[loganmarchione]

Mozilla also just posted their State of Mozilla 2022 (this includes financial statements). From what I've read, it seems that expenses are up and revenue from search deals is down.

https://stateof.mozilla.org/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38530382

https://www.ghacks.net/2023/12/05/mozilla-earned-close-to-60...

Firefox's market share has been on the decline since 2010.

https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share#monthly-2009...

Genuine question. What is justifying Mozilla Corporation CEO Mitchell Baker's salary?

- 2022 - $6.9m/yr

- 2021 - $5.5m/yr

- 2020 - $2.6m/yr

- 2019 - $3.0m/yr

- 2018 - $2.4m/yr

- 2017 - $2.2m/yr

- 2016 - $1.0m/yr

- 2015 - $997k/yr

[Certhas]

Am I reading the documents you link right?

Mozilla is wildly profitable.

They made a profit of roughly 150 Million dollars last year.

They have 1.2 Billion dollars in assets.

They have increased revenue from non-search deals significantly (56M -> 75M, up one third).

Despite all the gnashing of teeth in this comment section about woke Mozilla, they spent only 5 Million on grants last year. The vast majority goes towards developing Firefox and building up assets.

I had always just taken the statements that she is absurdly overpaid at face value and never looked into this myself. But Baker has overseen the rise of revenue and net income from almost zero to current numbers. If that doesn't look like a successfully run NGO, what does?

Not a big fan of CEO compensation in general, but I feel the one-sided focus on market share, which I feel is somewhat out of Mozillas control (can't even compete on the dominant mobile computing platform, anti-competitive Google leveraging its search monopoloy and advertising Chrome extremely aggresively, etc... ), while ignoring the actual financial health of the organisation is really biased.

[RyanHamilton]

If this was a for profit company I could agree with your focus on profit. Their mission statement is: "Mozilla is a global nonprofit dedicated to keeping the Internet a global public resource that is open and accessible to all.". You could argue the importance of market share at some percentages but below ~5% has to be considered a priority one emergency, if your goal is to keep the internet accessible for all. If their market share fell below 1% they would have effectively almost zero ability to steer standards.

[TedDoesntTalk]

> If this was a for profit company I could agree with your focus on profit.

There are two parts to Mozilla: a for-profit company and a non-profit company. They are separate. You are reading the mission statement of mozilla.org, not mozilla.com. Mitchell Baker is the CEO of the for-profit company, not the non-profit.

[wodenokoto]

Isn’t she chief lizard wrangler at both?

[TedDoesntTalk]

No. Mark Surman is the executive director of the non-profit (executive director is the term used for CEO at non-profits). She is the chair of the non-profit board, which is probably not a paid position (or paid very small token amount).

[nine_k]

A non-profit company is not a zero-revenue company. It's a company that reinvests all profits into its designated cause. A non-profit org with a billion-dollar revenue is a great non-profit org as it can finance the work on its cause really well.

[wodenokoto]

It kinda is a for profit organization.

Basically all revenue is made through the Mozilla Corporation.

[Certhas]

The question is, can you change the market share? Specifically as long as you depend on Google for your income.

If not, then the goal should be to build up assets and alternative revenue streams.

[lucideer]

> They have increased revenue from non-search deals significantly (56M -> 75M, up one third).

I'd love to feel optimistic about an increase in non-Google revenue, but 19M when the CEO alone is paying herself 7M of that alongside a 85M increase in expenses... it's still pretty hard to see it as a net positive here.

& of course the headline of this HN post is declining usage - that trumps profit either way imo

[thayne]

So that means instead of investing money into making the browser better and clawing back some market share, Mozilla Corporation is sending money up to the owning Mozilla Foundation, in the form of profits, to spend on non-browser initiatives.

[paulryanrogers]

The only amount of money that can claw back market share is a number big enough to buy Google. Google controls the leading web properties and pushes its browsers through there.

[mcfedr]

Features. Be as good as chrome and id use it.

[Certhas]

That's absurd. Firefox has been at parity with Chrome for a long time, both are extremely mature technologies. Sometimes one is ahead of the other in one way or the other, but they are largely identical. The exception is when Google or Microsoft "accidentally" break their websites on Firefox.

It's pure fantasy to insist that the market share of Firefox is primarily driven by technical merit. Otherwise, you couldn't explain why Firefox is still at 20% in Germany, for example.

[mcfedr]

Multiple profiles from chrome is such an important feature for me, I don't know people cope without it.

[vlovich123]

MAUs are down though and a non profit is supposed to be mission driven not revenue driven. The focus on market share is the belief that a better internet (Mozilla’s mission) starts by having a non profit browser leading the way. There might be some other metric but the financial health of Mozilla can only be one factor. Besides, at some point they get down to 0 market share and then the search deal revenue will go down (not sure again the next time they will be negotiating the deal)

[fallingknife]

A CEO making almost 5% of the company's profit is absolutely massive for a company that size.

[pennybanks]

i assume instead of google outright purchasing the company due to monopoly issues and internet outrage, they instead are just doing what they are doing now. thought i read they are up to 90% funded by google.. so its a little silly how these browser warriors champion their precious firefox or whatever other browser and condemn the evil chrome. but if you think about it they are all basically chrome developers. building ontop of chromium or working on firefox where those devs and chromes collab.

but in my opinion that isnt the reason google keeps firefox funded. i just think they do it for goodness sakes and not to cannibalize the only "competition". it really wasnt too long ago when it was chrome and firefox the two sleek awesome browsers saving the internet from nasty slow internet explorer.

[Yoric]

If I read correctly your message, you seem to assume that Firefox is a variant of Chromium. That's not the case.

[jeroenhd]

> Genuine question. What is justifying Mozilla Corporation CEO Mitchell Baker's salary?

This question is why I don't expect Mozilla to last at its current course. I like their work, but the endless increases in CEO salary while their most important money maker is fledgling is not justifiable.

[dehrmann]

The increases look reasonable to me, but not when you consider their declining market share. I guess she only returned to the role of CEO in 2020, but she's been in leadership for a long time, and the org's performance has been poor.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitchell_Baker#Negative_salary...

[Longhanks]

In what world is DOUBLING one's salary within two years while the company overall and, most importantly, the company's absolute flagship product are in continuous decline "reasonable"?

[SilasX]

From the link:

>>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."

So I bet it's something like:

Baker: "If you don't pay me market rates for comparable work, I'll leave and go mess up a different organization."

Google: "No, wait, stop, we'll get you the money!"

Considering all the unforced errors on Mozilla's part, I'm only half joking there (i.e. that Google is influencing the decision, via their search placement deals, to keep Firefox bad).

[jampekka]

There's nothing reasonable in these salaries.

[hospitalJail]

I expect it to last as a Zombie company in some sorts. Not a true, government subsidized zombie company, but a way for Google to pretend they don't decide the internet.

Google says 'Don't spend your money on bug fixes and you can get 400M for default search, and you get your 3M bonus.'

Oops, we arent allowed to speculate on HN? I'm just jaded...

[godelski]

So what do you care about more? Mozilla CEO making too much or Chrome getting to dictate the web?

Unfortunately there will always be things to complain about and no system is perfect. But we have to make choices like this and these are the results. You cannot complain about Google's control/dominance over the web and refuse to turn away from their products to use reasonable alternatives (when they exist). Firefox is by no means a bad browser and it is easy to switch over. You can also still use firefox and complain about Baker's salary but is this really a killer issue?

[jeroenhd]

I want Firefox to continue existing and I want it to become a major player again. If not Firefox, maybe a newcomer, just anyone other than Apple and Google.

I use Firefox on every device and I recommend others to do the same. That doesn't mean I agree with Mozilla, though, and their misplacement of funds make me worry about the future of Mozilla and Firefox as a browser. After firing the Rust team working on Servo, you'd expect austerity measures across the board, as Servo was clearly too expensive to continue investing in, yet Mozilla saw fit to continue rising Baker's wages, despite having just laid off 25% of its workforce.

I wonder about how much longer Mozilla will be able to exist. It's oriented around activism first, Firefox second, yet most of its income comes from its browser, and only because Google is scared of being branded a monopoly. If any other platform rises to popularity (and there are a few rising browser engines in the works, mostly as hobbies, but still) and Google switches to funding that project rather than Mozilla, I don't see how Firefox can survive.

[api]

Sounds like our entire civilization in microcosm.

[nine_k]

I can imagine that the CEO, or maybe a few other top officers, may say: "This is me who is bringing in all the search deals, which means all the money. Come on and try to oust me."

Mozilla is an open-source project. When an open-source project somehow loses its way, it's often forked by a new team of contributors who have a better idea. This happened several times: Open Office / Libre Office, MySQL / MariaDB, X86 / X11.org, hell, even GCC / egcs in the 1990s.

But this likely cannot happen to Mozilla, which is basically kept afloat by Google handing it some money for keeping it as a default search engine, about $400M a year currently [1]. There is little chance that an alternative "Better Mozilla" organization would collect as much, or at least half as much, to support a fork. It would e.g. take 33M users who agree to pay $5/mo for a Mozilla "support subscription" to collect $400M a year.

Maybe a web browser can be maintained for less than 400M, but likely not much less. The modern web is fiendishly complex, and you need both a desktop version (three platforms) and a mobile version.

[1]: https://www.pcmag.com/news/mozilla-signs-lucrative-3-year-go...

[tnorthcutt]

It would e.g. take 33M users who agree to pay $5/mo for a Mozilla "support subscription" to collect $400M a year.

Maybe I'm reading this wrong, but when I do the math (33M x 5 x 12) I get $1.98B.

Maybe you meant $1/month?

[widdershins]

Yep, you're right. At 5$/month they'd need 6.66M subscribed users. Still a lot, but more acheivable.

[abirch]

Most people don't want to pay for anything. Look at all of the workarounds for news sites. I try to pay or donate for most of what I use but there seem to be a lot of people who want to get everything for free.

[nine_k]

I totally won't mind paying for the occasional article I open, if micropayments were a thing! Pay a quarter, read something worthy.

The problem is that micropayments are not interesting for most news outlets: the friction of current solutions is high, the resulting revenue stream, unsteady. Monthly / yearly subscriptions bring a better revenue stream, and cost way less.

If micropayments were indeed zero-friction, and effectively zero-cost, maybe they'd be (reluctantly) integrated.

[abrahms]

My experience w/ most news outlets is that they have a random article I'm linked to. That's not worth a subscription in my mind. A news service you have an ongoing relationship with is.

[mariusor]

I'm deeply disturbed of this normalization of software as a subscription service. I want the return of good old days when people could pay once for their software and use it in perpetuity.

[nine_k]

This is not a subscription to use the browser. You can always build it from source and use for free, as designed.

This is a commitment to support the development, because the development should be oingoing. Not Netflix-style, but Patreon-style.

(Also see how JetBrains handles "subscriptions" to their closed-source software. Once you've paid, the version is forever yours. Updates are bought with some additional sums if desired.)

[gottorf]

I hate the "subscriptionification" of everything as much as anybody, but there is a cost to ongoing updates to software. Especially on something like a browser, where both standards and exceptional behavior contrary to the standards change rapidly.

Maybe we could go back to where people paid once and could pay separately for support?

[Barrin92]

subscription is a significantly fairer revenue model for software which undergoes regular upgrades and has support, which is most software nowadays.

It makes sure that people who continue to use continue to pay. Upfront charges are often either too low with long term users free-riding or too high, in case the project is abandoned. Subscription makes it much more likely to price products correctly.

[JohnFen]

> subscription is a significantly fairer revenue model for software which undergoes regular upgrades and has support

I could not disagree more. Subscriptions for software are a deeply unfair approach. Great for the companies, of course, but not for users.

A more fair approach is to charge for upgrades and support instead. At least that way, users only pay if/when they choose to obtain additional value.

[charcircuit]

Leaving nonpaying users on old versions on browsers with security issues and who will no longer support the latest web standards will be bad for the web.

[TheGRS]

This model gets implemented, and then the comments section is littered with "I prefer when I didn't need to pay for software upgrades and backward compatibility!"

[Analemma_]

Of all the types of software where you should be ok paying a subscription, browsers are the ones where should be most ok with it. Browsers, more than anything else, need constant updates because they're by far the biggest and juiciest attack surface for hackers, and also web devs will just stop supporting you if you're not on top of the treadmill of browser standard updates.

It's not feasible at all to call a browser "done" and leave it alone, so if you want one that's independent from adtech, a subscription is kind of your only option.

[matwood]

> I want the return of good old days when people could pay once for their software and use it in perpetuity.

This simply does not exist for any software that is internet connected.

[jampekka]

All my software is that. My monthly subscription is 0$.

[abirch]

I remember the forced obsolescence. There were a few good software packages but many would frequently force you to upgrade from version 12.31 to 13.0 which isn't backward compatible i.e., "This software doesn't run on Windows XP"

[tcbawo]

At least with Microsoft, they are fanatics about backwards compatibility. It is pretty rare for something designed for an OS prior to Windows XP to not run on current Windows OS versions.

[LaGrange]

I mean yes, but I read that more as "patronizing." I.e. how many patrons (of some sort) Mozilla would need.

[rdm_blackhole]

If you pay yearly, you usually get a discount so you cant multiply by 12.

[wkat4242]

> Maybe a web browser can be maintained for less than 400M, but likely not much less.

I doubt that. Mozilla wastes a ton, not only on CEO salaries but tangential projects and other dogoodery.

[PaulHoule]

The EU could have a privacy-friendly browser if it funded Mozilla or a Mozilla fork.

[rdm_blackhole]

That would be a no from me. Considering the recent headlines from the EU wanting to scan every private message on the phones of it's citizens in order to "protect the children".

[vlabakje90]

FIY, that has been rejected: https://fortune.com/europe/2023/10/26/eu-chat-control-csam-e...

[wkat4242]

For now yes. I'm sure it will be back on the agenda in some form or other before we know it.

[rdm_blackhole]

For now, but it's not over.

If not this time then the next. Just the fact that the commission was allowed to propose such a blatant privacy invading law is enough for me to know that privacy is not a something that the EU is serious about.

[jampekka]

Private corporations do the same without you knowing, without any pretence and without even illusion of accountability.

Non-profit is better than gov but private is way worse than even gov.

[rdm_blackhole]

I don't think this is what being argued here. We know that privacy is an after thought of most companies even in the EU.

But to think that the EU would be the guarantor of everyone's privacy on the web, is completely ridiculous.

Also your argument is not valid. When Google detects that you break their rules they ban your account. When the government has this kind power, then they have the power to do worse things to you, like imprisonment, fines, putting you on a blacklist and much more...

Those two things are not comparable.

[CWuestefeld]

I, for one, won't trust a government to ensure my privacy.

The EU does better than the US for consumer-related privacy issues. But I don't think the same can be said when the government wants to slap a label of "national security" onto something. That puts us into a whole different world of "anything goes".

[orangepurple]

Is this the same EU that is forcing browsers to accept government mandated certificate authorities?

Article 45 of eIDAS 2.0 will roll back web security by 12 years - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38181114 - Nov 2023 (77 comments)

Joint statement of scientists and NGOs on the EU’s proposed eIDAS reform - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38126997 - Nov 2023 (63 comments)

Last Chance to fix eIDAS: Secret EU law threatens Internet security - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38109494 - Nov 2023 (299 comments)

EFF about EU: EIDAS 2.0 Sets a Dangerous Precedent for Web Security - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33966364 - Dec 2022 (44 comments)

EU legislation eIDAS article 45.2 may force inclusion of insecure QWAC root CAs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32093891 - July 2022 (36 comments)

Mozilla and the EFF publish letter about the danger of Article 45.2 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30549119 - March 2022 (13 comments)

[ink_13]

> When an open-source project somehow loses its way, it's often forked by a new team of contributors who have a better idea

Perhaps ironically, this was also the genesis of Firefox

[lucideer]

> Perhaps ironically, this was also the genesis of Firefox

That's not entirely accurate (or at least, while accurate, is missing a lot of significant context) Mozilla was creating within Netscape, not in opposition to it, as a steward org for the open-sourcing of Navigator & Communicator. Even when Netscape was acquired by AOL, AOL continued to fund[0] Mozilla for years after the acquisition.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20050324025052/http://www.wired....

[amiga386]

That is the case, but even then Firefox really was a fork, within Mozilla.

Mozilla was created in 1998 to open-source Netscape Communicator suite. Mozilla released its own suite, also called "Mozilla" (e.g. "Mozilla 1.0" [0])

Independently of that effort, Dave Hyatt and Blake Ross made an experimenal, cut-down version of just the browser part of the suite, which they called "Phoenix", as in a Phoenix rising from the ashes. That's a fork. That's a fork by any metric.

They later rebranded Phoenix as Firefox, and eventually the Mozilla suite was abandoned. Mozilla changed tack in 2003 and switched to developing Firefox and Thunderbird as independent products [1]

[0] https://www-archive.mozilla.org/releases/mozilla1.0

[1] https://www-archive.mozilla.org/roadmap/roadmap-02-apr-2003

[cuu508]

But after that, IIRC Mozilla Suite was big, clunky and stagnating. And Phoenix, I mean, Firebird, I mean, Firefox was a lean spin-off.

[lucideer]

It was a spin-off within Mozilla though - not a rival fork.

[stonogo]

Firefox, however, was not. It was created because people didn't use most of the tools built into the Mozilla suite, and they were difficult to port (because they had a Motif frontend AND a GTK frontend).

https://website-archive.mozilla.org/www.mozilla.org/firefox_...

[e2le]

>Firefox's market share has been on the decline since 2010.

Its decline is also visible in Mozilla's own data [1], 252M users in January 2019 down to 188M in November 2023.

MAU has remained at around 188M since October, I would like to believe this is because of MV3 and the YouTube drama, but that would be naive.

Going forward I think there should be a position on the foundation [2] and corporation board [3] held by a community representative. At least then the community would have some say in the direction Mozilla is taking.

[1]: https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity

[2]: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Board

[3]: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/moco/

[Vvector]

Raise your hand if you also got a 7x raise over the last seven years.

[Buttons840]

Okay, now keep them raised if you were also performing worse on every metric each year.

[culi]

I actually don't think you'd see that many raised hands go down

[fouc]

The implied joke is they're talking about regular employees. Seems like you're thinking of CEOs?

[plugin-baby]

Now keep them raised if you didn’t change company...

[timthelion]

I did, went from working for a small non profit in the sustainable transport/urbanism sector to management in the telco industry. Sallary jumped almost 10x.

[timthelion]

Now I'm making bank. My anual sallary is around what mozilla CEO makes in two workdays.

[HumblyTossed]

> Genuine question. What is justifying Mozilla Corporation CEO Mitchell Baker's salary?

Nothing, of course. Absolutely nothing.

[lolc]

Their friends make more!

[jampekka]

> What is justifying Mozilla Corporation CEO Mitchell Baker's salary?

The same thing that is justifying obscene salaries in general. A circle of greed where obscenely paid people decide what obscenely paid people should be paid.

[digging]

I will say in their defense, they have a legitimate argument.

Offering a low-paying CEO role means you'll attract lower quality CEOs. The best CEOs have personal incentive to take the highest paying jobs. This element of competition does exist.

However, this ignores a few factors.

1. Mozilla don't seem to have a great CEO despite the pay.

2. Self-interest and CEO skills are not necessarily tightly coupled. They could be orthogonal. So a great CEO might be willing to take lower pay, especially a CEO that might be great for a company that is itself forgoing disgusting amounts of (ad) revenue in the interest of ethics.

3. (Not Mozilla specific but it's important to mention when this comes up) Decent regulations capping CEO pay would in fact remove this entire element of competition, freeing up companies from having to decide how much profit to sacrifice on the altar of business gods.

[triceratops]

> Offering a low-paying CEO role means you'll attract lower quality CEOs

Maybe in the private sector.

> The best CEOs have personal incentive to take the highest paying jobs

It has to be said again: in the private sector.

Non-profit CEOs shouldn't expect to be compensated as well as their private sector counterparts. The feeling of doing good is part of the reward.

[devit]

Presumably they have captured the Mozilla foundation board?

[ekianjo]

> Mozilla Corporation CEO Mitchell Baker's salary?

What a ridiculous question. Obvious the chief captain on the Titanic is not responsible for the Iceberg jumping at the boat.

[munk-a]

I think it's a pretty reasonable question when the salary is so incredibly out of line with what developers make. Is the CEO singlehandedly responsible for productivity equal to that of sixty or so developers?

[knute]

Not just in absolute terms, what could possibly justify a 600% increase in salary in 7 years?

[BigJ1211]

I don't know, but really want to. I need this in my life.

[chii]

good negotiation skills and friends in high places.

Salary has nothing to do with productivity at this level of an org.

[oliwarner]

> Salary has nothing to do with productivity at this level of an org.

That's nonsense. The difference at this level is you're not looking at personal productivity, you should be looking at a much broader interpretation. Except Mozilla doesn't. They've seen flailing commercial performance and have rewarded the CEO and laid off developers. It feels like madness because it is.

I love Firefox but Mozilla deserves to burn to the ground for this mismanagement.

[munk-a]

It should always be personal productivity but as a CEO your productivity is how much better you're doing than someone else in that role would. In the modern world too often executive compensation is viewed as "How valuable is this company" instead of "How much is this particular executive adding to the value of this company" - that's why we're seeing it spiral into simply ludicrous numbers.

[JohnFen]

> The difference at this level is you're not looking at personal productivity, you should be looking at a much broader interpretation.

That's one of the arguments made by CEOs who are trying to justify their insane salaries, yes. But it's very unpersuasive.

[ekianjo]

Did I need to append a /s for people to get my comment?

[munk-a]

Unfortunately yes - this view isn't so out there that it's not inconceivable that someone would genuinely express it.

[debo_]

You always have to /s here. I figure there are enough people reading HN who have different backgrounds in how they understand English that it's necessary.

Also important to label jokes.

[red-iron-pine]

also a tech startup incubator, where there is a non-trivial portion of the population is, or is trying very hard to be, something like that CEO.

in other words, for some people here it's not sarcasm.

[godelski]

Carry on. I for one laughed at the obviousness of the iceberg jumping out. We definitely should be encouraging more careful reading than hinting and reading everything as if they are words only. Your comment is about as obvious as it gets. Unless... the icebergs are alive. But then we have a bigger problem. Global warming is their revenge!

[danaris]

Poe's Law[0] applies.

Unfortunately, nowadays, unless you're among a group of people who already know your general opinions on things, it's nearly impossible to state an absurd position on some issue that a nontrivial number of people would actually, unironically, advocate for, until you get into the absolutely batshit stuff like "we should literally sacrifice poor people to the devil, then eat their flesh, to keep the rest of us from getting poor."

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law

[ReactiveJelly]

Honestly yeah I had to read it a couple times, I didn't notice the joke right away, cause there are people out there who justify CEO salaries, I just can't remember the justification offhand.

Maybe if you'd referenced Chernobyl I would have picked it up sooner. Or THERAC, that's a classic.

[wkat4242]

No you didn't. :P

[me_me_me]

on the internet, ALWAYS

[chombier]

Nope, sarcasm was pretty obvious from the "iceberg jumping at the boat" part.

[ekianjo]

that was the give-away

[mikeryan]

CEO salaries aren’t, and never have been, relative to the rank and file salaries.

The question is how much you need to be to get a competent executive relative to the open market.

You can argue whether they’re getting what they’re paying for but this doesn’t seem to be out of line relative to the leaders of other, similarly sized organizations. Also a non profit has to have higher salaries as there’s not a lot of room to offload that to bonuses or equity.

[wkat4242]

True, Hiring a CEO is basically buying into an old boys network. It's like legalised corruption. With them you buy the goodwill of all of their buddies in other CEO positions.

However in this case it doesn't actually seem to be paying off.

[eldaisfish]

the benchmark of what other CEOs make is a horrible metric. There is an entire industry of « Consultants » who will justify a higher CEO salary by claiming that other CEOs make the higher salary and then work with those other CEOs by point to your now higher salary.

[mikeryan]

Note, I didn’t say that it had to be relative to other CEO salaries. It has to be competitive to any other position that a candidate has available to them.

What would Mitchell make as an SVP at a FAANG company? What could they make as a startup founder?

[Buttons840]

> The question is how much you need to be to get a competent executive relative to the open market.

No! The real question is what happens without an executive, but some cheaper leadership structure instead?

I mean, maybe a cheaper leadership structure (whatever it may be) would run the company into the ground, but, well, at least they would achieve the same outcome for cheaper.

[ako]

Don’t know, as a shareholder I would be very happy with a capable CEO that is able to extract profits from a doomed product. As long as she’s bringing in more than she costs the ROI is positive.

[ghostpepper]

This is true at most tech companies though - the CEO making a multiple of a typical dev salary. The large increases year over year, however, while Firefox loses market share, is a bigger red flag IMHO.

[ako]

It’s simple math: how much revenue does she bring in, versus the costs. And how likely is it for the organization to find someone else that brings in equal or more, for reduced salary.

[hospitalJail]

I used to think this in my 20s.

No, the CEO(and board) are completely responsible. That is the point of leadership, to move the boat before it hits the iceburg or at least have a way of dealing with it.

Firefox is buggy but heavily advertised(or astroturfed, I dont know) on social media. Everyone knows about firefox, we don't need the ad. We need firefox not to suck.

[OfSanguineFire]

Firefox being “heavily advertised (or astroturfed)” on social media isn’t something I personally have ever seen in the last decade. (Unless one includes Mastodon as social media, even though its userbase is nowhere near representative of the general public.) And today a substantial number of internet users are mainly using smartphones, and the default browser on that smartphone, and the very idea that one can use a different browser has faded from the culture compared to the early millennium.

[dig1]

Maybe this is sarcasm, but the chief captain of the Titanic (Edward Smith) was not responsible for the iceberg jumping at the boat but was responsible for steering the ship at high speed through water known to have icebergs. He even said in an interview that he could not "imagine any condition which would cause a ship to founder. Modern shipbuilding has gone beyond that".

I can imagine a similar analogy with M. Baker.

[DenisM]

Snark is against the rules on HN.

> Don't be snarky.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[prng2021]

What a ridiculous analogy. What’s the iceberg here? Google Chrome? The originally underdog competitor they’ve known and battled for well over a decade?

[agumonkey]

imagine what would happen if all the upper layers were removed and all them millions would fall into contributors :)

[LegitShady]

damn I wish I'd get x7 increase in salary in 7 years. This guy must know where some bodies are buried.

[tristan957]

She is a woman.

[wkat4242]

Doesn't make the bodies any less dead :D

[taosx]

I hope mozilla the corporation dies faster so we could then focus on the browser. As someone said, the board is a joke.

[aaomidi]

If Mozilla is looking for a new CEO I’ll sign myself up.

[moron4hire]

I'll even give them a deal. I'll run the company into the ground at twice the speed for half the money.

[slig]

How? I feel that anything different than what's been done will improve their presence.

edit: username checks out.

[OhMeadhbh]

About Baker's salary, turns out there's a section about it on her Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitchell_Baker#Netscape_Commun... .

The relevant quote is "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 other words, there's an assumption every corporation is required to have a CEO/Lawyer from the Technorati class who acts as a drain on the finances of the corporation, why should Mozilla be any different? Since the Mozilla Foundation is not a widely held corporation (and is a 501c3) there are only a few institutional directors ( from https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/leadership/#boards ): Baker (AOL), Chambers (McKinsey), Cooper (Walmart), Lakhani (MIT/Harvard), Lisbonne (Stanford GSB), Molotsi (Intuit) and Lund.

If you think Baker's pay should be cut, Lakhani is probably the person to talk to, he's chair of the compensation committee.

After watching VCs from the 70s to the current time (yes, I'm that old) I have a theory about tech startups. Their primary concern is to pump money from old school monied interests to old school monied interests' children. So if you have cash you want to give to your kids more or less tax free (or tax reduced), you send them to Stanford or MIT, then you arrange a meeting for them w/ your old school chum who's now a VC in San Jose or Palo Alto. You give the VC cash which is treated as an investment by the IRS, and then the VC gives the money to whatever bizarre tech startup is being run by their old school chum's kids. If you're lucky, you get a return on your investment and you pay whatever capital gains tax you need to pay (which is most often taxed at a rate considerably below that for earned income.) Your kids get a decent salary for a few years, and if they're lucky and smart, they git bought out by a big firm that makes them a VP or something. The VC should be lucky enough over time to make enough money on the 10% of deals that make it to acquisition to pay for the 90% that fail completely or get acquired on bad terms.

Mozilla always seemed to me to demonstrate this also works for non-profits.

Also... the story of "using money to transfer generational wealth in the upper class" is clearly not a universal. There are clearly startups that are innovative. They may be helmed by a handsome 20-something from Stanford, but that's just an historical accident. I am sure YOUR startup is in this category. But the "using VC investment as a money laundering scheme to evade generational tax" happens often enough my inner marxian shouts every time I drive down El Camino in Palo Alto.

And this part is purely opinion. I appreciate you probably have a different opinion and absolutely do not think less of you for having a unique perspective:

And besides, the goal of tech money is now just to keep the party going. The web is shit, intended to distribute content from major content producers or to be festooned with ads (twitch and youtube). iProducts are there to look sleek and provide just enough functionality to convince you to buy another iProduct. Though you're probably not in the target demographic anymore since China and India are at the beginning of the growth curve. Protocols and programs we used to use: SMTP/IMAP/eMail, (S)FTP/File Transfer, Veronica/Archie/WAIS/Search, etc. are pretty much dead or owned by Google, Microsoft or Yahoo's corpse.

I think the reason olds are nostalgic for Commodore 64's, Atari 800's and even TI 99/4A's (and that there are a few kids who like leenucks and BSD) is they're systems that could operate without being attached to the dystopian cyberspace Carmen Hermosillo described in Pandora's Vox. The only "infrastructure" I needed for my 99/4 was a power outlet and a factory somewhere cranking out cassette tapes, 5.25" floppies and ribbons for my MX-80.

</opinion>

But I have digressed. If the resolution is that Mozilla has lost it's way, I would argue for the affirmative. Or rather argue it was sort of set up to fail. And heck, I didn't even once mention the management fiasco that was Boot to Gecko.

[oldpersonintx]

Firefox will be better off longterm as a true community project free from Mozilla.org.

Let Mozilla.org die.

[anonymous_sorry]

I doubt this. Maintaining and developing a competitive browser is serious work, and needs skilled professionals working on it full time, as well as getting stuck in to the web standards process. That requires a level of funding that most community projects only dream of. I can't see any incentive for industry to put money behind it in the way that they do with Linux.

I have very few complaints about Firefox as software. I only wish more people would use it. (That includes you, dear reader!) It is actually great, and if you've ever complained about AMP, WEI or anything like that, using a non-Google derived browser is one of the few things you can actually do to reduce Google's power here.

Firefox are up against the power of OS defaults and dirty tricks in an age where most people don't really know what a web browser is. But if you have any awareness or concern about the health of the open web, you are absolutely educated enough to use Firefox. Of course there will be the odd minor workflow thing to get used to. But Firefox is great. All you really need is the motivation to choose something other than the default.

[freedomben]

I'm sadly almost in this camp. Firefox is incredibly important to me and is critical for the open web to survive.

Mozilla has proven to be really bad stewards, and as long as they exist nobody is going to pick up firefox. They've had many years to wake and up correct the course but choose not to, so it may be time to die. If Mozilla disappeared, a new organization could pick it up and run with it. If it weren't so overloaded in tech already, I might even call it "Phoenix" as it arose from the ashes of Firefox.

[fragmede]

Since implementing EME, I'm not sure Firefox is critical for an open web, since by almost definition, EME isn't open. As a practical matter I can understand why they chose to implement it (though that was not without controversy), but let's not fool ourselves here.

[freedomben]

that's an interesting point to consider. I wonder what would have happened had they not done it? Would it have accelerated the decline? Or would it have been enough to get services not to use DRM? I'm not sure, but I think FF may have just dropped to irrelevancy faster had they not done it.

[aembleton]

You could fork it

[cozzyd]

While I have no idea about any of the aspects of Mitchell Baker's salary, I don't see this questioning of corporate CEO's. A generous reading might be that this is the salary required to avoid losing the CEO to some random VC selling useless widgets.

[toyg]

Looking at results since she got the job, maybe they should pay the money to such useless-widget company to poach her. I'm all for social enterprises but FF lost the plot.

[dheera]

I feel like it's not that high for a CEO salary at a mature compnay. Staff-level engineers are routinely paid upwards of 1M these days (yay inflation). 6M for a CEO doesn't sound unreasonable.

If these numbers sound high ... $1M today was $500K in 1996.

[FirmwareBurner]

> Staff-level engineers are routinely paid upwards of 1M these days

Yeah, at successful high performing trillion dolar tech companies like Nvidia or Apple, not broke*ss underperforming companies like Mozilla.

>6M for a CEO doesn't sound unreasonable.

It's unreasonable when you take into account Mozilla's lack of performance over the years. Where is their success, other than being kept on life support by being bankrolled by Google who's doing it solely to avoid anti-trust litigations over their monopoly on the browser market.

In a way, this is actually harming Firefox, knowing that they'll always be funded no matter how their product performs, just so that Alphabet has a legal David to their Goliath, gives them little incentive to try to be competitive.

[dheera]

> Where is their success

Huh what? I use Firefox and I'm actually very happy with it.

[Chabsff]

Somehow, I don't think a single person enjoying the browser justifies 6 Million dollars a year in executive overhead alone.

That's what what success means in this context: Something that makes that expense worthwhile.

[sleepybrett]

... what about two people though?

[FirmwareBurner]

We clearly have different definitions of what product and business success represents for a large tech company.

[bcrl]

Performance of Firefox has steadily gotten worse lately. My bank's website has massive lag when scrolling (1 second to redraw? Great!), but it works perfectly fine in Chrome. Firefox also gets into a state where screen updates in Streeview are laggy after anywhere from a few hours to a couple of days, but I can't figure out a way to predictably reproduce it on demand. Meanwhile, Chrome is snappy all the time. I also have to manually enable one of the acceleration settings under Linux. The end result is that I'm forced to use Chrome more and more as the Firefox user experience just plain sucks in these scenarios.

[freedomben]

This is probably much more your bank's fault than it is FF. I think Mozilla has badly neglected FF to the point they probably deserve to die so a new org can take their place, but the blame for that most likely falls at the feet of the bank for not testing on FF.

[dheera]

These websites also keep adding bloat on top of bloat, hell, a goddamn button is 56 layers of nested divs these days instead of just styling the shit out of <button>.

Or they do some batshit insane "polyfill" nonsense that turns the <button> into 56 layers of nested divs behind the hood.

HTML hasn't caught up either, there's no <toggle_switch> that invokes the native toggle switch that every OS already has, devs are forced to mimic the toggle with 85 layers of nested divs.

[benjaminsuch]

Sure, but this is not the criteria for a company to be successful or not.

[dheera]

Since when do you get to define the criteria?

I'm a happy user, I consider that a success in my book.

[sgift]

The point is that less and less people use Firefox, so there seems to be a problem with success in that area, even if you are someone who still uses it (as am I).

[tomashubelbauer]

I am also a happy Firefox user, but that doesn't preclude me from seeing that Mozilla is a failing steward of Firefox.

[magicalhippo]

As a happy Firefox user, I want Firefox to make me happy tomorrow as well, not just today.

[seniorivn]

and what about their book? inability to put yourself into someone else's shoes, is a very big flag. A red one in my book.

[Jcampuzano2]

Even if it were "not that high" for a CEO, what would justify a 7x increase while things have been looking downhill for years?

If anything, the board should have gotten rid of her at this point and hired someone else, even if at this higher salary it would make more sense than sticking with someone who obviously hasn't been leading the company to growth or sustainability (since they are trending downards).

[_dark_matter_]

Routinely??? I don't know of one staff level that gets paid that much

[dheera]

https://www.levels.fyi/companies/facebook/salaries/software-...

https://www.levels.fyi/companies/amazon/salaries/software-en...

https://www.levels.fyi/companies/google/salaries/software-en...

https://www.levels.fyi/companies/apple/salaries/software-eng...

[underdeserver]

These are all senior staff and up. Not one of these is staff level.

[tehbeard]

Strange how none of those listed are Mozilla...

https://www.levels.fyi/companies/mozilla/salaries/software-e...

Looks arround the $170-200k level....

[mattl]

Distinguished engineers aren't really 'staff-level'

[dheera]

Oh bleh, distinguished members of "the staff" that works there, one of those things, either way, these are all far below the CEO and 1M+

[qwertywert_]

Those aren't staff.

[matwood]

I'll agree with you that the CEO salary is fine. What isn't fine is the CEO's performance. They should be replaced.