15 ms·

With revenue declining, Mozilla CEO gets a 20% raise

384 points by billiam 3y ago

rvz 3y ago
Mozilla continues to let its users down on privacy by relying on Google's money (>80% of its entire revenue) after the CEO promised that they would move away from them 15 years ago. [0] That did not happen. Nothing has changed other than declining usage and revenue. But give the CEO another bonus over poor user usage, shrinking market share and destroying the browser, all done by themselves and now are being kept on life support by Google. [0] https://web.archive.org/web/20120105090543/https://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9044160/Mozilla_can_live_without_Google_s_money_Baker_says_ https://web.archive.org/web/20120105090543/https://www.compu...
- slyall 3y ago
  They have tried to move away from Google. The problem is none of their other ideas have worked out.
  - tempest_ 3y ago
    In fact they get chided around here for anything that isnt a firefox specific endevour. Browser engines are not a money making business (if it was Microsoft would still be in the game)
    - johannes1234321 3y ago
      The issue is: A browser engine is what is needed from them. VPN can be done by many organisations.
      - pseudalopex 3y ago
        Mozilla VPN is done by Mullvad mostly.
    - freeAgent 3y ago
      Many (most?) non-Firefox endeavors of the Mozilla Foundation have been half-hearted flops for which they deserve chiding. I struggle to name any non-Firefox Mozilla project that has been successful and which they've continued to support.
  - wkat4242 3y ago
    Because they're harebrained ideas. I don't want to pay Mozilla for a limited version of mullvad when I can get the full mullvad for less. I don't think they actually ever expected any of these ideas to work. In the meantime you can't even donate to firefox if you want to, only to the foundation. I mean, I give money to KDE every month and they manage to build a whole desktop environment. Why can't I do that with Mozilla? Oh wait, how much money does KDE waste on a CEO?
  - lolinder 3y ago
    Here's an idea: provide a donations bucket that gives a guarantee that they'll be earmarked exclusively for Firefox development. Nothing off the top for CEO salaries, nothing siphoned off for random side projects—this bucket should be guaranteed to pay the salaries of Firefox developers. It might not make millions, but I'd donate in a heartbeat if I knew that my money would actually go to Firefox and not to one of the dozens of random side quests that Mozilla keeps picking up.
    - yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
      > provide a donations bucket that gives a guarantee that they'll be earmarked exclusively for Firefox development I've head that there are tax problems with that. So maybe there needs to be a paid "Firefox Pro" or whatever?
      - lolinder 3y ago
        That'd work just as well for me. I just want a way to give Mozilla a clear signal that I pay them for Firefox, not for Pocket or a VPN or for whatever the flavor of the month is for the nonprofit. As is, there is no way for me to send them that signal, and I'm not prepared to endorse any of the non-Firefox projects Mozilla's put out.
      - wkat4242 3y ago
        The tax problems were because of the Google deal, not the donations.
    - pseudalopex 3y ago
      Money is fungible. How should they guarantee your donation paid Firefox developers only?
      - lolinder 3y ago
        You're correct, and this is a general problem with earmarking—there's nothing to stop the organization from just shifting unrestricted funds out of that bucket to compensate. I still would donate in this scenario, because the main point is that I want to be explicit about which activities Mozilla is engaging in that I find valuable. Donating to Mozilla right now would send the wrong message.
  - vidarh 3y ago
    For starters that'd be a reason to cut cost and allocate an increasing proportion of current revenue into a diversified investment portfolio to eventually gradually shift towards being able to at a minimum know they can cost-cut and survive of that investment return should they need to. If I was aiming to set up a company like Mozilla, I'd want all earnings to go into such a fund, and all costs to come out of buffered investment returns... Yes, significantly slows down the rate you can spend, but it also significantly increases the odds of longevity and independence. Of course that presumes the goal is to build the organization, not to get personally rich off it.
  - pseudalopex 3y ago
    Mozilla's subscriptions and advertising grew from nothing in 2016 to 13% of revenue in 2022.
  - Nextgrid 3y ago
    Here's an idea: an enterprise/power-user focused browser. The market for productivity tools is huge, and likewise for enterprise security snake oil. The browser, being at the front of most security threats would be a great place to implement security features that might not be entirely snake oil, and The Enterprise will gobble it up and pay up.
- cf1241290841 3y ago
  This might be poor framing. Maybe its for a job well done. A big reason for google funding is fears of monopoly lawsuits. From this perspective a firefox fewer people use is a good thing.
pcdoodle 3y ago
I like brave.
elijah_moham 3y ago
[dead]
sillywalk 3y ago
FTA, emphasis mine: "Chief product officer Steve Teixeira notes in the report the rapid growth of AI and social networks, although warns that Mozilla.social is unlikely to move beyond the experimentation phase in 2024. He says that Mozilla would be "exploring ways to better integrate advertising while adhering to our focus on privacy and choice," including web browsing."
- CatWChainsaw 3y ago
  Also the part where they need data for AI, so turbocharge the telemetry engines... (but am I wrong, downvoters? :))) what the hell bone do you have to pick with a fact? "As well as Teixeira's comments regarding advertising, Baker notes: "We need to be faster in prototyping, launching, learning, and iterating ... This requires rich data, and so we will be moving in that direction, but in a very Mozilla way."")
  - elzbardico 3y ago
    HN doesn't like some facts. Those disliked facts change over time. Don't overthink it. Downvotes in everything you post should be worrying, an ocasional downvote here and there is actually a good sign that you're not a part of a hive-mind.
    - CatWChainsaw 3y ago
      I added the quote in case it was a citation thing.
  - jodrellblank 3y ago
    Downvoting for complaining that downvoters think you're wrong, when downvoters just as likely think your comment is low effort. Even your defense of your comment is "I'm just regurgitating a sentence from the article and adding nothing".
Seattle3503 3y ago
Mozilla's corporate structure has the same problem OpenAI had. Because Mozilla is not a for-profit entity, management isn't accountable to shareholders with a financial stake. Because Mozilla isn't a charity, management isn't accountable to donors. Who is Mozilla management accountable to? A board; mostly made up Baker's associates. It is an incestuous arrangement. If Mozilla were serious, they would change the way management is held accountable. Baker needs someone who will actually hold her feet to the flames. Mozilla is entirely unimaginative, but is self sustaining as long as it keeps its advertisers. Mozilla is a shambling corpse that will continue to shuffle forward until it is no longer favorable for Google to buy search placement.
- lacrimacida 3y ago
  >Mozilla is a shambling corpse that will continue to shuffle forward until it is no longer favorable for Google to buy search placement. That’s the reason firefox will never improve.
  - omnimus 3y ago
    Improve in what sense? As a browser it has bern improving.
    - effingwewt 3y ago
      No it hasn't, and that's completely objective. They have ignored user requests every iteration. Check the play store you can see their score is gamed. Most reviews are 1-3 stars and all have the same complaints for years. It's been a steady downward trend since google started financing them to have someone to point at and say 'see we have competition, no monopoly here!'. They removed almost all addons and are barley (like 10+ years later!) bringing some of them back. Pocket spam. Collections. The list is ridiculous and getting to Google levels bad. I especially love the part where she laid off hella employees and gave herself a 1/5 raise.
      - omnimus 3y ago
shipscode 3y ago
Is there some secret FAANG-driven effort to just mess with the Mozilla CEO every couple years? They’re a seemingly worthless company to attract so much heat for their executives.
- dchftcs 3y ago
  It's not worthless; many people still want to like the product and would like the company to improve. Alas it seems to be a lost cause given what's discussed over the years, better move on and use the energy to support a browser focused on user experience that actually has a future.
- Jensson 3y ago
  > They’re a seemingly worthless company to attract so much heat for their executives. Most nerds used Firefox so they didn't use to be worthless, and those nerds care about what happened to the company.
- naremu 3y ago
  I think many people here probably use Firefox to some degree and are concerned at the sustainability of the entity that makes it, especially since it seems to follow a for-profit trend of higher executive pay even though it's non-profit and not on the most stable, defensible grounds compared to competing software.
  - MBCook 3y ago
    That’s the bit that really burns for me. I don’t know if they can make enough money for Firefox to survive. But over the years they’ve spent money on an email client basically no one uses, trying to make a social network, trying to make a phone operating system, and who knows what else. Just huge amounts of money going to what often looks like a complete fools errand. I understand Thunderbird but a phone OS? Money that could’ve gone to either make Firefox better or to advertise/promote it. If FF was doing great in the market and they had millions of spare dollars, pursuing other things that match their goals would make sense. But that really doesn’t seem like where they are. Instead it feels a lot more like if private equity bought an open source project.
admax88qqq 3y ago
Who sets the CEO pay for Mozilla? Is there a board that actually looked at their performance and decided a raise was appropriate? Or is it due to some term in her contract?
- AwaAwa 3y ago
  Her friends on the board. This isn't a joke, and you can easily look it up.
  - bawolff 3y ago
    You say that as if its shocking. Obviously the board sets ceo compensation. That is why boards exist.
    - 000ooo000 3y ago
      I don't think the comment you're replying to is 'shocked' by the detail you're talking about
    - wkat4242 3y ago
      Well technically they exist also to make sure the CEO does a good job. Which in this case they're not doing.
      - Nextgrid 3y ago
        > Which in this case they're not doing. I'm pretty sure they are doing, it's just that there is a big disconnect behind Mozilla's actual objectives and their claimed objective. Mozilla's actual objective is to provide an antitrust shield to Google by pretending to develop a good browser and get paid handsomely for this service. Mozilla's objective is not to actually develop a good browser - that's not only an unnecessary expense but would also bite the hand that feeds.
    - stephen_g 3y ago
      It's not that the board sets CEO compensation that's bad, it's the personal connections they have and the observation that they appear to set compensation more based those personal connections with the CEO, not based on any measure of performance or anything..
cyanydeez 3y ago
that's basically cumulative inflation since 2019.
COGlory 3y ago
Mitchell Baker is frankly a moron, surrounding herself with even bigger morons who have taken Firefox every direction except a good direction. Frankly, it's impressive how much they've missed and how far they've shifted from their original mission. Yet her salary has more than quadrupled since she took her position. Don't forget this phenomenal Baker quote from a few years ago: >In 2018 she received a total of $2,458,350 in compensation from Mozilla, which represents a 400% payrise since 2008. 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." [0] I wonder whether Eich manages to turn around the Firefox decline if he hadn't been given the boot. It started under him, but his latest venture (Brave) is growing steadily - 65 million monthly active users [1]. Mozilla needs to be at the very heart of the free an open web. They need to have the biggest Mastodon instance that you can actually depend on. They need to have the biggest Matrix server. They need to have the biggest free blogging platform. They need to hire a few full time community managers to spearhead putting together a clear set of community guidelines and organizing volunteer moderators. People all the way up the chain, accountability and responsiveness all the way up the chain. The anti-big tech. They could easily afford this, too. If it's free and open on the internet, Mozilla needs to be there. But instead they take half-hearted stabs, abandon them, let Firefox linger, and pay their CEO millions upon millions of dollars. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitchell_Baker#Negative_salary-achievements_correlation_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitchell_Baker#Negative_salary... [1] https://brave.com/transparency/ https://brave.com/transparency/
- scarface_74 3y ago
  So how is doing all of this “free” stuff going to increase revenue?
- Dalewyn 3y ago
  >Mitchell Baker is frankly a moron Mitchell Baker is a bloody genius, this is a woman who heads both the foundation and the corporation to make literally several millions while ostensibly claiming to champion the right to freedom of information and communications. What she is doing is unethical and suspect as hell, but so long as she can keep getting away with it she is absolutely not a moron. As the old saying goes: If it's stupid but it works, it ain't stupid. Note that "works" here does not mean furthering Mozilla's mission, it means securing a fat paycheck off her fiefdom.
bloopernova 3y ago
And how does that raise compare with other CEOs of similar organizations? Not that I think CEOs are worth their ludicrous salaries. It's just that the anti-diversity crowd loves to attack any organization they set their sights on for being "too progressive". So it's relevant to know whether this really is extraordinary.
- MBCook 3y ago
  While you’re right about that, the fact that they seem to have been trending downward for a very long time suggests they need someone new, whoever it is, and at a minimum should not be encouraging the current CEO with a raise. FF seems to be in serious trouble. The money mostly seems to go to a lot of different things that keep changing that are not the one thing that people use and want.
  - pseudalopex 3y ago
    > The money mostly seems to go to a lot of different things that keep changing that are not the one thing that people use and want. What do you believe they spend more on than Firefox?
- COGlory 3y ago
  What is another similar organization?
  - terminous 3y ago
    For all the valid criticism of the Wikipedia Foundation, their combined salaries of all "officers, directors, trustees, and key employees" (aka board and C suite) was $4.2 million in 2021 Page 12 of https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/1/14/Wikimedia_Foundation_2021_Form_990.pdf https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/1/14/Wikim...
- wkat4242 3y ago
  Mozilla deserves a lot of criticism. It doesn't need the anti diversity crowd for that. It's its own worst enemy right now (and it really starts with Baker). Diversity (which I really support) has nothing to do with it. What they have to do is put firefox back on the map. They deserve criticism for not doing that and for failing at their mission of an open web.
hipadev23 3y ago
Interesting contrast to the "everyone should use firefox in 2024" #1 article from a few days ago
- ramesh31 3y ago
  >Interesting contrast to the "everyone should use firefox in 2024" #1 article from a few days ago Firefox is an unqualified good to the world. Mozilla (as the nonprofit we once all knew and trusted) ceased to really exist years ago. Just another zombie corp bumbling along into discount acquistion/liquidation at this point. Once Google stops paying the bills, it'll be stripped for parts and join Netscape in heaven.
- times_trw 3y ago
  [flagged]
- stephen_g 3y ago
  I believe Firefox is a decent browser in spite of the CEO of the organisation. It's 100% rational to hold the positions that the CEO has performed poorly and doesn't deserve anything like the salary they are paid (and should probably be removed), at the same time as believing that the people working on Firefox have managed to do a quite good job in spite of the terrible leadership.
oarla 3y ago
If the CEO is being rewarded for declining revenue and users, then that's what the CEO was hired to do. Can't understand why the board wants lower revenue and user share.
- ergocoder 3y ago
  It is a non profit. Having less revenue is a win. Duh.
- jiggawatts 3y ago
  The board knows the ship is sinking. You and I would work hard to keep it afloat. They’re working hard to loot the hold of everything they can cart off and sell before it sinks.
  - npteljes 3y ago
    You might be downvoted, but "looting" matches my impression with regards to Mozilla and its current CEO. If I were to guess, they'll stay until it's this profitable, and when the Google money finally goes away, they will too, onto the next victim.
ThinkBeat 3y ago
In 2020, after returning to the position of CEO, her salary had risen to over $3 million 2021, her salary rose again to over $5 million, 2022 her salary rose again to nearly $7 million In August of the same year the Mozilla Corporation laid off approximately 250 employees due to shrinking revenues, After previously laying off roughly 70 in January (prior to the pandemic). B Baker blamed this on the COVID-19 pandemic, despite revenue rising to record highs in 2019, and market share shrinking. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitchell_Baker https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitchell_Baker
- elzbardico 3y ago
  So, people were stuck at their homes, with no other things to do than engaging electronically with the rest of the world, but this, somehow created problems for Mozilla, a company that builds a fucking web browser?
  - Zuiii 3y ago
    Are there penalties for ceos that knowingly issue false statements? Lots of execs lie these days.
    - g-b-r 3y ago
      Only if you mislead the investors, in a publicly traded company
- g-b-r 3y ago
  To be fair, she did a great job for who's actually paying (Google)
  - npteljes 3y ago
    This is the correct answer here. The CEO blood-boilingly doesn't make sense, if looking at the organization as a technological steward of Firefox and maybe related technologies. But the CEO and Firefox are just there, year after year. So maybe it's not the organization that's wrong, but rather the way of looking at them. So, as you say, if one shifts the perspective, to look at Google, using what's pocket change to them to keep a competitor alive, in order to keep them out of anti-trust and continue to let them dictate how the web is shaped, it suddenly makes sense.
alberth 3y ago
Mozilla seems to be in a lose-lose situation with HN crowd. When they attempt to diversify their revenue with VPN, email tokenization, etc, (things not tied to Google revenue) … HN crowd ridicules them for not being focused on gaining browser share. When it comes to Firefox, it seems few have even given it a fair try anytime recently. (How can they gain share when HN doesn’t give them a try) Irony is, HN loves Rust. And Rust was created at Mozilla. Note: I have no ties to Mozilla and am a Safari user.
- lolinder 3y ago
  You're talking as though HN is a monolithic entity with a single opinion. There are some HNers (myself included) who hate the direction that Mozilla is going under Baker. I want Mozilla to give me an option to put money into a bucket that will directly pay for browser development, the way that restaurants have a tip jar that goes directly to the employees. I want that because I use Firefox as a daily driver and want it to survive, and the way Mozilla spends the donations they get to the org as a whole isn't helpful to that end. Separately, there are other HNers who still think of Firefox as the slow dinosaur that Chrome unseated. These HNers likely don't have a strong opinion about Mitchell Baker because they have no skin in the game. And even more separately there are other HNers who love Rust. That Rust originally came from Mozilla may or may not even matter to these HNers. They probably do remember the day that Mitchell Baker laid off the whole Rust team, though.
- wkat4242 3y ago
  Well I use Firefox but I hate their harebrained monetisation schemes. And anyone with any idea of business knows they'll never pull in the money they need. Whatever the answer is, this isn't it.
- whatshisface 3y ago
  Mozilla shut down the Rust team to focus on Firefox.
- blitz_skull 3y ago
  I’m way closer to paying for Kagi than I am to paying for Firefox. Sure “apples to oranges” and all that, but if Kagi slapped a coat of paint on a shitty electron app, gave me bookmarks, profiles (for dev testing a la containers in Firefox), and asked me to cough up $10-$15 / month for it? Done. Paid. Maybe even a tip on top. What the hell does Firefox bring to the table? Sure they’re open source and “competition” to Google but come on… surely we can all see those aren’t features, they aren’t products, they’re bullet points.
sureglymop 3y ago
Genuine question: can anyone explain CEO pay to me? I fail to understand why it is commonly accepted that one or a few people can earn n times more than the average worker actually responsible for creating value. It doesn't seem meritocratic at all... Even in software engineering where we are arguably spoiled to be able to do interesting work possibly from home for upwards of 100k a year, what is the incentive to actually want to do work, if someone else can unjustifiably make 7m a year? So how is it possible that we as humans collectively just accept this, also psychologically speaking?
- sackfield 3y ago
  What usually happens here is the board of a company say to themselves "Let's hire a professional CEO", the next answer then is how, you don't see these jobs advertised on LinkedIn, so they get a talent recruitment agency. For C level management positions there are usually 2 options that control the most of the market, these 2 options have rosters of people from well known business schools with experience ready to step in. Because the supply is constrained by these companies the CEO pay increases well beyond market rates, as each CEO will earn X% more than the one before it by faking competitiveness, then the former CEOs will complain (as the Mozilla CEO did here) about relative market rates of other CEOs, even though the market rates are set by the cartel that proposed them in the first place. The board not wanting to rock the boat for the shareholders will generally agree to this extortion for optics, and round and round the merry go round goes.
  - makestuff 3y ago
    What are the two companies that control the market?
  - sneak 3y ago
    This makes no sense. There are too many companies and too many boards that could just hire any old MBA off the street for non-CEO-cartel prices and get the job done. There is no constrained supply of people willing to be the Mozilla CEO for, say, $2M/year.
daeros 3y ago
I use Firefox and I have 0 intention of going back to chrome at all, I have adopted a strategy of Firefox by default with chrome as mere backup for what Firefox won't run. The way I understand it they upset the free speech abolutist, but to be honest I don't really care, I like the roadmap and what the devs have been doing to firefox lately, I also don't mind being in the minority. I like it here, i'm not one of the ones that's going to switch browsers unless some major shoe drops that slows firefox to a crawl.
throwawaaarrgh 3y ago
Let them burn their cash, who cares? None of us is paying them. They're never going to die, their true masters will just keep them afloat so nobody can cry monopoly. It's not an accident that most of their money comes from their biggest competitor.
cvalka 3y ago
What would you do if you were her? I'd deprecate firefox.
renewiltord 3y ago
Guys. Mozilla set out to make the web standards compliant. Firefox was the tool they used. They won. It's done. The web is universally standards compliant. Massive success to the org. Right after the rebranding from Phoenix, things took off. Super BD effort to get standardization going. Huge community management effort to get all sorts of random people installing Firefox everywhere. This is the biggest success story ever. And this is why everyone has to always be growing. It's not enough to do what you set out to do. You have to always grow. If you're a for-profit corp this is your partners or shareholders who care. If you're a non-profit it's the general public. But whoever that person is, the moment you stop growing you're in trouble. Oh they'll say "unchecked growth is cancer" and so on but what they want is to say that while nonetheless you grow. Growth is survival. Even reaching your objective (as a non-profit) is death.
- themaninthedark 3y ago
  Someone else posted that they lost 95% of their market share in the last 15 years, that is quite literally the opposite of unchecked growth. Honestly, it seems like the problem is that the engineers let the business people in.
  - renewiltord 3y ago
    It was only ever successful because of business people.
    - Nextgrid 3y ago
      It was originally successful simply because it brought features to the table that were lacking in IE6, and those were written by engineers, not business people.
      - renewiltord 3y ago
        No. It was successful because of a massive business development and community building effort in addition to the product. Firefox was less compatible than IE because IE was what people built for. Konqueror's KHTML engine was actually more feature-complete for much of the time but there was no organization backing it until Safari based early Webkit on it. And Apple didn't back KHTML so much as just base Webkit on it. Epiphany was a Webkit-based fully open browser but didn't actually get as popular as Firefox. The whole Firefox thing was a huge success. When they turned Mozilla (the browser) into this it was a feat. And then to coordinate the complex efforts to beat IE. It was amazing stuff. It was a really well-done job by Mozilla.
terminous 3y ago
For all the valid criticism of the Wikipedia Foundation, their combined salaries of all "officers, directors, trustees, and key employees" (aka board and C suite) was $4.2 million in 2021 Page 12 of https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/1/14/Wikimedia_Foundation_2021_Form_990.pdf https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/1/14/Wikim...
- g-b-r 3y ago
  Yeah they just have some problem with handling the donations... https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/search?q=endowment&page=1&mlist=wikimedia-l%40lists.wikimedia.org&sort=date-desc https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/search?q=endowment&pa...
- SXX 3y ago
  This is because Jimmy Wales is still around and even though he dont control wikimedia directly he is actually a public figure with massive recognition and authority. And certainly have more following and trust than majority of FAANG CEOs. Unfortunately Mozilla never had benevolent dictator to begin with and now there is not a single person who can call the bullshit loud enough.
phendrenad2 3y ago
Honestly I don't care what Google, I mean Mozilla, does with their money. I gave up on caring about Firefox a long time ago.
LAC-Tech 3y ago
For younger readers - Mozilla is the company in charge of a web browser called Firefox, which was widely used from around 2004-2014.
reducesuffering 3y ago
Everyone that advocated for ousting technical Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich bears responsibility. Here's many of them: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7525198 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7525198 We are where we are today because of people on this very forum. Especially ironic when it's the more lefty types that have helped kill the non-profit open source browser and many are themselves solely using the for-profit Chrome ran by a capitalistic advertising panopticon. Great job, much appreciated /s
- wkat4242 3y ago
  Uhhh no, sorry. Getting Eich to leave was one thing. Getting a completely incompetent replacement hired is not on those people. Unless Eich was the one and only possible savior of Mozilla (as Steve Jobs arguably was to 1999's Apple - it does happen), these are two very different things. You don't fold your principles just because you risk rocking the boat. And Mozilla is a pretty progressive organisation. You can't have a figurehead that isn't aligned with that.
  - reducesuffering 3y ago
    This is the timeline we're on. Ousting Eich directly led to our current Mozilla situation. He's not the only who could've ran it successfully. But we are where we are because people wanted him ousted and instead were ok with Mitchell Baker types. From a realist perspective that cares about actual outcomes, we are in the worse timeline with an incompetent Mozilla vs. whatever small negative affects Eich would affect in the grand scheme of Prop 8 related issues.
    - wkat4242 3y ago
      With the benefit of hindsight, yes. If I were working at Mozilla it wouldn't affect how I'd act in the future though. Yes this turned out very poorly. But you can't predict these things. And principles are worthwhile to speak out for. And we don't even know if he'd have done a better job (though this is admittedly not hard) Eich wouldn't have made a change to prop 8, no. But the culture at and image of Mozilla would have changed.
g-b-r 3y ago
“This requires rich data” :facepalm:
dang 3y ago
Recent and related: Mozilla is two different entities - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38819284 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38819284 - Dec 2023 (25 comments) Mozilla 2023 annual report: CEO pay skyrockets, Firefox market share nosedives - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38795308 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38795308 - Dec 2023 (331 comments)
ta_9390 3y ago
Most tech startups spend years and sometimes decades in net losses while CEO get raises because revenue isn't the one and only performance and potential indicator. I cannot find any benefit of the articles bashing Mozilla with hot claims - that aren't necessarily false but used in misleading contexts - other than Google, Microsoft and Apple. I have used firefox for years because I believe in FOSS and privacy despite the shrinking market share and the poor addons market. I am not going to leave Firefox after the recent and significant improvments in the weakness points for some conspiracy theories based on completely normal facts
- Brian_K_White 3y ago
  Using and advocating the use of Firefox, and objecting to this Mozilla leadership situation are two different things. Of course we still have to use and prefer and advocate FF because there is no other serious option. And this leadership problem is a real problem.
- mardifoufs 3y ago
  Well that's the thing. Mozilla is not a private for profit corporation, the money isn't from investors, and the goal isn't to make a profit at the end of the day. Non profit CEOs always have a much smaller salary, and much smaller increases. That's just how it usually works because the money they have is supposed to go into fulfilling their objective, not make people rich. Why does Mozilla get a pass for this? It's so weird to see this defensiveness whenever the subject is brought up, because you can clearly like and support Mozilla and still disagree with a non profit paying 1% of what it earns to an underperforming ceo. That sum would be weird even if Mozilla was doing well.
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
  I'm just using it because the alternative is even more hostile towards me. I don't care about the drama, I just want to use an adblocker on all my browsers' devices. That said, FF mobile is still far from parity with its old version from 3 years ago when it did its big break, so it becomes hard to sympathize when a CEO salary doubles and I'm arguably getting a worse experience despite that.
poisonborz 3y ago
> We need to be faster in prototyping, launching, learning, and iterating... This requires rich data, and so we will be moving in that direction This is a debiliating disease of the software industry. People need software mostly as predictable tools, not some mystery magic entity that shapeshifts with each new profit incentive. To make it better, you can just ask them.
penguin_booze 3y ago
Executive pay is the cancer of modern times. It's like paying only the conductor for the entire orchestra.
dcchambers 3y ago
All good things must come to an end...maybe it's just time that we accept that Mozilla is not an exception to the rule. I firmly believe we need a strong nonprofit guiding standards and leading innovation in cross-platform technology, but is Mozilla still filling those shoes? What truly innovative things have Mozilla done lately? They have been playing catch-up/follow-the-leader with various consumer-focused things like federated social networks, VPNs, VR, etc. Firefox is treading water but still slowly sinking every year. Firefox is great browser - it's not a technical reason why Mozilla is "losing" - it's cultural/hype/marketing/something else entirely. Bugzilla hasn't had a major release in 5+ years and has lost the battle of bug tracking to things like GitHub Issues. Thunderbird is back in active development and has had good improvements but has a very niche market. There's Rust, but Rust has it's own foundation now and extends far beyond Mozilla. The MDN web docs are great, but wasn't that one of the teams hit hardest by "COVID Layoffs" in 2020?
- Nextgrid 3y ago
  > it's not a technical reason why Mozilla is "losing" I think it is - Firefox no longer has any selling points now that the competition has not only caught up but overtaken it. There are easy features they can add to make the browser appealing out-of-the-box to non-technical users but those would require courage and taking on some actual risk. Every other product is useless - we don't need yet another VPN, or yet another password manager. Both those markets are already saturated by both shitty and good products, there is nothing Mozilla can bring to the table.

384 points by billiam 3y ago

rvz 3y ago

Mozilla continues to let its users down on privacy by relying on Google's money (>80% of its entire revenue) after the CEO promised that they would move away from them 15 years ago. [0] That did not happen. Nothing has changed other than declining usage and revenue. But give the CEO another bonus over poor user usage, shrinking market share and destroying the browser, all done by themselves and now are being kept on life support by Google. [0] https://web.archive.org/web/20120105090543/https://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9044160/Mozilla_can_live_without_Google_s_money_Baker_says_ https://web.archive.org/web/20120105090543/https://www.compu...

slyall 3y ago
They have tried to move away from Google. The problem is none of their other ideas have worked out.
- tempest_ 3y ago
  In fact they get chided around here for anything that isnt a firefox specific endevour. Browser engines are not a money making business (if it was Microsoft would still be in the game)
  - johannes1234321 3y ago
    The issue is: A browser engine is what is needed from them. VPN can be done by many organisations.
    - pseudalopex 3y ago
      Mozilla VPN is done by Mullvad mostly.
  - freeAgent 3y ago
    Many (most?) non-Firefox endeavors of the Mozilla Foundation have been half-hearted flops for which they deserve chiding. I struggle to name any non-Firefox Mozilla project that has been successful and which they've continued to support.
- wkat4242 3y ago
  Because they're harebrained ideas. I don't want to pay Mozilla for a limited version of mullvad when I can get the full mullvad for less. I don't think they actually ever expected any of these ideas to work. In the meantime you can't even donate to firefox if you want to, only to the foundation. I mean, I give money to KDE every month and they manage to build a whole desktop environment. Why can't I do that with Mozilla? Oh wait, how much money does KDE waste on a CEO?
- lolinder 3y ago
  Here's an idea: provide a donations bucket that gives a guarantee that they'll be earmarked exclusively for Firefox development. Nothing off the top for CEO salaries, nothing siphoned off for random side projects—this bucket should be guaranteed to pay the salaries of Firefox developers. It might not make millions, but I'd donate in a heartbeat if I knew that my money would actually go to Firefox and not to one of the dozens of random side quests that Mozilla keeps picking up.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
    > provide a donations bucket that gives a guarantee that they'll be earmarked exclusively for Firefox development I've head that there are tax problems with that. So maybe there needs to be a paid "Firefox Pro" or whatever?
    - lolinder 3y ago
      That'd work just as well for me. I just want a way to give Mozilla a clear signal that I pay them for Firefox, not for Pocket or a VPN or for whatever the flavor of the month is for the nonprofit. As is, there is no way for me to send them that signal, and I'm not prepared to endorse any of the non-Firefox projects Mozilla's put out.
    - wkat4242 3y ago
      The tax problems were because of the Google deal, not the donations.
  - pseudalopex 3y ago
    Money is fungible. How should they guarantee your donation paid Firefox developers only?
    - lolinder 3y ago
      You're correct, and this is a general problem with earmarking—there's nothing to stop the organization from just shifting unrestricted funds out of that bucket to compensate. I still would donate in this scenario, because the main point is that I want to be explicit about which activities Mozilla is engaging in that I find valuable. Donating to Mozilla right now would send the wrong message.
- vidarh 3y ago
  For starters that'd be a reason to cut cost and allocate an increasing proportion of current revenue into a diversified investment portfolio to eventually gradually shift towards being able to at a minimum know they can cost-cut and survive of that investment return should they need to. If I was aiming to set up a company like Mozilla, I'd want all earnings to go into such a fund, and all costs to come out of buffered investment returns... Yes, significantly slows down the rate you can spend, but it also significantly increases the odds of longevity and independence. Of course that presumes the goal is to build the organization, not to get personally rich off it.
- pseudalopex 3y ago
  Mozilla's subscriptions and advertising grew from nothing in 2016 to 13% of revenue in 2022.
- Nextgrid 3y ago
  Here's an idea: an enterprise/power-user focused browser. The market for productivity tools is huge, and likewise for enterprise security snake oil. The browser, being at the front of most security threats would be a great place to implement security features that might not be entirely snake oil, and The Enterprise will gobble it up and pay up.
cf1241290841 3y ago
This might be poor framing. Maybe its for a job well done. A big reason for google funding is fears of monopoly lawsuits. From this perspective a firefox fewer people use is a good thing.

pcdoodle 3y ago

I like brave.

elijah_moham 3y ago

[dead]

sillywalk 3y ago

FTA, emphasis mine: "Chief product officer Steve Teixeira notes in the report the rapid growth of AI and social networks, although warns that Mozilla.social is unlikely to move beyond the experimentation phase in 2024. He says that Mozilla would be "exploring ways to better integrate advertising while adhering to our focus on privacy and choice," including web browsing."

CatWChainsaw 3y ago
Also the part where they need data for AI, so turbocharge the telemetry engines... (but am I wrong, downvoters? :))) what the hell bone do you have to pick with a fact? "As well as Teixeira's comments regarding advertising, Baker notes: "We need to be faster in prototyping, launching, learning, and iterating ... This requires rich data, and so we will be moving in that direction, but in a very Mozilla way."")
- elzbardico 3y ago
  HN doesn't like some facts. Those disliked facts change over time. Don't overthink it. Downvotes in everything you post should be worrying, an ocasional downvote here and there is actually a good sign that you're not a part of a hive-mind.
  - CatWChainsaw 3y ago
    I added the quote in case it was a citation thing.
- jodrellblank 3y ago
  Downvoting for complaining that downvoters think you're wrong, when downvoters just as likely think your comment is low effort. Even your defense of your comment is "I'm just regurgitating a sentence from the article and adding nothing".

Seattle3503 3y ago

Mozilla's corporate structure has the same problem OpenAI had. Because Mozilla is not a for-profit entity, management isn't accountable to shareholders with a financial stake. Because Mozilla isn't a charity, management isn't accountable to donors. Who is Mozilla management accountable to? A board; mostly made up Baker's associates. It is an incestuous arrangement. If Mozilla were serious, they would change the way management is held accountable. Baker needs someone who will actually hold her feet to the flames. Mozilla is entirely unimaginative, but is self sustaining as long as it keeps its advertisers. Mozilla is a shambling corpse that will continue to shuffle forward until it is no longer favorable for Google to buy search placement.

lacrimacida 3y ago
>Mozilla is a shambling corpse that will continue to shuffle forward until it is no longer favorable for Google to buy search placement. That’s the reason firefox will never improve.
- omnimus 3y ago
  Improve in what sense? As a browser it has bern improving.
  - effingwewt 3y ago
    No it hasn't, and that's completely objective. They have ignored user requests every iteration. Check the play store you can see their score is gamed. Most reviews are 1-3 stars and all have the same complaints for years. It's been a steady downward trend since google started financing them to have someone to point at and say 'see we have competition, no monopoly here!'. They removed almost all addons and are barley (like 10+ years later!) bringing some of them back. Pocket spam. Collections. The list is ridiculous and getting to Google levels bad. I especially love the part where she laid off hella employees and gave herself a 1/5 raise.
    - omnimus 3y ago

shipscode 3y ago

Is there some secret FAANG-driven effort to just mess with the Mozilla CEO every couple years? They’re a seemingly worthless company to attract so much heat for their executives.

dchftcs 3y ago
It's not worthless; many people still want to like the product and would like the company to improve. Alas it seems to be a lost cause given what's discussed over the years, better move on and use the energy to support a browser focused on user experience that actually has a future.
Jensson 3y ago
> They’re a seemingly worthless company to attract so much heat for their executives. Most nerds used Firefox so they didn't use to be worthless, and those nerds care about what happened to the company.
naremu 3y ago
I think many people here probably use Firefox to some degree and are concerned at the sustainability of the entity that makes it, especially since it seems to follow a for-profit trend of higher executive pay even though it's non-profit and not on the most stable, defensible grounds compared to competing software.
- MBCook 3y ago
  That’s the bit that really burns for me. I don’t know if they can make enough money for Firefox to survive. But over the years they’ve spent money on an email client basically no one uses, trying to make a social network, trying to make a phone operating system, and who knows what else. Just huge amounts of money going to what often looks like a complete fools errand. I understand Thunderbird but a phone OS? Money that could’ve gone to either make Firefox better or to advertise/promote it. If FF was doing great in the market and they had millions of spare dollars, pursuing other things that match their goals would make sense. But that really doesn’t seem like where they are. Instead it feels a lot more like if private equity bought an open source project.

admax88qqq 3y ago

Who sets the CEO pay for Mozilla? Is there a board that actually looked at their performance and decided a raise was appropriate? Or is it due to some term in her contract?

AwaAwa 3y ago
Her friends on the board. This isn't a joke, and you can easily look it up.
- bawolff 3y ago
  You say that as if its shocking. Obviously the board sets ceo compensation. That is why boards exist.
  - 000ooo000 3y ago
    I don't think the comment you're replying to is 'shocked' by the detail you're talking about
  - wkat4242 3y ago
    Well technically they exist also to make sure the CEO does a good job. Which in this case they're not doing.
    - Nextgrid 3y ago
      > Which in this case they're not doing. I'm pretty sure they are doing, it's just that there is a big disconnect behind Mozilla's actual objectives and their claimed objective. Mozilla's actual objective is to provide an antitrust shield to Google by pretending to develop a good browser and get paid handsomely for this service. Mozilla's objective is not to actually develop a good browser - that's not only an unnecessary expense but would also bite the hand that feeds.
  - stephen_g 3y ago
    It's not that the board sets CEO compensation that's bad, it's the personal connections they have and the observation that they appear to set compensation more based those personal connections with the CEO, not based on any measure of performance or anything..

cyanydeez 3y ago

that's basically cumulative inflation since 2019.

COGlory 3y ago

Mitchell Baker is frankly a moron, surrounding herself with even bigger morons who have taken Firefox every direction except a good direction. Frankly, it's impressive how much they've missed and how far they've shifted from their original mission. Yet her salary has more than quadrupled since she took her position. Don't forget this phenomenal Baker quote from a few years ago: >In 2018 she received a total of $2,458,350 in compensation from Mozilla, which represents a 400% payrise since 2008. 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." [0] I wonder whether Eich manages to turn around the Firefox decline if he hadn't been given the boot. It started under him, but his latest venture (Brave) is growing steadily - 65 million monthly active users [1]. Mozilla needs to be at the very heart of the free an open web. They need to have the biggest Mastodon instance that you can actually depend on. They need to have the biggest Matrix server. They need to have the biggest free blogging platform. They need to hire a few full time community managers to spearhead putting together a clear set of community guidelines and organizing volunteer moderators. People all the way up the chain, accountability and responsiveness all the way up the chain. The anti-big tech. They could easily afford this, too. If it's free and open on the internet, Mozilla needs to be there. But instead they take half-hearted stabs, abandon them, let Firefox linger, and pay their CEO millions upon millions of dollars. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitchell_Baker#Negative_salary-achievements_correlation_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitchell_Baker#Negative_salary... [1] https://brave.com/transparency/ https://brave.com/transparency/

scarface_74 3y ago
So how is doing all of this “free” stuff going to increase revenue?
Dalewyn 3y ago
>Mitchell Baker is frankly a moron Mitchell Baker is a bloody genius, this is a woman who heads both the foundation and the corporation to make literally several millions while ostensibly claiming to champion the right to freedom of information and communications. What she is doing is unethical and suspect as hell, but so long as she can keep getting away with it she is absolutely not a moron. As the old saying goes: If it's stupid but it works, it ain't stupid. Note that "works" here does not mean furthering Mozilla's mission, it means securing a fat paycheck off her fiefdom.

bloopernova 3y ago

And how does that raise compare with other CEOs of similar organizations? Not that I think CEOs are worth their ludicrous salaries. It's just that the anti-diversity crowd loves to attack any organization they set their sights on for being "too progressive". So it's relevant to know whether this really is extraordinary.

MBCook 3y ago
While you’re right about that, the fact that they seem to have been trending downward for a very long time suggests they need someone new, whoever it is, and at a minimum should not be encouraging the current CEO with a raise. FF seems to be in serious trouble. The money mostly seems to go to a lot of different things that keep changing that are not the one thing that people use and want.
- pseudalopex 3y ago
  > The money mostly seems to go to a lot of different things that keep changing that are not the one thing that people use and want. What do you believe they spend more on than Firefox?
COGlory 3y ago
What is another similar organization?
- terminous 3y ago
  For all the valid criticism of the Wikipedia Foundation, their combined salaries of all "officers, directors, trustees, and key employees" (aka board and C suite) was $4.2 million in 2021 Page 12 of https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/1/14/Wikimedia_Foundation_2021_Form_990.pdf https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/1/14/Wikim...
wkat4242 3y ago
Mozilla deserves a lot of criticism. It doesn't need the anti diversity crowd for that. It's its own worst enemy right now (and it really starts with Baker). Diversity (which I really support) has nothing to do with it. What they have to do is put firefox back on the map. They deserve criticism for not doing that and for failing at their mission of an open web.

hipadev23 3y ago

Interesting contrast to the "everyone should use firefox in 2024" #1 article from a few days ago

ramesh31 3y ago
>Interesting contrast to the "everyone should use firefox in 2024" #1 article from a few days ago Firefox is an unqualified good to the world. Mozilla (as the nonprofit we once all knew and trusted) ceased to really exist years ago. Just another zombie corp bumbling along into discount acquistion/liquidation at this point. Once Google stops paying the bills, it'll be stripped for parts and join Netscape in heaven.
times_trw 3y ago
[flagged]
stephen_g 3y ago
I believe Firefox is a decent browser in spite of the CEO of the organisation. It's 100% rational to hold the positions that the CEO has performed poorly and doesn't deserve anything like the salary they are paid (and should probably be removed), at the same time as believing that the people working on Firefox have managed to do a quite good job in spite of the terrible leadership.

oarla 3y ago

If the CEO is being rewarded for declining revenue and users, then that's what the CEO was hired to do. Can't understand why the board wants lower revenue and user share.

ergocoder 3y ago
It is a non profit. Having less revenue is a win. Duh.
jiggawatts 3y ago
The board knows the ship is sinking. You and I would work hard to keep it afloat. They’re working hard to loot the hold of everything they can cart off and sell before it sinks.
- npteljes 3y ago
  You might be downvoted, but "looting" matches my impression with regards to Mozilla and its current CEO. If I were to guess, they'll stay until it's this profitable, and when the Google money finally goes away, they will too, onto the next victim.

ThinkBeat 3y ago

In 2020, after returning to the position of CEO, her salary had risen to over $3 million 2021, her salary rose again to over $5 million, 2022 her salary rose again to nearly $7 million In August of the same year the Mozilla Corporation laid off approximately 250 employees due to shrinking revenues, After previously laying off roughly 70 in January (prior to the pandemic). B Baker blamed this on the COVID-19 pandemic, despite revenue rising to record highs in 2019, and market share shrinking. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitchell_Baker https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitchell_Baker

elzbardico 3y ago
So, people were stuck at their homes, with no other things to do than engaging electronically with the rest of the world, but this, somehow created problems for Mozilla, a company that builds a fucking web browser?
- Zuiii 3y ago
  Are there penalties for ceos that knowingly issue false statements? Lots of execs lie these days.
  - g-b-r 3y ago
    Only if you mislead the investors, in a publicly traded company
g-b-r 3y ago
To be fair, she did a great job for who's actually paying (Google)
- npteljes 3y ago
  This is the correct answer here. The CEO blood-boilingly doesn't make sense, if looking at the organization as a technological steward of Firefox and maybe related technologies. But the CEO and Firefox are just there, year after year. So maybe it's not the organization that's wrong, but rather the way of looking at them. So, as you say, if one shifts the perspective, to look at Google, using what's pocket change to them to keep a competitor alive, in order to keep them out of anti-trust and continue to let them dictate how the web is shaped, it suddenly makes sense.

alberth 3y ago

Mozilla seems to be in a lose-lose situation with HN crowd. When they attempt to diversify their revenue with VPN, email tokenization, etc, (things not tied to Google revenue) … HN crowd ridicules them for not being focused on gaining browser share. When it comes to Firefox, it seems few have even given it a fair try anytime recently. (How can they gain share when HN doesn’t give them a try) Irony is, HN loves Rust. And Rust was created at Mozilla. Note: I have no ties to Mozilla and am a Safari user.

lolinder 3y ago
You're talking as though HN is a monolithic entity with a single opinion. There are some HNers (myself included) who hate the direction that Mozilla is going under Baker. I want Mozilla to give me an option to put money into a bucket that will directly pay for browser development, the way that restaurants have a tip jar that goes directly to the employees. I want that because I use Firefox as a daily driver and want it to survive, and the way Mozilla spends the donations they get to the org as a whole isn't helpful to that end. Separately, there are other HNers who still think of Firefox as the slow dinosaur that Chrome unseated. These HNers likely don't have a strong opinion about Mitchell Baker because they have no skin in the game. And even more separately there are other HNers who love Rust. That Rust originally came from Mozilla may or may not even matter to these HNers. They probably do remember the day that Mitchell Baker laid off the whole Rust team, though.
wkat4242 3y ago
Well I use Firefox but I hate their harebrained monetisation schemes. And anyone with any idea of business knows they'll never pull in the money they need. Whatever the answer is, this isn't it.
whatshisface 3y ago
Mozilla shut down the Rust team to focus on Firefox.
blitz_skull 3y ago
I’m way closer to paying for Kagi than I am to paying for Firefox. Sure “apples to oranges” and all that, but if Kagi slapped a coat of paint on a shitty electron app, gave me bookmarks, profiles (for dev testing a la containers in Firefox), and asked me to cough up $10-$15 / month for it? Done. Paid. Maybe even a tip on top. What the hell does Firefox bring to the table? Sure they’re open source and “competition” to Google but come on… surely we can all see those aren’t features, they aren’t products, they’re bullet points.

sureglymop 3y ago

Genuine question: can anyone explain CEO pay to me? I fail to understand why it is commonly accepted that one or a few people can earn n times more than the average worker actually responsible for creating value. It doesn't seem meritocratic at all... Even in software engineering where we are arguably spoiled to be able to do interesting work possibly from home for upwards of 100k a year, what is the incentive to actually want to do work, if someone else can unjustifiably make 7m a year? So how is it possible that we as humans collectively just accept this, also psychologically speaking?

sackfield 3y ago
What usually happens here is the board of a company say to themselves "Let's hire a professional CEO", the next answer then is how, you don't see these jobs advertised on LinkedIn, so they get a talent recruitment agency. For C level management positions there are usually 2 options that control the most of the market, these 2 options have rosters of people from well known business schools with experience ready to step in. Because the supply is constrained by these companies the CEO pay increases well beyond market rates, as each CEO will earn X% more than the one before it by faking competitiveness, then the former CEOs will complain (as the Mozilla CEO did here) about relative market rates of other CEOs, even though the market rates are set by the cartel that proposed them in the first place. The board not wanting to rock the boat for the shareholders will generally agree to this extortion for optics, and round and round the merry go round goes.
- makestuff 3y ago
  What are the two companies that control the market?
- sneak 3y ago
  This makes no sense. There are too many companies and too many boards that could just hire any old MBA off the street for non-CEO-cartel prices and get the job done. There is no constrained supply of people willing to be the Mozilla CEO for, say, $2M/year.

daeros 3y ago

I use Firefox and I have 0 intention of going back to chrome at all, I have adopted a strategy of Firefox by default with chrome as mere backup for what Firefox won't run. The way I understand it they upset the free speech abolutist, but to be honest I don't really care, I like the roadmap and what the devs have been doing to firefox lately, I also don't mind being in the minority. I like it here, i'm not one of the ones that's going to switch browsers unless some major shoe drops that slows firefox to a crawl.

throwawaaarrgh 3y ago

Let them burn their cash, who cares? None of us is paying them. They're never going to die, their true masters will just keep them afloat so nobody can cry monopoly. It's not an accident that most of their money comes from their biggest competitor.

cvalka 3y ago

What would you do if you were her? I'd deprecate firefox.

renewiltord 3y ago

Guys. Mozilla set out to make the web standards compliant. Firefox was the tool they used. They won. It's done. The web is universally standards compliant. Massive success to the org. Right after the rebranding from Phoenix, things took off. Super BD effort to get standardization going. Huge community management effort to get all sorts of random people installing Firefox everywhere. This is the biggest success story ever. And this is why everyone has to always be growing. It's not enough to do what you set out to do. You have to always grow. If you're a for-profit corp this is your partners or shareholders who care. If you're a non-profit it's the general public. But whoever that person is, the moment you stop growing you're in trouble. Oh they'll say "unchecked growth is cancer" and so on but what they want is to say that while nonetheless you grow. Growth is survival. Even reaching your objective (as a non-profit) is death.

themaninthedark 3y ago
Someone else posted that they lost 95% of their market share in the last 15 years, that is quite literally the opposite of unchecked growth. Honestly, it seems like the problem is that the engineers let the business people in.
- renewiltord 3y ago
  It was only ever successful because of business people.
  - Nextgrid 3y ago
    It was originally successful simply because it brought features to the table that were lacking in IE6, and those were written by engineers, not business people.
    - renewiltord 3y ago
      No. It was successful because of a massive business development and community building effort in addition to the product. Firefox was less compatible than IE because IE was what people built for. Konqueror's KHTML engine was actually more feature-complete for much of the time but there was no organization backing it until Safari based early Webkit on it. And Apple didn't back KHTML so much as just base Webkit on it. Epiphany was a Webkit-based fully open browser but didn't actually get as popular as Firefox. The whole Firefox thing was a huge success. When they turned Mozilla (the browser) into this it was a feat. And then to coordinate the complex efforts to beat IE. It was amazing stuff. It was a really well-done job by Mozilla.

terminous 3y ago

For all the valid criticism of the Wikipedia Foundation, their combined salaries of all "officers, directors, trustees, and key employees" (aka board and C suite) was $4.2 million in 2021 Page 12 of https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/1/14/Wikimedia_Foundation_2021_Form_990.pdf https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/1/14/Wikim...

g-b-r 3y ago
Yeah they just have some problem with handling the donations... https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/search?q=endowment&page=1&mlist=wikimedia-l%40lists.wikimedia.org&sort=date-desc https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/search?q=endowment&pa...
SXX 3y ago
This is because Jimmy Wales is still around and even though he dont control wikimedia directly he is actually a public figure with massive recognition and authority. And certainly have more following and trust than majority of FAANG CEOs. Unfortunately Mozilla never had benevolent dictator to begin with and now there is not a single person who can call the bullshit loud enough.

phendrenad2 3y ago

Honestly I don't care what Google, I mean Mozilla, does with their money. I gave up on caring about Firefox a long time ago.

LAC-Tech 3y ago

For younger readers - Mozilla is the company in charge of a web browser called Firefox, which was widely used from around 2004-2014.

reducesuffering 3y ago

Everyone that advocated for ousting technical Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich bears responsibility. Here's many of them: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7525198 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7525198 We are where we are today because of people on this very forum. Especially ironic when it's the more lefty types that have helped kill the non-profit open source browser and many are themselves solely using the for-profit Chrome ran by a capitalistic advertising panopticon. Great job, much appreciated /s

wkat4242 3y ago
Uhhh no, sorry. Getting Eich to leave was one thing. Getting a completely incompetent replacement hired is not on those people. Unless Eich was the one and only possible savior of Mozilla (as Steve Jobs arguably was to 1999's Apple - it does happen), these are two very different things. You don't fold your principles just because you risk rocking the boat. And Mozilla is a pretty progressive organisation. You can't have a figurehead that isn't aligned with that.
- reducesuffering 3y ago
  This is the timeline we're on. Ousting Eich directly led to our current Mozilla situation. He's not the only who could've ran it successfully. But we are where we are because people wanted him ousted and instead were ok with Mitchell Baker types. From a realist perspective that cares about actual outcomes, we are in the worse timeline with an incompetent Mozilla vs. whatever small negative affects Eich would affect in the grand scheme of Prop 8 related issues.
  - wkat4242 3y ago
    With the benefit of hindsight, yes. If I were working at Mozilla it wouldn't affect how I'd act in the future though. Yes this turned out very poorly. But you can't predict these things. And principles are worthwhile to speak out for. And we don't even know if he'd have done a better job (though this is admittedly not hard) Eich wouldn't have made a change to prop 8, no. But the culture at and image of Mozilla would have changed.

g-b-r 3y ago

“This requires rich data” :facepalm:

dang 3y ago

Recent and related: Mozilla is two different entities - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38819284 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38819284 - Dec 2023 (25 comments) Mozilla 2023 annual report: CEO pay skyrockets, Firefox market share nosedives - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38795308 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38795308 - Dec 2023 (331 comments)

ta_9390 3y ago

Most tech startups spend years and sometimes decades in net losses while CEO get raises because revenue isn't the one and only performance and potential indicator. I cannot find any benefit of the articles bashing Mozilla with hot claims - that aren't necessarily false but used in misleading contexts - other than Google, Microsoft and Apple. I have used firefox for years because I believe in FOSS and privacy despite the shrinking market share and the poor addons market. I am not going to leave Firefox after the recent and significant improvments in the weakness points for some conspiracy theories based on completely normal facts

Brian_K_White 3y ago
Using and advocating the use of Firefox, and objecting to this Mozilla leadership situation are two different things. Of course we still have to use and prefer and advocate FF because there is no other serious option. And this leadership problem is a real problem.
mardifoufs 3y ago
Well that's the thing. Mozilla is not a private for profit corporation, the money isn't from investors, and the goal isn't to make a profit at the end of the day. Non profit CEOs always have a much smaller salary, and much smaller increases. That's just how it usually works because the money they have is supposed to go into fulfilling their objective, not make people rich. Why does Mozilla get a pass for this? It's so weird to see this defensiveness whenever the subject is brought up, because you can clearly like and support Mozilla and still disagree with a non profit paying 1% of what it earns to an underperforming ceo. That sum would be weird even if Mozilla was doing well.
johnnyanmac 3y ago
I'm just using it because the alternative is even more hostile towards me. I don't care about the drama, I just want to use an adblocker on all my browsers' devices. That said, FF mobile is still far from parity with its old version from 3 years ago when it did its big break, so it becomes hard to sympathize when a CEO salary doubles and I'm arguably getting a worse experience despite that.

poisonborz 3y ago

> We need to be faster in prototyping, launching, learning, and iterating... This requires rich data, and so we will be moving in that direction This is a debiliating disease of the software industry. People need software mostly as predictable tools, not some mystery magic entity that shapeshifts with each new profit incentive. To make it better, you can just ask them.

penguin_booze 3y ago

Executive pay is the cancer of modern times. It's like paying only the conductor for the entire orchestra.

dcchambers 3y ago

All good things must come to an end...maybe it's just time that we accept that Mozilla is not an exception to the rule. I firmly believe we need a strong nonprofit guiding standards and leading innovation in cross-platform technology, but is Mozilla still filling those shoes? What truly innovative things have Mozilla done lately? They have been playing catch-up/follow-the-leader with various consumer-focused things like federated social networks, VPNs, VR, etc. Firefox is treading water but still slowly sinking every year. Firefox is great browser - it's not a technical reason why Mozilla is "losing" - it's cultural/hype/marketing/something else entirely. Bugzilla hasn't had a major release in 5+ years and has lost the battle of bug tracking to things like GitHub Issues. Thunderbird is back in active development and has had good improvements but has a very niche market. There's Rust, but Rust has it's own foundation now and extends far beyond Mozilla. The MDN web docs are great, but wasn't that one of the teams hit hardest by "COVID Layoffs" in 2020?

Nextgrid 3y ago
> it's not a technical reason why Mozilla is "losing" I think it is - Firefox no longer has any selling points now that the competition has not only caught up but overtaken it. There are easy features they can add to make the browser appealing out-of-the-box to non-technical users but those would require courage and taking on some actual risk. Every other product is useless - we don't need yet another VPN, or yet another password manager. Both those markets are already saturated by both shitty and good products, there is nothing Mozilla can bring to the table.