[Spivak]

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.

[mekoka]

> It's not the golden calf it once was

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.

[Hasu]

> 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.

[mekoka]

> 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.

[AJ007]

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.

[wolverine876]

Can you back up these accusations?

[mekoka]

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.

[wolverine876]

All that reasoning is claims without facts (and they don't match my unsubstantiated beliefs).

[pgeorgi]

It's less a "Firefox above all" sentiment, it's that Mozilla had

1. Firefox as baseline product declining

2. Lots of failed experiments to find new revenue streams while staying true to its mission

3. Baker's CEO salary rising several-fold

4. Engineers laid off for cost reduction

Any three of them might well be okay, all four together look terribly self-centered on Baker's part.

[GuB-42]

> 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.

[csdvrx]

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.

[rvba]

> 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.

[smolder]

I'm surprised anyone is saying anything positive about Edge. This is the chromium fork whose innovations include built-in "buy now, pay later" ads.