4 ms·

Mozilla is a case study in how damaging a CEO can be. She is truly a disaster and I have literally zero confidence in the company's success (or its ability to e

Mozilla is a case study in how damaging a CEO can be. She is truly a disaster and I have literally zero confidence in the company's success (or its ability to effect its mission) under her leadership.

dgb23 3y ago
That comes off as too targeted. This instance shows a few _general_ problems: 1. Compensation is a function of power, not merit. Merit is a secondary, indirect factor that _can_ have an effect on power, but it's not a necessary condition. Power often comes from social currency, negotiation, manipulation, wealth and ownership. 2. Power and responsibility are at best loosely correlated. Often those in power try excuse their obscene privileges by pointing to responsibility. According to this idea, their decisions are force multipliers and they carry a huge risk. But reality shows time and time again, that this isn't true outside of the most extreme cases. They accumulate power and wealth to an irresponsible degree and make irresponsible decisions all the time without being held accountable. In fact, many get _rewarded_ instead. --- I want a Mozilla that is the steward of the fastest, most advanced, secure and user respecting browser. I want the best in class dev tools. I would gladly pay good money for that and I 100% bet that there would be enough people who would too.
- AnthonyMouse 3y ago
  What I don't understand is why someone doesn't just, essentially, fork the browser and take over for them. You'd either need someone with enough name recognition that the people tired of Mozilla's incompetence would switch to their fork (and thereby give them the search revenue), or a donation from someone to get them off the ground, but nobody even wants to make the attempt?
  - paulryanrogers 3y ago
    There are several Firefox forks of some note: LibreWolf, Palemoon, etc. I think you'll find that maintaining a huge, legacy codebase that supports a rapidly expanding API is significantly more costly than a single engineer's salary.
    - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
      The point is to ultimately take over the entire thing. Find some existing pain point that people don't like about Firefox, fix it, make sure people know the better version is available. People switch to it, you get more search revenue and donations, you hire more developers. It's the same way Mozilla operates, but this time you hire competent management so your market share goes up instead of down.
      - paulryanrogers 3y ago
        Browsers are a pretty crowded market and they seem to have reached a certain equilibrium of normie-facing features. Unlikely you'll gain traction among regular users who are bagged to use their OS or search vendor's own. Perhaps one could gain Mozilla users, though hard to compete against millions of dollars of development (regardless of whether CEO is taking a chunk or not).
        AnthonyMouse 3y ago
        > Browsers are a pretty crowded market and they seem to have reached a certain equilibrium of normie-facing features. I feel like you could have said the same thing about IE 4.0. It's more like, the incumbents don't care outside of what they need for their own purposes and Mozilla is the one supposed to be doing it but they're not. Except for the crowded market, but that's not even true now. We've got Firefox and the KHTML lineage and that's about it. > Unlikely you'll gain traction among regular users who are bagged to use their OS or search vendor's own. Chrome has 64% market share on desktop despite the proprietors of Edge and Safari having a combined ~90% desktop market share. Firefox itself had 32% market share in 2010. You can get people to switch from the default if they have a reason. > Perhaps one could gain Mozilla users, though hard to compete against millions of dollars of development (regardless of whether CEO is taking a chunk or not). The problem is more than the CEO taking too much. They're not actually spending most of the money on making Firefox better. They should also be spending more of it on marketing, because their funding is directly tied to how many users they have, which keeps going down.
  - sangnoir 3y ago
    > What I don't understand is why someone doesn't just, essentially, fork the browser and take over for them 1) it costs money, so those doing ot for philosophical reasons may find it daunting 2) Those who'd do it to make money (less ideologically aligned with Mozilla) would rather fork Chromium instead as it has momentum

dgb23 3y ago

That comes off as too targeted. This instance shows a few _general_ problems: 1. Compensation is a function of power, not merit. Merit is a secondary, indirect factor that _can_ have an effect on power, but it's not a necessary condition. Power often comes from social currency, negotiation, manipulation, wealth and ownership. 2. Power and responsibility are at best loosely correlated. Often those in power try excuse their obscene privileges by pointing to responsibility. According to this idea, their decisions are force multipliers and they carry a huge risk. But reality shows time and time again, that this isn't true outside of the most extreme cases. They accumulate power and wealth to an irresponsible degree and make irresponsible decisions all the time without being held accountable. In fact, many get _rewarded_ instead. --- I want a Mozilla that is the steward of the fastest, most advanced, secure and user respecting browser. I want the best in class dev tools. I would gladly pay good money for that and I 100% bet that there would be enough people who would too.

AnthonyMouse 3y ago
What I don't understand is why someone doesn't just, essentially, fork the browser and take over for them. You'd either need someone with enough name recognition that the people tired of Mozilla's incompetence would switch to their fork (and thereby give them the search revenue), or a donation from someone to get them off the ground, but nobody even wants to make the attempt?
- paulryanrogers 3y ago
  There are several Firefox forks of some note: LibreWolf, Palemoon, etc. I think you'll find that maintaining a huge, legacy codebase that supports a rapidly expanding API is significantly more costly than a single engineer's salary.
  - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
    The point is to ultimately take over the entire thing. Find some existing pain point that people don't like about Firefox, fix it, make sure people know the better version is available. People switch to it, you get more search revenue and donations, you hire more developers. It's the same way Mozilla operates, but this time you hire competent management so your market share goes up instead of down.
    - paulryanrogers 3y ago
      Browsers are a pretty crowded market and they seem to have reached a certain equilibrium of normie-facing features. Unlikely you'll gain traction among regular users who are bagged to use their OS or search vendor's own. Perhaps one could gain Mozilla users, though hard to compete against millions of dollars of development (regardless of whether CEO is taking a chunk or not).
      - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
        > Browsers are a pretty crowded market and they seem to have reached a certain equilibrium of normie-facing features. I feel like you could have said the same thing about IE 4.0. It's more like, the incumbents don't care outside of what they need for their own purposes and Mozilla is the one supposed to be doing it but they're not. Except for the crowded market, but that's not even true now. We've got Firefox and the KHTML lineage and that's about it. > Unlikely you'll gain traction among regular users who are bagged to use their OS or search vendor's own. Chrome has 64% market share on desktop despite the proprietors of Edge and Safari having a combined ~90% desktop market share. Firefox itself had 32% market share in 2010. You can get people to switch from the default if they have a reason. > Perhaps one could gain Mozilla users, though hard to compete against millions of dollars of development (regardless of whether CEO is taking a chunk or not). The problem is more than the CEO taking too much. They're not actually spending most of the money on making Firefox better. They should also be spending more of it on marketing, because their funding is directly tied to how many users they have, which keeps going down.
- sangnoir 3y ago
  > What I don't understand is why someone doesn't just, essentially, fork the browser and take over for them 1) it costs money, so those doing ot for philosophical reasons may find it daunting 2) Those who'd do it to make money (less ideologically aligned with Mozilla) would rather fork Chromium instead as it has momentum