6 ms·

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 imp

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.
- xboxnolifes 3y ago
  Not being able to create a success and instead making personal wealth by siphoning money through someone else's creation while it rots is not a quality I would label as genius.
  - david422 3y ago
    Perhaps the people that keep paying her are the morons then?
    - g-b-r 3y ago
      Aren't the people that keep paying her Google?
      - dansiemens 3y ago
        Yep: “Most of the revenue of Mozilla Corporation comes from Google (81% in 2022)” [0] [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation
  - Dalewyn 3y ago
    Look, if I can make seven million god damn greenbacks while claiming to be the leader of the free peoples but actually doing nothing or maybe even something to subvert them, I will call myself a genius.
    - moralestapia 3y ago
      Sorry man, but I loathe people who think that way. Particularly since I've ( and many others) found a way to make a living without resorting to that sort of schemes.
      - Dalewyn 3y ago
        To be clear: I don't support nor even agree with what she is doing. She is a key part of the disease Mozilla is suffering from. But with that said, I am also willing to at least respect the fact someone is making an absolute killing of a living for next to nothing. Think about it: $7,000,000.00 for doing next to nothing at bare minimum. Most people would kill for that kind of income to work ratio. Mitchell Baker is a woman who figured out how to game the system she's in and win big (bigly?), I can and will respect that even if I otherwise vehemently detest her. The first step to addressing a problem is figuring out the problem.
AwaAwa 3y ago
It seems to me that Mozilla mission is more about doing 'just enough' to ensure Mitchell has a good Xmas every year. Fire this Fox and go back to Mozilla minus One. If nothing else, the movie rights to this would make more sense than their current direction.
silisili 3y ago
I think he could have turned it around, but I'm glad Brave exists. People hate BAT for reasons, but the idea of controlling the ad stream at the software level is a winning one to me. I can't think of any other platform where ads were given such free reign. Could you imagine watching TV, then a commercial comes on that either a) crashes the tv, or b) changes the channel multiple times so you can't get back, or c) installs malware onto the tv, or d) clones itself 20 times over the content you were watching, or any other fun stuff web ads have been known to do.
- throwaway3078 3y ago
  Eich was CTO of the Mozilla Corporation since its founding in 2005 until 2014, during which Firefox market share slid from its peak at 30% to 13%. What would Eich have done as CEO to turn around Firefox that he wasn’t able to do as CTO for nine years? That said, Brave has innovated and had some VC-fueled success. I just don’t see him as the Firefox savior some people do. https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share#yearly-2009-2023 https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share#yearly-2009-...
  - BackBlast 3y ago
    A lieutenant is not the captain. As a lieutenant, I don't get to just go do whatever. I advise, I provide options, I make calls that don't to up to the CEO level. I pick tech stacks, I pick how to do the things we decide to do. But the final call on what we are doing is the captain's. Especially about the fundamental direction like how to acquire users, markets we target, and how to acquire revenue.
  - BrendanEich 3y ago
    Brave is not "VC-fueled". Small seed funding which we transcended long ago. But if we were, you'd be practicing a variation on the Genetic Fallacy. Do better. I know a few HN haters fixate on me as cause of all problems at Mozilla, but if they were playing fair, they'd give me some credit for growing Brave to ~60M MAU or (better metric) 24.5M DAU. A lot of these users came from Firefox. So I can grow a browser, I've done it three times at least. But elsewhere I've written that Mozilla wouldn't have let me do what was needed, in my speculative opinion. Brave doesn't advertise itself in the User-Agent: header, so statcounter lumps us in with Chrome.
lupusreal 3y ago
Mozilla doesn't need any Mastadon instance. They need to stop pretending to be a social media company and focus all their resources on browser development. Their only reason for being involved in social media in the first place is because it gives them a plaything for their forays into censorship and narrative engineering. This is one aspect of the cancer Mitchell Baker has been cultivating in Mozilla
- COGlory 3y ago
  Firefox engineering is in a pretty good spot. What they need now is clout and market share to bring in income and brand awareness. I'm not sure how else to achieve that? They need people to associate them with being the good stewards. Best way to do that is to be a good steward. https://treeherder.mozilla.org/perfherder/graphs?timerange=31536000&series=mozilla-central,3735773,1,13&series=mozilla-central,3412459,1,13 https://treeherder.mozilla.org/perfherder/graphs?timerange=3...
  - chii 3y ago
    > They need people to associate them with being the good stewards nobody cares about good web stewardship. Actual people care about performance, ease of use, integration, and capability. And chrome is already good enough now-a-days, which means it takes a huge improvement to firefox for people to switch (not to mention an advertising drive when those improvements come about). There's a reason why Dvorak keyboard isn't more popular than qwerty, even tho Dvorak is slightly better.
    - vimwizard 3y ago
      Switching from chrome to Firefox isn't the same as switching from qwerty to Dvorak.
      - yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
        Agreed; it's more like turning caps lock into ctrl; not zero friction, but pretty close and much nicer.
throwawayzilla 3y ago
> 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." I was working at Mozilla when she made this comment -- shortly after laying off ~25% of the fucking company -- and it was the final straw for me. I can't speak to whether it was the final straw for others as well, but I can say that in the span of about 8-9 months after those layoffs every single person on my team, many who had been there 5+ years, quit and took "normal" tech industry jobs that typically paid 2-2.5x more than Mozilla. Apparently in Baker's mind it's OK to ask the people doing the actual work to take a massive discount to their compensation for ideological reasons, but when it interferes with her lavish lifestyle it's suddenly unthinkable. She is truly an anchor around Mozilla's neck, and at this point I've just sort of grudgingly accepted that she'll only leave once she's drained every last drop of blood she can get from the company and from the well-meaning and dedicated people trying to make a genuinely independent web browser. All I can hope is that some sort of phoenix (get it?) manages to arise from the ashes when that finally happens.
- AndrewKemendo 3y ago
  I applaud your decision! Need more people standing on principle
- chii 3y ago
  > She is truly an anchor around Mozilla's neck perhaps it's because this is what google wants mozilla to be - a lame duck that cannot compete against chrome.
  - candiddevmike 3y ago
    This is a really interesting possibility. A crippled competitor is ideal--keeps Chrome ahead, but still have a multi platform competitor to point at when the DoJ comes knocking.
    - borgunit2 3y ago
qp11 3y ago
What the above lacks is a finance model of how to make it work with real numbers.
- wmf 3y ago
  $500M per year isn't enough to develop and market a browser?
  - ycdxvjp 3y ago
    Too many technical people talk without being capable of generating revenue. Instead of developing that finance capability lets cry about how others are supposed to raise funds and hand it to us. Its pure nonsense. Tech folk who get into details of raising cash are the only ones who have impact. The rest are useless loudmouths.
dang 3y ago
Please don't post personal attacks to HN, and please follow the site guidelines in general, including the one about not calling names, and also the one about not fulminating: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html We particularly don't want mob dynamics here. p.s. I have zero opinion about this person or this organization, just in case anyone is worried about that. I just care about preserving HN for curious conversation, which is what the guidelines are written to convey.
- COGlory 3y ago
  I'm pretty surprised to be seeing this comment because I don't think this is a particularly personal attack since it's a public figure with measurable performance, and I feel as though I frequently see similar comments about Musk, Bezos, etc. Is it acceptable to change it to "is behaving like a moron" and "surrounded herself with people who make moronic decisions"?
  - tptacek 3y ago
    Settled law on HN. See: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=you%20may%20not%20owe%20by%3Adang&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
    - COGlory 3y ago
      Fair enough
- throwawayzilla 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - dang 3y ago
    As I said, we don't want mob dynamics here. Between your reply (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38850057 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38850057) and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38849882 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38849882, and the fact that the GP was upvoted to the top of the page, there were clear signs of that developing. It's not about the individual or the topic. We don't want HN to be that kind of community.
COGlory 3y ago
I can't edit this one anymore, but in light of being reminded of the community guidelines, I will offer instead that Mitchell is not a moron, but is making decisions that are extremely questionable in light of the stated goals of the Mozilla foundation, and has failed to execute well enough and quickly enough to the point that it calls into question her competence.
- BrendanEich 3y ago
  Honestly, Mitchell is making about 16x what I make, so she's not stupid. Staying at Mozilla, hiking my own salary, pandering to politically powerful factions... I am glad I didn't stay to face those temptations. But as I've written elsewhere, I could not have done what needed doing at Mozilla.

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.

xboxnolifes 3y ago
Not being able to create a success and instead making personal wealth by siphoning money through someone else's creation while it rots is not a quality I would label as genius.
- david422 3y ago
  Perhaps the people that keep paying her are the morons then?
  - g-b-r 3y ago
    Aren't the people that keep paying her Google?
    - dansiemens 3y ago
      Yep: “Most of the revenue of Mozilla Corporation comes from Google (81% in 2022)” [0] [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation
- Dalewyn 3y ago
  Look, if I can make seven million god damn greenbacks while claiming to be the leader of the free peoples but actually doing nothing or maybe even something to subvert them, I will call myself a genius.
  - moralestapia 3y ago
    Sorry man, but I loathe people who think that way. Particularly since I've ( and many others) found a way to make a living without resorting to that sort of schemes.
    - Dalewyn 3y ago
      To be clear: I don't support nor even agree with what she is doing. She is a key part of the disease Mozilla is suffering from. But with that said, I am also willing to at least respect the fact someone is making an absolute killing of a living for next to nothing. Think about it: $7,000,000.00 for doing next to nothing at bare minimum. Most people would kill for that kind of income to work ratio. Mitchell Baker is a woman who figured out how to game the system she's in and win big (bigly?), I can and will respect that even if I otherwise vehemently detest her. The first step to addressing a problem is figuring out the problem.

AwaAwa 3y ago

It seems to me that Mozilla mission is more about doing 'just enough' to ensure Mitchell has a good Xmas every year. Fire this Fox and go back to Mozilla minus One. If nothing else, the movie rights to this would make more sense than their current direction.

silisili 3y ago

I think he could have turned it around, but I'm glad Brave exists. People hate BAT for reasons, but the idea of controlling the ad stream at the software level is a winning one to me. I can't think of any other platform where ads were given such free reign. Could you imagine watching TV, then a commercial comes on that either a) crashes the tv, or b) changes the channel multiple times so you can't get back, or c) installs malware onto the tv, or d) clones itself 20 times over the content you were watching, or any other fun stuff web ads have been known to do.

throwaway3078 3y ago
Eich was CTO of the Mozilla Corporation since its founding in 2005 until 2014, during which Firefox market share slid from its peak at 30% to 13%. What would Eich have done as CEO to turn around Firefox that he wasn’t able to do as CTO for nine years? That said, Brave has innovated and had some VC-fueled success. I just don’t see him as the Firefox savior some people do. https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share#yearly-2009-2023 https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share#yearly-2009-...
- BackBlast 3y ago
  A lieutenant is not the captain. As a lieutenant, I don't get to just go do whatever. I advise, I provide options, I make calls that don't to up to the CEO level. I pick tech stacks, I pick how to do the things we decide to do. But the final call on what we are doing is the captain's. Especially about the fundamental direction like how to acquire users, markets we target, and how to acquire revenue.
- BrendanEich 3y ago
  Brave is not "VC-fueled". Small seed funding which we transcended long ago. But if we were, you'd be practicing a variation on the Genetic Fallacy. Do better. I know a few HN haters fixate on me as cause of all problems at Mozilla, but if they were playing fair, they'd give me some credit for growing Brave to ~60M MAU or (better metric) 24.5M DAU. A lot of these users came from Firefox. So I can grow a browser, I've done it three times at least. But elsewhere I've written that Mozilla wouldn't have let me do what was needed, in my speculative opinion. Brave doesn't advertise itself in the User-Agent: header, so statcounter lumps us in with Chrome.

lupusreal 3y ago

Mozilla doesn't need any Mastadon instance. They need to stop pretending to be a social media company and focus all their resources on browser development. Their only reason for being involved in social media in the first place is because it gives them a plaything for their forays into censorship and narrative engineering. This is one aspect of the cancer Mitchell Baker has been cultivating in Mozilla

COGlory 3y ago
Firefox engineering is in a pretty good spot. What they need now is clout and market share to bring in income and brand awareness. I'm not sure how else to achieve that? They need people to associate them with being the good stewards. Best way to do that is to be a good steward. https://treeherder.mozilla.org/perfherder/graphs?timerange=31536000&series=mozilla-central,3735773,1,13&series=mozilla-central,3412459,1,13 https://treeherder.mozilla.org/perfherder/graphs?timerange=3...
- chii 3y ago
  > They need people to associate them with being the good stewards nobody cares about good web stewardship. Actual people care about performance, ease of use, integration, and capability. And chrome is already good enough now-a-days, which means it takes a huge improvement to firefox for people to switch (not to mention an advertising drive when those improvements come about). There's a reason why Dvorak keyboard isn't more popular than qwerty, even tho Dvorak is slightly better.
  - vimwizard 3y ago
    Switching from chrome to Firefox isn't the same as switching from qwerty to Dvorak.
    - yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
      Agreed; it's more like turning caps lock into ctrl; not zero friction, but pretty close and much nicer.

throwawayzilla 3y ago

> 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." I was working at Mozilla when she made this comment -- shortly after laying off ~25% of the fucking company -- and it was the final straw for me. I can't speak to whether it was the final straw for others as well, but I can say that in the span of about 8-9 months after those layoffs every single person on my team, many who had been there 5+ years, quit and took "normal" tech industry jobs that typically paid 2-2.5x more than Mozilla. Apparently in Baker's mind it's OK to ask the people doing the actual work to take a massive discount to their compensation for ideological reasons, but when it interferes with her lavish lifestyle it's suddenly unthinkable. She is truly an anchor around Mozilla's neck, and at this point I've just sort of grudgingly accepted that she'll only leave once she's drained every last drop of blood she can get from the company and from the well-meaning and dedicated people trying to make a genuinely independent web browser. All I can hope is that some sort of phoenix (get it?) manages to arise from the ashes when that finally happens.

AndrewKemendo 3y ago
I applaud your decision! Need more people standing on principle
chii 3y ago
> She is truly an anchor around Mozilla's neck perhaps it's because this is what google wants mozilla to be - a lame duck that cannot compete against chrome.
- candiddevmike 3y ago
  This is a really interesting possibility. A crippled competitor is ideal--keeps Chrome ahead, but still have a multi platform competitor to point at when the DoJ comes knocking.
  - borgunit2 3y ago

qp11 3y ago

What the above lacks is a finance model of how to make it work with real numbers.

wmf 3y ago
$500M per year isn't enough to develop and market a browser?
- ycdxvjp 3y ago
  Too many technical people talk without being capable of generating revenue. Instead of developing that finance capability lets cry about how others are supposed to raise funds and hand it to us. Its pure nonsense. Tech folk who get into details of raising cash are the only ones who have impact. The rest are useless loudmouths.

dang 3y ago

Please don't post personal attacks to HN, and please follow the site guidelines in general, including the one about not calling names, and also the one about not fulminating: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html We particularly don't want mob dynamics here. p.s. I have zero opinion about this person or this organization, just in case anyone is worried about that. I just care about preserving HN for curious conversation, which is what the guidelines are written to convey.

COGlory 3y ago
I'm pretty surprised to be seeing this comment because I don't think this is a particularly personal attack since it's a public figure with measurable performance, and I feel as though I frequently see similar comments about Musk, Bezos, etc. Is it acceptable to change it to "is behaving like a moron" and "surrounded herself with people who make moronic decisions"?
- tptacek 3y ago
  Settled law on HN. See: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=you%20may%20not%20owe%20by%3Adang&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
  - COGlory 3y ago
    Fair enough
throwawayzilla 3y ago
[flagged]
- dang 3y ago
  As I said, we don't want mob dynamics here. Between your reply (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38850057 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38850057) and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38849882 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38849882, and the fact that the GP was upvoted to the top of the page, there were clear signs of that developing. It's not about the individual or the topic. We don't want HN to be that kind of community.

COGlory 3y ago

I can't edit this one anymore, but in light of being reminded of the community guidelines, I will offer instead that Mitchell is not a moron, but is making decisions that are extremely questionable in light of the stated goals of the Mozilla foundation, and has failed to execute well enough and quickly enough to the point that it calls into question her competence.

BrendanEich 3y ago
Honestly, Mitchell is making about 16x what I make, so she's not stupid. Staying at Mozilla, hiking my own salary, pandering to politically powerful factions... I am glad I didn't stay to face those temptations. But as I've written elsewhere, I could not have done what needed doing at Mozilla.