[cjpearson]

I don't think Mozilla has always made the right decisions, but they are in a difficult position, and the anti-Mozilla arguments are typically much more vague and directionless. Some common demands:

- Mozilla should develop revenue independent of Google - Mozilla should not monetize Firefox - Mozilla should only focus on Firefox - Mozilla should develop cool research projects - Mozilla should be run like a competitive and professional business - Mozilla should have a salary cap and expect executives to treat it like a passion project

Some of these goals are opposite ends of the same slider, so it's not possible to maximize both. Typically, Mozilla seems to pick a middle-ground. For example, my understanding is that while salaries are quite decent, they tend to be below what Apple and Google will offer for similar roles.

Maybe it's seen as waffling whenever they shift these sliders, and maybe that's a fair criticism. But nobody else seems to be able to put together a clear and realistic alternative plan. Most of them pick and choose contradictory goals, other plans like Zawinski's are at least clear, but too radical for those who still want revenue to pay developers or to be able to watch Netflix in their browser.

[glenstein]

Exactly, and to your point, a lot of the charges against Mozilla are mutually exclusive, contradictory, or barely even half-made attempts at arguments. You've outlined the make money/don't make money contradiction. But to add a few more of the crazy criticisms, sincerely made:

- Implying without evidence that the VPN is run at prohibitively massive cost and at the expense of other programs

- Claiming that Mozilla has "run out of money" (they have over $1 billion in assets)

- Overstating costs of Mozilla's dabbling in blockchain (they wrote a paper or two)

- Claiming the CEO pay has crippled Mozilla's ability to work on core browser (it's slightly more than 1% of their revenue)

- Claiming without any mechanism or argument that there's a missing feature Mozilla could have developed that would have restored all their market share

- Related to the above, completely ignoring that Chrome drove market share in its own proactive ways, leveraging its search and Android dominance, rolling out affordable Chromebooks and that these drove the market share more than anything specific to Mozilla

- Firefox has become bloated and slow (Outdated talking point, it was true for a time, but then they did the dang thing and delivered Quantum, which delivered the major advances in speed in stability that everyone asked for)

That's not to say there's no valid criticisms, there are plenty. There seems to be real cause and effect, for instance, on Firefox's investments in FirefoxOS and the ability to invest resources in the browser, and that did happen over a time where market share was lost. And the dabbling in ads risks compromising the soul of their mission in critical ways.

But meanwhile these (above) have all generally been basically misunderstandings or bad arguments with no internal logic, but claimed over and over again in the backwaters of internet comment sections with complete impunity. The case study in comment section hallucinations is as interesting to me as what is presently unfolding at Mozilla itself.

[jfengel]

(it's slightly more than 1% of their revenue)

In a lot of industries, 1% revenue is rather a lot. Many domains have profit margins of 5% or even less; that would be fully 20% of your earnings.

Software development is not "many industries", and Mozilla isn't most software development companies. So it's hard for me to say whether that specific CEO salary is appropriate. But I'd rather see his salary described by earnings, rather than revenue, since revenue by itself could just be churn.

[glenstein]

If it impresses you that the CEO pay is 20% of earnings, then, well, software development is going to be something like 500% of earnings, overhead will be 250%, and so on. The relative proportions of the different expenses will be the same. They just look bigger when you compare them to profits.

The CEO pay certainly matters and it's more than I would like, but I don't see how considering it as 20% of profits rather than 1% of revenue demonstrates that it's taking more away from development than any other 1% of their spending.

[jfengel]

Yes, but now you're comparing the CEO to entire departments. Each individual software developer is receiving less than 1% of earnings. Is the CEO really 20 times more productive than they are?

Would it be possible to increase net earnings with a CEO who took home only 19% of net earnings? Changing out a single developer for a cheaper one is not going to be meaningful. But a CEO who takes home a significant fraction of the profit could probably be replaced by somebody who does 99.9% as good a job for 95% of the salary.

In fact, there's a good chance that one of those developers could do 50% as good a job for 1% of the salary. The shareholders would take home more money.

[glenstein]

I feel like I've been consistent throughout by evaluating costs as a percentage of revenue. That’s the actual denominator Mozilla uses when allocating its budget. There’s no switch or sleight of hand happening here. One percent of revenue is one percent of the available operating budget.

It seems like you've changed your framing entirely. Your original point was that CEO pay is significant because it's 20 percent of net earnings. That implied this metric better captured the weight of the cost. But now you’ve moved to a different argument, comparing the CEO’s compensation to individual developers and bringing in a shareholder-return perspective. These are entirely separate lines of reasoning and don’t follow from the point you started with.

Also, Mozilla doesn’t have shareholders? So the idea that the CEO should be compensated in a way that maximizes shareholder earnings doesn’t really apply. Mozilla’s spending decisions should be judged in terms of how well they serve its mission, not whether they increase a surplus that could be distributed to hypothetical owners.

I’m not even necessarily defending the CEO pay on its own. I just don't think you can make the case that it crippled their ability to work on needed features, and I think the logic you’re using has shifted in a way that doesn’t hold up when applied to Mozilla’s actual structure or purpose.

[justsomehnguy]

> Is the CEO really 20 times more productive than they are?

People up the ladder are getting more money not for their productiveness, but for the risks. A single developer can't ruin the company/sales (well, most of the times). A single C-level can do that with ease.

[dingaling]

Isn't the general employee at higher risk than the CEO? Entire departments can be RIFfed at the stroke of a pen and the employees don't have a Golden Parachute or a revolving door to the next corporation.

[ChrisMarshallNY]

> his salary

I may be wrong (I frequently am), but I think the current CEO is a woman, who replaced another woman (with a funny haircut).

[NautilusWave]

Don't you have to look at Mozilla CEO's salary in the context of that of other non-profits?

[fzzzy]

Mozilla Corp isn’t a non-profit. Mozilla org is, but the discussion is about the corp ceo.

[LexiMax]

> The case study in comment section hallucinations is as interesting to me as what is presently unfolding at Mozilla itself.

I have long suspected that a good chunk of the controversy surrounding Mozilla that I've seen is...let's just call it motivated reasoning.

[jama211]

Well said, and this applies to most armchair experts on most subjects on the internet.

[rightbyte]

Both Mozilla and the Wikipedia Foundation seem to have the same problem of doing everything but focusing on their core raison d'être.

Like, what is there even to say but constantly complain about that.

[detaro]

Or rather, people disagree with the Foundations on what their purpose should be.

[kristjank]

If the turtle-saving foundation I donate to has a windfall, I would expect it to save more turtles, not to instead also focus on feeding hotdogs to hungry Somali children. This does not mean that feeding hotdogs to hungry Somali children is wrong, it is an even more important goal than saving the turtles, but somewhere in the process, there pillaged a decision maker that misinterpreted (acceptable) or ignored (unacceptable) the intentions of the benefactors.

[detaro]

Except the foundations mission statement isn't turtle-saving, that's just what you think is clearly the most important part of their work that they should solely focus on, in your opinion. And it's not wrong of you to want to be able to donate towards the parts that you care about, but it's an obvious disconnect from the reality of what their stated goals are (and hence you blame decision makers for decisions that are actually fully in line with the mission statements).

Mozilla Foundation never was the Firefox Development Foundation, as much as some of us want it to be. Wikimedia never was the Wikipedia Development and Operations Foundation. If you dislike that, donate to entities with narrower goals (I personally prefer directing money towards OSM and KDE for example)

[kristjank]

If a foundation spins off a project's community with certain goals, they take on to some degree the goals and the vision of the people that built it. Those are opinions, and they are important to the cited goals. If then a foreign element enters the system due to the sad state of the technology/corporate enterprises nowadays and changes the mission statement, you have not changed the spirit it was created with, you changed a business strategy in a way that is disconnected and hostile to the initial goal. A lot of the times the goals aren't really stated at all clearly, are protected by different acts like codes of conduct, and open to modification by impassionate people with ephemeral leadership positions who don't care what happens to the organization down the line.

Sure, I can become the chairman of Turtle saving international and change our charter to prioritize feeding hotdogs to hungry Somalis, but I am still doing an ideological disservice to the grassroots initiative that built the foundation and created the position for me to be sitting on, no?

Also, this seems to me extremely fragile when situations are reversed, say that an outright awful organization like an international petrol company gets a new mission statement. Should all they did before and after that be forgiven because their stated goals say otherwise?

I personally see this as little less than a ground truth, but perhaps there is some way that stated goals stand above all regardless.

EDIT: I do see how you make a very good point when you're looking mostly from the present towards the future, though.

[detaro]

In both cases, their "wide" mission statements have been around for a long time, it's not a recent thing. E.g. you maybe can say that Mozilla Foundation in 2003 was presented as something else than what it decided to adopt in 2007 with the Mozilla Manifesto, but well, that's a 4 year period that ended 18 years ago and happened under the original leadership, it's not later executives somehow distorting it.

[tiahura]

The foundation’s mission was to enrich the board and advance their personal agendas.

[rightbyte]

Yes but for rethorical reasons I pretend to not know what you mean. That would validify their claims.

[mschuster91]

> Both Mozilla and the Wikipedia Foundation seem to have the same problem of doing everything but focusing on their core raison d'être.

At least for Wikimedia... running Wikipedia itself isn't expensive, they're not running it as a resume-driven-development project in some hyperscaler that brings associated costs, they run bare metal servers to this day (and so, notably, does StackOverflow who run a ridiculously lean setup).

Wikimedia's mission from the start was to be more than just "run Wikipedia and make sure it isn't bought off by some corporate interest", it always had outreach and social responsibility at its core. The problem is, for some people being a responsible citizen of society is already political in itself and, thus, bad.

[umbra07]

> Wikimedia's mission from the start was to be more than just "run Wikipedia and make sure it isn't bought off by some corporate interest", it always had outreach and social responsibility at its core. The problem is, for some people being a responsible citizen of society is already political in itself and, thus, bad.

but then why do they constantly run banners implying that Wikipedia will shut down if I don't donate right now?

[mschuster91]

Capitalism, plain and simple. I don't like it either, but that's the way all fundraising has devolved down to. And hell, it's been that way even decades ago with images of starving little African kids being used for emotional manipulation.

In any decent world, governments would use tax money to both fund projects like Wikimedia and help get poor countries off on a self-sustaining economy, but that ship has sailed I am afraid.

[eadmund]

I don’t believe that ‘capitalism’ is a good explanation for the behaviour of a charitable organisation with no shareholders.

An issue with private funding for charitable projects is, as you note, appeals to the emotions of private donors.

An issue with the public funding for charitable projects you propose is appeals to the emotions of both legislators and executive agents. Another issue is corruption: a project which can figure out how to both receive money from taxes and influence elections can ultimately write its own meal ticket.

[umbra07]

hmm, perhaps I was unclear.

You said that the Wikimedia Foundation's core mission is to basically do good things. Their core goal is not to keep Wikipedia running (as most people believe).

Wikimedia runs very prominent banner ads all the time on Wikipedia, saying that they need money to keep Wikipedia running, and that they're a small team that depends on community funding to keep Wikipedia running, and they can't do it without you, and please please please donate by this date. I think it is very reasonable for your average Wikipedia user to believe the following, thanks to how Wikimedia advertises:

* Wikimedia is the non-profit organization that runs Wikipedia. They're basically the same thing, since Wikimedia's goal is running Wikipedia.

* Wikipedia is run by a small team

* Wikipedia is heavily reliant on donations from normal people

* Wikipedia needs money all the time. I know this because they're constantly running big highlighted banner ads urgently asking for money before $DATE

If what you said is true, and Wikimedia's core mission is not in fact, to preserve Wikipedia, then they're engaging in deceptive advertising. They're giving the impression that they need money right now to keep Wikipedia's funding source secure, but in reality, their goal is much broader than just Wikipedia. I think it's reasonable to assume that Wikipedia's funding could be much more secure if the Wikimedia Foundation solely focused on running Wikipedia. In other words, if they stopped spending on $NOT_WIKIPEDIA_REL_COST they would be fine.

What does this have to do with capitalism or $ENTITY using pictures of starving African children?

> In any decent world, governments would use tax money to both fund projects like Wikimedia and help get poor countries off on a self-sustaining economy, but that ship has sailed I am afraid.

I want to make sure I'm not misinterpreting your words. Are you saying that it's okay for Wikimedia to engage in knowingly deceptive advertising because otherwise poor countries won't be able to get their economy running?

Are we agreeing that they're knowingly being deceptive, and that they wouldn't need to be deceptive if they just focused on Wikipedia? And we're disagreeing on whether that deception is moral or immoral?

[mschuster91]

> What does this have to do with capitalism or $ENTITY using pictures of starving African children?

To show that, thanks to capitalism, deception has become the norm in advertising (of all kind, frankly), and either you go along and play the game, or you go six feet under. It's immoral, sure, but I'd much more prefer to see the system itself fixed than to only nab random offenders.

> I want to make sure I'm not misinterpreting your words. Are you saying that it's okay for Wikimedia to engage in knowingly deceptive advertising because otherwise poor countries won't be able to get their economy running?

No. The part with the poor countries refers to that I don't want to see any kind of fundraiser stuff that should be a government's job, and on top of that I disdain many of the charity campaigns relating to Africa because the "aid" we gave utterly crushed the local agricultural and textile industry, sending off many countries into a disastrous dependency loop - if you want to read more on that, look up "mitumba".

[x-complexity]

> Capitalism, plain and simple. I don't like it either, but that's the way all fundraising has devolved down to.

No.

*Even under a socialist framework*, the tactics used for fundraising would not be alien. The main difference would be to court either (a) the public votes for funding approval, or (b) the leadership votes that hold the administration's purse strings.

Don't blame it on the system. There are only so many ways to gather resources before the different methods overlap with each other.

> In any decent world, governments would use tax money to both fund projects like Wikimedia and help get poor countries off on a self-sustaining economy, but that ship has sailed I am afraid.

Counterpoint: Why is it *my* burden to bear on building up *their* economy/business/organization? They're not as inept as implied in your saviour complex.

[DoctorOW]

> and so, notably, does StackOverflow who run a ridiculously lean setup

Bad news.

https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/404231/we-re-finall...

[LexiMax]

I've noticed this as well. It's in especially stark contrast when you compare to other browsers, such as Brave, whose gaffes and controversies tend to be overlooked, excused, or forgotten about.

EDIT: For me, my choice of browser is simplified by the fact that I don't trust any chromium browser to keep long-term compatibility with extensions I rely upon, especially uBlock Origin.

[pixxel]

Brave is dragged at any available half-chance opportunity…

[red-iron-pine]

Brave deserves to be dragged sometimes

[const_cast]

Not really, but I will say Brave has had more controversies and they're more severe than anything Firefox or Mozilla have done. But you wouldn't gather that from online comments.

[StopDisinfo910]

> Typically, Mozilla seems to pick a middle-ground.

Deeply disagree.

I think you are avoiding looking at facts by presenting the issue as a matter of contradicting opinions.

Mozilla did fire an executive with a track record of good decisions for political pressure by a minority linked to things unrelated to his tenure.

Mozilla invested significant amount of moneys in a lot of projects which all failed: buying Pocket, the tv thing, the smartphone things. Meanwhile, their main product has been losing market share while they barely fought on the marketing side of things. Worse, there were multiple events leading to negative marketing created by poor strategy.

Despite this string of failures, top management has been significantly increasing their compensation. The issue is not knowing if these compensations are competitive. Everything points to the top management being grossly incompetent. Nobody wants them to treat it like a passion project. People want them out.

I mean except Google of course which is all to happy that they meet the goal assigned to them: not being a competitor in the browser market and being an useful umbrella in case competition authorities wants to take a look at Chrome.

[glenstein]

>Mozilla invested significant amount of moneys in a lot of projects which all failed: buying Pocket, the tv thing, the smartphone things. Meanwhile, their main product has been losing market share while they barely fought on the marketing side of things.

This right here is the myth that keeps getting repeated without evidence. As I said in a different comment, most of these widely criticized side bets happened long after the market share decline, so the attempt to tie that to cause and effect just doesn't work. And the "significant" money invested in the side bets is almost never quantified (normally people trying to make this argument, once you ask for numbers, are just browsing the 990 for the first time and making random guesses).

The VPN cost seems like it was utterly trivial, the amount to purchase Pocket was never disclosed but I read of fundraising around $14MM and implied valuations in the low to mid tens of millions, which may be the ballpark of what Pocket costed to acquire. And Pocket did bring in revenue, also possibly on the order of tens of millions. So the worst case is that they lost low tens of millions, the best case is that it was a wash.

So that's not nothing, but that's what it looks like to attach these claims to facts. It's probably less than what their endowment earns them in a year, and relatively small against their annual revenue. But it doesn't tell a story of side bets triggering a collapse in market share like people keep claiming.

And it seems like I keep having to repeat this, but these kinds of narratives completely ignore what were likely the real drivers of market share change, which was Google leveraging its powerful position in search, on Android, the rollout of Chromebooks.

[glenstein]

>Mozilla did fire an executive with a track record of good decisions for political pressure

Sidebar for this one. Seems like you are referring to Brandon Eich who was CEO for all of 11 days. He was significant to Mozilla in other ways before that, but interestingly, it's his career at Mozilla that most intersects with the period of major collapse in market share.

>while they barely fought on the marketing side of things

Mozilla has long had a rather huge marketing budget that, depending on the person, is something for which they're criticized. I foget the exact numbers, but after software and development, "operations", and legal, marketing is the biggest chunk of spending and it's comparable to those other departments. If you wanted to argue that they are spending too much that actually would, imo, be one of the stronger charges to make against Mozilla, depending on what you think their priorities should be.

[BrendanEich]

> Brandon Eich

To be an elite HN hater, you need to spell my name correctly.

> it's his career at Mozilla that most intersects with the period of major collapse in market share.

This is completely wrong, since I was a founder of Mozilla from 1998 on, so I was there for growth from 0 for Mozilla Suite, then from 0 for Firefox, to the peak after Chrome was out. Did you think I just joined Mozilla in 2010?

Some links:

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

Note the orange line for Firefox. Statcounter doesn't go back earlier, but we started from 0 with mozilla/browser, grew to a million or two with Phoenix/Firebird, then on to millions from launch on Nov 9, 2004 of Firefox 1.0.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38998243

Lots of decline after I left, but I'll take some blame for decline before I quit, if you credit me for all the growth from inception. Deal?

[glenstein]

I apologize for getting your name wrong.

>This is completely wrong, since I was a founder of Mozilla from 1998 on, so I was there for growth from 0 for Mozilla Suite, then from 0 for Firefox, to the peak after Chrome was out. Did you think I just joined Mozilla in 2010?

This marks the first time I've ever heard someone argue that time period B didn't happen because it was preceded by time period A. I think claiming they both did indeed happen is a more coherent interpretation of historical events.

>Lots of decline after I left, but I'll take some blame for decline before I quit, if you credit me for all the growth from inception. Deal?

I actually love Mozilla and everything it's been able to achieve which is why I'm here pushing back against haters in the comment section. There's currently a mass hallucination happening at HN, where commenters are claiming that Mozilla's various side bets from 2020-2025 retroactively caused the market share losses of 2010-2015. Someone motivated to point to your tenure as capable of reversing those losses would have to reconcile that with the fact that your tenure coincided with the biggest collapse in market share. My hope is not that they would endorse that interpretation, but that it would reveal the motivated reasoning of treating market share decline as reversible if only you had stayed.

I would argue the real largest single driver of market share loss was the emergence of Chromium, and Google's flexing of unparalleled leverage to push Chromium out to everyone combined with Embrace-Extend-Extinguish battle plan on web standards. Excluding that from the story, and trying to framing it entirely in terms of Mozilla missteps is unfair to Mozilla, and is what I'm pushing back against.

[BrendanEich]

From the statcounter links I gave:

>>> (31.82-14.34)x100/31.82

54

>>> (14.34-2.37)x100/14.35

83

54% drop from peak to when I left, 83% drop after. No one said "didn't happen".

[glenstein]

Time period B shows a clear net drop in market share in absolute percentage terms. You reframed it as a percentage drop from peak and combined it with time period A. That’s a shift in metric and scope, not a basis for calling the reference "completely wrong." It would only be wrong if that period didn’t happen which obviously isn’t the case.

[0xy]

He's CEO of Brave which now has a third the amount of market share of Firefox and rapidly rising, while Firefox continues to crater.

[glenstein]

I'll happily credit Eich for his successes if he ever again applies his talents to a non Chromium browser. But right now that's Firefox, and hopefully soon, Ladybird.

[BrendanEich]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43336441 (ladybird)

You go build a web engine. I've done it enough and the fight for user rights is a level up now. Brave would have died on the Gecko or Servo hill, and quickly, if we'd been foolish enough to charge up it.

[sfink]

Not that it matters to anyone, but I feel a responsibility to say it: Brendan, you were right and I was wrong about the CEO pay. It still doesn't bother me as a thing in itself, but it now seems like a critical trigger in the cascade of events leading to the MBA types taking over.

I still disagree with a lot of the HN crowd's complaints about Mozilla, and think we're still serving an important function for now. The bulk of the complaints are applying hindsight to decisions that were difficult at the time, and suggesting alternate paths that are ludicrously unrealistic or optimistic. Other complaints are on target, but way overblown. But the complaint that management has been taken over by the industry-standard hype-chasing short term value extraction mindset? I can't point to any evidence that says they haven't. (Admittedly, it's hard to find a company these days that hasn't...)

[pseudalopex]

The smartphone things meant Firefox OS?

The TV thing meant the Fire TV version? How much did it cost? How much did Amazon pay Mozilla?

What was Eich's track record of good decisions? He supported Firefox OS. This seems a bad decision according to you. Many people say Firefox was much inferior to Chrome from 2008 to 2017 at least. Eich was CTO from 2005 to 2014. His track record at Brave includes multiple events which led to negative marketing.

Eich's tenure as Mozilla's CEO included failing to prepare for a predictable PR crisis, declining to apologize for harming people, and declining to say he wouldn't do it again.

[BrendanEich]

I grew Mozilla and then Firefox from zero (not 2005 CTO title, from 1998 public [late 1997 inside Netscape] in tech leader role for Mozilla, rainmaker and exec sponsor in 2001 for mozilla/browser which became Firefox) to their heights.

Now I'm growing Brave to 100M MAU (we will pass Firefox as it falls and we rise, likely this October). Take care!

[pseudalopex]

My comment was not intended as a summary of your CV. The 2005 CTO title was enough to establish you didn't inherit 2008 Firefox.

Mitchell Baker also could boast she grew Mozilla and Firefox to their heights. Her tenure after 2008 is not called a track record of good decisions.

[BrendanEich]

Why are you commenting about part of my time at Mozilla to try to put me in a bad light, then when I challenge you, suddenly dragging Mitchell in? I was not attacking her, but you were definitely attacking me. Changing the subject to someone else does not excuse your usual sniping at me.

For your information, Mitchell and I collaborated closely as leaders (I was tech, she was mgmt/legal) of Mozilla from 1999 on to Firefox launch and peak in 2010 or 2011. We also worked after that year to deal with CEO issues, before with her support I became CEO. We both supported FirefoxOS among other projects I was a tech cofounder or sponsor of. Have a nice day.

[handsclean]

You’re twisting what people ask for. The real versions are not contradictory.

- Mozilla should develop revenue independent of Google.

- Mozilla should respect Firefox’s users.

- Mozilla should focus mainly on Firefox.

- Mozilla should not kill wildly successful side projects, especially when they complement Firefox.

- Mozilla should be well run.

- Mozilla should not let a few extremely rich executives loot the business.

This is a company that has repeatedly refused actual begging to accept payment for things, then killed those things for lack of funding. They defined themselves as the advocate for users on the web, then started selling user data and lied about it. Sure there’s a grey area, but Mozilla is far from it.

[NoboruWataya]

Points 3 and 4 are contradictory, or at least, very difficult to reconcile. The use of "mainly" means you can technically say it's possible to achieve both but I doubt any of Mozilla's critics will ever be happy with their attempts to do so.

Points 1 to 3 also seem very difficult to reconcile. If they need to develop revenue independent of Google, and they need to focus mainly on Firefox, then at some stage they need to monetise other aspects of the browser. How do they do that in a way that is respectful to its users? What is the way for Mozilla to develop a new revenue stream, via Firefox (their main focus), that everyone is happy with?

Points 5 and 6 are too vague, I don't see how they could ever objectively be measured against those principles (other than by looking at the other principles).

All of this is to say that they can't win. They launch new products to try and make money, they are selling out and abandoning their core mission. They try instead to make money from their main product, they are selling out and betraying their users. They try to increase Firefox's mass appeal, they are dumbing it down and letting down their power users. They don't try to increase Firefox's mass appeal, they are failing to stay relevant.

Remember when Mitchell Baker was the problem?

[tiahura]

Isn’t she still pulling the strings?

[pseudalopex]

Baker resigned as Mozilla Corporation CEO last year. She resigned from all remaining Mozilla positions this year.

[glenstein]

>You’re twisting what people ask for.

I've seen the comments they are talking about, so I don't agree they are twisting anything. Your aspirationally consistent restatement of the case is vague, and the contradictions are specific. Does the existence of the investment fund count as failing to focus on Firefox or succeeding at developing revenue independent of Google? How about the VPN, another potential revenue source?

Is advocating for open web standards (as mentioned in the article as an example of a good thing) a distraction from Firefox (as I've seen commenters here suggest), or respecting users by giving a voice to their users in standards deliberation where their voice would otherwise be excluded?

And how confident are you that your answers are the unique and consistent representation of what users really want, and that I won't be able to quote half a dozen commenters coming to completely different diagnoses of the same questions?

[throw123xz]

> Mozilla should develop revenue independent of Google

And then you get articles like these complaining about Mozilla re-selling a VPN service.

(I agree with your points.)

[LexiMax]

> And then you get articles like these complaining about Mozilla re-selling a VPN service.

Not only that, but their competitors are also selling - or at the very least promoting - VPN services.

[ang_cire]

> repeatedly refused actual begging to accept payment for things

I don't claim to know Mozilla's internal workings, but my wife works for an education-space 501c3, and there are very strict rules about how they can fundraise, how they can spend money that's been donated, etc. I'm sure Mozilla Foundation is large enough to manage this stuff, but things like per-project bank accounts and tax records are still overhead they would have to deal with. I know one of their (my wife's org's) thorniest areas is around what money can be spent on non-"core mission" expenses.

[ang_cire]

Tried to provide insight into this, but apparently they just wanted to hate on Mozilla. xD

[bmn__]

Alternative view-point: the Mozilla Corporation exists, which is not bound by these rules.

(I did not downvote you. The HN users who did so without explanation are lamers.)

[pseudalopex]

There are strict rules for businesses soliciting donations. Mozilla Corporation would have to be more careful than most because of confusion between the non profit Mozilla Foundation and for profit Mozilla Corporation. And many people who claim they would donate to Mozilla Corporation demand per project accounting if they don't demand elimination of all projects they dislike.

[pseudalopex]

> refused actual begging to accept payment for things, then killed those things for lack of funding

Those were which things?

[const_cast]

> - Mozilla should develop revenue independent of Google. > - Mozilla should respect Firefox’s users.

These are contradictory, because how, exactly, do you expect them to make money?

They push and advertise a paid VPN service and everyone loses their minds and acts like Mozilla is the evilest company there ever darn was. But they do nothing, and then they "respect users", but they rely on Google for revenue.

> - Mozilla should focus mainly on Firefox. > - Mozilla should not kill wildly successful side projects, especially when they complement Firefox.

These are also contradictory and even contradict the first two. These side projects were not very successful, they were just well-liked. There's a difference.

If they push these side-projects, they're not focusing on Firefox, and they're disrespecting users, AND they're irresponsibly using their revenue. Oops.

And, on the topic of side projects, it seems to me that everyone rallies around them and calls them stupid and unnecessary... until they're killed. Then suddenly, magically, everyone and their Mom was using them. Really? Where was this support before? Are the supporters just unusually silent?

Like Pocket. I heard nothing, NOTHING, but ridicule for Pocket. Until it got discontinued. Then everyone loved it, it was the darling child of Mozilla, it was the best, and everyone used it. Really? Yeah, okay.

[pseudalopex]

> And, on the topic of side projects, it seems to me that everyone rallies around them and calls them stupid and unnecessary... until they're killed. Then suddenly, magically, everyone and their Mom was using them. Really? Where was this support before? Are the supporters just unusually silent?

> Like Pocket. I heard nothing, NOTHING, but ridicule for Pocket. Until it got discontinued. Then everyone loved it, it was the darling child of Mozilla, it was the best, and everyone used it. Really? Yeah, okay.

I agreed with you before this. I saw positive comments about Pocket before Mozilla announced they would shut it down. And HN comments after the announcement were more mixed than your summary.

Few complaints about Pocket were about the reading list service. They were about Mozilla integrating it. Or buying it. Or breaking their promise to open the source. Or lying about privacy. Or trying to hide Pocket paid them. Or the chum box on the new tab page. Almost any discussion of Mozilla or Firefox would prompt 1 or more of these complaints.

[const_cast]

Frankly I think people are going to be mad at Mozilla no matter what, and at this point I treat the discourse like a psyop.

Does Mozilla make mistakes? Of course. But when their competitors, Chrome, make the same mistakes but orders of magnitude worse, and nobody says anything, I can't take it seriously.

Does Mozilla disrespect their users? A bit, sometimes, in specific circumstances. Google's entire business model is disrespecting their users. So, if that's your gauge, then you're actually arguing in favor of Firefox. Same thing goes for ads. Same things go for shady payments.

This is not to say that we shouldn't critique Mozilla or Firefox. We should. But, I can't help but feel that the critique is disproportionate. And, it makes me wonder how much of it is critique, and how much of it is suspicious praise towards Google.

It's this sort of expectation problem. Maybe there's a word for it. But, since Google has shown so much bad behavior, they've set that expectation for themselves. And now, they're off the hook. They're playing a different game all together. Mozilla has one set of standards, and Chrome has another.

In this universe, Mozilla is a PhD student and Chrome is a toddler. We don't knock the toddler for shitting their pants because it's what we expect. And, we certainly wouldn't expect the toddler to construct a bibliography!

[mschuster91]

> - Mozilla should not let a few extremely rich executives loot the business.

The problem is, when searching for high-level executives, you're not competing against other NGOs, you're competing with the wide free market - and salaries there are, frankly, out of control and have been so for decades [1]. Either Mozilla Foundation plays the dirty game just like everyone else does, or they go out of business.

It's the system that's broken at a fundamental level, not individual actors.

[1] https://www.epi.org/publication/ceo-pay-in-2023/

[tetromino_]

One might ask why Mozilla needs to search for a high-level executive in the first place. Most open source projects, even very large ones, function reasonably well without a hired executive - so what makes Mozilla different such that it requires this luxury good?

[mschuster91]

> Most open source projects, even very large ones, function reasonably well without a hired executive - so what makes Mozilla different such that it requires this luxury good?

For a certain definition of "reasonably well", that is.

And often enough, big money is at play, it's just hidden from the public eye - just look how much money IBM, RedHat, Google, Meta and other very large players spend on salaries for kernel and other OSS developers - and their managers in turn are paid the usual ridiculous executive salaries. That just doesn't show up on any public finance report.

[tiahura]

Thank God for Linus.

[stalfosknight]

Maybe they should ditch the corposuits and let the engineers run the company à la Valve.

[lovich]

The name for the effect you are describing is Baumol’s cost disease

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect

[danaris]

> or they go out of business.

How does "failing to attract an executive whose primary differentiating characteristic is demanding exorbitant amounts of money" lead to them going out of business?

[Tostino]

Widen the hiring pool then. I'm sure there are plenty of competent people who do care deeply to keep an alternative browser in the market.

[Ferret7446]

> I don't think Mozilla has always made the right decisions

That's a very twisted way of putting it. Mozilla has almost always made egregiously bad decisions, especially with its money. Indeed, "I don't think Mozilla has always made the right decisions"

[kristjank]

I am sorry that my response is so long, but you raised so many often repeated points that I wanted to reply somewhere near them.

To me, the motives of the users were always pretty clear and aligned with freedom, privacy and empowering end-users with free software. Then the suits came and reinterpreted it enough that if you look at it from the right angle, which is coincidentally always somewhere up Google's ass, it may align with what they're doing now.

- Mozilla should develop revenue independent of Google: true, but it could be in a different form than a search engine deal that effectively pipes all of user's queries to the most agressive advertising spyware syndicate of the world.

- Mozilla should not monetize Firefox: this is true. They can monetize adjacent support services like they did with the VPN and Relay (which I gladly paid for), but not the main product if they want it to be omnipresent.

- Mozilla should only focus on Firefox: strongly disagree. Mozilla should work on TECHNOLOGIES. TFA describes very well how Mozilla produced Rust and Servo, which are clearly more widely used software than Firefox. The difference between those two and Firefox is that they aren't a product to be marketed, they are technologies used in other projects! This makes it pretty easy to gain market share and get a higher user share to sit with the big players. Technologies, unlike products, are however very unappealing to the managerial caste since they need to mature a great deal more. This is a sociological problem. If a well-designed commercial product can be cathedral, a lot of technology projects I've seen people build resemble zen gardens. A midwit paid six figures to do nothing always tends to despise those who, for the same amount of money, tend to a zen-garden-like project with passion and intent. This also aligns somewhat with "Mozilla should develop cool research projects."

- Mozilla should be run like a competitive and professional business: nah. adjacent services could, but not really. Most successful software companies work off of cloud services and support nowadays. The shipped product is maybe 5% of the extracted value. A non-enshittified browser won't do much better, so I think it better to discard the thought altogether and focus on the free browser, then sell subscriptions to Relay, Pocket, or something else that works well with the free browser.

I guess my main gripe is that I see huge projects like Apache, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, PFSense, Proxmox, etc. Which are huge software projects that thrive by developing technologies. Some like PFSense and Proxmox then provide a product on top of it, but the focus is on the technology. Mozilla turned from a company developing software and technology to a company that's selling a free product and trying to profit from it. And hiring more executives won't bring better tech in.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that you can't cash in a good product for more than a few months, but you can capitalize on a good technology practically forever. And Mozilla can't seem to understand that software can be either, both, or none of the above, so it's starting to do what their clueless executives are good at: extract value.

[kmeisthax]

Looking at your list of contradictory demands, I will point out that Mozilla themselves seemed to act the way you criticize their critics for acting. They tried to pull themselves in every direction all at once and it turns out Mozilla can't really do that.

I mean, everyone shits on Wikimedia for ballooning expenses, but at least they figured out crowdfunding.

That's not to say Mozilla can't make any strategic bets. It's just that they have to be both:

1. Complimentary or integral to their flagship browser product, Firefox, and,

2. Have a reasonable path to success

Let's look at Boot2Gecko, or "Firefox OS", through this lens. Firefox needs to be on as many operating systems as possible, including mobile OSes. And it was true that one particular mobile OS vendor was loud and proud in banning Gecko. The obvious choice would have been to put all your effort into making a good mobile browser on other mobile OSes[0], but instead Mozilla decided to make a whole OS. This doesn't get Firefox in the hands of more people, but it sure as hell ties up expensive engineer time on building an entirely new platform.

Now, let's look at Rust and Servo. Those are critical developer tools. Firefox is built with them. But Mozilla jettisoned them, unceremoniously, even though they were delivering tangible improvements to the browser.

Zawinski's plan seems too radical now because Mozilla larded themselves up on side projects like Boot2Gecko and acquisitions like Pocket and Anonym, while tossing things like Rust and Servo out the window. To be clear, if Mozilla had used Pocket to make themselves Google-independent, I wouldn't be complaining about it, but instead they shut it down.

The reason why I focus on Firefox is because it's the only power Mozilla has to negotiate with. When Hollywood wanted to be able to use DRM in browser, Mozilla surrendered, almost unconditionally. And they had to, because the answer to "Firefox remains principled and doesn't put DRM in the browser" is "every streaming service tells people to uninstall Firefox".

Compare that to Apple, who was able to singlehandedly block any requirement for baseline video codec support in HTML5 because they didn't want to implement Ogg Theora. That's what being a big player in the browser market gets you.

Furthermore, Zawinski's plan is the only option. Mozilla is out of time, the DOJ is actively attempting to shut off Google's antitrust insurance and that basically spells doom for Mozilla. Hell, Mozilla themselves put out an extremely morally compromised position statement, because selling the search default is the only thing Mozilla managed to make stick. If Mozilla doesn't implement Zawinski's plan, they'll collapse and cease operating.

[0] In practice, just Android. I don't remember if Windows Phone had the same limitations as iOS did, but it's market share was so limited it did not matter.

[pseudalopex]

> The obvious choice would have been to put all your effort into making a good mobile browser on other mobile OSes[0], but instead Mozilla decided to make a whole OS.

Firefox was losing market share to Chrome on desktop platforms which Google did not own and which did not bundle Chrome. It was not and is not obvious a better Android Firefox would have halted the decline. And any Windows Phone effort would have been wasted.

Some people think Mozilla gave up Firefox OS too soon.

In another history all iOS browsers are Safari, all Windows Phone browsers are Internet Explorer, and all Android browsers distributed through Google Play are Chrome. HN comments say Mozilla were foolish to bet this would not happen.

> Now, let's look at Rust and Servo. Those are critical developer tools. Firefox is built with them. But Mozilla jettisoned them, unceremoniously, even though they were delivering tangible improvements to the browser.

Firefox includes components prototyped in Servo. It is not used as a developer tool as far as I know. Many tangible improvements to the browser were delivered without Servo.

Many companies rely on Rust without funding it. Mozilla passing Rust to an independent foundation was painful for Rust. It is unclear it harmed Mozilla.

> Zawinski's plan seems too radical now because Mozilla larded themselves up on side projects like Boot2Gecko and acquisitions like Pocket and Anonym, while tossing things like Rust and Servo out the window. To be clear, if Mozilla had used Pocket to make themselves Google-independent, I wouldn't be complaining about it, but instead they shut it down.

Why do you call Firefox OS its development name? Boot2Gecko may have been a side project. Firefox OS was the main project according to people who worked for Mozilla then.

Mozilla shut down Pocket to refocus on Firefox because Pocket was unprofitable or insufficiently profitable apparently.

Mozilla acquired Anonym last year. I think Mozilla owning an advertising company will enshittify Firefox. But how did you determine so soon it was dead weight?

> Zawinski's plan

Does Zawinski's plan mean Building THE reference implementation web browser, and Being a jugular-snapping attack dog on standards committees? The 1st part is a vague objective. Not a plan. And the 2nd part depends on the 1st part.

[FirmwareBurner]

>anti-Mozilla arguments are typically much more vague and directionless.

No they aren't. People just want a good product that's free from bloat and doesn't change the UI every week, interrupting you when you open it to advertise some sponsored affiliate websites on the home page (Otto and Adidas in my case) or new features I never asked for and will never use like Pocket or the VPN.

The org and leadership should also focus their funds on the technical development of the product itself, instead on social and political activism and virtue signaling since I don't want lectures form my products.

Basically, Mozilla just needs to "PUT THE FRIES IN THE BAG" and everyone would be happy, and even throw in a few bucks every now and then as a gesture of appreciation and good will.

But Mozilla lost users by doing the exact opposite of that, being drunk on the Google funded gravy train and knowledge that they're untouchable, being only thing preventing Chrome being considered a monopoly by regulators.

So good riddance from me, you reap what you sow, RIP BOZO, I can't support a bad product run by incompetent people just on idealism alone, it actually needs to be technically superior first and foremost.

[lurk2]

> interrupting you when you open it to advertise some affiliate websites on the home page or new features I never asked for and will never use.

I may be in the minority here but I’d be fine with them trying to push SaaS add-ons like a VPN if they would stop moving UI elements around.

[hooverd]

I also see people complain that Firefox doesn't the feature you don't like, or they're focusing on the wrong different features. They can't win.

[FirmwareBurner]

Then how come Chrome does everything I need? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

What's this business strategy called?

I call it "not shooting yourself in the foot". Mozilla management should try it.

Like I said, Mozilla can win by "putting the fries in the bag". Nobody switched from Chrome to Firefox because they had Pocket or some VPN or they had affiliate websites on the home page. On the contrary.

[glenstein]

>Then how come Chrome does everything I need? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

They let you block ads and respect your privacy? Or are you insisting on behalf of Mozilla's user base that those are not things being requested?

I would go so far as to say that respecting privacy has been one of the biggest requests from critics of Mozilla, one of the biggest senses of violation, and that replicating Chrome's abandonment of privacy is, therefore, one of the bigger examples of a contradictory request.

Google also doesn't make money from Chrome directly, yet that's what is asked of Mozilla. So how do they do what Chrome does while simultaneously fulfill the user request to leverage their browser to make money?

>Nobody switched from Chrome to Firefox because they had Pocket or some VPN or they had affiliate websites on the home page

Look up the history of Firefox market share and tell me if you can find a cause and effect relationship between market share change and any particular side bet. Because I can't find any, with one exception I'll get to in a second. Most of the side bets people complain about came in after Chrome already rose to dominance and had nothing to do with the change in market share. If words mean things, that should matter when people make this argument, but I feel like people forgot they're supposed to actually make real arguments to back these claims up.

The only exception I can find is Firefox OS, which, again, highlights the contradiction between wanting Mozilla to diversify its offerings but criticizing them when they do. It was actually one of their better big picture vision ideas in my estimation and was given favorable gloss in the article we're all talking about. But you can argue it siphoned away resources, and many people do.

So I think the criticisms are pretty all over the map, and the article linked here is actually one the best pieces I've seen that strikes the right balance.

[OneDeuxTriSeiGo]

Chrome does everything you need because Chrome is your baseline that you are used to and because of that your requirement is "it does what Chrome does".

Firefox has features that people "need" but they only know they want it because they already use it and they won't switch away from Firefox unless whatever they'd switch to has the same feature.

Ex: I will never switch away to another browser unless it has extensions that allow you to group tabs and "store them in the background" like you can with Firefox's Simple Tab Groups. Likewise I know people who won't switch to a manifest v3 browser because they don't want their adblock crippled.

TLDR: Your requirements are "whatever I currently use but better". You will never win users by trying to beat a better funded and better staffed project at that. Instead you have to try to do new things and discover what can make your project stand out.

[FirmwareBurner]

I used Opera before FF due to its unique and innovative features, then FF when Opera became Chinese, then Chrome when FF went to shit by changing its UI for the worst every week.

None of the new features FF introduced did I ever need, and judging by its market share I am not alone. FF just focuses on useless features that nobody asked for. If you asked for those feature, congrats, you're part of the 0,001% userbase, too bad that's irrelevant. Bad leadership. You can defend FF all you want but the market share speaks for itself.

They had unlimited money from Google and they squandered it. That's like playing a game with cheat codes and coming in last every time. Mozilla leadership should resign and go flip burghers at McDs instead as they're shit at their tech jobs.

Mozilla had to just not fuck with the UI, features and put ads, and it would have been as easy win.