5 ms·

> Mozilla is two different entities. The Mozilla Corporation and the Mozilla Foundation. The second one? That's the social good one you really want focused on i

> Mozilla is two different entities. The Mozilla Corporation and the Mozilla Foundation. The second one? That's the social good one you really want focused on important things. The most social good that Mozilla (either Foundation or Corporation) does is developing Firefox. That is what I want them to focus on. > You'll see that the top earner there, Mitchell Baker, who is very handsomely rewarded, is actually paid by the Mozilla Corporation, not the Foundation. Put another way, the non-profit is not blowing its funding on a CEO. Isn’t it the Corporation that pays the salaries of the Firefox developers? That means that instead of paying 28 developers 250k/year to work on improving Firefox, they spend that money on a single CEO! That doesn’t seem so sanguine as this article suggests.

afavour 3y ago
> The most social good that Mozilla (either Foundation or Corporation) does is developing Firefox I want to agree with that but with a 3% browser market share there’s a pretty hard limit on how much social good the browser alone can ever achieve. Personally I want them to be expanding their horizons beyond just the browser. Firefox OS was ultimately a failure but if it had come much earlier (i.e. if Firefox had been proactive and anticipated a smartphone market their browser was locked out of) the future could have looked different.
- YoshiRulz 3y ago
  What? Mozilla's pursuit of other ventures of varying importance is precisely what lead to the Chrome (Blink) monopoly in the first place. FF lags behind (or is perceived to)⟶users switch to Chrome⟶sites stop testing on FF⟶sites don't work on FF⟶users switch to Chrome... (Also, was Firefox was ever locked out of the smartphone market? I thought only Apple blocked third-party browsers.)
  - ddggee 3y ago
    [flagged]
  - Kinrany 3y ago
    Mozilla doesn't have enough money to keep up with Chrome regardless.
    - AtlasBarfed 3y ago
      What is firefox fundamentally missing from Chrome? I daily drive firefox as much as possible, and only go into chrome on some machines if it may have an old password stored there. I don't miss Chrome one bit. I don't notice any difference between the browsers. As for the article, this is some pedantic pro-CEO bullcrap. 3 million dollars? GTFO. Nonprofit CEOs that pay themselves this are not acting in the goodwill of the organization they represent. They are just being leeches. Firefox will have a search contract with someone, and that will be worth a lot of money. Otherwise no firefox/mozilla CEO has effectively raised the profile of the browser, so none of them are worth a tenth or less of that salary.
      - Dalewyn 3y ago
        >What is firefox fundamentally missing from Chrome? Speed. Usability. Practicality. Reality. I daresay Chrome murdering adblocking is still better than Mozilla's gaslighting. Mozilla is that bad; they steal precious time and resources away from actually doing something worthwhile.
        AtlasBarfed 3y ago
        Ok google
        mcv 3y ago
        I use both Firefox and Chrome, and Firefox has better usability and is not lagging in performance in any practical way. And I'm a very heavy user. Not sure what you mean by Firefox missing reality. It exists.
      - Kinrany 3y ago
        I don't think it would have mattered if Firefox suddenly started improving rapidly. Alphabet has enough money and competence to not fall behind in features, ever, and it has the advertising power to never lose their market share. The best thing Firefox can do for the world is to keep raising the bar, so that Chrome has to keep up. This will not affect their popularity but it will make browsers better.
  - orbital-decay 3y ago
    > Mozilla's pursuit of other ventures of varying importance is precisely what lead to the Chrome (Blink) monopoly in the first place. Not Chrome being shoved down users' throats on every corner, including the main page of the internet? Not accidental breakage of competing browsers on YouTube?
  - afavour 3y ago
    > Mozilla's pursuit of other ventures of varying importance is precisely what lead to the Chrome (Blink) monopoly in the first place No it isn’t. It’s because their competitor is Google and it has more resources than god.
ykonstant 3y ago
In particular, zero percent of any donation to the MF goes or is allowed to go to Firefox development. This is something many donors do not understand about Mozilla's corporate structure.
- LargeTomato 3y ago
  Donations are one thing. Organizational focus is another. Mozilla likes to act like they uphold web freedom by providing an independent browser but at the same time they build things like Rust.
  - goku12 3y ago
    > but at the same time they build things like Rust. That's a mischaracterization of Rust's history with Mozilla. Mozilla's support for Rust was primarily for helping Firefox compete against Chrome, though this is not the popular narrative. Chrome, when it came out, had a multi-process architecture that was faster and snappier than Firefox. Parallelism in Firefox's Gecko was proving to be very challenging with the existing C++ code base. Early Rust grew in lock-step with the experimental Servo engine. Eventually, some of the Servo components made it to Firefox through the Quantum project - making it a whole lot faster and competent. Rust, Servo and Quantum are probably the reasons why we still have an alternative to the blink engine. Rust is very much in scope of Mozilla's work to keep the independent browser alive. On the other hand, gutting both Rust and Servo teams is probably the indication that they lost sight of their vision and goals. Servo, though incomplete, had shown performance never seen before in the industry. For a while, there was hope that Servo might eventually become a full-fledged engine. But Mozilla decided to go on other pursuits.

afavour 3y ago

> The most social good that Mozilla (either Foundation or Corporation) does is developing Firefox I want to agree with that but with a 3% browser market share there’s a pretty hard limit on how much social good the browser alone can ever achieve. Personally I want them to be expanding their horizons beyond just the browser. Firefox OS was ultimately a failure but if it had come much earlier (i.e. if Firefox had been proactive and anticipated a smartphone market their browser was locked out of) the future could have looked different.

YoshiRulz 3y ago
What? Mozilla's pursuit of other ventures of varying importance is precisely what lead to the Chrome (Blink) monopoly in the first place. FF lags behind (or is perceived to)⟶users switch to Chrome⟶sites stop testing on FF⟶sites don't work on FF⟶users switch to Chrome... (Also, was Firefox was ever locked out of the smartphone market? I thought only Apple blocked third-party browsers.)
- ddggee 3y ago
  [flagged]
- Kinrany 3y ago
  Mozilla doesn't have enough money to keep up with Chrome regardless.
  - AtlasBarfed 3y ago
    What is firefox fundamentally missing from Chrome? I daily drive firefox as much as possible, and only go into chrome on some machines if it may have an old password stored there. I don't miss Chrome one bit. I don't notice any difference between the browsers. As for the article, this is some pedantic pro-CEO bullcrap. 3 million dollars? GTFO. Nonprofit CEOs that pay themselves this are not acting in the goodwill of the organization they represent. They are just being leeches. Firefox will have a search contract with someone, and that will be worth a lot of money. Otherwise no firefox/mozilla CEO has effectively raised the profile of the browser, so none of them are worth a tenth or less of that salary.
    - Dalewyn 3y ago
      >What is firefox fundamentally missing from Chrome? Speed. Usability. Practicality. Reality. I daresay Chrome murdering adblocking is still better than Mozilla's gaslighting. Mozilla is that bad; they steal precious time and resources away from actually doing something worthwhile.
      - AtlasBarfed 3y ago
        Ok google
      - mcv 3y ago
        I use both Firefox and Chrome, and Firefox has better usability and is not lagging in performance in any practical way. And I'm a very heavy user. Not sure what you mean by Firefox missing reality. It exists.
    - Kinrany 3y ago
      I don't think it would have mattered if Firefox suddenly started improving rapidly. Alphabet has enough money and competence to not fall behind in features, ever, and it has the advertising power to never lose their market share. The best thing Firefox can do for the world is to keep raising the bar, so that Chrome has to keep up. This will not affect their popularity but it will make browsers better.
- orbital-decay 3y ago
  > Mozilla's pursuit of other ventures of varying importance is precisely what lead to the Chrome (Blink) monopoly in the first place. Not Chrome being shoved down users' throats on every corner, including the main page of the internet? Not accidental breakage of competing browsers on YouTube?
- afavour 3y ago
  > Mozilla's pursuit of other ventures of varying importance is precisely what lead to the Chrome (Blink) monopoly in the first place No it isn’t. It’s because their competitor is Google and it has more resources than god.

ykonstant 3y ago

In particular, zero percent of any donation to the MF goes or is allowed to go to Firefox development. This is something many donors do not understand about Mozilla's corporate structure.

LargeTomato 3y ago
Donations are one thing. Organizational focus is another. Mozilla likes to act like they uphold web freedom by providing an independent browser but at the same time they build things like Rust.
- goku12 3y ago
  > but at the same time they build things like Rust. That's a mischaracterization of Rust's history with Mozilla. Mozilla's support for Rust was primarily for helping Firefox compete against Chrome, though this is not the popular narrative. Chrome, when it came out, had a multi-process architecture that was faster and snappier than Firefox. Parallelism in Firefox's Gecko was proving to be very challenging with the existing C++ code base. Early Rust grew in lock-step with the experimental Servo engine. Eventually, some of the Servo components made it to Firefox through the Quantum project - making it a whole lot faster and competent. Rust, Servo and Quantum are probably the reasons why we still have an alternative to the blink engine. Rust is very much in scope of Mozilla's work to keep the independent browser alive. On the other hand, gutting both Rust and Servo teams is probably the indication that they lost sight of their vision and goals. Servo, though incomplete, had shown performance never seen before in the industry. For a while, there was hope that Servo might eventually become a full-fledged engine. But Mozilla decided to go on other pursuits.