14 ms·

Steve Teixeira, Mozilla’s New Chief Product Officer

• Aisen8010 4y ago
  It's surprising that Mitchell Bakers still is Mozilla's CEO. Firefox has been bleeding users for years, but no change in the command.
  • coffeeblack 4y ago
    It’s 2022, it doesn’t surprise me.
  • influx 4y ago
    "In 2018 she received a total of $2,458,350 in compensation from Mozilla, which represents a 400% payrise since 2008.[14] On the same period, Firefox marketshare was down 85%. When asked about her salary she stated "I learned that my pay was about an 80% discount to market. Meaning that competitive roles elsewhere were paying about 5 times as much. That's too big a discount to ask people and their families to commit to." In 2020, after returning to the position of CEO, her salary had risen to over $3 million. In the same year the Mozilla Corporation laid off approximately 250 employees due to shrinking revenues. Baker blamed this on the Coronavirus pandemic."
    • jackmott 4y ago
    • testing7787 4y ago
    • LudwigNagasena 4y ago
      What market is she talking about? Does the market for the executives of declining browsers that lost their market share and have no clear prospects command such wages?
      • jiggawatts 4y ago
        I've been offered over 2x as much as her to drive a browser into the ground, but I rejected the offer because my family wouldn't accept the shame of accepting such a meagre offer. /s
      • laweijfmvo 4y ago
        > What market is she talking about? I guess that would be the CEOs of Google (Chrome), Microsoft (Edge), and Apple (Safari)...
        • solarkraft 4y ago
          That would be hilarious
    • jjulius 4y ago
      This alone makes me want to stop using it. I won't, because the alternatives are worse, but goddamnit that's gross.
    • djbusby 4y ago
      Why not move to a job that pays more if you're qualified? I hate that CEO comp goes up just "because market" but staff wages are stagnant or lost entirely.
      • pseudalopex 4y ago
        She said her pay was 80% below market. Not is. Why move if you can stay and get paid the same?
    • fleddr 4y ago
      There must be something in the water in California. Mozilla excessively prides itself on progressive signaling, whilst internally running the place like the most cruel neoliberal companies out there.
      • SllX 4y ago
        The problem is that we took the LSD out of the water.
      • the_only_law 4y ago
        > Mozilla excessively prides itself on progressive signaling, whilst internally running the place like the most cruel neoliberal companies out there. Isn’t this just most companies?
        • deleted 4y ago
          [deleted]
        • fleddr 4y ago
          Definitely, this is just an extreme version of it.
      • Ekaros 4y ago
        Isn't that the typical way of these companies signal hell out and then be fully neoliberal. Signalling after all is pretty cheap. Or at best couple million even for big companies.
    • ekianjo 4y ago
      > I learned that my pay was about an 80% discount to market. And your performance is actually much worse than 80% discount in other companies. Any CEO with such results would be fired in 2 years anywhere else. > Baker blamed this on the Coronavirus pandemic. Sure, always blame external factors for your own incompetence. That's what politicians do every morning during breakfast.
    • artdigital 4y ago
      I wanted to support firefox but when I first read this a whil eback it made me lose all sympathy and support for Mozilla. As long as she's the head, I won't be using their services and products
  • smegsicle 4y ago
    > Steve stood out to us because of his extensive experience at tech and internet companies where he played instrumental roles in shaping products from research, design, security, development, and getting them out to market, and also because he was the only seemingly qualified candidate that didn't call me an incompetent overpaid retard to my face.
  • ZeroGravitas 4y ago
    I believe Mozilla has been losing market share, but not users, while the market has grown substantially, often on platforms that have banned alternative browsers. Maybe that's now changed, but if it has, and Mozilla is actually losing users, I'd say it probably has more to do with those platforms choices than any particular woman you don't like.
• maverick74 4y ago
  Ah ah. Another one eating Mozilla's revenue big time!!! They all talk experience but never the numbers being paid. The solution is not a well paid employee! It's an employee that likes what it does, no mater the money
• ngetchell 4y ago
  Please, please, please focus on making the browser better. Hammer home the privacy angle against Chrome. Force Canonical to sit down and fix the Snap launching issues. Open source Pocket and make special features a perk of donating to the browser. Not sure if this is possible but being lean enough to handle the eventuality of Google refusing to bid to be the default search partner.
  • kitsunesoba 4y ago
    I would also like customizability to stop being trimmed away, and ideally for some of the things that users currently accomplish with userchrome hacks to be supported directly one way or another.
    • TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
      … and say no to Web Extension manifest v3, or at least make long-lived background pages an option instead of short-lived service workers.
    • idle_zealot 4y ago
      The number 1 thing I want to see from Firefox is fist-class support for tree tabs. Using an extension and hacking on userChrome to hide the tab bar is getting tiring, especially with the barriers Mozilla have erected to make user styles more difficult to enable.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • acrispino 4y ago
    Canonical is working on firefox snap performance: https://snapcraft.io/blog/improving-firefox-snap-performance-part-3 https://snapcraft.io/blog/improving-firefox-snap-performance... That said, I've switched to using the firefox tarball. Start up performance isn't the only issue. Snap firefox doesn't seem to respect my dconf settings and I experienced some strange hangups that forced me to kill the browser.
  • hammyhavoc 4y ago
• fzfaa 4y ago
  Is he of Spanish or Portuguese descent? Sounds like a Galician last name but I'm not sure.
  • flobosg 4y ago
    Teixeira is a Galician-Portuguese surname.
  • a2800276 4y ago
    Just out of curiosity, would such genetic disposition make him a better or a worse fit for the job? Would the people of Galicia be proud that one of their sons works for Firefox or would they be ashamed?
    • fzfaa 4y ago
      I don't have the answer to either question, I'm afraid.
    • khazhoux 4y ago
      There was nothing wrong with his question. Your not-so-subtle implication of racism is inappropriate. Some people are simply interested in language and names. I've never seen the surname Teixeira before and I also wondered the same thing, since "eira" suggests Portuguese but the 'x' seems like Nahuatl or Mexican Spanish (like Tlaxcala).
• Pavelvossssoim 4y ago
• Pavelvossssoim 4y ago
• skrtskrt 4y ago
  > There are few opportunities today to build software that is unambiguously good for the world He’s coming from a brief stint at Twitter and long stints at Facebook and Microsoft. What could he know about building something unambiguously good for the world?
  • zeroonetwothree 4y ago
    Yeah I am pretty worried about this as a big FF user.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • happytoexplain 4y ago
    I don't read that as implying he believes his previous employers built such products. He is in fact emphasizing the rarity of such a thing, and I agree with him.
    • skrtskrt 4y ago
      No it doesn’t read that way, but it raises the question of whether he really knows what an unequivocally good tech product is and whether he will stoutly refuse to compromise for the sake of growth. I think any amount of time as a corporate decisionmaker can skew your moral compass, and he was at three companies that have history of being particularly damaging
  • CRConrad 4y ago
    > What could he know about building something unambiguously good for the world? His old memories from Borland, where he spent 1993-98 building Delphi and C++ Builder.
• buscoquadnary 4y ago
  > Steve comes to us most recently from Twitter, where he spent eight months as a Vice President of Product for their Machine Learning and Data platforms. Prior to that, Steve led Product Management, Design and Research in Facebook’s Infrastructure organization. He also spent almost 14 years at Microsoft where he was responsible for the Windows third-party software ecosystems and held leadership roles in Windows IoT, Visual Studio and the Technical Computing Group. This guy is sounding like bad news all around. I want the CPO to be someone with a strong tech background and I mean actual tech not tech bro. This guy's resume reads like a list of out of date buzzwords. This is another MBA suit that is going to make FF worse not better, mark my words.
  • pavlov 4y ago
    The bar for “actual tech” must be extremely high if Twitter-scale ML, Facebook-scale infrastructure and Microsoft IDEs and Technical Computing group don’t count.
    • Nextgrid 4y ago
      > Twitter-scale ML That one made me laugh. Their "ML" can't even detect crypto scammers impersonating Elon Musk despite them using exactly the same name, profile picture and replying using very predictable texts that a basic regular expression can pick up.
      • hammyhavoc 4y ago
        It's probably in their financial interests to not clamp down too hard on crypto considering how much the crypto chuds love Twitter. I get so much 'like' spam from verified (how the fuck?) crypto scammers.
    • jjulius 4y ago
      The expanded quote is... >... I mean actual tech not tech bro. ... under which it becomes a lot more obvious what OP is referring to. "Actual tech" in the older, "Technology will transform the world for good!" sense, rather than, "Let's use technology to make the most money possible, fuck it," sense.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• primeblue 4y ago
• tlb 4y ago
  There is so much opportunity to make Firefox great. It could make a billion people significantly happier and safer online. I hope he can make it happen.
  • hammyhavoc 4y ago
    Why a billion?
• lysergia 4y ago
  Great! Now: Stop tracking people with telemetry. You don’t need to know how many users you have. People strip FF of telemetry anyways. Look at LibreWolf and learn. Clean up the FF addons repository. So many addons are plain malware and invading peoples privacy surreptitiously. Get rid of Pocket. Nobody uses it and it was forced on users. Stop piggybacking on handouts from Google. There are other ways to source revenue. Make FF donationware if you must. I would happily send you £5.00 per month if it means I and others can continue to use FF.
  • m-p-3 4y ago
    > Get rid of Pocket. Nobody uses it and it was forced on users. I use it daily..
    • mikewave 4y ago
      So go to the website and use it. Many of us simply find it as a way for more propaganda to be fed to us unasked-for when we open up a new tab (at least, until we remember to turn it off).
      • Nextgrid 4y ago
        In fact internally it's still packaged as an add-on that is installed on first run. Unbundling it would be super easy.
      • m-p-3 4y ago
        The product belongs to Mozilla, so I don't see why they shouldn't integrate it.
        • kyleee 4y ago
          as with many things though it should be consent based and opt in; they can have a big button "add pocket to your firefox" and those who want it can opt in and everyone else won't have to go through the rigamarole of finding all the settings (strewn about in various locations including about:config) to disable it
• Barrin92 4y ago
  baffled by a lot of the demands already in the thread. Firefox needs one thing right now and that is market share or else the browser is dead in a few years. Privacy, telemetry, and Linux don't matter, sorry folks, if they did people wouldn't use Chrome or Edge. The most important thing is compatibility with major sites at this point. if people's banking or health insurance page reject Firefox, people are just going to use Chrome. The mobile battery drain is a disaster as well. with less than 1% usage on android phones there should easily be room for many more users if you baked in ublock origin and fixed the performance because people actually do hate mobile ads.
  • least 4y ago
    > Firefox needs one thing right now and that is market share or else the browser is dead in a few years. > The most important thing is compatibility with major sites at this point. if people's banking or health insurance page reject Firefox, people are just going to use Chrome. That's really not the primary issue, although it will drive people back to their preferred browser if that is an issue. Firefox is fighting an uphill battle against default browsers, which are Edge on Windows, Safari on MacOS/iOS, and Chrome on Android phones. You can't just say "We're compatible with all the sites that already work with the browser you use" and expect people to switch. You need genuinely useful and unique selling points that can be appreciated by the average person in order to overcome the default's inertia.
    • p1esk 4y ago
      Are people leaving FF or are people not switching to FF? Which is more important?
      • fleddr 4y ago
        The amount of internet users keeps growing significantly, where almost all new users are dedicated mobile users, whom tend to use Chrome/Safari. So the market grows in size, almost none of that growth being distributed to Firefox, hence the slow and endless bleed.
    • 4y ago
• 0xbadc0de5 4y ago
  Sadly, I think Mozilla is beyond saving at this point. I was a long time Firefox user until 2021 - since inception, and Netscape before that. I've since stopped using it in favor of Brave - which actually delivers what Firefox had been promising. Mozilla's been hopelessly mismanaged for well over a decade and has been bleeding users the entire time. This is doubly unfortunate because they do have some genuinely solid tech and one of the only independent rendering engines. The CEO should have been shown the door back in 2012.
  • knewter 4y ago
    Almost like ousting Brendan Eich was an incredibly stupid move.
    • pipeline_peak 4y ago
      Being a prominent figure in tech and donating $1,000 to the campaign against equal marriage in California was an incredibly stupid move. It’s not 1998, he didn’t stand a chance.
      • _-david-_ 4y ago
        I think it is important to note he donated money on the side that got 52% of voters. Its not like he was in a massive minority.
        • tuckerman 4y ago
          I don't think the popularity or lack thereof of the side changes whether or not someone would be willing to work for Eich. Everyone is entitled to their beliefs but are not entitled to avoid scrutiny and I think he made the right call stepping down. I would personally never consider working at a company where he was in my management chain nor would I champion a browser from a company he leads.
          • _-david-_ 4y ago
• _HMCB_ 4y ago
  I’ve been following Mozilla for what I can gather has been 20 years. Maybe more. It’s been a company chasing ideals. Guess what? The market really doesn’t care all that much. If 1-3% market share is all that mattered, then they could prop their feet up and coast. This company is dead in the water. This new guy is a pacifier until the inevitable.
• jiggawatts 4y ago
  I've been using Mozilla browsers since NetScape Navigator. I'll probably have to stop soon. Firefox is just too buggy and incomplete. The attitude of the developers on Bugzilla is just horrendous. Users take their time to submit detailed reports, with repro steps, explanations, references, and screenshots of how other browsers behave. These tickets will sit in the queue for decades, sometimes with thousands or even tens of thousands of "me too!" and "is this fixed yet?" comments. The only response you will see from anyone at Mozilla is internal paper-pushing. Assigning of categories, merging bugs, assigning to a team, or whatever. Almost never will you see an actual developer fix the issue. Currently, Firefox the only major browser that: - Doesn't consistently support colour management. - Doesn't support HDR on sites like YouTube. - Doesn't pick up the operating system PKI trust store. - Doesn't play nice with Enterprise deployment and configuration management. ... etc ... The core team has lost its way and is too busy playing with stupid pet projects with no business value. The CPO should really start knocking some heads together and start asking tough questions like: - Why are there open bug tickets old enough to drink and have little bugs of their own? - Why is Firefox unable to correctly view content on the #1 video site in the world? Etc... Fix the basics!
  • torstenvl 4y ago
    > Doesn't pick up the operating system PKI trust store. This was super frustrating for me. I filed a related bug when loading the CACKey module stopped working. While that bug didn't get fixed, I found out about two settings to do what you want. Set security.enterprise_roots.enabled and security.osclientcerts.autoload to true in about:config and restart Firefox. Doing that plus loading and trusting the appropriate certs in Keychain Access makes my CAC/PIV work.
    • jiggawatts 4y ago
      They never actually fixed the bug. Notice the word "roots" in "security.enterprise_roots.enabled"? The PKI hierarchy is more than just "roots". A tree is more than just a stump.[1] No amount of begging or pleading with the Mozilla dev team ever succeeded in convincing them to read the Microsoft documentation for how PKI works in Windows. There's a set of constants in the Win32 headers that defines the various certificate trust stores in Windows. You know, "machine", "machine policy", "user", and "user policy" multiplied out to make combinations with "root", "intermediate", "crl", etc... Over 20 years they have slowly, one at a time added a random subset of them. RANDOM. Just... one... at... a time... in some unfathomable order. It was mind-blowing to watch this unfold. The simplest thing they could have done was simply support all of the stores by copy-pasting the whole block of constants and writing a for loop across all of them. Done. Fixed. Close ticket. But noooo... got to keep those tickets open for decades and decades by making sure that whatever is there remains permanently incomplete. It boggles the mind. [1] As a random example of how this can be broken in Firefox is that it is unable to use LDAP to load an intermediate CA certificate. The use of LDAP is common on large Windows-based enterprise networks, because it's the default. It's trivial to "push" these intermediate CA certs into the local trust store of every machine using policy, at which point the protocol support no longer matters. Firefox could have simply picked up the certificate from the local store. It already has the code for doing this for Root certs, but refuses to use identical code for Intermediate certs.
• mcint 4y ago
  Good luck to Steve and the team. I hope he has a broad remit, and can find a way to thrive while upholding Mozilla's values. I hope to see new experiments, and maybe new community. I love the internal meme of areweXyet, and wish they hosted that metric for projects and goals outside Mozilla too.
  • djbusby 4y ago
    No experiments! Get back on the main-line, critical-path.
    • solarkraft 4y ago
      They should experiment with messing up less (that said some Mozilla side projects have been cool).
• i_am_proteus 4y ago
  How much funding would a new nonprofit need to hard fork Firefox and try to actually get it right? Unless FF becomes a compellingly better browser for the average user, it will keep on losing to the default Edge/Chrome/Safari.
  • djbusby 4y ago
    Working with my finance team, we guessed, minimum, three persons per component team, for very narrow definition of components. There were roughly 50 components we identified (poorly) and some overlap but...we were looking at (again min) 150 good (expensive) devs and like 30 to 50 eng-managers. And still need to fill roles for vision, finance, architecture, etc. So, at this point...millions per year. However, I've been maintaining a small fork, with just small tweaks by my self, and LibreWolf has some patches too - for very little money.
    • solarkraft 4y ago
      > However, I've been maintaining a small fork Do you mind elaborating? I'd really just like some "Unmozillaed Firefox" or "Firefoxium" that removes some of the crap Mozilla tries to impose ("no, you can't install extensions from outside of the store", "using a userChrome.css? haha, no"). But all prominent FF forks are full of crazy "privacy enhancements" that mean virtually no web app will work.
      • djbusby 4y ago
        Sure. Building Firefox is pretty easy. And then you can pick/choose the patches from LibreWolf maybe. And also for example strip out the Pocket shit, or frob all the defaults to what you like (no DNS over HTTP) and tweak the style too, and even "fix" the default HTML styles.
  • throwaway_4ever 4y ago
    Brave, Brendan Eich's (previous Mozilla CEO) new company and browser, has raised $42m and has probably ~220 employees. He said even then, they had to fork Chromium because they didn't have the resources to actually do all the work involved in a feature complete browser engine. So I'm guessing $500m funding, because even Microsoft didn't invest in an outside-Chromium engine for Edge.
• ekianjo 4y ago
  > accelerate the growth Does Mozilla have any growing product right now?
  • hammyhavoc 4y ago
    Salaries for CEOs?
• nathanaldensr 4y ago
  My whole family and I would switch from Firefox to Brave today if Brave (and really, Chromium, under the hood) supported multi-account containers. It's simply too amazing a feature to give up. As it stands, I have five PCs running Firefox in my house.
• egberts1 4y ago
  Inflation of CxO positions. Not always good if trying to retain quality Mozilla developers.
• pipeline_peak 4y ago
  Is there a distribution of Firefox without any Rust, or experimental overhead? We all know it was an OSS project before there was a company backing it. We don’t need these sjw weirdos, we need a project that focuses on just a functioning core, Gecko and SpiderMonkey. Similar to how the Linux project is just a kernel and people ship their own stuff on top, as they please. The biggest problems are the lack of people who care and funding. How could a browser be profitable, it’s fucking free. Today that’s Googles endorsement, which is the last company they need to depend on. How could people be convinced, what is the actual problem with Chrome holding dominance?
  • solarkraft 4y ago
    Are you trolling? Without any Rust? I'd like a Linux kernel, but without any C, please ...
    • pipeline_peak 4y ago
      Rust is not compatible with C++, you don’t think those bindings cause latency?
• solarkraft 4y ago
  With how Mozilla has been behaving in the last decade I'll be ecstatic if the does as much as slowing down the worsening.
• Am4TIfIsER0ppos 4y ago
  Is he going to run `git checkout v3.6` and make them start over?