[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.

[Certhas]

I regularly use multiple profiles in Firefox.

Firefox also has containers which (AFAIK) Chrome lacks. The UI for Profiles is probably worse, but Containers dramatically reduced the need for them for many (but by no means all) use cases.

It's definitely not the case that Firefox is behind here. I would say they are slightly ahead overall, but which of the Browsers is ahead depends on your specific use case.

It should be fairly obvious that this has nothing to do with the reason that Chrome has 10 times more users.

[paulryanrogers]

Firefox has separate profiles and multiple containers per profile.

[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.