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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.