Linux dominated, and not because of Red Hat.
Many people and perhaps in the future everyone uses Postgres, even if MS and Oracle spend millions (billions?) to prevent this.
Are there other browsers that have successfully built a niche? And how does one use that to bring in enough money to sustain a reasonable sized organization?
To me it neither seems easy, nor any guarantee of success.
Well Mozilla got >$6.000.000.000 - so I do thing this is enough money. Do you think they would have needed more money?
Brave currently tries to grow from the secure niche. I think Chrome started from the developer niche, with developer tools, being embeddable, open sourcing a rendering engine etc.
I am not sure clawing back a significant amount of marketshare can be done with any amount of money. As long as there is no access to a distribution channel that is similar in size and low friction to what the other browsers have, it will at least be extremely tough. Far from "easy".
I can't live without multi-row tabs but it's totally doable in current Firefox. It's now possible with just CSS. It still breaks every so often when they make big UI changes but it's manageable.
Vivaldi is great on paper (if you don't care about it being F/OSS), but it's wildly unstable compared to all other major browsers including Firefox. Every time I try to use it as a primary, I end up running into something blocking within a week, reporting it, and switching back to whatever.
Which is a shame, because, stability aside, it really is the best option among Blink-based browsers, at least for the power user. No containers, sadly, but the problem there is Blink itself.
I have no problem with Firefox staying as it is. But do not push new products via it. Focusing on the things other companies cannot copy (privacy, extensibility for the user) is definitely the angle for Firefox IMHO.
It becomes better after it became worse. It's not that hard to make it better after you burned all the bridges who lifted your product into the sky. Though, at this point, there isn't much left anymore outside the core-abilities.
Firefox has been always the best browser as it is the only open and free (as free from adversarial incentives).
Unfortunately many people (especially here) have advertised Chrome instead, naively believing Chrome to have these important properties.
Chrome has always been the controlled frontend for Google business and Google is readily willing to hurt the browser to aid its business and keep its dominance.
Blink is also open and free enough. The wide usage of it, and the manifold companies pushing successfully against Google, is proof enough. Firefox on the other side is not free from hostile behavior itself. The manifold bullshit that Mozilla did over the years telling.
And in general, your requirement is not matching the demand of the majority of users. I don't give a f** if something is open or liberated, I'm a user, I care firstly whether it's doing what I need, and being open&free are just tools to balance the powerplay of the creators.
But if not enough people are using the browser, they have no power anyway. And if there is only one developer, then we as the users have not way to balance our power against them. Mozilla has shown over the last decade that the user has no power in their game, which shows that free and open software in itself has little meaning.
The multiple blink-browsers are showing better how this is supposed to work, then the one project who always claims this as one of their main goals.
Majority of the Blink browser users are Chrome users, followed by Edge users and then somewhere come Opera users, what depending on the polls is on par with Firefox users or far behind it.
But none of this matters as I was talking about browsers, not browser engines, that are not the same thing and none of the Blink browsers listed above are open source browsers.
Majority of the users are using the browser they are told to use. If everyone is telling them to use Chrome, they use it. And there practically has not been much resistance to Chrome. How many IT people have told over the years to not user Chrome, and use Firefox instead? There was huge resistance to IE, but not to Chrome, and it pays now its dividends.
Is Chrome now doing what the users want? How many people are upset about the latest moves by Google. For me it was obvious result for long time, I was actually surprised that it didn't happen earlier. Now based on the reactions, many users didn't expect it.
Chrome is better for websites that are specifically tweak to run well only on Chrome. Surprisingly, such websites are not trivial in amount and traffic.
Firefox definitely gets better, as much as it frustrates me sometimes. It's not hard to come up with examples, I've yet to see any other browser use persistent or temporary containers per tab and per site - just to name the most obvious.
7 years later Firefox still hasn't caught up to 2017 Firefox in functionality. Using ancient versions of Firefox isn't an option, so I switched to Vivaldi.
I thought we were talking about the browser, but yes I like Rust a lot, although I switched to Go because the benefits of the borrow checker were just not worth the effort in my use cases. I would wish more main stream languages would experiment with owner transfer though
> the benefits of the borrow checker were just not worth the effort in my use cases
Hot take: it's usually not, and people are using Rust in a lot of places where it's the wrong choice. It looks a lot more appealing when you're writing an OS or a browser.
You’re omitting something crucial though. Between the commercial Netscape and the open-source Firefox, there was the open-source Mozilla browser. Firefox wasn’t the Mozilla organisation’s first free and open-source browser. Firefox was the cut-back reboot of the open-source Mozilla browser. So clearly Mitchell’s work to create a spin-off for Firefox wasn’t necessary for them to have an open-source browser.
Besides which – forming a spin-off company seems like super basic stuff for a lawyer? Why are you describing it as if it’s some crucial innovation?
Someone who'd got it wrong would have opened the door for the kind of IP clawback we're seeing with the cloud tech startups wanting to pull people into their companion SaaS products.
> Mozilla was originally the Netscape browser, which was a paid browser. All browsers were paid at the time, until IE came along and was bundled for free with Windows. Firefox broke that chokehold, and make an open web possible.
AFAIK The Mozilla project (initially started by JWZ) started when Netscape made its browser open source. The reason for this was the loss of market share due to free IE. Firefox came a few years later as a spin-off from the Mozilla Application Suite. Mozilla/Firefox's popularity correlated with Linux's because we needed a good open-source web browser on Linux (and BSD), not because she saw some opportunity to make an open web possible.
> No, she didn't write any code, but she is directly responsible for forming a company that enabled Firefox to be free and open source.
Unlike Brendan's role (excluding javascript), she had a small part, but I would not call it significant.
IE didn't gain share because it was free (Netscape was, as well). It gained share because, with Windows 95 OSR 2.5, it because integrated into the operating system and no longer had to be downloaded separately.
While being bundled made it easier to start using IE, that didn't guarantee that people would try it, and it didn't guarantee that they'd continue to use it on an ongoing basis after that.
It may not be as obvious now, but at the time, IE often offered a better experience for both users and web developers.
IE tended to be faster and stabler than its competitors, and releases like IE3 and IE5 offered a number of innovative features and technologies.
IE coming with Windows clearly didn't prevent a large number of users from switching to Firefox once Firefox started offering a better experience, and then to Chrome once it started generally offering a better experience than both Firefox and IE did.
IE had better CSS support, as well, and JS scripting was more powerful (ironic, given that JS was originally a Netscape thing).
I would say that the turning point was when HTML 4 adopted a lot of things based on the way IE did them rather than Netscape (e.g. <div> + CSS rather than <layer> etc). By IE5, if you were on Windows, you pretty much had to be a die-hard Netscape fan to keep using it.
Mitchell gave us Firefox, literally. When AOL canned Mitchell as the tip of the layoffs that would be the end of Netscape, she, almost singlehandedly, made the Mozilla Foundation happen which gave my project, then m/b but soon renamed Phoenix and then renamed Firefox, a chance at life. Take her away, and when Ben, Blake, myself, dbaron and a couple others were laid off from AOL-Netscape, that would have been game fucking over for Gecko and what became Firefox. It's really that simple.
I’m going to throw my hat in the ring to say FirefoxOS and the phone (of which I bought the first beta version) were IMO great ideas and they should have stuck with it. The iOS/Android duopoly really needed a web-SPA option. Maybe they were too early (rust & wasm would have helped a lot with the speed), maybe it was too difficult a task…but I really wish they had succeeded.
I think it’s an unpopular opinion but I think it’s actually not an impossible goal today. One well run org making an OS for phones that put the user not profits first is possible. Just like Linux was in the 90s.
It's not great at all. Convicted persons on parole are often disallowed from Internet use or smartphone ownership, so I see a lot of parolees with KaiOS flip-phones.
The text entry is really, really horrible. That's probably the worst bit. The OS is pretty unintuitive and inconsistent in the UX. No-one is really developing apps for it as far as I know.
It's definitely way worse than c. 2007 Nokia Symbian devices.
KaiOS is struggling because business on the low-end segment is very hard. Which means that the technical side is cutting corners and you end up with a lacking product in important areas like security. (disclaimer: I worked there and left recently)
The idea of Mobile WebOS wasn't bad on itself, but execution at Mozilla, both management direction and workload just wasn't up to the speed of Google Android or Apple iOS. They were targeting Smartphone of $35, thinking in the future most of the smartphone sold, the entry level phone will be at that price range. Falling into the same fallacy as Bill Gates, all hardware will eventually cost next to nothing, software is expensive. [Note] Bill said that in 00s and Mozilla thought of it in early 10s. So somewhat 20-30 years later Silicon Valley still has zero understanding of how Hardware and Supply Chains works.
Not only did that $35 dollars phone never happened, average selling price of iPhone was $700+ selling at hundreds of millions of unit every year. Mozilla later had to revise the target to $50 phone which was still wrong. It just shows software people simply dont get it.
And they had the vision of running the OS, preferably with Javascript only. Writing all modules in JS if possible. It was the early days before asm.js or WASM. And they spend a lot of time battling this. One engineers even wrote the culture was so JS-focused no one dare to ask why some of these aren't written in C++.
All that combine with rapid pace of development in Smartphone software. They lost out and it is now forked into KaiOS. Which is doing surprisingly well without Mozilla.
Mozilla kind of feels like Xerox in many ways. A lot of great "ideas" came out of it. But they never manage to capture much value.
[Note] It does seems counterintuitive, but 20 years later may be ChatGPT / LLM will make software cheaper faster than hardware getting cost reduction.
Firefox was actually successful, in the form of its fork KaiOS. It's a shame that Mozilla wasn't the organisation that managed to bring the OS to the people, but KaiOS is still running on millions of phones today. Mozilla partnered with them to upgrade the Gecko engine from some ancient version to a much more recent version, as well.
With KaiOS 3 not receiving many app updates necessary to continue functioning (WhatsApp, most importantly) I'm not sure how long it'll stick around, but it certainly left its mark on the mobile phone industry.
She also wrote this incredibly rude and grotesque obituary for Gervase Markham after he died of cancer (working for Mozilla until the end). You are welcome to disagree, but Gerv contributed just as much to Mozilla as Mitchell did.
She also wrote that awful "we need to go even further than deplatforming" blog post a few years back. I have no real opinions about her skill as CEO, but when she is out there actively encouraging the division in our society I could not in good conscience support Mozilla any more. I hope that the next CEO will be more focused on building up, rather than tearing down.
What is questionable about the things that she suggests? The only thing that I see there that is debatable is "amplify factual voices", and then only because it's unclear who decides what those are. But all other suggestions seem common sense to me.
If you mean the fact that she is condemning the US Capitol riot in no uncertain terms, I fail to see how that is "encouraging the division in our society". The riot itself did that, not commentary on it.
The ideas in the blog post are good, but the title is terrible; deplatforming is a synonym for censorship, which is a weird thing for the CEO of Mozilla to advocate for. The ideas would be better received if they were presented as an alternative to deplatforming.
I didn't get that vibe from reading the post at all. On the contrary, I perceive it as a celebration of the person who had invested so much of their (unfortunately ultimately limited) time to their common cause.
I initially didn't get that vibe but then I re-read it. Yikes.
> Gerv challenged me, infuriated me, impressed me, enraged me, surprised me. He developed a greater ability to work with ambiguity, which impressed me.
This is manager-speak describing someone who is incompetent. Someone who, only thanks to management, become less incompetent. Should that be in an obituary?
On the whole, Mitchell paints Gerv as a great programmer and an unruly religious nutjob. A good worker and, as she conveys, a bad person. Frankly, I'm unsure why she didn't just say a few parting words and leave it at that. I don't think she was his friend, and he probably didn't think of her as his mentor.
I suspect her stock in Mozilla depended being seen as a "great community leader", and that this was an opportunity to signal her goodness over a report she couldn't manage and whose views her people hated. It's self-serving, to say the least.
I think it's just honesty. You don't have to pretend that the bad a person did ("bad" being defined by your own perspective, of course) didn't exist in order to celebrate the good.
I think the article author managed to balance the feeling of gratefulness towards the person for their contributions, while obviously perceiving that person's worldview as unfathomable in comparison to their own.
In that situation, what other choice did the author have? Lie (by omission)? I respect the fact that the author chose to be honest instead.
And I think people should appreciate that choice or at least understand it without dismissing it as some kind of character assassination or rudeness.
An ever increasing number of people nowadays seem to be very much guilty of the same things the author mentioned in their post (the black and white worldview), it's not exclusive to deeply religious or conservative people. It very much exists on the "other side" as well. They will usually cite their own favorite pieces of dogmatic gospel (e.g. the "paradox of tolerance") to justify dismissing a person outright, based on some "incompatible" worldview or statement.
The author, however, didn't resort to this. As someone who obviously has no insight into what the article describes, to me it still absolutely comes across as balanced.
It's an obituary of a co-worker/employee, right after his painful drawn out death. It's not a professional biography or a profile. It's ostensibly intended to comfort the bereaved. I truly don't understand a worldview where instead of a) not writing anything at all or b) saying something like "While I strongly disagreed with his religious beliefs, but as a co-worker and employee of many years, he was....", something like this was written.
In case it's not clear, the vitriol was solely based on his being an unapologetic Christian. Not at any overt acts as an employee.
Have you considered those left-behind to be those who have been hurt, too? Addressing the bad may allow them to process mixed, or even "shameful" feelings about someone's passing. Feelings they can't voice, because of your "you can't speak ill about the dead".
> was solely based on his being an unapologetic Christian
I have my suspicions what's implied by this... and how that may be perceived as indeed very hurtful and destructive to some.
I think it indicates a care and deeper appreciation for the person in a way that anything else wouldn't.
"$NAME was $COMPANY's first intern, and went on to stay with $COMPANY for eighteen years. We thank $NAME for $GENDEREDPOSSESSIVE years of service." would feel soulless, as if she didn't know the person at all. It's the sort of obituary a VP at Apple might get; named, but essentially anonymous. A form letter, without any actual sense of appreciation or understanding.
I don't particularly like Mitchell's handling of Mozilla, but this obituary is one I'd like to have for myself. It's written in a manner that politely disagrees with the subject while acknowledging perceived harms, in a way that's not dissimilar to his own views on how ideas should be addressed while not falling into the trap of modern pluralism (the acceptance of all beliefs as equally valid) which he personally thought to be harmful.[1]
It's a remarkable obituary for what seems like an intensely bright human who was openly disagreeable.
I think it's because you agree with Baker's positions that you're more willing to not see her statements as in poor taste.
On the other side where I am, it is a bitch slap and a half.
It is very clear to me that Baker actively detests Markham even past his death. That's fine. I also detest people that are long dead. But this blog post is not really something that I would call "good", it truly reads to me as a very bitter person goading about, not a final ribbing between friends.
Don't treat something like this as 'remarkable', that's dulling the word.
I think that you're actually the one who disagrees with Gerv; as he notes in his writings, a society where all views are seen as equally correct is bad. It's not wrong to draw a line and say, "This person is wrong about this," and it's not a sign of detesting someone; to quote him, distinctions have to be made. You are, ironically, the one completely disagreeing with him, pushing ideological diversity.
I don't see the post as a "bitch slap" to him, despite more or less disagreeing with Mitchell's views, but it's probably a "bitch slap" to you.
> I think that you're actually the one who disagrees with Gerv
I make no judgement on Markham's thoughts on the matter. If I am or not is probably the position you should take, but its not one I'm pushing here.
Words presented by Baker are not words I would like from someone I respect, 8 days after my death, just enough tact to know not do it within the first week before the man is decaying in the ground, not enough to think about what people will think of the person that's still alive afterwards.
> but it's probably a "bitch slap" to you.
Yes, I state it as much, there is no statistical uncertainty here on my end. There is no allegations or false journalistic integrity to take credence to.
The man is dead, there is no rebuttal. Baker took her final words and danced on his grave with it, figuratively, I can't be certain if she was in attendance or will be sometime in the future.
> You are, ironically, the one completely disagreeing with him, pushing ideological diversity.
If I am, then I suppose it. I'll leave this here as an address to your view here:
> It's not wrong to draw a line and say, "This person is wrong about this," and it's not a sign of detesting someone
Would you honestly say that someone being described in the following way is not a clear line:
"Eventually Gerv felt called to live his faith by publicly judging others in politely stated but damning terms. His contributions to expanding the Mozilla community would eventually become shadowed by behaviors that made it more difficult for people to participate. But in 2001 all of this was far in the future."
To me it reads like a final backstabbing against someone who held diametrically opposing views and who no longer has the ability to talk back. If you can't say something nice, say nothing at all. Fully half of the sentences in that obituary list his shortcomings, if that's your attitude then you should refrain from writing an obituary. You don't have to lionize the person or turn it into a hagiography but at the same time you don't have to use it as an opportunity to have the final word and to highlight once more to a much larger audience why you really didn't like someone and why someone didn't fit your view of Mozilla.
Speaking of spreading personal dogmatic gospels, I'd like to call out that the
> "paradox of tolerance"
Is better understood as the "peace treaty of tolerance". There's no obligation or expectation to be tolerant of someone who is intolerant to your existence. You can choose to remain tolerant of those who break the treaty, but I personally don't extend that courtesy to those whom I perceive to be consistent belligerents.
I am not sure I understand, or at least I disagree here. Many people (at Mozilla, and outside) were highly offended by Mitchell's brief obituary of a long-time employee, for reasons that are apparent to most on a simple reading. As a follow-up, I picked the worst phrase in the obituary as an example, but there are obviously more. But the entire point of the criticism are those, to many, highly offensive sections, not the anodyne remainder of the obituary.
I only skimmed the article but it seemed to me that you were cherry-picking a phrase that only appeared at the end and was not the main thrust of the piece.
HN has another guideline for this sort of situation: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
Well, I respectfully disagree, both that it was a cherry picked part of the In Memoriam, (see the below, which I believe is similar, and 20%+ of the piece), and that it was not incredibly notable for such statements to be made in the specific context of a memoriam of a long term (originally as a volunteer) employee who died in such a terrible and anguished way leaving behind a widow and children.
When there is ambiguity, I assume the best. I don't believe that applies to the below. I encourage you to read this reaction (in my original post), which articulates my feelings far better than I could.
Eventually Gerv felt called to live his faith by publicly judging others in politely stated but damning terms. His contributions to expanding the Mozilla community would eventually become shadowed by behaviors that made it more difficult for people to participate.
...
Gerv’s default approach was to see things in binary terms — yes or no, black or white, on or off, one or zero. Over the years I worked with him to moderate this trait so that he could better appreciate nuance and the many “gray” areas on complex topics. Gerv challenged me, infuriated me, impressed me, enraged me, surprised me. He developed a greater ability to work with ambiguity, which impressed me.
Gerv’s faith did not have ambiguity at least none that I ever saw. Gerv was crisp. He had very precise views about marriage, sex, gender and related topics. He was adamant that his interpretation was correct, and that his interpretation should be encoded into law. These views made their way into the Mozilla environment. They have been traumatic and damaging, both to individuals and to Mozilla overall.
...
To memorialize Gerv’s passing, it is fitting that we remember all of Gerv — the full person, good and bad, the damage and trauma he caused, as well as his many positive contributions. Any other view is sentimental. We should be clear-eyed, acknowledge the problems, and appreciate the positive contributions.
It isn't just one statement in the article. It's basically the tone of the entire article. Examples:
"Eventually Gerv felt called to live his faith by publicly judging others in politely stated but damning terms. His contributions to expanding the Mozilla community would eventually become shadowed by behaviors that made it more difficult for people to participate."
"Gerv’s default approach was to see things in binary terms — yes or no, black or white, on or off, one or zero."
"Gerv’s faith did not have ambiguity at least none that I ever saw. Gerv was crisp. He had very precise views about marriage, sex, gender and related topics. He was adamant that his interpretation was correct, and that his interpretation should be encoded into law. These views made their way into the Mozilla environment. They have been traumatic and damaging, both to individuals and to Mozilla overall."
"To memorialize Gerv’s passing, it is fitting that we remember all of Gerv — the full person, good and bad, the damage and trauma he caused, as well as his many positive contributions. Any other view is sentimental. We should be clear-eyed, acknowledge the problems, and appreciate the positive contributions."
With all due respect, I don't think that this is a proper application of that rule. Sometimes, a single line changes the entire substance of a piece, and I believe that this is one of those times. I think that to trash talk someone while ostensibly writing a eulogy for them is grossly inappropriate and deserves criticism, even if it is a small part of the piece by volume.
I feel like I've gone a full 180 from my feelings on the company after reading this.
Having their personal beliefs belittled by a CEO after their death is frankly disgusting. I will be switching off of Firefox, I wish I had seen this earlier.
That's a fair point, but at this point, there are a lot of browsers with open source browsing engines and they don't have the baggage that we see here.
I learned about that from Immortal Technique's "The 3rd World". Great song, but thankfully they didn't do that in Japan.
Their real crimes are the proliferation of plastic water bottles / other microplastic garbage and the amount of sugar in their drinks (although the most popular drinks in Japan are not available abroad because they are expensive and not sweet — green tea etc..). Not to mention the amount of overtime the average worker had; something I tried to change but one that managers were allergic too (adding new meaningless procedures once old ones were simplified and automated).
None of that changes the facts about failed aforementioned Mozilla CEO, cowardly attacking a dead man because he didn't match her personal and socially fashionable beliefs. Why would you even make a new account to defend that?
Thanks for posting this article. As expected, this article tells a much deeper story than the reductionist retort made by the parent poster. A very interesting one, too.
She gave herself 20-30 million dollars while the company tanked in every measurable way and devs got fired.
She's the reason we have Firefox and the modern web? What in the actual flippin bizarro dimension?
Besides being a member of the parasitic upper classes the leeches on all of our work while robbing to live on yachts and in mansions i don't see what she excelled at.
It's depressing how much this class of people is filled with nepotism, favours, family and an almost aristocratic talentlessness besides the random figureheads appointed PR.
I also disagree with her salary while layoffs were happening, however recent raises don't negate the fact that she also built Mozilla from the start.
She's not a member of the parasitic upper class. She was laid off from Netscape 20+ years ago, and just never stopped. She kept volunteering for free, and eventually lead the charge to spin it off into its own entity.
You either die the hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain.
She wasn’t up to the job but decided to stay there because it afforded her a higher salary than ANY OTHER company would ever hire her for because very few people are worth salaries in the millions and Baker was not one of them.
My problem with Baker wasn’t her compensation it’s that her desire for that compensation caused her to occupy the CEO seat and tank Firefox. I’d rather Mozilla had paid her 50 million to retire and find a new CEO, it probably would have turned out better than to let somebody incompetent do a job because she was selfless in the past.
I'm not entirely sure what parasitic upper class is, but getting paid over 2 million while the company you are in charge of dives, and then in response saying you should be earning 5x more.. truly nobody needs that kind of money.. maybe this isn't 'parasitic upper class' but it's certainly what's wrong with the world
She laid off 250 people in 2020 and proceeded to raise her own salary by $2,000,000 per year over the following two years. Whatever her prior record is that behaviour is despicable.
Leeching is precisely how I would describe someone who demands more and more money each year from a company that's declining due to their own mismanagement and at the same time takes money from those who earn less.
Hey, I agree. I was very against the layoffs (I built this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24135032), and at my own company I have a very strict layoffs-are-the-absolute-worst-case-scenario rule (which I got from working at Mozilla back in 2010; we were proud to have been one of the few companies who had never done layoffs back then!)
I think Mitchell has made many bad decisions the past few years. When I saw the news, my gut reaction was to post something negative. However, having known her and known all the work she put in early, I wanted to post a counterbalance. She wasn't a great CEO (and the $$ is a very bad look), but she's done a lot of good for the community over the past 20 years.
So you agree to a bunch of examples of terrible things she's done, and then counterbalance it with a vague "she's done a lot of good for the community over the past 20 years"?
Oh, and she was considerate towards your feelings in an email, and a followup email?
I too have seen many corporate higher-ups be highly pleasant when you talk/correspond with them. But they do jack shit about the actual issue, but assure you that they care about your feelings.
I'd rather she was an absolute bitch to everyone, but actually steered the organization in the right direction. That would have had a better positive impact on the world than a few placating emails.
In 2018 she received a total of $2,458,350 in compensation from Mozilla, which represents a 400% payrise since 2008.[15] 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."
In 2020, after returning to the position of CEO, her salary had risen to over $3 million (in 2021, her salary rose again to over $5 million,[16] and again to nearly $7 million in 2022[17]). 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). Baker blamed this on the COVID-19 pandemic, despite revenue rising to record highs in 2019, and market share shrinking.[18]
In other words, no she definitely is. She fired 250 devs while doubling her pay multiple times to live a luxurious life while lying about the cause. People have to feed their families, she doesn't need that much and this is not good community spirit.
It gets even more interesting googling bit further and becomes a brilliant example of either "money corrupts people" or "i'm romanticising my upperclass upbringing", because she apparently went from patos filled stories about her dad paying just above minimum wage (lol) to firing 250 devs while she ran with the money:
"[about her parents] So I would call them progressive. I would call them really focused on -- well, so for example, he would never pay minimum wage. They ran a small business. It was pretty--
Weber: Doing what?
Baker: -- hand to mouth. A pewter factory, making wine goblets and gift items out of pewter. Not so easy to do in the Bay Area, which is expensive. And so he would hire someone at minimum wage. But he had a period of time -- it was six weeks, or two months, or three months, or whatever it was-- after a probationary period, and then he refused. He felt he needed to pay a living wage."
"According to the company's filings, Mitchell Baker's compensation went from $5,591,406 in 2021 [PDF] to $6,903,089 in 2022."
Did not continue to dig further.
Mozilla tanked a lot, even Thunderbird is doing better recently.
So definitely part of the 'parasitic upper class.
I wonder if being a corporate lawyer at a corporate company is what hobbles Mozilla/Firefox. Could they have found better success, albeit chaotically, being organized/governed like Linux/Debian/Python orgs? And specifically not being for profit? And if so, would someone w/ her background be blinkered enough to not be able to see it?
Ballmer was also an okay CEO, he missed mobile but he didn’t miss cloud and made MSFT a crapton of money.
Definitely no star, heck back in the day he tried to convince Bill Gates to stop investing in this dead end “Windows” project because OS/2 was obviously the future. But certainly not a train wreck like Baker.
He also killed the Microsoft courier duel screen tablet as he didn't see it as integrating well with office. Killing possible the best designed consumer tablet at the time allowing Apple and Google to own mobile.
Azure started under Ballmer’s tenure as CEO, years before Nadella became CEO, and now is the second biggest cloud company in the world. I wish I could mostly miss something like that.
Not to say Nadella doesn’t deserve most of the credit but it speaks well of Ballmer that an internally promoted employee like Nadella who replaced him did so well.
Again I can nitpick but he grew revenue and did not fatally injure MSFT. He was mediocre but not terrible is all I’m saying.
> I worked at Mozilla back in 2012, as we were pivoting to FirefoxOS (a mobile OS). I was very low in the company, but for some reason sent Mitchell an email detailing why I thought it was a bad idea.
I remember the gist being that we were trying to compete against the two biggest companies on the planet, and (outside of some concerns about security) nobody seemed to really be complaining about the two options. If our goal was to bet the company (financially) on it, it made no sense to try to undercut Android... at the time Android was open source and ran on dirt cheap phones.
I remember a big part of it being "nobody wants a phone that doesn't have Angry Birds on it". I wasn't specifically worried about that one game (although it was insanely popular at the time), but rather all the apps – Uber, Facebook, etc. We had no ability to make parternships of that level happen. Especially since some of those companies (like Facebook) were trying to build their OWN phones at the time.
I just didn't think there was a market for a phone with no apps, that was positioning itself as the "cheaper" version of an already cheap (and ubiquitous) competitor. And I wouldn't have cared, if it wasn't for the fact that we had to move the entire company towards building this – which we did for a few years.
Damn, I wasn't aware of this. I had a big interest in FirefoxOS when it was developed, so much that I named one of ours dogs after one component of it (Gaia). I was always sad that FirefoxOS (tried) to pivot to IoT instead of continuing to iterate on the idea, seems KaiOS is worth looking into.
A couple of years ago my elderly parents got feature phones with KaiOS. It was slow (at least on those devices), cumbersome, and some basic things such as SMS felt quite unintuitive and complex to operate. Think old feature phone OSes where you have to navigate from one menu to another with arrow keys, a few buttons and limited screen space, but without the relative polish of those actual old phone OSes from the days when they were standard. And with tangible sluggishness added.
n = 1 and I don't know how much phone vendors customize KaiOS. Maybe it was only cumbersome due to customizations or limitations from that vendor. Maybe it works better on touch devices. Maybe the hardware just wasn't up to the task. But it didn't leave a good mark.
I think there was kind of a need for such a software, not just phones. But not sure why Mozilla was the company to deliver that. And not sure it would be a money maker.
Nokia also had an internal 'next gen small OS' that they also killed during that time.
I feel like developing consumer software products that focus on privacy is like pouring a glass of water on a forest fire. If the goal is a free, fair, and private web then those need to be the most economical and profitable values for all software developed on the web. If Mozilla offered developer focused product suites that made it so it was super cheap and easy to develop a website that was private by default then markets would do the rest.
Firefox could then be modified to remove the need to mention "Google", "Microsoft", "DuckDuckGo", "eBay", "our partners", "our third-party ad platform", "a third-party referral platform", "our campaign marketing vendors", "sends Mozilla", and any other companies/organizations/third-parties we find referenced in that document.
A privacy-respecting browser would never collect nor send any data beyond that necessary to provide its core web browsing functionality.
Any functionality that might compromise a user's privacy should not be bundled by default, and would instead have to be explicitly opted into by manually installing an extension that provides such functionality. This would include Firefox's/Mozilla's own "telemetry".
She might still be a great CEO but maybe just not the CEO Mozilla needs right now. There are not "universal great CEOs", just CEOs that fit a company during a specific time.
I worked at Mozilla because I saw John Lilly (CEO at the time) speak in 2009.
Someone snarkily asked him about Chrome, and he responded that Chrome was a victory for Mozilla – the mission was an open web, and choice was what Mozilla was fighting for. I thought it was a very healthy view.
without having read that, I would agree, more competitors is better. It just seems like mozilla decided to not really fight to develop product, thus reducing the competitors in the arena
This sounds like corporate speak covering up for a forced resignation. The red herring of the interim CEO doing anything serious on privacy is not real since:
> Chambers says she won’t be seeking a permanent CEO role because she plans to move back to Australia later this year for family reasons.
Here's my optimistic educated guess: The board finally caught on to the fact that Mitchell is an overpaid failed CEO for a "company" (e.g. weird for-profit entity that runs a "non-profit") propped up by its largest competitor to avoid anti-trust accusations. Its only real product has dwindling, barely mattering, marketshare (<5%)^. Chambers, being from the board and not the executive structure, is obviously a caretaker "for cover" while the new CEO search goes on.
As an outside observer, I don't know the company culture directly, but I have to assume Baker is not the type of person to just leave that role. If she wanted to leave, she could stay until a permanent CEO has been found.
It must have become obvious by now, even to the board, that Mozilla has been a sinking ship under the destructive influence of Baker.
Growing dissatisfaction within the employee base could play a role. But judging from the comfortable bubble they live in due to google money coming in regardless of performance, it seems this is more about the board seeing the stagnation that endangers their own future income as well.
I would not be surprised if, internally, the resignation was planned together with Baker already 2-3 years ago, and her pay rise was part of the internal deal to compensate her.
I helped create Librewolf, which originally was still called Librefox. Mozilla complained about the "fox" part of the name. While that behavior is probably understandable, it shows the type of company Mozilla has become, where a small irrelevant open-source skin of Firefox is seen as a threat. Mozilla, unfortunately, has long been a wolf in sheeps clothing, working together with Google behind the scenes to harm the open non-commercial internet.
> Mozilla, unfortunately, has long been a wolf in sheeps clothing, working together with Google behind the scenes to harm the open non-commercial internet.
That's a pretty strong claim, probably one that requires providing further proof of that happening, than just pointing to "comfortable bubble due to google money" and Mozilla defending their trademark.
It's self-evident. I'm not talking about some shady conspiracy. Google has been keeping Firefox alive. Thus the incentives for Mozilla have been aligned with Google, which has an interest to plaster everything with ads, thus commercialize everything. Mozilla had to hide this obvious incentive and pretend it was on the side of the user, thus it became a wolf in sheeps clothing.
Mozilla started to implement some nice privacy-preserving features, all the while knowing that including a google search with search suggestions as you type means that literally everything people type into the address bar gets send to google, making privacy impossible.
The almost endless money flow from google, independent from performance, led to a strange company culture where nothing mattered anymore except having a good time with co-workers. Without the correct (monetary) incentives, there is no pressure to innovate.
> strange company culture where nothing mattered anymore except having a good time with co-workers.
You can see how Ex-Mozilla people try to cover up their CEO's bad leadership in these comment threads alone. Apparently the CEO being nice to them and championing their pet social causes is enough to earn their loyalty.
She didn't blog about this in https://blog.lizardwrangler.com/. Given that the last 3 blogposts are about company changes, the lack of a post about this event smells of resentment.
It seems mostly to focus on "Vision", "Strategy", "Outstanding Execution" and other corporate-speak stuff.
Anyone who worked with Laura Chambers (new, interim CEO) in the past want to share what kind of changes one could expect from them? More business/marketing stuff or back to engineering focus?
> Her bullshits will be on delivering bullshit products that bullshit our mission and building bullshits that bullshit momentum. Laura and I will be working closely together throughout February to ensure a bullshit transition, and in my role as Exec Chair I’ll continue to provide advice and bullshit in areas that touch on our unique history and Mozilla characteristics.
> Laura’s bullshits will be on Mozilla Corporation with two bullshit bullshits:
Long long overdue. Baker did nothing but see Mozilla decline while she arranged pay raises for herself and fired engineers. Should have been canned for incompetence a decade ago.
A CEO willing to take a modest compensation package (only enough to be middle-class comfortable, like Mozilla's engineers should be) might be signal that they're really aligned with the non-profit mission.
People often say you need to pay the big bucks to get a good funding-raiser, but bringing in money isn't the only job of the CEO there.
I really don't sympathize with the argument that CEO's have be paid big bucks to perform. People would kill for a position like this as long as they could make a living. Free software is a medium that literally has dudes work night and day on some random meme project, create communities, partners and policies just because of their ideological beliefs. No other medium has this incredible level of activity. If Mozilla can't find a leader, they can surely make one.
I don't think paying a lot for good talent is a problem even at a nonprofit (and it's not just about fundraising) i.e. the issue at Mozilla is competence and alignment not money
Lots of tech companies are laying off people, and generally not all layoffs are wrong. How do you distinguish whether Mozilla's layoffs, etc, are wrong?
> Lots of tech companies are laying off people, and generally not all layoffs are wrong. How do you distinguish whether Mozilla's layoffs, etc, are wrong?
No one is complaining about Mozilla's layoffs in a void. Even if they were no layoffs whatsoever, the facts remains:
1. Firefox was neglected and lost a massive market share.
2. Executives were flourishing while the ship was going under
Mozilla's layoffs were just a more tangible symptom of her strategy that the browser is a low-priority.
> What is the factual basis for saying that Firefox was neglected? Lots of stuff is repeated around here, but it's not impression from any facts.
Interesting, what do you attribute Firefox's bleeding out marketshare steadily over the past decade to if not neglect from leadership? Strategy is at the core of the CEO role and other executives.
Mitchell Baker actually stated herself, I think in 2020 at the time of layoffs, that Mozilla needed to focus on stuff like decentralized web, artificial intelligence, security and privacy network, etc. So yes it seems evident that the browser was neglected to pursue other endeavors, that mind you, didn't see much success either.
It doesn't matter what I attribute it to; I'm not an expert.
An obvious alternative explanation - really the null hypothesis, IMHO - is competition from Google. Google has much greater brand power, engineering resources, and marketing power than anyone. They could advertise Chrome across their incredibly popular ecosystem, including on the (possibly) most popular page on the Internet, https://www.google.com.
Chrome is a pretty good product, too, and didn't have legacy code like Gecko to deal with. I'm not sure what any Mozilla CEO could do.
Maybe facing those odds, it was better to invest in other things too. Mozilla's mission isn't a web browser, but to make the web free and (private).
As someone who's nearly exclusively used Firefox since before it was called Firefox, I would not say that the product itself has been neglected. It continues to get better, from my point of view. Like seriously if you're reading this and at all interested, just try to switch to it for a week, it's great.
However it is factual that its marketshare (and thus, relevance (and thus, influence on the web)) has dramatically declined over the past decade or so. People complain about Mozilla's tech side quests (and occasionally people complain about their social-cause chases), but this is the real honest complaint. Firefox is trending toward irrelevancy, while Google has gradually taken control of this market. Meanwhile, CEO compensation has gone up (amid layoffs in the ZIRP era, for that matter).
If other children stick their hands into the fire, will you stuck your too?
Seriously, people who run company should make decisions that are useful for the company, not parrot what others are doing.
Firefox was neglected for years, they did not tackle requests of users (customization, addons), but spend tens of millions (if not hundreds) on everything else. Then they started to run out of cash, so instead of focusing on their CORE PRODUCT they started firing developers.. because it is popular?
I'm not sure that FF going down in usage can be put on the CEO at this point. There's way too many forces against them, it is not a "fair" fight against the only other option.
Google is way larger and has deals set in place to ensure that basically everyone ends up with it as the default. Let that go on for a generation or two and people forget all about FF. They cannot compete against that.
As for CEO pay, that's typical. Asking or expecting for it to not go up exponentially is pointless, that's just how it works now.
Without trying to pin everything on the CEO, I don't think it's also fair to treat Firefox as helpless and doomed.
For another data point we can look at Thunderbird, another Mozilla project. Thunderbird had started stagnating. It was borderline abandoned for a while, until Mozilla made it official.
The community tried to catch the discarded codebase and keep it alive, Thunderbird got a new home. Remember we're talking about a desktop email client in the age where a couple major companies entirely own email, as a concept. Email _is_ Gmail and Outlook, it's not even close to a fair fight for a small third party email client to compete against that.
> As for CEO pay, that's typical. Asking or expecting for it to not go up exponentially is pointless, that's just how it works now.
The point is that it doesn't have to be typical, nor should it be. There's no universal law of reality which says that CEO pay must forever go up exponentially. It is bad behavior when other companies do it, it was bad behavior when Mozilla did it, and it deserves the criticism it is getting.
Even us die-hard Firefox users are forced to use other browsers just to get full PWA support. If Mozilla makes it difficult for fans of their browser to stick with Firefox, it's not surprising that non-Firefox users won't bother sticking with it or even trying it in the first place.
It is not really Mozilla doing anything to make it difficult to get the same experience, but rather uninformed or ignorant web developers building Chromium/Chrome-only experiences. For examples just check out the uninformed tech stack of Slack, MS Teams, and similar that so many companies use. None of those tools work properly in FF, since their devs do not create a cross browser experience adhering to standards. While I am not particularly a fan of Discord, I want to mention, that already years ago they had a working voice and video chat working in the browser in FF. No idiotic gaslighting attempt of "having to change the browser".
A notification on a website stating that one must use another browser is a sign of utter incompetence or ignorance.
Lack of installable PWA support is squarely on Firefox. At this point, I think they're the only remotely major browser that doesn't have it.
And yes, there is an extension for that. Which is unofficial, requires you to do hacky things (such as installing a whole separate Firefox runtime), and still doesn't fully support things like notifications.
I think that it's not a UI/UX thing, honestly they are almost exactly the same thing (tabs, URL bar, webpage). The difference is that people use what they are given, and when you are Google it's easier to be seen by everybody.
Firefox's multiple profiles' UX is not user-friendly at all. You need to either type "about:profiles" in the address bar or start the desired profile from the command line.
The history/bookmark manager UI is 2000-ish and does not align with current mobile-like design trends.
---
Multi-account containers are a cool idea, but they are somewhat power-user-oriented. Ordinary users often don't grasp the concept of cookies, let alone understand the extension's description.
> Under the hood, it separates website storage into tab-specific Containers. Cookies downloaded by one Container are not available to other Containers.
Not a good thing if Mozilla wanted to increase their market share.
Middle-aged users are already using Firefox if they value the open web, but young users will be driven away by the 2000-ish UI. Mozilla cannot attract new users if they can't keep up with the design trend.
The best solution I can think of is making fancy UI the default but also making it possible for power users to switch back to the old UI.
Genuinely interested: do you have any numbers backing those claims about UI, or is it your intuition?
My intuition is that the vast majority of people use the first browser they are exposed to, even if it is IE6. People are exposed to Google Chrome first, it's not a question of UI/UX.
Otherwise, why would the vast majority of people use Google Chrome instead of one of the gazillion Chromium-based clones? The UX is the same, right?
That's why Google is putting the profile button on the address bar: to promote the feature. The UI for adding new users is simple and straightforward too.
Both of them have those features, but the key problem is about UI/UX. Clearly, Mozilla doesn't devote as many resources to improving UI/UX as Google does.
Multiple profiles' UX is not user-friendly at all. You need to either type "about:profiles" in the address bar or start the desired profile from the command line.
The history/bookmark manager UI is 2000-ish and does not align with current mobile-like design trends.
Tangential, but this spurred an interest in reading a few of their annual reports. It seems general purpose LLMs are bad at doing this, at least when I asked what annual revenue was it confidently said $466m for 2020 but the report said 496867 so basically $497m.
Anyone have a blogpost/video/guide on the basics of reading financial statements? I definitely could brush up on whats important within these statements and how to better interpret them....
Edit: the reason I replied here, was because I wanted to see how the company did during her tenure as CEO. That was the leap my brain took.
Just a quick note; the market share decrease is relative to FF's original market share, in 2008. This may seem obvious to some but its really easy to get confused about absolute/relative changes when talking about percentages of percentages.
I mean I kinda doubt any new CEO is going to take an appreciable cut to salary. Baker got a bad rap among tech nerds for whom Mozilla === Firefox for trying to find literally any new market outside Firefox. It's not the golden calf it once was and only survives because of Google's hedge against antitrust.
If they can't find a way to bring in outside money that isn't from Google they're gonna have a bad time if Google ever stops feeling threatened by US regulators, and making bets on new products is the only real thing you can do. Edge has proven in an embarrassingly public way that being a better browser under the hood doesn't get you more users.
Can you blame people for not understanding how a company who once had one of the most dominant and influential applications on the Internet, managed to fumble, by basically acting like a wallflower and letting the ecosystem figure the future out?
> Any new market outside Firefox
Why was this even necessary? Firefox has always been an undervalued asset at Mozilla. They sat on it and seem to have barely invested enough effort to make it decent enough to compete with Chrome. Back in 2009, if you'd asked me where I saw Firefox 10 years from then, I'd have said that in 2019 it's more than simply a browser. It's a platform competing with Apple and Google for apps, but on the web. It would have a core web browser with various derivatives. For example, one aimed at general purpose browsing (the FF we know currently), one for business apps (e.g. specialized browser augmented to understand better languages than plain old HTML/CSS/JS and built-in libraries for business apps; think Visual Basic, Notion), one for game apps, one for education apps, and more. Mozilla would provide tools and toolkits to make it easy for devs to just build apps for the web, so that they don't have to fight with the front-end. Apple is doing it for iOS, Google is doing it for Android. I still don't understand why Mozilla couldn't see itself sharing this cake with Firefox when it had 30%+ market share.
> Why was this even necessary? Firefox has always been an undervalued asset at Mozilla. They sat on it and seem to have barely invested enough effort to make it decent enough to compete with Chrome.
It's necessary because Firefox doesn't make money.
>Apple is doing it for iOS, Google is doing it for Android. I still don't understand why Mozilla couldn't see itself sharing this cake with Firefox when it had 30%+ market share.
Mozilla's browser development is funded almost entirely by Google. If Mozilla had stepped up to become a real competitor, Google would have shut off the money, and Firefox would have just died. Google sells ads. Apple sells hardware. Mozilla doesn't sell anything. If they want to be independent and compete, they need independent income.
> Mozilla's browser development is funded almost entirely by Google. If Mozilla had stepped up to become a real competitor, Google would have shut off the money
That's been the trope for many years. I believed it in the past. I'm skeptical it's still the case. Mozilla made enough money over the years to risk leveraging some of Firefox's potential and buy its own independence. I'm also optimistic that Mozilla has always been uniquely qualified, with enough resources, know-how, and branding power to set up some of the ideas that I suggested, relatively quickly.
For instance, if even tomorrow they came out with a specialized Business Firefox offshoot, augmented to simplify the development of business web apps (e.g. it natively understands TypeScript and a few selected frameworks; it easily integrates with cloud providers and APIs; it simplifies dealing with the local file system and databases; basically a special browser tuned to understand modern front-end development), companies would pay attention. For devs, no need to start playing around with complicated tooling. The environment is the browser. I know I'd at least give it a try with no second thought. The trade-off to building apps quickly would be the need to install that Business Firefox. I think it's a decent trade-off.
They could have done a deal with Microsoft, even for a fraction of the amount and been just fine. Google's ad business model is a cash fire hose. If they actually backed off development because of Google's money, then it's corruption and particularly egregious because it involves a non-profit and a monopoly.
For the record, I'm fine with Firefox the way it is now. I use Lynx more than I use Chrome.
I think that I'm rather observing than accusing. Which of my statements do you need evidence for? That Mozilla fumbled despite Firefox having 30% of the browser market share? See its market share today. That they played wallflower while others were figuring out the front-end ecosystem? See the ensuing decade of front-end tooling extravaganza, through which Firefox's role was reduced to the app that eventually runs your web app (i.e. you the community figure it all out). That Firefox was an undervalued asset? See their foray into other venues, despite Firefox's untapped potential in being a real platform for the web (unlike Android and iOS). That Mozilla didn't see Firefox as their Trojan horse to share the apps market pie? See their equivalent of the App Store and Google Play. That they sat on it to barely make it compete with Chrome? Firefox has been my primary browser since it was still named Firebird, there was an extended stretch during which my faithfulness had nothing to do with it offering a better experience than Chrome. Indeed, even today, I still have to start Chrome from time to time for a few things that FF doesn't handle well.
> Baker got a bad rap among tech nerds for whom Mozilla === Firefox for trying to find literally any new market outside Firefox.
Maybe I am a tech nerd, but for me Mozilla is Firefox. We have thousands of privacy-oriented companies and organizations, but there is only one independent browser. I am fine with Mozilla finding some other ways to make cash, but it they have a mission, that's the browser. So if I see money being spent (vs money being earned) on something that is not Firefox, I am sad. Now, they are free to do as they want, if they want to drop Firefox, that's their right, but that would make one less good thing in this world.
I think you perfectly summed it up. Mozilla depends on google largesse, which limits its perimeter of freedom.
Imagine if Firefox included perfect ad blocking + antitracking (ex: reporting a standard canvas size, having multi account container on) out of the box. Add an AI API so that users who have very basic questions wouldn't need to interact with a search engine. I don't think it would fare well with google.
Google money has unfortunately created the perfect innovation trap: it removed the incentives that Firefox could have had, to create a product that users would want that could have a positive feedback loop on what users want.
Instead, Firefox is what google want: an hedge against antitrust.
I don't think the previous CEO could do anything to find out a new market when isolated like this from market signals (like donations which are the equivalent of sales: a signal that what you are providing is what users want)
I think Google is also stuck in a local optimum trap: it can't innovate out of ads and tracking. Its own technology had to be taken by OpenAI as an outsider, with Microsoft money, to deliver a product.
> Edge has proven is an embarrassingly public way that being a better browser under the hood doesn't get you more users.
Edge is yet another proof that Google technology was sound, but is better managed by outside companies.
The network effect from google created the eye of Sauron, with little else to show on. It acts as an incentives to anyone who cares about privacy or products not being killed.
I think it's a tragedy because Google has been strongly incentivized to cut off the seeds it saw, to put more money and labor on its core offering, if only avoid the risk of cannibalizing its core business.
ABC/alphabet was about edging that risk, trying to diversify by recognizing business is inherently risky, but you have to make wild bets to get alpha.
Unfortunately, it may have been too little too late: 10 years later, I don't think Google has the money or the manpower to try to do that at a scale that matters.
Even if it did, its bad reputation for culling out products doesn't inspire trust: personally, I'd rather run llama.cpp than make any bet that Gemini will still be operating in a few years, and for free software I'd trust Microsoft over Google.
It's a tragedy, because it has had ripple effects on Firefox, taking similar wrong decisions to cut really innovative technologies (Rust) before they could grow.
> Imagine if Firefox included perfect ad blocking + antitracking (ex: reporting a standard canvas size, having multi account container on) out of the box. Add an AI API so that users who have very basic questions wouldn't need to interact with a search engine. I don't think it would fare well with google.
When she writes that she will focus on privacy - isnt that exactly what it would be?
We all know that this "privacy focus" is just bullshit and will end up with nothing anyway.
I think most people are upset that Mozilla went from a CEO with a compensation[1] of ~800K and decent market share to one earning around 7mln but with the scraps of market share that we have now. Nobody can say if Eich would have done things differently, but I guess we'll never know.
Serious question because a few more minutes of Googling than I should've taken couldn't answer it: did Baker set her own salary, or did the Mozilla board collectively set it? Is any of that released by Mozilla?
Laura Chambers, the interim CEO, is listed on Mozilla's website as "member of the compensation committee". Karim Lakhani's chair of the compensation committee and has been on the board since 2016. So I'm assuming the same people who decided to pay Baker $7M/year are still there?
CEO pay is always set by the board (the compensation committee is usually a subset of the board). It may be the case that the CEO demands certain comp and the board composed of their friends grants that request, but it's still the board.
What are you talking about? Criticism comes with the territory of being the CEO of a company. A CEO is going to receive the blame or accolades for a company depending on whether it fails or succeeds. People largely perceive Mozilla to be a declining company. So, yes, she is naturally going to receive the blame for that. What also comes with the territory is massive compensation.
Whatever the justification for commenter behavior (which doesn't justify it all in my mind; it just says lots of people do it), how does that address my GP comment?
I can't think of any important things Mozilla has created since pushing Brendan Eich out 9 years ago. That's almost a decade and billions in revenue they've burned through.
There's now almost no programmers on the board or in senior leadership positions. The interim CEO they picked is an MBA who ran a business line at AirBnB.
I was executive sponsor of Rust, which Graydon Hoare was doing as a personal project while working with me on ES4. Rob Sayre, JS team manager, agreed Rust should be an official project, so Graydon went full time on Rust at Mozilla. This was in 2008.
Later, others notably Niko Matsakis and Patrick Walton (apologies for leaving yet other folks’ names out) took Rust to 1.0.
Mitchell didn’t know what Rust was until I explained it, wasn’t CEO when we made it an official project, but was CEO for this:
Holy shit, this is actually Eich. Comment deserves more attention
Huge fan, you were pushed out unfairly - it's wild that you were fired for donating money to a vote that passed. It was a normal and popular opinion at the time.
Brendan, I'm a big fan of a lot of your work, but I really think it's a poor look commenting in this thread at all. Most folks on HN are well aware of Mitchell's record, and those that aren't...well it's willful ignorance on their part.
I think it comes off as petty to punch down, and wanted to let Mr. Eich know (out of respect) in case he didn't realize it. But if he realizes it and doesn't care, or just disagrees, that's his decision.
Punching down implies I’m up. How do you figure that? I’m not at Mozilla, not paying myself a seven figure salary, not ever engaging with the Davos set.
In any event, my comment laid out salient bits Rust history, which however much you might not like them, do not “punch” anyone.
You're a chief executive of a successful web technology and browser organization, while it looks as though Baker is being removed from the one you previously left.
I have no issue with the Rust facts, just that the context makes it look like you're being petty by further highlighting Baker's failure in a thread about what is effectively her removal, and I thought maybe you didn't realize that and would like to know. If you know and don't care, or disagree, then just disregard me.
>I’m not at Mozilla, not paying myself a seven figure salary, not ever engaging with the Davos set.
Mozilla's a dying organization kept on life support by Google and playing make-believe hero of the free web these days. Certainly tough to get much lower than that.
You are assuming facts not in evidence or provably false per public IRS 990 forms:
1. Mitchell was not as far as I know removed.
2. She has extracted over $20M gross pay including bonuses for the last several years. I’ll do the exact math later.
Let’s see how much her comp goes down in this year’s IRS Form 990, which will come out at the earliest in late 2025.
3. Mozilla has a ton of cash in the bank while Brave is still building a new business model. To say I’m doing better in any financial sense is cheeky. If you use Brave, thanks for your support.
Last thing: Mozilla will take years to die, and it could perdure as an NGO, even after Firefox. Don’t assume it will die quickly. We are all dying, in this world.
"Punching down" is a sophomoric dunce-phrase in any event, but even with the most charitable interpretation of that phrase, it's wrong. I was not punching, nor is your asserted direction "down".
Mitchell (along with all leadership) should not be immune from criticism, even (or especially, if the leader in part caused the downfall) if you wrongly believe that they were fired, underpaid, or running a "dying" outfit -- all of which as far as I know are false.
You are only getting Brendan's story, and why is Brendan going out of his way to attack Mitchell Baker? It strongly implies some powerful drive besides sharing information.
Whatever white knighting is, I'm interested in the truth, in the dangers of Internet mobs, and in fairness to anyone (including you). All are essential. Look at what our world has become as people disparage all that.
> the person who has destroyed firefox’s marketshare?
One aspect of that mob mentality: You skipped past having evidence and reasoning for that assertion; it's just assumed. And then you act out in anger that anyone would question the mob's assumptions.
Don’t ignore context. The comment to which my first comment above replied implied that Mitchell (for Mozilla) was due credit for Rust.
Your (1) is still planting a falsehood: Mitchell’s role when I sponsored Rust was not CEO, she did not have to approve or reject Rust, but she did assent to my advice that we make Rust an official project.
This is not an attack, it’s simply what happened. You are the one who keeps concern trolling, or whatever it is you are doing, to give Mitchell undue credit or to shield her from anything that could be taken as criticism.
> I can't think of any important things Mozilla has created since pushing Brendan Eich out 9 years ago.
Comment to which I replied, which you wrote:
> Rust, for example.
Let's recap, since you seem to have a very short context window or memory. Someone wrote they couldn't think of anything important Mozilla created after I left. You cited Rust. I testified that Rust started many years before I left and I was Rust's C-level sponsor and immediate colleague of its creator.
You then reappear after several nesting replies to imply I'm lying and have bad motives. After this, here we are with you ignoring your own false claim that Mozilla created Rust after I left. It seems to me, without ascribing motive, that you are the one with a weak grasp on the truth here, even the truth of what you wrote in prior comments on this page.
I think the public and personal contexts are getting mixed together here, to bad effect (as always).
It's a personal situation for you and I can't imagine how much s-t you have heard and taken over the years. You have the misfortune to be personally invested in a public issue, and I'm glad I'm not in your shoes. If we were at a dinner party, of course I wouldn't say a word about it - it would be rude to you and you know infinitely more about it.
But we're not at a private dinner; we're in a public context. People discuss public issues without being experts or researching every detail; they will get some things wrong or be imprecise. Also, they are just not as focused as you are - understandably - on the same things and at the same level detail. When I credited Mozilla with Firefox and Rust, I didn't specifically credit Mitchell Baker with it, nor did I care about that detail of who did what (also, I didn't talk about creation; much of the Rust development was after you - but I only say that because you care; I don't). That's really important to you and so that's what you focused on and I can see where you got that impression - it just wasn't important enough to clarify. It was a bit sloppy, but I'm not writing a dissertation or a contract.
You did inject yourself personally into a 'public context'; I don't think the anger is appropriate, nor your bullshit about my motives. What I wrote was a genuine complement to everyone at Mozilla, including you: It was reminding the world that Mozilla has done so far is spectacular - unreal, heroic achievements that changed the world, twice over. Mozilla is just Mozilla to me, not one person or another.
Still, I apologize that I wasn't more polite when I remarked about potential bias. I didn't respond directly to you, but I should have been careful to make it respectful - not because you are a big deal on some scale, but just the opposite: you're a human being. I knew you were around and regardless of context, I don't buy that public figures are free game for abuse. Good luck with Brave, another great idea that I hope changes the world.
I already said I was not going to speculate on your motives, after easily showing your false claim: that Mozilla created Rust after I left.
So the only "bullshit" about motives has come from you. And you are the only one who seemed emotional, if not angry, to the point you threw "attack" as a typical DARVO move. This is pure projection.
It matters who did what, when. Especially in view of Mitchell's power of the purse at Mozilla. Yes, she could have killed Rust, but it would have blown up in her face and she had no need to kill it. No, she does not get credit for creating Rust even after I left. The Rust team was working on spin-out well before they all left. As for Servo, it is better off out of Mozilla: https://news.itsfoss.com/servo-rust-web-engine/.
Netscape, on its deathbed (and I think due to Baker's efforts, in part), open-sourced the Netscape code. Mozilla was created by ex-Netscapers, developed that code, and released a few versions of a Mozilla browser, which followed Netscape's idea of integrating browser, mail client, webpage editor, other stuff (maybe IRC client?).
Sometime later, a few Mozillians decided the web and Mozilla needed a simple, sleek, fast browser, and built Firefox.
Mozilla was created by Netscape itself, before its "deathbed". They were possibly the first "open-core" project of significant scale: they wanted to do a Big Rewrite (Netscape 4 code was unmanageable and crusty), and hoped that doing it as opensource would speed things up. The original Mozilla suite was supposed to be the experimental/rough version, which Netscape would then polish and sell as its own. Unfortunately, by the time this happened (and it did happen - Netscape released a few Mozilla-based versions), the browser market was entirely commoditized and there was no path to profitability for Netscape (which had been absorbed by AOL by then). The Big Rewrite took way longer than expected, and the open setup introduced even more development friction.
The Mozilla suite never got anything else beyond browser/mail/editor. I think the AOL version shipped a bunch of extra bookmarks and that's it. They had already built some infrastructure for extensions and themes though, and that's effectively what Firefox took to extreme consequences: a skunkwork group of Mozilla devs stripped the suite down to the lone browser, and forced everything else to be an extension. That was Phoenix (rebirth and all that), which became Firebird (because people can't spell Phoenix, and the other surviving products could be aligned as Thunderbird and Sunbird), which became Firefox (because oops in IT there's a Firebird already, a database with angry lawyers).
He achieved a lot.
Launched a new browser with full privacy protections by default, an independent search engine, a private LLM service and more while Mozilla just rebranded things from others.
If anything, it shows how Mozilla with it's resources are just wasting money, brave was bootstraped with a much smaller team and capital, yet they defended privacy in a way Firefox never could.
> they defended privacy in a way Firefox never could
I have some familiarity with Brave. They use Chromium (or some components of it?) which is probably more secure from attackers. It has some built-in privacy, but how is it better than Firefox's?
Because it blocks ads and all trackers with no exceptions? The reason is they aren't afraid from Google, in addition to that they launched a fully independent search engine and added new isolation features to chromium, like localhost access and cookie isolation.
> Mitchell Baker is stepping down as CEO to focus on AI
& from her own blogpost on this announcement[0]:
> I will return to supporting the CEO and leadership team as I have done previously as Exec Chair. In addition, I will expand my work [... to ...] more consistently representing Mozilla in the public [...] through speaking and direct engagement with the community.
I cannot believe Baker doesn't read at least some notes on community sentiment around her various decisions at Mozilla; it must take an astounding level of cognitive dissonance for her to see herself as a suitable candidate for "direct engagement with the community".
It's clear the previous CEO's strategy was not working - neither from a level of personal appeal to me, or for population at large measures like market share, so I'm hoping this means a positive change.
I'm surprised I had to scroll so far down to find a reasonable comment that did not immediately insult Mitchell Baker.
I'm no fan of Baker, but the least we can do is wish her best wishes and hope for a great future for all parties involved. I didn't like her when she was CEO at Mozilla, I don't like her anymore now that she isn't CEO at Mozilla but that doesn't mean I have to resort to shallow attacks on her character. I expect more from HN.
Edit: Corrected mistake about Baker no longer being at Mozilla. Thanks to @M2Ys4U.
Hard for a community of devs to sympathize with a leader who did not admit to their own incompetence and instead of stepping down fired 250 devs while giving herself a raise.
She was simply a parasite and her character is being attacked because her character is fucking awful. With enough money for her family to live comfortably on for eons she fucked with hundreds of lives while driving a business into the ground.
What I don’t understand is people’s blind worship of the upper class and their entitlement to firing hundreds of people while boosting their salary while being incompetent and how they deserve to have nice things said about them when they leave the company they exploited.
I agree, and I'm not one to believe that a CEO should be paid peanuts for the level of responsibility and time commitment it takes to be in that position, but that's assuming the CEO is actually taking responsibility for the performance of the company. If goals are repeatedly not being met the CEO should be the first to take responsibility and take a pay cut or fuck off. If the United States value merit, incompetent CEOs should be held to a higher standard than a rank-and-file employee.
I wonder how many times in a row it would take of you being fired by the CEO who completely mismanaged the company, while massively increasing their own salary multiple times, before you stop wishing them well.
In fact maybe the problem is that you are wishing her well. She's exploited other people enough to be doing well enough on her own. She doesn't need anyone to wish her well. Maybe the least she deserves is to not be doing well at other people's expense. What about those people?
Being nice isn't always the right answer. When people do bad things, there should be negative consequences for them, otherwise that signals to them that their behavior was appropriate. It wasn't. You are doing the morally wrong thing by wishing her well.
No. She isn't entitled any “best whishes” or respect whatsoever when she's been draining Mozilla's money straight to her own pocket “to cover the needs of her family”. Parasitic behavior deserves shaming, that's it.
I hope people are less judgmental and more compassionate toward my and your errors. Shaming, IME and in my belief, is a toxic act in service of the attacker; it makes the situation worse, and even the attacker feels worse and is degraded (though they feel powerful).
Eh this only goes so far. Obviously none of us are embedded into her brain and know exactly what she's thinking, but there's a huge difference between making a mistake because of a misjudgement, and siphoning money off while laying of developers. One of those is something that could happen to you or I, the other is something you or I would have to intentionally make happen.
Now if I disagree, I'm not in good faith? You can't imagine someone has a valid, different point of view? If that's the their perspective, isn't that lacking in good faith?
It's not necessarily that, it's more like your points in the thread come across (to me at least) as a bit of sealioning.
Not everything needs a "what if it was you in that position, your mom, your friend, your sister" POV. Sometimes people are just bad at their jobs, and it's ok to criticize them for it.
It's definition is, people raising questions about things that I believe are already established. But those are the most important questions.
I'm aware that some people have judged and condemned Baker, but that's not persuasive or at all conclusive. Internet mob behavior - and it's clear in some of the responses in this thread and in others - is a signal of error, sometimes of very serious errors. Nobody (wise) ever said, 'this person is really angry and out of control; their analysis must be highly accurate and precise, and their judgment reliable.'
There's also an element to the term's meaning of just asking questions endlessly, but I have expressed clear, strong opinions too.
I don't believe that her past actions need to be taken into consideration when wishing her the very best for the future.
This is slightly unrelated to the point I was trying to make, but I don't think us commentors are entitled to make passes at her character or doubt her motives. Perhaps from your position it seems like an objective fact that Baker was engaging in morally dubious acts (I personally don't think so) but that still doesn't give you (or any of us!) a right to judge her. We do not know her personally so I don't think we have any right to shame her at all. That's just my opinion, I know its controversial, feel free to argue.
Argue is the wrond word there, it makes it seem like I'm silently judging you from a higher pedestal (though I suppose this entire comment gives off that impression) but if you have any questions feel free to ask me. Again this makes it seem like I'm in a position of superiority, I don't know of a better way to phrase it.
Uh yeah .. Michelle Baker, who is one of the founders of Mozilla, the writer of the MPL and who played a role (for a time as the volunteer general manager of the mozilla org, then later again as an employee) in everything from Mozillas rise to - unfortunately - now its decline by being part of the org had "insinuated" herself into Mozilla. You obviously lack the knowledge about Baker and Mozilla to have any business making statements on this topic.
(If you wanna tell me that Michelle Baker recognized before mozilla.org even existed that it will have a meteoric rise, that the person who would have been CEO instead of her took himself out of the race and that that would allow her to make millions as CEO of Mozilla, all I can say is: I doubt that she has a crystal ball that good.)
She is literally a co-founder of the project, foundation and corporation, was the original CEO of the corporation (before stepping down in 2008 before coming back in 2019 as CEO) and has been executive chairwoman of the board for both the foundation and corporation for as long as Mozilla has existed, so you can call her a bad CEO, but diminishing her as “a lawyer working for a large organization” is pretty dismissive for a person who was one of the first lawyers for what became a large corporation (she joined Netscape in 1994 IIRC), co-founded the open source project, led that open source project at AOL, continued to run the open source project after AOL laid her off, and is the person who is probably more than any other figure, directly responsible for the charitable organization even existing to begin with.
I’m not going to argue that Baker was a good CEO, because I honestly don’t know. And I won’t say that Firefox’s languishing isn’t in some ways a reflection of her leadership because she’s been executive chairwoman of the foundation (which the corporation reports to) basically since its inception, but she’s also for better or worse, synonymous with Mozilla. You don’t have Mozilla in any form without her and she’s been there from the beginning.
You don’t have to like her, but this attempt at diminishing her role as a foundational leader of Mozilla is off base and weird.
The idea that Mitchell Baker "insinuated herself" into Mozilla is ridiculous. She was an early Netscape employee, one of the original creators of the Mozilla project, and a founder of the Mozilla Foundation.
> Are you sure that what you're calling "shallow attacks" aren't just statements of truth that show someone to be an awful person?
I believe that is something that can only be said by Baker, or people who know her sufficiently well. I assume most of the commentors here who are criticising Baker do not fall in either of those categories.
All the problems Mozilla has are summed up in this one sentence (taken from the Mozilla blog post):
> Enter Laura Chambers, a dynamic board member who will step into the CEO role for the remainder of this year.
"Laura Chambers" is a link to her LinkedIn profile. Nothing you can do but shake your head if it didn't occur to anyone that putting that link in the post announcing her appointment was a bad idea.
What I find weird is how many professional web developers contact me to ask what theme I’m using on my blog, a straight HTML website with 42 lines of inline CSS. I even was asked once with JS library I was using. (there is no JS, it’s a blog !)
None of those sending me those emails bothered to even look at the code. None even thought it was possible that this was NOT a "theme" somewhere on the web.
Well the parent expresses surprise at how many such emails they receive. I don't think the disrespect an entire class of people, they just say "it's not a couple naive emails, it's a lot more than I would expect".
I always find it frustrating to read HN comments expressing hatred towards mobile and whitespace-rich designs.
These designs exist based on user research, as most people find them pleasant and intuitive. I don't understand what's wrong with these design patterns.
I don't doubt in the slightest that fancy mobile-y design styles look nice and are often intuitive at T=0, but we've lost a lot of throughput and information density by going for them as an industry.
It's the same as trying to write code on a phone, but backwards
All too often being 'mobile first' means being desktop last. It feels like a betrayal when UX becomes a zero sum tradeoff between new users and the enthusiast users who built the platform and community to be what it is. User research metrics will favor the new users every time because inexperienced users tend to be the majority. Eventually, the enthusiast users leave, causing many to wonder why the original culture and appeal of a website disappeared.
I'm not sure why people think tech asceticism would grant people the ability to successfully run a large company.
The decline of Firefox's popularity didn't happen because the CEO uses LinkedIn, arguably one could say that the resistance to trends would be more harmful than helpful if you're aiming to improve browser marketshare. The problem for Mozilla is that the internet is not mostly weird nerds anymore.
During Chrome's rise to popularity I don't think focusing on privacy was the popular thing to do, but the tides do seem to be turning and Mozilla could benefit from riding this wave again.
When you pay 6M, I think you have the right to be slightly elitist. Isn't that the whole argument for such indecent salaries? "But they are one of a kind! We have to pay them that much otherwise we're screwed".
Being in love with the tech doesn't make someone a good CEO. Notably, sometimes standing too close to a problem prevents one from seeing solutions. Let's maybe start with actual admonisions against her (and her replacement's) relevant qualifications, achievements, or character (or lack thereof), instead of grabbing pitchforks and venting about how she's the wrong person to get a greenfield browser off the ground; simply put, that's not where Firefox or Mozilla is at right now.
It has nothing to do with tech. It's about a “pivot to data privacy” linking to one of the worse offender is terms of privacy invasion, that's just insane. It's as if say announced pivot to cloud computing and did so on a website hosted on AWS.
Let say for a moment that it is acceptable for the CEO of a corporation working on the independence of the Web to not have her personal independent webpage.
I know, absurd, but let’s assume.
Let say for a moment that it is acceptable that the personal independent webpage is replaced by a monopolistic platform trying to centralize the web.
I know, absurd, but let’s assume
Let say for a moment that we don’t care that the platform is owned by one of the biggest competitor of the corporation. Historically and currently.
I know, absurd, but let’s assume.
Let say for a moment that it is not a problem that the platform is one of the worst offender when regarding privacy of its users and handling personal data, even if the new CEO is talking about privacy.
I know, absurd, but let’s assume.
Let say that to there’s no problem in requiring every person clicking this link to have an account on the linked platform to know who the privacy-oriented new CEO is.
I know, absurd, but let’s assume.
Let say that nobody at Mozilla considered it to be a problem as the introductory post of the new CEO…
I’m sorry I’m sounding condescending. I was trying to be funny. The point is that there are so many problems that it is even a problem to list them. Those problems are so evident to me that I didn’t thought people might not understand it.
1. Linkedin is a platform promoting a closed-garden vision of the web while Firefox is seen a the last stand against that closed vision.
2. Linkedin is owned by Microsoft. Microsoft has been the biggest opponent to Mozilla and still is, even if it may be topped by Google in that place.
3. Linkedin is known for its terrible security practices regarding personal datas. It is also a big seller of private data. Which goes against "promoting privacy".
This tells a lot from a symbolic perspective. But it is not only symbolic:
4. You need a Linkedin account to view the link. Meaning that the very first step of the news CEO is requiring users to have an account on a rival platform which harvest their data if they want to know who she is.
5. It means that the new CEO find her Linkedin account more important that any personal website, if any, which is philosophically the opposite of Mozilla self-proclaimed mission.
I hope it is is clearer and you understand that, yes, it is a big deal. CEO position is mostly symbolic. The very first move and the fact that nobody at Mozilla even realized that it could send a bad signal is enough indication that nobody there even understand the original mission anymore. Nobody there cares about privacy. Nobody there cares about the independence of the Web.
What he means is that as a CEO of a corporation that is supposed to defend things like openness, privacy, power to the users etc., it's ironic that the only tool to see her profile is from a Microsoft-owned company, which is quite the opposite of most of Mozilla's core values (well, mostly regarding privacy).
I don't find myself reacting to any of that with the angst it seems this inspired in you. If someone doesn't have a personal website, it doesn't make me think they hate independent websites or privacy. And if they don't have a personal website but someone on their staff needs to link to a persistent, business-oriented online profile, LinkedIn is about as good as anything I can think of.
Because you have to create an account, be logged in, and agree to be tracked. In other words, the opposite of the mission of Mozilla. They've long had a reputation as one of the worst offenders, and they're owned by Microsoft, which is obviously not known for respecting user privacy.
Absurd, how? Can you be more specific and plain about what you believe is wrong, without the oratory rhetoric? You’ve presented a list of evidence in support of some point you have in mind, but we need you to plainly state your beliefs — not just your arguments in support of them — if you’d like us to consider your views.
These things are somewhat ironic, given the focus of the states mission. But is it /really/ a reflection or explanation of any serious problem that the organization has? Is is really an indication that the interim CEO is not capable?
Chambers doesn't look like she has any other digital footprint in general apart from the one LinkedIn page that still doesn't contain any personal info other than her workex and education.
I would argue this is much better than having your own website and putting out more information about yourself than is needed.
Because you have to create an account, be logged in, and agree to be tracked. In other words, the opposite of the mission of Mozilla. They've long had a reputation as one of the worst offenders, and they're owned by Microsoft, which is obviously not known for respecting user privacy.
Everyone: Mozilla sucks and hasn’t done anything useful in the last ten years.
Also everyone: oh, this rust thing is nice.
Hm. Not every toy you make is a winner, but I think it’s fair to say that while maybe it wasn’t a commercial success, we all ought to say thank you for supporting rust and servo while it was growing up.
Mitchell Baker wasn't CEO while Rust was growing up, and within six months of taking up the position again she'd laid off Mozilla's Rust team. It's totally fair that she gets exactly zero credit for Rust's success.
Even if every single person that is aware of how problematic Chrome's dominance is would switch to Firefox right now, that wouldn't move the needle in any measurable way.
When it comes to quasi-monopolies like this, the "problem" are the passive consumers that will just use whatever comes pre-installed and pre-configure (and when it comes to browsers isn't associated to Microsoft). Coincidentally, that behavior is also what keeps Firefox/Mozilla alive by being able to charge for the default search engine configuration.
If you only use Firefox how do you know that it's great? My general impression is that Firefox is lagging far behind in many areas. It hasn't gotten worse, probably gotten better, but the other players have gotten MUCH better.
Oh I use Edge at work actually and Chrome when occassional things break (mostly Google services). I find them very much the same. What differences stand out to you?
I've had Chrome, Safari, and Firefox open pretty much all day every day for the past decade+ and find them to be overwhelmingly alike. What is Firefox missing?
This is a great question. A lot of it I can't quite put my finger on. It just felt off. Which makes it impossible for them to improve since it's not concrete.
I know for a fact one of the things I hated was that I was hoping to get vertical tabs working, but the vertical tab extension I tried at the time felt clunky and only duplicated the tabs in both horizontal and vertical. To disable the horizontal I'd have to edit a custom css file. This all felt very amateur hour. And I think I even went through the effort of doing so and it broke something else in the process (possibly my fault).
Admittedly I don't have a good solution for this even now in my daily driver (Ungoogled Chromium), so it's not a firm "They need to fix this." I think I was just turned off that a solution boiled down to "create a custom config file".
Perhaps something particular to your machine...out of curiosity I overlaid screenshots of HN on both on Mac and Linux and the text was nearly pixel identical, though Firefox seemingly has a taller default paragraph line height than Chrome. There were a handful tiny differences in individual character rendering and spacing, but so minor as to be basically impossible to identify without quickly flipping back and forth between the overlaid layers while zoomed in.
Same, I use Firefox 90% of the time and I have no idea what all the complaining is about. My only real issue is that fullscreening videos on macOS sucks (ie, it takes forever).
I certainly don't personally care about declining market share, that's not my problem. Mozilla makes a good product. Chrome has become the default browser thanks to Google's muscle (and also making a good product), and I dunno what grand strategy is supposed to compete with that.
> I dunno what grand strategy is supposed to compete with that.
Agree 100%.
In its current state I find Firefox simply _better_ than Chrome - mostly due to how well integrated Multi-Account Containers are. Like you I am puzzled by exactly what is Firefox missing that it is a deal breaker for people. Is it just the occasional hiccup when using a Google/MS service? Some people mention 4K videos not playing properly - that sounds like an acceptable reason. But surely that still isn't a good reason for not being able to have Firefox as one's daily driver.
I have the same suspicion as you, Chrome's marketshare is simply because Google services are so popular and they direct you to Chrome, and that the most popular mobile OS (Android) runs Chrome by default.
Is there "financial success" to be made in programming languages? Usually companies use them to promote their own product environments, which is how they make money, but not through the language (or the compiler, or the interpreter) itself
That’s kind of my point. What would be the play for Rust? Mozilla is all about open source-it’s hard to imagine some enterprise scheme here, or what that would even be.
They should have dogfooded harder - rebuilding Gecko fully in Rust, then shopping it around as the safer and faster alternative to Chromium for embedding. Community would get it for free, OEMs gotta pay, but it would be so much better, more modern, and more robust, that nobody would have minded.
No company would do that. What OEM is going to pay for a new, less compatible browser engine written in an unproven language that no one knows? Even if it is safer, that's pretty much the lowest priority for many companies, and safer != unable to exploit.
Companies who want to embed a browser engine into their product use WebKit, which is free, and maintained by multiple other companies, and has been around long enough that it should be compatible with pretty much any website that exists.
Webkit was "new and unproven" once. It won out because it was easy to slot in, well-performing, and more modern than alternatives at the time. Most big projects have slowly moved away from WebKit anyway, to its more modern derivatives Blink and Chromium.
If Mozilla could produce an engine that is easier/as easy as to slot in, it's maybe faster or lighter in a few areas, and basically guarantees no exploits and crashes, there would be a massive market. Browser views power more and more appliances and applications, for which the current options are "the lesser evil" - cue the complaints about massive Electron apps. There is a big space for competition there, for someone whose main business is building browsers.
> Mitchell Baker is stepping down as CEO to focus on AI and internet safety as chair of the nonprofit foundation
> Baker, a Silicon Valley pioneer who co-founded the Mozilla Project, says it was her decision to step down as CEO, adding that the move is motivated by a sense of urgency over the current state of the internet and public trust.
Mitchell is not leaving and stepped down on her own. I hope that this still means a good change for Mozilla.
I'm confused as to why Baker is not running things while a permanent CEO is found.
Chambers is stepping in temporarily, and Fortune offers some details: "Chambers says she won’t be seeking a permanent CEO role because she plans to move back to Australia later this year for family reasons. 'I think this is an example of Mozilla doing the right role modelling in how to manage a succession,' says Chambers."
If it's only going to take a matter of months to find a new CEO, and Baker has been doing it since 2020, and before that from 05-08, what difference does it make if she keeps running things a few/several more months? Why have a third person running things temporarily?
In my experience interim CEO are used to make unpopular decisions in the company and then removed, kind of like getting New Coke and then as everyone gets mad you bring back Coke Classic but now with cheaper ingredients and everyone is happy.
I don't want to be so alarmist, but... haven't Brave kind of eaten Firefox lunch here?
Yes, Brave subtly pushes some crypto nonsense, but it also delivers on privacy, it focuses where it matters. (It also bundles IPFS and Tor in the base install, I believe.)
And you can say "oh it's still Chrome!" but - Chromium is FOSS, and to me, it shows that Brave focus on what matters (data privacy) and not on what doesn't (writing their own HTML, CSS, JS engine).
I don't agree with the opinion that browser needs to have its own rendering engine to be able to be focused on privacy. I think it's the opposite - using Chrome engine helps Brave to focus on what matters.
But it's just me. It's fun to build own browser engine, I get it, I just don't know if it's time and money well spent.
> It's fun to build own browser engine, I get it, I just don't know if it's time and money well spent.
It's not about fun, it's about denying Google the right to exercise complete control over the way that the web evolves. Having independent browser engines with substantial market share is the only path to a web that isn't just an extension of Google, and we shouldn't be relying on Apple alone to bear that weight.
That said, the success of this strategy for containing Google depends on having market share, which Mozilla's recent strategies have completely failed to do, but that has less to do with their independence than it does with Mozilla's focusing on just about anything other than Firefox.
The Edge browser sometimes holds features back even though they are based on chromium source code. For example AV1 support, so there is some kind of diversity of browsers possible even though the people who code it all up have power.. but they have power because they create features which is deserved.
A fork with features removed is better than nothing, but not as good as an independent implementation. A fork has to weigh the risks of becoming too far out of sync with mainline—if it vetoes too often it can become difficult or impossible to merge in future fixes from upstream. An independent implementation, on the other hand, can make a call on each feature individually based on the value and the risks.
it's the same thing in the end: Firefox weighs pros and cons of implementing a feature and Edge weighs pros and cons of including a feature. It is still true though that Google has more power when everyone depends on their implementation especially because it's the path of least resistance to include everything and change nothing. And yes that means it could be more work if you choose to change something.
> especially because it's the path of least resistance to include everything and change nothing
It's only the path of least resistance for a chromium fork. For Firefox it takes a lot of work to implement a feature, which means the value proposition has to be really good for it to make it in.
And you can say "oh it's still Chrome!" but - Chromium is FOSS, and to me, it shows that Brave focus on what matters (data privacy) and not on what doesn't (writing their own HTML, CSS, JS engine)
but avoiding a browser monoculture does matter. having all browsers built on chromium is a serious problem given the way google treats chrome. see the latest decisions regarding extension support and adblocking all of which will end up in chromium. do you think brave will have the resources to fork chromium to avoid those changes?
Pick your battles... easier to cherrypick your own stuff on top of already existing codebase. At least you need to worry only about a small patchset rather than own rendering and js engine just for a very abstract concept of "avoiding monoculture", and instead of focusing on CSS rules and JS optimization and whatnot, you can focus on things that matter for your goals
it's not my fight though. If Mozilla thinks burning all these resources on their own engine is a good thing then, burn ahead. there are worst things to burn money on in the end. and it's not my money...
Having an independent engine is not necessarily about privacy, it's about... Well, independence. If Google gets away with Blink being the only viable engine, they can push any bullshit they want (e.g. WEI) and we'll have to live with it. A Chromium-only future is one where "the web" is just another name for Google's walled garden.
One of the things I like about Brave (it's been my daily driver for years now) is that it lets me give the gift of The Internet I Experience to non-technical folks like my mom.
Most people are just... inundated with ads. Try using a stock Chrome with no ad blockers for just a day. It's absolutely miserable. But every time you add another "setup" step you add potential breakage.
Now, I can just give someone Brave and they can have the same experience most of us do on HN!
Brave’s usage curve is still going up and the MAU is approaching 70 million. Firefox has another 115 million monthly active users. By Chrome’s numbers either is barely used.
- DeAMPing: I think AMP has been dead for a few years now
- Limiting network server calls: I think this is a bit tangential to privacy, limiting calls is generally good but it doesn't mean you're transmitting less information. Brave's post comparing different browsers' first startup network calls is from 2019, not sure how Firefox performs today.
- Private windows with Tor: Firefox doesn't have built-in Tor integration, but the actual Tor Browser is built from Firefox.
I think Firefox also has one or two features that Brave does not, like Multi-Account Containers, and some paid services like https://relay.firefox.com/.
IMHO the best selling point for Brave is on Android because it's Chrome with a built-in ad-blocker. Firefox was always noticeably slower than Chrome on Android. They were usually on par on desktop except for the occasional website that would lock up the JavaScript engine and freeze Firefox.
A great goal for Firefox would be "the archiveable, downloadable internet". Make it easy to download stuff off a page, even if the site is adversarial. I should be able to right-click and download an Instagram photo or a YouTube video. Integrate something like archive-it (the Internet Archive tool) for full-page downloads.
It fits with the goal of an open internet, is easy to sell to users, and it's unlikely that Chrome will add the feature, since Google owns YouTube. And there's an obvious route for monetization: sell cloud storage for archived pages.
Mozilla is back at trying to find PMF because what they set out to do they achieved: the web is now standards-compliant and almost all browser engines are almost entirely open-source. The web is truly cross-platform and open. This is a blinding success and entirely due to Mozilla's operations in the 2000s that brought standards-compliance and open-source to the forefront.
What happens to an org with a goal when it hits the goal? It has to find a new goal or dissolve. It's tempting to say that dissolution is the right thing. But if you have accumulated resources, I imagine it's hard not to direct that at something else you care about.
The standards-compliant web was a big deal. I cared about that a lot. Many of my friends were Firefox ambassadors or whatever. Kids were installing Firefox on computer lab machines and hiding the IE icon. It was a different time.
I don't really care about data privacy like that, but maybe there are others who care about it like I cared about being able to view the web on a Linux browser with as much fidelity as IE on Windows. I find it unlikely since I think techno-optimism is a galvanizing goal and techno-pessimism is a limiting one. But that's just my opinion.
Overall, I'm quite happy with what Mozilla did. It makes sense they have to cycle CEOs till someone finds out what sticks.
> I simply cannot trust a CEO of a company who says outright that we need more deplatforming on the Internet.
> We need more than deplatforming
the article you've linked explicitly states that deplatforming is an incomplete solution and that what should really be happening is increasing transparency.
Still waiting for a Mozilla-branded email domain/provider. They've already got their Mozilla-branded partnerships with the VPN and now the data scrubber. Not sure why they're sleeping on email. That seems like an obvious thing that I would pay for.
It's not the worst idea. The Linux foundation will let you buy a @linux.com email (for people who want to feel like an important Linux person).
I like that it's not something like FirefoxOS where they need to invest years of R&D playing catch-up. Relatively simple to set-up. And free advertising for the Brand™ whenever someone sends an email, such marketing value, very viral.
Baker is just cashing in. Unlike CEOs who've been on Big Money from the start (or shortly after the start), she has toiled in relative obscurity for a very long time, arguably being severely underpaid for the responsibilities she took on.
At some point she stopped believing in the long-term prospect of Mozilla, or in its mission, and decided she would get hers before it was too late.
Does Mozilla even need a CEO and its weird company+foundation structure? They should run it more like KDE or TDF and use that $6M to pay a few dozen engineers.
Well, it depends... in Eastern Europe you could probably hire 80 developers with that money, while in California 15-20. "A few dozen" seems like a fair approximation.
Perhaps you should look up how much Mozilla engineers get paid. You can hire a lot of P2 engineers (including the often overlooked extra cost for the employer to cover insurance, rrsp, 401k, etc) for six million united states dollars. Especially if your company already works highly distributed.
That might be great if Mozilla developed some basic CRUD application. I highly doubt that what they need is a couple dozen more junior people (we'll overlook the fact that we are all ignoring what the word few means). If they actually had a strategy for the future, they'd probably need more P3s, 4s, and 5s. P5s are far more expensive. You also have equipment costs. Unless things have changed, they pay for a lot of home equipment including chairs. They also had annual get togethers that were extremely expensive per person and they frequently flew people around to pair.
Three cheers for someone who has become hated by the only community that still use Firefox.
I don’t think Firefox will ever see double digit usage again, but I hope there can be some kind of turn around and privacy focus built into my browser.
You're probably right because we've left. I was a Firefox advocate for the longest time. I used Firefox since v3.0, and before that Mozilla and Netscape. I only recently switched over to Brave in the past year or two. I'm doing my part to switch friends and family over too. The only thing Mozilla has accomplished in the past 10 years was releasing Rust, and that was before firing the whole team.
I don't have any particular opinion on Mitchel Baker, but...
> You're probably right because we've left
"We"? I certainly didn't and I'm not alone.
> I only recently switched over to Brave in the past year or two. I'm doing my part to switch friends and family over too
You don't say why. Why leave Firefox for Brave, and more importantly, why encourage people to do so?
Despite all Mozilla's flaws, Firefox is still great and contrary to Brave, it doesn't contribute to Google's browser monopoly.
Integrated adblocking, which is often mentioned, is not a good reason: it's faster and easier to install uBlock Origin on an existing Firefox install than to install a brand new browser and make your relatives change their habits.
What do you say to your relatives to justify this switch?
I'm trying to understand what I can take from your comment here.
I was replying to the statement in the parent post:
>> If you are suggesting that people who still use firefox hate Mitchell Baker, you are mistaken.
I stopped using Firefox. From this and other threads about Mozilla/Firefox, plenty of other HN people have too. It's not just Mitchel Baker. Mozilla has been under schizophrenic leadership for years, running in a hundred directions while neglecting their core product: Firefox. Firefox at its best broke IE's dominance, and at it's peak had 30% market share, and now it's what? 4%? If the trend continues, it's going to drop below Steam's Linux market share of 1%.
> You don't say why. Why leave Firefox for Brave, and more importantly, why encourage people to do so?
>
> Despite all Mozilla's flaws, Firefox is still great and contrary to Brave, it doesn't contribute to Google's browser monopoly.
I don't see Firefox having a long term future. Brave, Vivaldi, or one of these other Chrome reskins will assume Firefox's place as it slowly fades into a niche browser. Even Microsoft gave up and made Edge a Chrome reskin. Mozilla had the opportunity to have the best and most popular browser and they blew it. They abandoned Firefox OS and Servo. Somehow Rust survived.
> Integrated adblocking, which is often mentioned, is not a good reason: it's faster and easier to install uBlock Origin on an existing Firefox install than to install a brand new browser and make your relatives change their habits.
>
> What do you say to your relatives to justify this switch?
When they ask, and they do for some reason because I wound up being IT, I tell them I prefer to use Brave now. That it's a privacy focused variation of Chrome. Or if they complain about ads on Android's Youtube app, I tell them to use Youtube from Brave. When I setup a new computer for any of them I now install Brave along side whatever previous browser they used: Chrome, Edge, or Firefox. I used to always install Chrome and Firefox (with uBlock Origin of course).
Two things. First, an Android browser that's as fast as Chrome (a reskin) with a built-in ad-blocker. Sure you can install uBlock Origin on Firefox for Android but it's noticeably slower than Chrome. Second, a continuation of the old Firefox spirit as a privacy focused browser. Firefox has since lost that spirit and has been chasing after Chrome since at least 57. The shitcoins are a passing fad. Just turn them off.
So you discount mozilla actually implementing and maintaining a separate multiplatform browser engine and a whole ass language for that and instead find more value in forking other people's work and adding rudimentary features on top of it? I would have imagined someone who used to be firefox advocate since 3.0 to be used to getting subpar performance.
Rust is independent now, and Mozilla fired most of that team a while ago. Mozilla has little to show for raking in $500 million a year from Google.
Firefox never was slow on the desktop in my experience. Chrome was faster for the first few years. SpiderMonkey always lagged behind V8 in benchmarks, but general performance of the browsers has been equal since the early or mid 2010s.
If you judge things based on hn threads, you'd think google is going to be bankrupt tomorrow while having 0 users. It is still the most popular search engine in the world.
I think most people are quite aware google prints money with ads, and quite reasonably deride google for all the rest their bewildering product decisions
> If you are suggesting that people who still use firefox hate Mitchell Baker, you are mistaken.
I dunno about that. I'm a Firefox user and I dislike Mozilla as an organization and think that Mitchell Baker is completely incompetent. The modern browser space is a shitshow and Firefox is just the least worst option out there.
I don't know how to be any more clear, as someone who used firefox since 3.0 and talked to plenty people irl who use firefox - the haters are a vocal minority that only exists on forums.
> the haters are a vocal minority that only exists on forums.
You seem to have lost the total picture - some sort of tunnel vision due to focusing on the "forums".
Firefox had a gigantic market share but lost it.
Let's assume that the market share dropped from 80% to 3%. So 77% percentage points lost!
So from original market share of 80%:
1) 77% users simply quit. They didnt bother to come to "the forums" to complain. They didnt like the product, so they simply stopped using it. They voted with their legs and wallets.
Then there are still 3% of users that remain with firefox (of the original 80%). Those can be probably divided into few subgroups:
2) Those who dislike the direction where firefox is going - and objectively, arent they right? Product lost lots of market share (you call them "haters")
3) Those who still use the product for many reasons
4) Those who will use the product even if it is subpart and completely worse the competition. Like those sports fans that support a team even if the team is very bad. This vocal minority of zealots will defend their favorite product at all costs. Even if firefox pissed on their faces, they would come to "the forums" and write that rain is great...
It's not exactly dinner table conversation, and average internet-users probably wouldn't care much about the implications of such a company and situations, sure. The misgivings aren't justified among many who are aware of the details? Shouldn't non-profits deserve some scrutiny when they're seemingly being mishandled?
It's rare enough to warrant a discussion in passing wherever I notice it. Usually people use it because they don't want google monopoly and I have not seen anyone have the kind of burning passion for looking into pockets of women CEO's as in the comments here. I disagree with a lot of the decisions she made, but looking at suggestions for improving ff marketshare in this thread I am happy that she was at the helm and not random hn'ers.
Chrome’s path of ‘number go up’ growth which Google seems to now require from their products will be increasingly evil. We’ve managed to stop attestation, but I’m afraid they’ll try again and in different ways, more subtly and quietly. Firefox better be ready with both the browser engineering and a massive marketing push when this happens.
All the Lockwise functionality has been integrated into Firefox’s password manager on Android and iOS, including password syncing and filling passwords into native apps’ login.
> But AI has given the nonprofit foundation and its cofounder Baker a fresh sense of mission in creating alternatives to tackle deepfakes, data privacy issues and the power of big tech. It launched a Mozilla.ai startup last year and Mozilla Corp. is focused on product extensions like Mozilla Monitor that wipe subscribers’ data off the web.
Ironically, it has been Facebook with its release of Llama models and hat you can run yourself that has actually increased end user power and control with respect to AI. Having something that you can run on your machine (either owned or rented) is intrinsically more empowering and private for the user than sending your data off to some other company subject to their rules and their notions of “safety”.
Good riddance. State of mozilla shows she was not fit for the job. It is too late anyway. Years ago, she should have been fired for her post after the death of a veteran mozilla developer.
Focus on data privacy may ring a bell with people using ad blockers. Not for the regular joe though. They just want things to work and Chrome just works.
I wonder what percentage of internet users use ad blockers? That would pretty much represent the market cap for Firefox.
Good. Note that language like "has chosen to step down" doesn't really mean anything. It could still practically mean they were fired, as in they were given an ultimatum of step down or we'll fire you.
But let's be real: she should be fired. She had no vision for Mozilla. Her pay went up as Firefox market share went down. Her strategy revolved around "<buzzword of the year> services". Most recently, that was "AI services".
Now Mozilla has already spun out the Rust Foundation (in 2021). I'm not sure what their strategy needs to be but I think it revolves around doubling-down on Rust, kind of like how the Apache Foundation incubates a bunch of projects. Just like we have Webkit, that could mean creating Rust browser components and a browser entirely based on that, kind of like how they tried to with Servo in FF.
Memory safety is simply too important an issue for reliance on C/C++ in the long term. Provably correct programs and components are (IMHO) going to become increasingly important.
Stop playing around with [buzzword] (currently "AI"). Double down on Rust.
Firefox's unique selling point was that you could trust it. Mozilla taught me that open source software was free from skeevy used-car-salesman commercial advertising tricks.
This morning at work when I opened Firefox, instead of a blank tab it showed a popup advert saying “New device in your future?”. I found this string on bugzilla.mozilla.org, and apparently it's supposed to be an advert for setting up a Mozilla Account.
This is too stressful. I need a tool I don't have to second-guess all the time.
I've used Firefox for 20 years. I wish it would go back to behaving like a not-for-profit I can trust.
(Also, if anyone from Fedora is listening, please consider whether having this sort of user experience in an app installed by default harms your reputation more or less than GNOME Web would.)
My biggest problem with the old CEO was her unnecessarily large salary while laying off the entire Servo team and then some. If this new CEO is still making nearly 3 million then I don't think we have fixed the problem.
Haven’t Mozilla pivoted continually for years? At this point I’m unsure if I’d call it ‘pivoting’ rather than ‘continually turning in circles toward whatever the newest shiniest fad is’.
When you look at their latest products, it seems like they were starting to sell user data, it was quite scary since Mozilla is like the most respected company when it comes to privacy.
> Mozilla Corp., which manages the open-source Firefox browser, announced today that Mitchell Baker is stepping down as CEO to focus on AI and internet safety as chair of the nonprofit foundation.
Finally. After lining her pockets and running Firefox into the ground for 15 years.
Quite hilarious Mozilla took this long to realize how she was slowly destroying the company to the point where it is beyond saving and incapable of making money other than being on Google's payroll.
As Mozilla's #1 hater I wish them all the best. The specific mentioning on doubling down on firefox specifically is exactly the kind of change I have said again and again they need to do. We shall see what comes of it, but for once, I wish them well!
Mozilla should handover Firefox to a separate entity and continue with their wishy washy projects. Only thing they are doing right now is ruining Firefox. I'll surely donate to such an entity if they solely focus on Firefox.
In case you were wondering how they make money...this is from Investopedia:
"
Mozilla Firefox
Mozilla releases its annual financial statements each November for the previous year. The company’s latest revenue numbers are from 2020 when the browser brought in nearly $497 million, 88.8% of which came from royalties.
These royalties refer to the percentage of advertising revenue Mozilla receives whenever someone uses the built-in search engine that the Firefox browser provides.
In addition to search royalties, Mozilla earns money from donations and from sponsored new tab tiles, which can be disabled."
I've always used Firefox. I've long converted my friends and loved ones into Firefox users, going in depth about the pros of using a browser that does not exist solely to profit off their data and impose their rules onto a free internet (somewhat) that I grew up on and live off, to this day.
Dev teams find it easier to slap "Use Chrome for best experience" or the more annoying "Your browser is not supported" on web applications instead of maintaining compatibility for another browser, but can you blame them?
I've thought long and hard about the "free" internet. The free internet, the trove of knowledge, the bleeding edge of what technology has to offer, one of the more important places where humanity advances. Also perhaps regresses in the veil of psuedo anonymity.
Pixels, cookies, beacons, benign sounding words all used to profile and map everything about you on this internet. To sell you more ads, to keep the % increase over past quarter at acceptable rates.
This rant is exaggerated, inaccurate and perhaps emotional coming from me. The internet is something I hold dear, my privacy is something I hold dear. From time to time I see myself type "dat" and FF autocompletes it to "data.firefox.com", say a little "oh well" to myself and click the return key. I click on the yellow button at the bottom of the page and stare at the MAU chart for a good few seconds before Ctrl+W and going back to whatever I was doing. Small up spikes made me happy, but the downward trend does not make me sad, since I have accepted it. Maybe somebody crazy and determined will fork the project, if it comes to that, but maintaining a browser is a tall ordeal and maintaining is not enough.
Baker at some point after laying off hundreds of Mozilla employees said something along the lines of "I could be making more elsewhere, so this little pay increase to myself is no biggie" (not her words at all, but this is what she meant).
I have waited so long for this news. A long, long, time. Maybe now, FF can ship security patches as fast as Chrome does, maybe now the small upward spikes in the MAU chart won't be so small anymore, maybe now Mozilla will stop making Pocket a thing, maybe now the days of free internet are extended a little more.
I have worked at an personalized ad startup (criteo)
I have read on crypto, own some.
Despite it I have exactly ZERO F** IDEA of what privacy means and entails in context to web browsing. Last thing i read was that 'anonymous' stuff were actually not anonymous, and that anyway someone could track you even across IP. And yeah also there's the NSA it knows anything about you anyway.
> what privacy means and entails in context to web browsing
The most private browsing you can have is when no other party besides you (A) and the site you are bringing up (B) are part of the communication.
- TLS, formerly SSL, provides transport security - meaning eavesdroppers that might be listening in to A and B above will only see encrypted data.
- DoH provides transport security for the system that resolves DNS names to IP addresses (needed for your browser to connect to a site). DNS is distributed and not authenticated by design, meaning the DNS server your browser talks to could be redirected or intercepted. DoH prevents at least your ISP or public Wi-Fi network provider from doing that.
So those are things that increase privacy. The following decrease privacy.
- Web sites themselves run code (Javascript) which can communicate back with the server in the background.
- Javascript and HTML cookies allow websites to store arbitrary data on your computer - not typically too much data, but enough to store a unique identifier that can be used to recognize you. Other data your browser provides to Javascript, such as screen resolution, installed fonts, and mouse events, can also be used.
- Websites often import code from other servers - such as gathering metrics, delivering ads, etc. The code these servers run often reports data back to them and stores their own persistent data such as cookies, etc. Adblocking is a popular way to reduce this impact.
These are ways "tracking across your IP" can be done. This persistent data can also be used to correlate your visits, so that, even if you are not logged in to a site (e.g. anonymous), the website can still know who you are.
None of the above really addresses what a website does with basic statistics and information it collects after it is transmitted and has made it completely out of the browser. In most cases you've given this data voluntarily and it's needed to conduct a service, such as purchase history from an e-commerce site. That's really a separate privacy thing and not possible to directly address using browser technologies.
Not that privacy is important, but in the age where everyone is thinking GPTs will become the new interface to internet, it does not look like the right strategy for a browser to pivot to privacy.
Edge already has a copilot and looks like Chrome has something in the works too. I am afraid this strategy will only push Firefox more distance from prime time.
All within family - the same people who ignored Firefox and didnt give the users what they want (customization & extensions) now just swap places around.
Meanwhile Firefox marketshare is pathetic and money can dry up.
Chrome killing extensions too! Google must be happy of installing those people in charge of Mozilla.
I feel like data privacy is always the last throe of a company before hanging it up. I hope that's not the case with Mozilla. Not a big enough market cares about data privacy to make it a primary marketing message, unfortunately.
Congratulations to Mozilla for making it through this era!
"The hate of men will pass, and CEOs leave, and the power they took from the people will return to the people. And so long as CEOs leave, liberty will never perish."
They can focus their energy on one thing. Improve Firefox performance when compared to Chrome and see market share rise. They are distracted with Pocket, VPN among other things
Can this new CEO please concentrate on the core product, which is the Firefox browser, and not all these other services like VPN and monitoring of personal data?
I hope they can at least spin off the browser division into its own entity. Mozilla the org has become some sort of wannabe think tank that people are vaguely aware of but mostly just ignore. Meanwhile, Firefox has been circling the drain for a decade...
This is a group that gets way too much money from Google and doesn't know what to do with it...
Now the people who have consistently put the blame for Firefox's declining relevance squarely on Mitchell will be vindicated or exposed. What market share do we think Firefox will have in a year's time? (Personally I'm not too hopeful.)
Being "pro-data-privacy" as a browser vendor seems like an inherently contradiction in terms. It's like apple feigning interest in protecting consumers when they run their own ad network.
They could consider dropping Gecko in favor of Blink, which would save a lot of engineering resources that could be used to implement features instead of web compatibility, and would effectively guarantee that Firefox will be always strictly better than Chrome (since it would be Chrome minus the Google antifeatures plus the Mozilla features).
Your wants are not necessarily the best business strategy. Basing their browser off Chromium and then innovating off of it could lead to more user value being delivered.
https://archive.ph/rmMEb