[quesera]

I don't know who should be Mozilla CEO. But I know that the current management is failing in unexciting and repetitive ways.

Someone with new ideas should be Mozilla CEO. Someone who believes in the mission of the organization, and will use the organization's vast resources to chart a new path that respects that mission.

An executive search would have no trouble finding quaified candidates at that pay level. They might not work out either. But failing in the same way, over and over, is silly magnified to horrifying due to the importance of Mozilla to the web and the public.

I don't entirely agree about Eich. He was respected in the org, and obviously has ideas that exceed Mozilla's charter. A CTO is limited in their strategic scope, so I don't think his years working for Baker indicate he would fail in the same way she has.

[wisniewskit]

There is nothing repetitive about the approaches of the last few Mozilla CEOs. They did not simply steer the same course as their predecessors. I'm not even sure where this idea could come from?

I'm also confused as to why you think an executive search would surely find a better candidate when it clearly hasn't. We can't just pretend the problem away. If we can't find a better candidate than the woman who ran MoCo when it was founded, then we're grasping at straws.

It also doesn't matter whether we want to believe Eich could have done better. He didn't, and he isn't going to be their CEO now. So I'd rather not pick at old wounds too much.

[BrendanEich]

You picked first, with that “lucky… twisted” line. I was CTO without reports until I took SVP Engineering at start of January, 2013. Until then, I had influence but no line of management authority over engineers or others except my great EA who started in 2012. Nevertheless, I was the key principal engineer / chief architect and later main exec backing everything from Firefox with add-ons instead of the suite approach (Netscape, SeaMonkey), Thunderbird, Mozilla spinning out of AOL, us starting HTML5 with Apple and Opera via the WHATWG, Mozilla rejoining ECMA, Rust, Servo, TraceMonkey, Firefox OS, Mozilla Research, and long term JS leadership that culminated in ES6.

The difficulties Mozilla has had in finding a better direction have a lot to do with depending too much on search revenue, Google now and from 2004 except for the ill-fated Yahoo deal in end of 2014 which blew up in 2017. At Brave, I’ve had to find other revenue than a Google Search deal. I couldn’t have done it at Mozilla, but never mind me: Mozilla can’t find other revenue either, and this probably dooms them as Firefox sheds users while Google pays on traffic (I’m told).