[KingOfCoders]

I do personally think tech companies [0] are better of if the CEO is a visionary techie instead of a lawyer.

[0] Mozilla and others might not think they are a tech company but a activist plattform, so this is irrelevant to them from their perspective

[pseudalopex]

When would you say were Mozilla's best years?

[KingOfCoders]

From the techie perspective, Mozilla didn't have "best years" I think. As a Mosaic/Netscape/FF user, I liked Mozilla for two things, adhering to standards compared to IE and being open source (the second being the reason I still use it today, not because of technology (I don't like tab management with 50+ tabs open e.G, never liked the environment implementation)). I don't consider Firefox a technological marvel, but IE looked very bad. Firefox for me never innovated enough or seemed to have the user in mind. From my perspective the USP was always "We're the open source one" which wasn't enough when Chrome arrived.

Not an Opera user, but from the sidelines it always looked like Opera was innovating more.

[pseudalopex]

Mozilla's CEOs from 2008 to 2013 had technical backgrounds. And Bill Gates had vision and technical experience of course. So it seems hard to say technical CEOs are better consistently. Even if better means more innovative.

[KingOfCoders]

"And Bill Gates had vision and technical experience of course."

I think the developer, developer, developer days of M$ (ha, anyone?) were quite good. I did like MS Basic on CP/M (before using Turbo Pascal, first time I felt like a professional!). I started my Amiga development with AmigaBasic drawing lines and circles (before switching to 68k assembler).