36 ms·

Mozilla names new CEO as it pivots to data privacy

859 points by jacooper 3y ago

ionwake 3y ago
Dunno I always felt weird since they embedded google analytics into one of their menus. Before people start arguing with me yes I think the latest news is they eventually got rid of it. But it was weird man
- m463 3y ago
  I love firefox and use it daily, but I dislike that you cannot prevent firefox from phoning home. You can disable every single setting, including making changes to about:config and it will continue to phone home.
  - ionwake 3y ago
    Lol I had no idea
  - rs_rs_rs_rs_rs 3y ago
    >I love firefox and use it daily, but I dislike that you cannot prevent firefox from phoning home. By "phone home" you mean the fact that it looks if there's newer versions to update itself? That's a good thing. And yes, you can disable it.
    - m463 3y ago
      no, it will talk to firefox.settings.services.mozilla.com
altairprime 3y ago
See also: https://blog.mozilla.org/mozilla/a-new-chapter-for-mozilla-laura-chambers-expanded-role/ https://blog.mozilla.org/mozilla/a-new-chapter-for-mozilla-l...
bpierre 3y ago
https://archive.ph/rmMEb https://archive.ph/rmMEb
pas 3y ago
Laura Chambers interim CEO, so ... no, Mozilla just fired Mitchell Baker, and that's it.
- acomagu 3y ago
  I I just heard about him for the first time, why does he hate you?
deleted 3y ago
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faeriechangling 3y ago
Long long overdue. Baker did nothing but see Mozilla decline while she arranged pay raises for herself and fired engineers. Should have been canned for incompetence a decade ago.
Gerlo 3y ago
Thank goodness. Mitchell Baker was running Mozilla into the ground while stuffing her pockets. >Doubling down on our core products, like Firefox... The fact that they acknowledged Firefox at all gives me some hope.
- Spivak 3y ago
  I mean I kinda doubt any new CEO is going to take an appreciable cut to salary. Baker got a bad rap among tech nerds for whom Mozilla === Firefox for trying to find literally any new market outside Firefox. It's not the golden calf it once was and only survives because of Google's hedge against antitrust. If they can't find a way to bring in outside money that isn't from Google they're gonna have a bad time if Google ever stops feeling threatened by US regulators, and making bets on new products is the only real thing you can do. Edge has proven in an embarrassingly public way that being a better browser under the hood doesn't get you more users.
  - pgeorgi 3y ago
    It's less a "Firefox above all" sentiment, it's that Mozilla had 1. Firefox as baseline product declining 2. Lots of failed experiments to find new revenue streams while staying true to its mission 3. Baker's CEO salary rising several-fold 4. Engineers laid off for cost reduction Any three of them might well be okay, all four together look terribly self-centered on Baker's part.
  - mekoka 3y ago
    > It's not the golden calf it once was Can you blame people for not understanding how a company who once had one of the most dominant and influential applications on the Internet, managed to fumble, by basically acting like a wallflower and letting the ecosystem figure the future out? > Any new market outside Firefox Why was this even necessary? Firefox has always been an undervalued asset at Mozilla. They sat on it and seem to have barely invested enough effort to make it decent enough to compete with Chrome. Back in 2009, if you'd asked me where I saw Firefox 10 years from then, I'd have said that in 2019 it's more than simply a browser. It's a platform competing with Apple and Google for apps, but on the web. It would have a core web browser with various derivatives. For example, one aimed at general purpose browsing (the FF we know currently), one for business apps (e.g. specialized browser augmented to understand better languages than plain old HTML/CSS/JS and built-in libraries for business apps; think Visual Basic, Notion), one for game apps, one for education apps, and more. Mozilla would provide tools and toolkits to make it easy for devs to just build apps for the web, so that they don't have to fight with the front-end. Apple is doing it for iOS, Google is doing it for Android. I still don't understand why Mozilla couldn't see itself sharing this cake with Firefox when it had 30%+ market share.
diggan 3y ago
I cannot read the submission article, but I can read the statement from Mozilla/Mitchell Baker (https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/a-new-chapter-for-mozilla-laura-chambers-expanded-role/ https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/a-new-chapter-for-mozill...), which doesn't mention either "data" nor "privacy". It seems mostly to focus on "Vision", "Strategy", "Outstanding Execution" and other corporate-speak stuff. Anyone who worked with Laura Chambers (new, interim CEO) in the past want to share what kind of changes one could expect from them? More business/marketing stuff or back to engineering focus?
- sandebert 3y ago
  Oh dear, that statement didn't fare well when I applied bullshit.js. https://mourner.github.io/bullshit.js/ https://mourner.github.io/bullshit.js/
  - zzleeper 3y ago
    Wow you weren't joking: > Her bullshits will be on delivering bullshit products that bullshit our mission and building bullshits that bullshit momentum. Laura and I will be working closely together throughout February to ensure a bullshit transition, and in my role as Exec Chair I’ll continue to provide advice and bullshit in areas that touch on our unique history and Mozilla characteristics. > Laura’s bullshits will be on Mozilla Corporation with two bullshit bullshits:
    - slater 3y ago
      “What are the connections between this bullshit malaise and how humans are bullshitting with each other and bullshit?” haha
  - kunagi7 3y ago
    I will keep this script around. Half of the article became "bullshit" and that shows to which kind of public is this information directed to.
  - maxloh 3y ago
bluish29 3y ago
> Mitchell Baker is stepping down as CEO to focus on AI and internet safety as chair of the nonprofit foundation > Baker, a Silicon Valley pioneer who co-founded the Mozilla Project, says it was her decision to step down as CEO, adding that the move is motivated by a sense of urgency over the current state of the internet and public trust. Mitchell is not leaving and stepped down on her own. I hope that this still means a good change for Mozilla.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- alecco 3y ago
  Will her compensation change? Hmm
deleted 3y ago
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RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y ago
> But AI has given the nonprofit foundation and its cofounder Baker a fresh sense of mission in creating alternatives to tackle deepfakes, data privacy issues and the power of big tech. It launched a Mozilla.ai startup last year and Mozilla Corp. is focused on product extensions like Mozilla Monitor that wipe subscribers’ data off the web. Ironically, it has been Facebook with its release of Llama models and hat you can run yourself that has actually increased end user power and control with respect to AI. Having something that you can run on your machine (either owned or rented) is intrinsically more empowering and private for the user than sending your data off to some other company subject to their rules and their notions of “safety”.
- lenerdenator 3y ago
  It's also worth noting that Facebo - er - Meta has been one of the few to train its models on data it actually has an unambiguous legal right to.
  - sp332 3y ago
    Llama models were trained on Books3.
    - lenerdenator 3y ago
      Ope. Shit, nevermind then. I thought they'd pull it from, y'know, the massive dataset their users generate and that they have unambiguous legal rights to in perpetuity.
victor9000 3y ago
Well, it was either continue down a path of irrelevance or try something different. Hopefully this means a brighter future for Firefox.
- martin_drapeau 3y ago
  Focus on data privacy may ring a bell with people using ad blockers. Not for the regular joe though. They just want things to work and Chrome just works. I wonder what percentage of internet users use ad blockers? That would pretty much represent the market cap for Firefox.
  - asddubs 3y ago
    I've heard the number 30% tossed around before, but I'm not sure how accurate it is
bachmeier 3y ago
All the problems Mozilla has are summed up in this one sentence (taken from the Mozilla blog post): > Enter Laura Chambers, a dynamic board member who will step into the CEO role for the remainder of this year. "Laura Chambers" is a link to her LinkedIn profile. Nothing you can do but shake your head if it didn't occur to anyone that putting that link in the post announcing her appointment was a bad idea.
- altairprime 3y ago
  > putting that link in the post announcing her appointment was a bad idea In what way? (Footnote: OP’s reply is in another thread.) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39303697 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39303697
- blowski 3y ago
  Bad idea because it's LinkedIn, which has a shady reputation? Or that her profile doesn't look good? Or something else?
  - bachmeier 3y ago
    See my answer here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39303697 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39303697
  - fsflover 3y ago
    LinkedIn doesn't have shady reputation. It is shady.
- hosteur 3y ago
  I am probably just slow but why is that a bad idea?
  - ploum 3y ago
    Let say for a moment that it is acceptable for the CEO of a corporation working on the independence of the Web to not have her personal independent webpage. I know, absurd, but let’s assume. Let say for a moment that it is acceptable that the personal independent webpage is replaced by a monopolistic platform trying to centralize the web. I know, absurd, but let’s assume Let say for a moment that we don’t care that the platform is owned by one of the biggest competitor of the corporation. Historically and currently. I know, absurd, but let’s assume. Let say for a moment that it is not a problem that the platform is one of the worst offender when regarding privacy of its users and handling personal data, even if the new CEO is talking about privacy. I know, absurd, but let’s assume. Let say that to there’s no problem in requiring every person clicking this link to have an account on the linked platform to know who the privacy-oriented new CEO is. I know, absurd, but let’s assume. Let say that nobody at Mozilla considered it to be a problem as the introductory post of the new CEO…
aunty_helen 3y ago
Three cheers for someone who has become hated by the only community that still use Firefox. I don’t think Firefox will ever see double digit usage again, but I hope there can be some kind of turn around and privacy focus built into my browser.
- actualwitch 3y ago
  If you are suggesting that people who still use firefox hate Mitchell Baker, you are mistaken.
  - Vt71fcAqt7 3y ago
    You're right. Some of us are using forks with Mozilla's telemetry removed.
    - actualwitch 3y ago
      I can assure you, the amount of people who daily forks of ff is even smaller than the amount of people who hate Mitchell Baker.
  - temp0826 3y ago
    Can't tell if sarcasm. Long time user (and often evangelistic) of firefox and loathe the turns she took as ceo.
    - actualwitch 3y ago
      I don't know how to be any more clear, as someone who used firefox since 3.0 and talked to plenty people irl who use firefox - the haters are a vocal minority that only exists on forums.
      - temp0826 3y ago
        It's not exactly dinner table conversation, and average internet-users probably wouldn't care much about the implications of such a company and situations, sure. The misgivings aren't justified among many who are aware of the details? Shouldn't non-profits deserve some scrutiny when they're seemingly being mishandled?
Macha 3y ago
It's clear the previous CEO's strategy was not working - neither from a level of personal appeal to me, or for population at large measures like market share, so I'm hoping this means a positive change.
- subtra3t 3y ago
  I'm surprised I had to scroll so far down to find a reasonable comment that did not immediately insult Mitchell Baker. I'm no fan of Baker, but the least we can do is wish her best wishes and hope for a great future for all parties involved. I didn't like her when she was CEO at Mozilla, I don't like her anymore now that she isn't CEO at Mozilla but that doesn't mean I have to resort to shallow attacks on her character. I expect more from HN. Edit: Corrected mistake about Baker no longer being at Mozilla. Thanks to @M2Ys4U.
  - M2Ys4U 3y ago
    She's not leaving Mozilla, she's returning to her old position of Executive Chair
    - subtra3t 3y ago
      Sorry, my bad. Thanks for correcting, I've edited my comment.
  - pbhjpbhj 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - samth 3y ago
      The idea that Mitchell Baker "insinuated herself" into Mozilla is ridiculous. She was an early Netscape employee, one of the original creators of the Mozilla project, and a founder of the Mozilla Foundation.
    - sgift 3y ago
      Uh yeah .. Michelle Baker, who is one of the founders of Mozilla, the writer of the MPL and who played a role (for a time as the volunteer general manager of the mozilla org, then later again as an employee) in everything from Mozillas rise to - unfortunately - now its decline by being part of the org had "insinuated" herself into Mozilla. You obviously lack the knowledge about Baker and Mozilla to have any business making statements on this topic. (If you wanna tell me that Michelle Baker recognized before mozilla.org even existed that it will have a meteoric rise, that the person who would have been CEO instead of her took himself out of the race and that that would allow her to make millions as CEO of Mozilla, all I can say is: I doubt that she has a crystal ball that good.)
tux3 3y ago
Congratulations to Mozilla for making it through this era! "The hate of men will pass, and CEOs leave, and the power they took from the people will return to the people. And so long as CEOs leave, liberty will never perish." Today's a day of hope
- SiempreViernes 3y ago
  They are getting a new CEO, not becoming a cooperative...
gkoberger 3y ago
I worked at Mozilla back in 2012, as we were pivoting to FirefoxOS (a mobile OS). I was very low in the company, but for some reason sent Mitchell an email detailing why I thought it was a bad idea. She not only responded in a very gracious way, but also followed up months later to check if my feelings had changed. While they had not, she didn't owe me anything and I really appreciated her attentiveness. Mitchell really cares about Mozilla and its community. Mitchell was a great community leader. That doesn't always translate to being a good CEO or leader of a business, however Mitchell is a huge reason (if not THE reason) why we have Firefox today – and, even if you don't currently use Firefox, a huge reason why we have the web we have today. So, while I haven't been the biggest fan of Mozilla's decisions the past few years, I do want to give credit to Mitchell for everything she did for the open web and open source. She was a supporter before anyone really cared, and played a huge part in getting is to where we are now over the past 20+ years. (I am glad this is the direction they have chosen! Here's a 2015 post where I write about how I think Mozilla should focus on data privacy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10698997 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10698997)
- lolinder 3y ago
  It's interesting to hear this, because from the outside Mitchell's tenure has seemed to be a disaster, with a complete inability to stay focused on one thing for long enough to make a difference. Mozilla in recent memory has reminded me more than anything of the dogs in Pixar's Up ("squirrel!"), constantly chasing after the latest shiny tech fad while neglecting the fundamentals. They've been a follower on everything and have failed to lead on anything. Mitchell's justification for stepping down as CEO seems to me to follow this same pattern: she's stepping down in order to focus on AI and internet safety. It's good to know that she's a decent person and was good to Mozilla employees, but it's hard to square the picture you paint with the complete lack of direction I've seen during her tenure. Maybe Mozilla was in a much worse situation than I thought at the time she took the position?
  - gkoberger 3y ago
    I agree with everything you said. All I can say in response is that being a great community leader and open web advocate doesn't always square with someone who has to make a profit for hundreds or thousands of employees. I have no inside information, but here's my guess at what happened. John Lilly was a great CEO. When he left, there was a gigantic void. They hired Gary Kovacs, who started the "squirrel!"-ing. He wasn't well-liked, and used Mozilla as a stepping stone. So going forward they only hired from the Mozilla community, which is a small pool – both of people who could do it and people who wanted to do it. I'm not sure if Mitchell wanted it or not, but I don't think there was a lot of competition. Being the CEO of Mozilla is not a good job, and I imagine it's really hard to fill. There's a ton of pressure, relatively low salary, no equity, no exit.
sickofparadox 3y ago
As Mozilla's #1 hater I wish them all the best. The specific mentioning on doubling down on firefox specifically is exactly the kind of change I have said again and again they need to do. We shall see what comes of it, but for once, I wish them well!
jmyeet 3y ago
Good. Note that language like "has chosen to step down" doesn't really mean anything. It could still practically mean they were fired, as in they were given an ultimatum of step down or we'll fire you. But let's be real: she should be fired. She had no vision for Mozilla. Her pay went up as Firefox market share went down. Her strategy revolved around "<buzzword of the year> services". Most recently, that was "AI services". Now Mozilla has already spun out the Rust Foundation (in 2021). I'm not sure what their strategy needs to be but I think it revolves around doubling-down on Rust, kind of like how the Apache Foundation incubates a bunch of projects. Just like we have Webkit, that could mean creating Rust browser components and a browser entirely based on that, kind of like how they tried to with Servo in FF. Memory safety is simply too important an issue for reliance on C/C++ in the long term. Provably correct programs and components are (IMHO) going to become increasingly important. Stop playing around with [buzzword] (currently "AI"). Double down on Rust.
throwaway918274 3y ago
Is the new CEO gonna continue to get millions of dollars while Firefox slips deeper and deeper into irrelevance?
- peanuty1 3y ago
  "According to the company's filings, Mitchell Baker's compensation went from $5,591,406 in 2021 to $6,903,089 in 2022."
0x5FC3 3y ago
I've always used Firefox. I've long converted my friends and loved ones into Firefox users, going in depth about the pros of using a browser that does not exist solely to profit off their data and impose their rules onto a free internet (somewhat) that I grew up on and live off, to this day. Dev teams find it easier to slap "Use Chrome for best experience" or the more annoying "Your browser is not supported" on web applications instead of maintaining compatibility for another browser, but can you blame them? I've thought long and hard about the "free" internet. The free internet, the trove of knowledge, the bleeding edge of what technology has to offer, one of the more important places where humanity advances. Also perhaps regresses in the veil of psuedo anonymity. Pixels, cookies, beacons, benign sounding words all used to profile and map everything about you on this internet. To sell you more ads, to keep the % increase over past quarter at acceptable rates. This rant is exaggerated, inaccurate and perhaps emotional coming from me. The internet is something I hold dear, my privacy is something I hold dear. From time to time I see myself type "dat" and FF autocompletes it to "data.firefox.com", say a little "oh well" to myself and click the return key. I click on the yellow button at the bottom of the page and stare at the MAU chart for a good few seconds before Ctrl+W and going back to whatever I was doing. Small up spikes made me happy, but the downward trend does not make me sad, since I have accepted it. Maybe somebody crazy and determined will fork the project, if it comes to that, but maintaining a browser is a tall ordeal and maintaining is not enough. Baker at some point after laying off hundreds of Mozilla employees said something along the lines of "I could be making more elsewhere, so this little pay increase to myself is no biggie" (not her words at all, but this is what she meant). I have waited so long for this news. A long, long, time. Maybe now, FF can ship security patches as fast as Chrome does, maybe now the small upward spikes in the MAU chart won't be so small anymore, maybe now Mozilla will stop making Pocket a thing, maybe now the days of free internet are extended a little more.
wokwokwok 3y ago
Everyone: Mozilla sucks and hasn’t done anything useful in the last ten years. Also everyone: oh, this rust thing is nice. Hm. Not every toy you make is a winner, but I think it’s fair to say that while maybe it wasn’t a commercial success, we all ought to say thank you for supporting rust and servo while it was growing up.
- paxys 3y ago
  Also everyone: Chrome is too dominant we need an alternative. Ask them if they have tried this fantastic alternative called Firefox and you'll get silence.
  - TheCleric 3y ago
    Not necessarily. I firmly think we need a non-Chrome based alternative, and through actual use, think that current Firefox ain’t it.
    - derac 3y ago
      I only use Firefox and it's great. I actually use Librewolf and it very rarely has issues with sites. What do you think is wrong with it?
      - TylerE 3y ago
        If you only use Firefox how do you know that it's great? My general impression is that Firefox is lagging far behind in many areas. It hasn't gotten worse, probably gotten better, but the other players have gotten MUCH better.
        derac 3y ago
        Oh I use Edge at work actually and Chrome when occassional things break (mostly Google services). I find them very much the same. What differences stand out to you?
        3y ago
shp0ngle 3y ago
I don't want to be so alarmist, but... haven't Brave kind of eaten Firefox lunch here? Yes, Brave subtly pushes some crypto nonsense, but it also delivers on privacy, it focuses where it matters. (It also bundles IPFS and Tor in the base install, I believe.) And you can say "oh it's still Chrome!" but - Chromium is FOSS, and to me, it shows that Brave focus on what matters (data privacy) and not on what doesn't (writing their own HTML, CSS, JS engine). I don't agree with the opinion that browser needs to have its own rendering engine to be able to be focused on privacy. I think it's the opposite - using Chrome engine helps Brave to focus on what matters. But it's just me. It's fun to build own browser engine, I get it, I just don't know if it's time and money well spent.
- presentation 3y ago
  It hasn’t in the sense that barely anyone uses Brave.
  - Rebelgecko 3y ago
    If trends continue (of course no guarantee they will) it looks like Brave might surpass Firefox's market share in the next few years
  - sharps1 3y ago
    Brave’s usage curve is still going up and the MAU is approaching 70 million. Firefox has another 115 million monthly active users. By Chrome’s numbers either is barely used. https://bravebat.info/brave_browser_active_users https://bravebat.info/brave_browser_active_users
- sebtron 3y ago
  Having an independent engine is not necessarily about privacy, it's about... Well, independence. If Google gets away with Blink being the only viable engine, they can push any bullshit they want (e.g. WEI) and we'll have to live with it. A Chromium-only future is one where "the web" is just another name for Google's walled garden.
  - 3y ago
weinzierl 3y ago
We will see which kind of data privacy they pivot to this time. - The one that puts the data subject in the focus and protects the end user - The one that aims to cut out Google and tries to hand out pieces of the cake to other companies. I hope not the second kind again. We've already been there with Mozilla's investments into Cliqz GmbH and Hubert Burda's empire.
thesausageking 3y ago
I can't think of any important things Mozilla has created since pushing Brendan Eich out 9 years ago. That's almost a decade and billions in revenue they've burned through. There's now almost no programmers on the board or in senior leadership positions. The interim CEO they picked is an MBA who ran a business line at AirBnB. It seems like another case of MBAs taking over.
- wolverine876 3y ago
  Rust, for example. How many organizations the size of Mozilla create two revolutionary products in unrelated fields?
  - depr 3y ago
    Didn't Netscape create Firefox?
    - wolverine876 3y ago
      Netscape, on its deathbed (and I think due to Baker's efforts, in part), open-sourced the Netscape code. Mozilla was created by ex-Netscapers, developed that code, and released a few versions of a Mozilla browser, which followed Netscape's idea of integrating browser, mail client, webpage editor, other stuff (maybe IRC client?). Sometime later, a few Mozillians decided the web and Mozilla needed a simple, sleek, fast browser, and built Firefox.
      - toyg 3y ago
        Mozilla was created by Netscape itself, before its "deathbed". They were possibly the first "open-core" project of significant scale: they wanted to do a Big Rewrite (Netscape 4 code was unmanageable and crusty), and hoped that doing it as opensource would speed things up. The original Mozilla suite was supposed to be the experimental/rough version, which Netscape would then polish and sell as its own. Unfortunately, by the time this happened (and it did happen - Netscape released a few Mozilla-based versions), the browser market was entirely commoditized and there was no path to profitability for Netscape (which had been absorbed by AOL by then). The Big Rewrite took way longer than expected, and the open setup introduced even more development friction. The Mozilla suite never got anything else beyond browser/mail/editor. I think the AOL version shipped a bunch of extra bookmarks and that's it. They had already built some infrastructure for extensions and themes though, and that's effectively what Firefox took to extreme consequences: a skunkwork group of Mozilla devs stripped the suite down to the lone browser, and forced everything else to be an extension. That was Phoenix (rebirth and all that), which became Firebird (because people can't spell Phoenix, and the other surviving products could be aligned as Thunderbird and Sunbird), which became Firefox (because oops in IT there's a Firebird already, a database with angry lawyers).
solardev 3y ago
I hope they can at least spin off the browser division into its own entity. Mozilla the org has become some sort of wannabe think tank that people are vaguely aware of but mostly just ignore. Meanwhile, Firefox has been circling the drain for a decade... This is a group that gets way too much money from Google and doesn't know what to do with it...
devit 3y ago
They could consider dropping Gecko in favor of Blink, which would save a lot of engineering resources that could be used to implement features instead of web compatibility, and would effectively guarantee that Firefox will be always strictly better than Chrome (since it would be Chrome minus the Google antifeatures plus the Mozilla features).
- deleted 3y ago
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- jhaenchen 3y ago
  We need more engines not less.
  - charcircuit 3y ago
    Your wants are not necessarily the best business strategy. Basing their browser off Chromium and then innovating off of it could lead to more user value being delivered.
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breathen 3y ago
Being "pro-data-privacy" as a browser vendor seems like an inherently contradiction in terms. It's like apple feigning interest in protecting consumers when they run their own ad network.
dingi 3y ago
Mozilla should handover Firefox to a separate entity and continue with their wishy washy projects. Only thing they are doing right now is ruining Firefox. I'll surely donate to such an entity if they solely focus on Firefox.
7thaccount 3y ago
In case you were wondering how they make money...this is from Investopedia: " Mozilla Firefox Mozilla releases its annual financial statements each November for the previous year. The company’s latest revenue numbers are from 2020 when the browser brought in nearly $497 million, 88.8% of which came from royalties. These royalties refer to the percentage of advertising revenue Mozilla receives whenever someone uses the built-in search engine that the Firefox browser provides. In addition to search royalties, Mozilla earns money from donations and from sponsored new tab tiles, which can be disabled."
eduction 3y ago
I'm confused as to why Baker is not running things while a permanent CEO is found. Chambers is stepping in temporarily, and Fortune offers some details: "Chambers says she won’t be seeking a permanent CEO role because she plans to move back to Australia later this year for family reasons. 'I think this is an example of Mozilla doing the right role modelling in how to manage a succession,' says Chambers." If it's only going to take a matter of months to find a new CEO, and Baker has been doing it since 2020, and before that from 05-08, what difference does it make if she keeps running things a few/several more months? Why have a third person running things temporarily?
- dexterjs 3y ago
  In my experience interim CEO are used to make unpopular decisions in the company and then removed, kind of like getting New Coke and then as everyone gets mad you bring back Coke Classic but now with cheaper ingredients and everyone is happy.
- duped 3y ago
  When you fire someone you don't generally keep them around the office
  - iowemoretohim 3y ago
    But she's still the Chairwoman of Mozilla Foundation.
AdmiralAsshat 3y ago
Still waiting for a Mozilla-branded email domain/provider. They've already got their Mozilla-branded partnerships with the VPN and now the data scrubber. Not sure why they're sleeping on email. That seems like an obvious thing that I would pay for.
- tux3 3y ago
  It's not the worst idea. The Linux foundation will let you buy a @linux.com email (for people who want to feel like an important Linux person). I like that it's not something like FirefoxOS where they need to invest years of R&D playing catch-up. Relatively simple to set-up. And free advertising for the Brand™ whenever someone sends an email, such marketing value, very viral.
lucideer 3y ago
> Mitchell Baker is stepping down as CEO to focus on AI & from her own blogpost on this announcement[0]: > I will return to supporting the CEO and leadership team as I have done previously as Exec Chair. In addition, I will expand my work [... to ...] more consistently representing Mozilla in the public [...] through speaking and direct engagement with the community. I cannot believe Baker doesn't read at least some notes on community sentiment around her various decisions at Mozilla; it must take an astounding level of cognitive dissonance for her to see herself as a suitable candidate for "direct engagement with the community". [0] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/a-new-chapter-for-mozilla-laura-chambers-expanded-role/ https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/a-new-chapter-for-mozill...
sicromoft 3y ago
https://archive.is/rmMEb https://archive.is/rmMEb
jokoon 3y ago
Well Finally! When you look at their latest products, it seems like they were starting to sell user data, it was quite scary since Mozilla is like the most respected company when it comes to privacy.
wolvesechoes 3y ago
One leech moves to leech elsewhere, another one rises in its place. There must be a leech. "What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun"
MentallyRetired 3y ago
I feel like data privacy is always the last throe of a company before hanging it up. I hope that's not the case with Mozilla. Not a big enough market cares about data privacy to make it a primary marketing message, unfortunately.
aaa_aaa 3y ago
Good riddance. State of mozilla shows she was not fit for the job. It is too late anyway. Years ago, she should have been fired for her post after the death of a veteran mozilla developer.
deleted 3y ago
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wkat4242 3y ago
Oh wow. This is great. Mitchell Baker was not good for Mozilla at all. I don't know Laura Chambers but I hope she will do a better job.
davidguetta 3y ago
I'm an engineer. I have created some websites. I have worked at an personalized ad startup (criteo) I have read on crypto, own some. Despite it I have exactly ZERO F** IDEA of what privacy means and entails in context to web browsing. Last thing i read was that 'anonymous' stuff were actually not anonymous, and that anyway someone could track you even across IP. And yeah also there's the NSA it knows anything about you anyway. Could someone ELI5 ?
- globular-toast 3y ago
  This is why education matters.
- tenebrisalietum 3y ago
  > what privacy means and entails in context to web browsing The most private browsing you can have is when no other party besides you (A) and the site you are bringing up (B) are part of the communication. - TLS, formerly SSL, provides transport security - meaning eavesdroppers that might be listening in to A and B above will only see encrypted data. - DoH provides transport security for the system that resolves DNS names to IP addresses (needed for your browser to connect to a site). DNS is distributed and not authenticated by design, meaning the DNS server your browser talks to could be redirected or intercepted. DoH prevents at least your ISP or public Wi-Fi network provider from doing that. So those are things that increase privacy. The following decrease privacy. - Web sites themselves run code (Javascript) which can communicate back with the server in the background. - Javascript and HTML cookies allow websites to store arbitrary data on your computer - not typically too much data, but enough to store a unique identifier that can be used to recognize you. Other data your browser provides to Javascript, such as screen resolution, installed fonts, and mouse events, can also be used. - Websites often import code from other servers - such as gathering metrics, delivering ads, etc. The code these servers run often reports data back to them and stores their own persistent data such as cookies, etc. Adblocking is a popular way to reduce this impact. These are ways "tracking across your IP" can be done. This persistent data can also be used to correlate your visits, so that, even if you are not logged in to a site (e.g. anonymous), the website can still know who you are. None of the above really addresses what a website does with basic statistics and information it collects after it is transmitted and has made it completely out of the browser. In most cases you've given this data voluntarily and it's needed to conduct a service, such as purchase history from an e-commerce site. That's really a separate privacy thing and not possible to directly address using browser technologies.
hexagonwin 3y ago
> Mozilla now makes most of its almost $600 million in annual revenue from promoting Chrome as the default search engine on its home page. This isn't that related to the topic but isn't that supposed to be Google, not Chrome?
- FireBeyond 3y ago
  Leaving aside small business, are there (m)any larger organizations where the CEO makes >1% of revenue? Mitchell making $6.9M in cash compensation of a $600M revenue company is the equivalent of: - Chuck Robbins of Cisco making $655M/year - Mark Benioff of Salesforce making $360M/year Maybe let's look smaller: - Fidji Simo of Instacart making $29M/year - Patrick Collison of Stripe making $166M/year When you look at it like that, Baker's compensation is quite absurd. (And for more comedic value than anything serious, similar to Tim Apple making $4.4B/year...)
  - toyg 3y ago
    Baker is just cashing in. Unlike CEOs who've been on Big Money from the start (or shortly after the start), she has toiled in relative obscurity for a very long time, arguably being severely underpaid for the responsibilities she took on. At some point she stopped believing in the long-term prospect of Mozilla, or in its mission, and decided she would get hers before it was too late. In a way, I humanly sympathise.
renewiltord 3y ago
Mozilla is back at trying to find PMF because what they set out to do they achieved: the web is now standards-compliant and almost all browser engines are almost entirely open-source. The web is truly cross-platform and open. This is a blinding success and entirely due to Mozilla's operations in the 2000s that brought standards-compliance and open-source to the forefront. What happens to an org with a goal when it hits the goal? It has to find a new goal or dissolve. It's tempting to say that dissolution is the right thing. But if you have accumulated resources, I imagine it's hard not to direct that at something else you care about. The standards-compliant web was a big deal. I cared about that a lot. Many of my friends were Firefox ambassadors or whatever. Kids were installing Firefox on computer lab machines and hiding the IE icon. It was a different time. I don't really care about data privacy like that, but maybe there are others who care about it like I cared about being able to view the web on a Linux browser with as much fidelity as IE on Windows. I find it unlikely since I think techno-optimism is a galvanizing goal and techno-pessimism is a limiting one. But that's just my opinion. Overall, I'm quite happy with what Mozilla did. It makes sense they have to cycle CEOs till someone finds out what sticks.
apapapa 3y ago
Can someone turn Mozilla around at this point? Hopefully...
BadHumans 3y ago
My biggest problem with the old CEO was her unnecessarily large salary while laying off the entire Servo team and then some. If this new CEO is still making nearly 3 million then I don't think we have fixed the problem.
- peanuty1 3y ago
  "According to the company's filings, Mitchell Baker's compensation went from $5,591,406 in 2021 to $6,903,089 in 2022."
  - BadHumans 3y ago
    Oh I guess I missed a few raises. 7 million for the CEO of Mozilla is crazy.
DaOne256 3y ago
https://archive.ph/rmMEb https://archive.ph/rmMEb
ChrisArchitect 3y ago
Related: official Moz post https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/a-new-chapter-for-mozilla-laura-chambers-expanded-role/ https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/a-new-chapter-for-mozill...
speckx 3y ago
Can this new CEO please concentrate on the core product, which is the Firefox browser, and not all these other services like VPN and monitoring of personal data?
nikisweeting 3y ago
I hope new CEO re-invigorates Pocket, there haven't been new features in aaaages :'(
jml7c5 3y ago
A great goal for Firefox would be "the archiveable, downloadable internet". Make it easy to download stuff off a page, even if the site is adversarial. I should be able to right-click and download an Instagram photo or a YouTube video. Integrate something like archive-it (the Internet Archive tool) for full-page downloads. It fits with the goal of an open internet, is easy to sell to users, and it's unlikely that Chrome will add the feature, since Google owns YouTube. And there's an obvious route for monetization: sell cloud storage for archived pages.
- kyleee 3y ago
  Great product idea, maybe brave will implement it. Seems like more innovation than Firefox is willing to take on. There are thousands of crappy browser extensions cashing in on demand for downloading x from y website
neonate 3y ago
http://web.archive.org/web/20240208175632/https://fortune.com/2024/02/08/mozilla-firefox-ceo-laura-chambers-mitchell-baker-leadership-transition/ http://web.archive.org/web/20240208175632/https://fortune.co... https://archive.ph/rmMEb https://archive.ph/rmMEb
linuxandrew 3y ago
Does Mozilla even need a CEO and its weird company+foundation structure? They should run it more like KDE or TDF and use that $6M to pay a few dozen engineers.
- manicennui 3y ago
  $6 million does not pay a few dozen engineers.
  - bmoxb 3y ago
    6,000,000 / 24 = 250,000 Seems like enough to me.
    - manicennui 3y ago
      [flagged]
      - olejorgenb 3y ago
        If they hired remote it's not a crazy estimate..
      - toyg 3y ago
        Well, it depends... in Eastern Europe you could probably hire 80 developers with that money, while in California 15-20. "A few dozen" seems like a fair approximation.
      - TheRealPomax 3y ago
        Perhaps you should look up how much Mozilla engineers get paid. You can hire a lot of P2 engineers (including the often overlooked extra cost for the employer to cover insurance, rrsp, 401k, etc) for six million united states dollars. Especially if your company already works highly distributed.
        manicennui 3y ago
paulvnickerson 3y ago
Hopefully this person doesn't have the "wrong" ideological opinions [1] [1] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/brendan-eich-steps-down-as-mozilla-ceo/ https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/brendan-eich-steps-down-...
beretguy 3y ago
Can we pivot to tab groups?
dang 3y ago
Related ongoing thread: A New Chapter for Mozilla - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39302624 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39302624 - Feb 2024 (8 comments)
rnd0 3y ago
What does "pivots to data privacy" mean, in this case? They're getting out of software (firefox, seamonkey, etc)?
- Pufferbo 3y ago
  They have many more products which they can profit directly from, rather than just deals from other companies (i.e. Google as the default search). Firefox rely comes to mind (which is a great product that I personally use and pay for). They probably want to focus more on those areas.
shdh 3y ago
The one product that Mozilla made recently that I really enjoyed using was Lockwise, and they basically killed the product. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/end-of-support-firefox-lockwise https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/end-of-support-firefox-...
- cpeterso 3y ago
  All the Lockwise functionality has been integrated into Firefox’s password manager on Android and iOS, including password syncing and filling passwords into native apps’ login.
zitterbewegung 3y ago
Can they pivot back to the priority of making a good browser?
hsbauauvhabzb 3y ago
Haven’t Mozilla pivoted continually for years? At this point I’m unsure if I’d call it ‘pivoting’ rather than ‘continually turning in circles toward whatever the newest shiniest fad is’. I truly hope this stops with new management.
declan_roberts 3y ago
Good riddance. I simply cannot trust a CEO of a company who says outright that we need more deplatforming on the Internet. She needed to go. I wish it would’ve been sooner. https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/we-need-more-than-deplatforming/ https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/we-need-more-than-deplat...
- ambichook 3y ago
  > I simply cannot trust a CEO of a company who says outright that we need more deplatforming on the Internet. > We need more than deplatforming the article you've linked explicitly states that deplatforming is an incomplete solution and that what should really be happening is increasing transparency.
  - bakchodi 3y ago
    She's advocating for something more like complete shunning for having the non-progressive opinions, which is ... something. Progressives are like 8% of the electorate, she probably wouldn't like what would happen if there were more censorship of political opinions
rvz 3y ago
> Mozilla Corp., which manages the open-source Firefox browser, announced today that Mitchell Baker is stepping down as CEO to focus on AI and internet safety as chair of the nonprofit foundation. Finally. After lining her pockets and running Firefox into the ground for 15 years. Quite hilarious Mozilla took this long to realize how she was slowly destroying the company to the point where it is beyond saving and incapable of making money other than being on Google's payroll.
WoodenChair 3y ago
This sounds like corporate speak covering up for a forced resignation. The red herring of the interim CEO doing anything serious on privacy is not real since: > Chambers says she won’t be seeking a permanent CEO role because she plans to move back to Australia later this year for family reasons. Here's my optimistic educated guess: The board finally caught on to the fact that Mitchell is an overpaid failed CEO for a "company" (e.g. weird for-profit entity that runs a "non-profit") propped up by its largest competitor to avoid anti-trust accusations. Its only real product has dwindling, barely mattering, marketshare (<5%)^. Chambers, being from the board and not the executive structure, is obviously a caretaker "for cover" while the new CEO search goes on. ^If you're curious about an expansion on this, my opinions on it based on their financial statements are in our podcast episode "How Does Mozilla Make Money?" from a year ago: https://pnc.st/s/kopec-explains-software/bdecab32/how-does-mozilla-make-money- https://pnc.st/s/kopec-explains-software/bdecab32/how-does-m...
- hitekker 3y ago
  I'd wager forced too. She didn't blog about this in https://blog.lizardwrangler.com/ https://blog.lizardwrangler.com/. Given that the last 3 blogposts are about company changes, the lack of a post about this event smells of resentment.
  - hackernewds 3y ago
    or NDAs and gag clauses on the golden parachutes - which surely exists.
- beirut_bootleg 3y ago
  > (e.g. weird for-profit entity that runs a "non-profit") propped up by its largest competitor to avoid anti-trust accusations. Not totally unheard of. Sounds a bit like OpenAI for the most part. > Its only real product has dwindling, barely mattering, marketshare (<5%)^ While competing with browsers bundled with operating systems. A bit of nuance.
  - lolinder 3y ago
NoboruWataya 3y ago
Now the people who have consistently put the blame for Firefox's declining relevance squarely on Mitchell will be vindicated or exposed. What market share do we think Firefox will have in a year's time? (Personally I'm not too hopeful.)
seshagiric 3y ago
Not that privacy is important, but in the age where everyone is thinking GPTs will become the new interface to internet, it does not look like the right strategy for a browser to pivot to privacy. Edge already has a copilot and looks like Chrome has something in the works too. I am afraid this strategy will only push Firefox more distance from prime time.
rvba 3y ago
All within family - the same people who ignored Firefox and didnt give the users what they want (customization & extensions) now just swap places around. Meanwhile Firefox marketshare is pathetic and money can dry up. Chrome killing extensions too! Google must be happy of installing those people in charge of Mozilla.
Madmallard 3y ago
Pivots >to< data privacy? I thought they were all for that the entire time? Sounds stinky.
ptman 3y ago
We need a direct way to fund firefox https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/ability-to-donate-money-to-the-firefox-development-team-directly/idi-p/198 https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/ability-to-donate-money...
grey_earthling 3y ago
Firefox's unique selling point was that you could trust it. Mozilla taught me that open source software was free from skeevy used-car-salesman commercial advertising tricks. This morning at work when I opened Firefox, instead of a blank tab it showed a popup advert saying “New device in your future?”. I found this string on bugzilla.mozilla.org, and apparently it's supposed to be an advert for setting up a Mozilla Account. This is too stressful. I need a tool I don't have to second-guess all the time. I've used Firefox for 20 years. I wish it would go back to behaving like a not-for-profit I can trust. (Also, if anyone from Fedora is listening, please consider whether having this sort of user experience in an app installed by default harms your reputation more or less than GNOME Web would.)
throwaway220033 3y ago
Who remembers the campaign they launched to kick Brendan Eich out?
rtz121 3y ago
I wish Mozilla would pivot to developing Firefox.
qwertyuiop_ 3y ago
They can focus their energy on one thing. Improve Firefox performance when compared to Chrome and see market share rise. They are distracted with Pocket, VPN among other things
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

859 points by jacooper 3y ago

Dunno I always felt weird since they embedded google analytics into one of their menus. Before people start arguing with me yes I think the latest news is they eventually got rid of it. But it was weird man

m463 3y ago
I love firefox and use it daily, but I dislike that you cannot prevent firefox from phoning home. You can disable every single setting, including making changes to about:config and it will continue to phone home.
- ionwake 3y ago
  Lol I had no idea
- rs_rs_rs_rs_rs 3y ago
  >I love firefox and use it daily, but I dislike that you cannot prevent firefox from phoning home. By "phone home" you mean the fact that it looks if there's newer versions to update itself? That's a good thing. And yes, you can disable it.
  - m463 3y ago
    no, it will talk to firefox.settings.services.mozilla.com

altairprime 3y ago

See also: https://blog.mozilla.org/mozilla/a-new-chapter-for-mozilla-laura-chambers-expanded-role/ https://blog.mozilla.org/mozilla/a-new-chapter-for-mozilla-l...

bpierre 3y ago

https://archive.ph/rmMEb https://archive.ph/rmMEb

pas 3y ago

Laura Chambers interim CEO, so ... no, Mozilla just fired Mitchell Baker, and that's it.

acomagu 3y ago
I I just heard about him for the first time, why does he hate you?

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

faeriechangling 3y ago

Long long overdue. Baker did nothing but see Mozilla decline while she arranged pay raises for herself and fired engineers. Should have been canned for incompetence a decade ago.

Gerlo 3y ago

Thank goodness. Mitchell Baker was running Mozilla into the ground while stuffing her pockets. >Doubling down on our core products, like Firefox... The fact that they acknowledged Firefox at all gives me some hope.

Spivak 3y ago
I mean I kinda doubt any new CEO is going to take an appreciable cut to salary. Baker got a bad rap among tech nerds for whom Mozilla === Firefox for trying to find literally any new market outside Firefox. It's not the golden calf it once was and only survives because of Google's hedge against antitrust. If they can't find a way to bring in outside money that isn't from Google they're gonna have a bad time if Google ever stops feeling threatened by US regulators, and making bets on new products is the only real thing you can do. Edge has proven in an embarrassingly public way that being a better browser under the hood doesn't get you more users.
- pgeorgi 3y ago
  It's less a "Firefox above all" sentiment, it's that Mozilla had 1. Firefox as baseline product declining 2. Lots of failed experiments to find new revenue streams while staying true to its mission 3. Baker's CEO salary rising several-fold 4. Engineers laid off for cost reduction Any three of them might well be okay, all four together look terribly self-centered on Baker's part.
- mekoka 3y ago
  > It's not the golden calf it once was Can you blame people for not understanding how a company who once had one of the most dominant and influential applications on the Internet, managed to fumble, by basically acting like a wallflower and letting the ecosystem figure the future out? > Any new market outside Firefox Why was this even necessary? Firefox has always been an undervalued asset at Mozilla. They sat on it and seem to have barely invested enough effort to make it decent enough to compete with Chrome. Back in 2009, if you'd asked me where I saw Firefox 10 years from then, I'd have said that in 2019 it's more than simply a browser. It's a platform competing with Apple and Google for apps, but on the web. It would have a core web browser with various derivatives. For example, one aimed at general purpose browsing (the FF we know currently), one for business apps (e.g. specialized browser augmented to understand better languages than plain old HTML/CSS/JS and built-in libraries for business apps; think Visual Basic, Notion), one for game apps, one for education apps, and more. Mozilla would provide tools and toolkits to make it easy for devs to just build apps for the web, so that they don't have to fight with the front-end. Apple is doing it for iOS, Google is doing it for Android. I still don't understand why Mozilla couldn't see itself sharing this cake with Firefox when it had 30%+ market share.

diggan 3y ago

I cannot read the submission article, but I can read the statement from Mozilla/Mitchell Baker (https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/a-new-chapter-for-mozilla-laura-chambers-expanded-role/ https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/a-new-chapter-for-mozill...), which doesn't mention either "data" nor "privacy". It seems mostly to focus on "Vision", "Strategy", "Outstanding Execution" and other corporate-speak stuff. Anyone who worked with Laura Chambers (new, interim CEO) in the past want to share what kind of changes one could expect from them? More business/marketing stuff or back to engineering focus?

sandebert 3y ago
Oh dear, that statement didn't fare well when I applied bullshit.js. https://mourner.github.io/bullshit.js/ https://mourner.github.io/bullshit.js/
- zzleeper 3y ago
  Wow you weren't joking: > Her bullshits will be on delivering bullshit products that bullshit our mission and building bullshits that bullshit momentum. Laura and I will be working closely together throughout February to ensure a bullshit transition, and in my role as Exec Chair I’ll continue to provide advice and bullshit in areas that touch on our unique history and Mozilla characteristics. > Laura’s bullshits will be on Mozilla Corporation with two bullshit bullshits:
  - slater 3y ago
    “What are the connections between this bullshit malaise and how humans are bullshitting with each other and bullshit?” haha
- kunagi7 3y ago
  I will keep this script around. Half of the article became "bullshit" and that shows to which kind of public is this information directed to.
- maxloh 3y ago

bluish29 3y ago

> Mitchell Baker is stepping down as CEO to focus on AI and internet safety as chair of the nonprofit foundation > Baker, a Silicon Valley pioneer who co-founded the Mozilla Project, says it was her decision to step down as CEO, adding that the move is motivated by a sense of urgency over the current state of the internet and public trust. Mitchell is not leaving and stepped down on her own. I hope that this still means a good change for Mozilla.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
alecco 3y ago
Will her compensation change? Hmm

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y ago

> But AI has given the nonprofit foundation and its cofounder Baker a fresh sense of mission in creating alternatives to tackle deepfakes, data privacy issues and the power of big tech. It launched a Mozilla.ai startup last year and Mozilla Corp. is focused on product extensions like Mozilla Monitor that wipe subscribers’ data off the web. Ironically, it has been Facebook with its release of Llama models and hat you can run yourself that has actually increased end user power and control with respect to AI. Having something that you can run on your machine (either owned or rented) is intrinsically more empowering and private for the user than sending your data off to some other company subject to their rules and their notions of “safety”.

lenerdenator 3y ago
It's also worth noting that Facebo - er - Meta has been one of the few to train its models on data it actually has an unambiguous legal right to.
- sp332 3y ago
  Llama models were trained on Books3.
  - lenerdenator 3y ago
    Ope. Shit, nevermind then. I thought they'd pull it from, y'know, the massive dataset their users generate and that they have unambiguous legal rights to in perpetuity.

victor9000 3y ago

Well, it was either continue down a path of irrelevance or try something different. Hopefully this means a brighter future for Firefox.

martin_drapeau 3y ago
Focus on data privacy may ring a bell with people using ad blockers. Not for the regular joe though. They just want things to work and Chrome just works. I wonder what percentage of internet users use ad blockers? That would pretty much represent the market cap for Firefox.
- asddubs 3y ago
  I've heard the number 30% tossed around before, but I'm not sure how accurate it is

bachmeier 3y ago

All the problems Mozilla has are summed up in this one sentence (taken from the Mozilla blog post): > Enter Laura Chambers, a dynamic board member who will step into the CEO role for the remainder of this year. "Laura Chambers" is a link to her LinkedIn profile. Nothing you can do but shake your head if it didn't occur to anyone that putting that link in the post announcing her appointment was a bad idea.

altairprime 3y ago
> putting that link in the post announcing her appointment was a bad idea In what way? (Footnote: OP’s reply is in another thread.) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39303697 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39303697
blowski 3y ago
Bad idea because it's LinkedIn, which has a shady reputation? Or that her profile doesn't look good? Or something else?
- bachmeier 3y ago
  See my answer here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39303697 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39303697
- fsflover 3y ago
  LinkedIn doesn't have shady reputation. It is shady.
hosteur 3y ago
I am probably just slow but why is that a bad idea?
- ploum 3y ago
  Let say for a moment that it is acceptable for the CEO of a corporation working on the independence of the Web to not have her personal independent webpage. I know, absurd, but let’s assume. Let say for a moment that it is acceptable that the personal independent webpage is replaced by a monopolistic platform trying to centralize the web. I know, absurd, but let’s assume Let say for a moment that we don’t care that the platform is owned by one of the biggest competitor of the corporation. Historically and currently. I know, absurd, but let’s assume. Let say for a moment that it is not a problem that the platform is one of the worst offender when regarding privacy of its users and handling personal data, even if the new CEO is talking about privacy. I know, absurd, but let’s assume. Let say that to there’s no problem in requiring every person clicking this link to have an account on the linked platform to know who the privacy-oriented new CEO is. I know, absurd, but let’s assume. Let say that nobody at Mozilla considered it to be a problem as the introductory post of the new CEO…

aunty_helen 3y ago

Three cheers for someone who has become hated by the only community that still use Firefox. I don’t think Firefox will ever see double digit usage again, but I hope there can be some kind of turn around and privacy focus built into my browser.

actualwitch 3y ago
If you are suggesting that people who still use firefox hate Mitchell Baker, you are mistaken.
- Vt71fcAqt7 3y ago
  You're right. Some of us are using forks with Mozilla's telemetry removed.
  - actualwitch 3y ago
    I can assure you, the amount of people who daily forks of ff is even smaller than the amount of people who hate Mitchell Baker.
- temp0826 3y ago
  Can't tell if sarcasm. Long time user (and often evangelistic) of firefox and loathe the turns she took as ceo.
  - actualwitch 3y ago
    I don't know how to be any more clear, as someone who used firefox since 3.0 and talked to plenty people irl who use firefox - the haters are a vocal minority that only exists on forums.
    - temp0826 3y ago
      It's not exactly dinner table conversation, and average internet-users probably wouldn't care much about the implications of such a company and situations, sure. The misgivings aren't justified among many who are aware of the details? Shouldn't non-profits deserve some scrutiny when they're seemingly being mishandled?

Macha 3y ago

It's clear the previous CEO's strategy was not working - neither from a level of personal appeal to me, or for population at large measures like market share, so I'm hoping this means a positive change.

subtra3t 3y ago
I'm surprised I had to scroll so far down to find a reasonable comment that did not immediately insult Mitchell Baker. I'm no fan of Baker, but the least we can do is wish her best wishes and hope for a great future for all parties involved. I didn't like her when she was CEO at Mozilla, I don't like her anymore now that she isn't CEO at Mozilla but that doesn't mean I have to resort to shallow attacks on her character. I expect more from HN. Edit: Corrected mistake about Baker no longer being at Mozilla. Thanks to @M2Ys4U.
- M2Ys4U 3y ago
  She's not leaving Mozilla, she's returning to her old position of Executive Chair
  - subtra3t 3y ago
    Sorry, my bad. Thanks for correcting, I've edited my comment.
- pbhjpbhj 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - samth 3y ago
    The idea that Mitchell Baker "insinuated herself" into Mozilla is ridiculous. She was an early Netscape employee, one of the original creators of the Mozilla project, and a founder of the Mozilla Foundation.
  - sgift 3y ago
    Uh yeah .. Michelle Baker, who is one of the founders of Mozilla, the writer of the MPL and who played a role (for a time as the volunteer general manager of the mozilla org, then later again as an employee) in everything from Mozillas rise to - unfortunately - now its decline by being part of the org had "insinuated" herself into Mozilla. You obviously lack the knowledge about Baker and Mozilla to have any business making statements on this topic. (If you wanna tell me that Michelle Baker recognized before mozilla.org even existed that it will have a meteoric rise, that the person who would have been CEO instead of her took himself out of the race and that that would allow her to make millions as CEO of Mozilla, all I can say is: I doubt that she has a crystal ball that good.)

tux3 3y ago

Congratulations to Mozilla for making it through this era! "The hate of men will pass, and CEOs leave, and the power they took from the people will return to the people. And so long as CEOs leave, liberty will never perish." Today's a day of hope

SiempreViernes 3y ago
They are getting a new CEO, not becoming a cooperative...

gkoberger 3y ago

I worked at Mozilla back in 2012, as we were pivoting to FirefoxOS (a mobile OS). I was very low in the company, but for some reason sent Mitchell an email detailing why I thought it was a bad idea. She not only responded in a very gracious way, but also followed up months later to check if my feelings had changed. While they had not, she didn't owe me anything and I really appreciated her attentiveness. Mitchell really cares about Mozilla and its community. Mitchell was a great community leader. That doesn't always translate to being a good CEO or leader of a business, however Mitchell is a huge reason (if not THE reason) why we have Firefox today – and, even if you don't currently use Firefox, a huge reason why we have the web we have today. So, while I haven't been the biggest fan of Mozilla's decisions the past few years, I do want to give credit to Mitchell for everything she did for the open web and open source. She was a supporter before anyone really cared, and played a huge part in getting is to where we are now over the past 20+ years. (I am glad this is the direction they have chosen! Here's a 2015 post where I write about how I think Mozilla should focus on data privacy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10698997 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10698997)

lolinder 3y ago
It's interesting to hear this, because from the outside Mitchell's tenure has seemed to be a disaster, with a complete inability to stay focused on one thing for long enough to make a difference. Mozilla in recent memory has reminded me more than anything of the dogs in Pixar's Up ("squirrel!"), constantly chasing after the latest shiny tech fad while neglecting the fundamentals. They've been a follower on everything and have failed to lead on anything. Mitchell's justification for stepping down as CEO seems to me to follow this same pattern: she's stepping down in order to focus on AI and internet safety. It's good to know that she's a decent person and was good to Mozilla employees, but it's hard to square the picture you paint with the complete lack of direction I've seen during her tenure. Maybe Mozilla was in a much worse situation than I thought at the time she took the position?
- gkoberger 3y ago
  I agree with everything you said. All I can say in response is that being a great community leader and open web advocate doesn't always square with someone who has to make a profit for hundreds or thousands of employees. I have no inside information, but here's my guess at what happened. John Lilly was a great CEO. When he left, there was a gigantic void. They hired Gary Kovacs, who started the "squirrel!"-ing. He wasn't well-liked, and used Mozilla as a stepping stone. So going forward they only hired from the Mozilla community, which is a small pool – both of people who could do it and people who wanted to do it. I'm not sure if Mitchell wanted it or not, but I don't think there was a lot of competition. Being the CEO of Mozilla is not a good job, and I imagine it's really hard to fill. There's a ton of pressure, relatively low salary, no equity, no exit.

sickofparadox 3y ago

As Mozilla's #1 hater I wish them all the best. The specific mentioning on doubling down on firefox specifically is exactly the kind of change I have said again and again they need to do. We shall see what comes of it, but for once, I wish them well!

jmyeet 3y ago

Good. Note that language like "has chosen to step down" doesn't really mean anything. It could still practically mean they were fired, as in they were given an ultimatum of step down or we'll fire you. But let's be real: she should be fired. She had no vision for Mozilla. Her pay went up as Firefox market share went down. Her strategy revolved around "<buzzword of the year> services". Most recently, that was "AI services". Now Mozilla has already spun out the Rust Foundation (in 2021). I'm not sure what their strategy needs to be but I think it revolves around doubling-down on Rust, kind of like how the Apache Foundation incubates a bunch of projects. Just like we have Webkit, that could mean creating Rust browser components and a browser entirely based on that, kind of like how they tried to with Servo in FF. Memory safety is simply too important an issue for reliance on C/C++ in the long term. Provably correct programs and components are (IMHO) going to become increasingly important. Stop playing around with [buzzword] (currently "AI"). Double down on Rust.

throwaway918274 3y ago

Is the new CEO gonna continue to get millions of dollars while Firefox slips deeper and deeper into irrelevance?

peanuty1 3y ago
"According to the company's filings, Mitchell Baker's compensation went from $5,591,406 in 2021 to $6,903,089 in 2022."

0x5FC3 3y ago

I've always used Firefox. I've long converted my friends and loved ones into Firefox users, going in depth about the pros of using a browser that does not exist solely to profit off their data and impose their rules onto a free internet (somewhat) that I grew up on and live off, to this day. Dev teams find it easier to slap "Use Chrome for best experience" or the more annoying "Your browser is not supported" on web applications instead of maintaining compatibility for another browser, but can you blame them? I've thought long and hard about the "free" internet. The free internet, the trove of knowledge, the bleeding edge of what technology has to offer, one of the more important places where humanity advances. Also perhaps regresses in the veil of psuedo anonymity. Pixels, cookies, beacons, benign sounding words all used to profile and map everything about you on this internet. To sell you more ads, to keep the % increase over past quarter at acceptable rates. This rant is exaggerated, inaccurate and perhaps emotional coming from me. The internet is something I hold dear, my privacy is something I hold dear. From time to time I see myself type "dat" and FF autocompletes it to "data.firefox.com", say a little "oh well" to myself and click the return key. I click on the yellow button at the bottom of the page and stare at the MAU chart for a good few seconds before Ctrl+W and going back to whatever I was doing. Small up spikes made me happy, but the downward trend does not make me sad, since I have accepted it. Maybe somebody crazy and determined will fork the project, if it comes to that, but maintaining a browser is a tall ordeal and maintaining is not enough. Baker at some point after laying off hundreds of Mozilla employees said something along the lines of "I could be making more elsewhere, so this little pay increase to myself is no biggie" (not her words at all, but this is what she meant). I have waited so long for this news. A long, long, time. Maybe now, FF can ship security patches as fast as Chrome does, maybe now the small upward spikes in the MAU chart won't be so small anymore, maybe now Mozilla will stop making Pocket a thing, maybe now the days of free internet are extended a little more.

wokwokwok 3y ago

Everyone: Mozilla sucks and hasn’t done anything useful in the last ten years. Also everyone: oh, this rust thing is nice. Hm. Not every toy you make is a winner, but I think it’s fair to say that while maybe it wasn’t a commercial success, we all ought to say thank you for supporting rust and servo while it was growing up.

paxys 3y ago
Also everyone: Chrome is too dominant we need an alternative. Ask them if they have tried this fantastic alternative called Firefox and you'll get silence.
- TheCleric 3y ago
  Not necessarily. I firmly think we need a non-Chrome based alternative, and through actual use, think that current Firefox ain’t it.
  - derac 3y ago
    I only use Firefox and it's great. I actually use Librewolf and it very rarely has issues with sites. What do you think is wrong with it?
    - TylerE 3y ago
      If you only use Firefox how do you know that it's great? My general impression is that Firefox is lagging far behind in many areas. It hasn't gotten worse, probably gotten better, but the other players have gotten MUCH better.
      - derac 3y ago
        Oh I use Edge at work actually and Chrome when occassional things break (mostly Google services). I find them very much the same. What differences stand out to you?
      - 3y ago

shp0ngle 3y ago

I don't want to be so alarmist, but... haven't Brave kind of eaten Firefox lunch here? Yes, Brave subtly pushes some crypto nonsense, but it also delivers on privacy, it focuses where it matters. (It also bundles IPFS and Tor in the base install, I believe.) And you can say "oh it's still Chrome!" but - Chromium is FOSS, and to me, it shows that Brave focus on what matters (data privacy) and not on what doesn't (writing their own HTML, CSS, JS engine). I don't agree with the opinion that browser needs to have its own rendering engine to be able to be focused on privacy. I think it's the opposite - using Chrome engine helps Brave to focus on what matters. But it's just me. It's fun to build own browser engine, I get it, I just don't know if it's time and money well spent.

presentation 3y ago
It hasn’t in the sense that barely anyone uses Brave.
- Rebelgecko 3y ago
  If trends continue (of course no guarantee they will) it looks like Brave might surpass Firefox's market share in the next few years
- sharps1 3y ago
  Brave’s usage curve is still going up and the MAU is approaching 70 million. Firefox has another 115 million monthly active users. By Chrome’s numbers either is barely used. https://bravebat.info/brave_browser_active_users https://bravebat.info/brave_browser_active_users
sebtron 3y ago
Having an independent engine is not necessarily about privacy, it's about... Well, independence. If Google gets away with Blink being the only viable engine, they can push any bullshit they want (e.g. WEI) and we'll have to live with it. A Chromium-only future is one where "the web" is just another name for Google's walled garden.
- 3y ago

weinzierl 3y ago

We will see which kind of data privacy they pivot to this time. - The one that puts the data subject in the focus and protects the end user - The one that aims to cut out Google and tries to hand out pieces of the cake to other companies. I hope not the second kind again. We've already been there with Mozilla's investments into Cliqz GmbH and Hubert Burda's empire.

thesausageking 3y ago

I can't think of any important things Mozilla has created since pushing Brendan Eich out 9 years ago. That's almost a decade and billions in revenue they've burned through. There's now almost no programmers on the board or in senior leadership positions. The interim CEO they picked is an MBA who ran a business line at AirBnB. It seems like another case of MBAs taking over.

wolverine876 3y ago
Rust, for example. How many organizations the size of Mozilla create two revolutionary products in unrelated fields?
- depr 3y ago
  Didn't Netscape create Firefox?
  - wolverine876 3y ago
    Netscape, on its deathbed (and I think due to Baker's efforts, in part), open-sourced the Netscape code. Mozilla was created by ex-Netscapers, developed that code, and released a few versions of a Mozilla browser, which followed Netscape's idea of integrating browser, mail client, webpage editor, other stuff (maybe IRC client?). Sometime later, a few Mozillians decided the web and Mozilla needed a simple, sleek, fast browser, and built Firefox.
    - toyg 3y ago
      Mozilla was created by Netscape itself, before its "deathbed". They were possibly the first "open-core" project of significant scale: they wanted to do a Big Rewrite (Netscape 4 code was unmanageable and crusty), and hoped that doing it as opensource would speed things up. The original Mozilla suite was supposed to be the experimental/rough version, which Netscape would then polish and sell as its own. Unfortunately, by the time this happened (and it did happen - Netscape released a few Mozilla-based versions), the browser market was entirely commoditized and there was no path to profitability for Netscape (which had been absorbed by AOL by then). The Big Rewrite took way longer than expected, and the open setup introduced even more development friction. The Mozilla suite never got anything else beyond browser/mail/editor. I think the AOL version shipped a bunch of extra bookmarks and that's it. They had already built some infrastructure for extensions and themes though, and that's effectively what Firefox took to extreme consequences: a skunkwork group of Mozilla devs stripped the suite down to the lone browser, and forced everything else to be an extension. That was Phoenix (rebirth and all that), which became Firebird (because people can't spell Phoenix, and the other surviving products could be aligned as Thunderbird and Sunbird), which became Firefox (because oops in IT there's a Firebird already, a database with angry lawyers).

solardev 3y ago

I hope they can at least spin off the browser division into its own entity. Mozilla the org has become some sort of wannabe think tank that people are vaguely aware of but mostly just ignore. Meanwhile, Firefox has been circling the drain for a decade... This is a group that gets way too much money from Google and doesn't know what to do with it...

devit 3y ago

They could consider dropping Gecko in favor of Blink, which would save a lot of engineering resources that could be used to implement features instead of web compatibility, and would effectively guarantee that Firefox will be always strictly better than Chrome (since it would be Chrome minus the Google antifeatures plus the Mozilla features).

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jhaenchen 3y ago
We need more engines not less.
- charcircuit 3y ago
  Your wants are not necessarily the best business strategy. Basing their browser off Chromium and then innovating off of it could lead to more user value being delivered.
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breathen 3y ago

Being "pro-data-privacy" as a browser vendor seems like an inherently contradiction in terms. It's like apple feigning interest in protecting consumers when they run their own ad network.

dingi 3y ago

Mozilla should handover Firefox to a separate entity and continue with their wishy washy projects. Only thing they are doing right now is ruining Firefox. I'll surely donate to such an entity if they solely focus on Firefox.

7thaccount 3y ago

In case you were wondering how they make money...this is from Investopedia: " Mozilla Firefox Mozilla releases its annual financial statements each November for the previous year. The company’s latest revenue numbers are from 2020 when the browser brought in nearly $497 million, 88.8% of which came from royalties. These royalties refer to the percentage of advertising revenue Mozilla receives whenever someone uses the built-in search engine that the Firefox browser provides. In addition to search royalties, Mozilla earns money from donations and from sponsored new tab tiles, which can be disabled."

eduction 3y ago

I'm confused as to why Baker is not running things while a permanent CEO is found. Chambers is stepping in temporarily, and Fortune offers some details: "Chambers says she won’t be seeking a permanent CEO role because she plans to move back to Australia later this year for family reasons. 'I think this is an example of Mozilla doing the right role modelling in how to manage a succession,' says Chambers." If it's only going to take a matter of months to find a new CEO, and Baker has been doing it since 2020, and before that from 05-08, what difference does it make if she keeps running things a few/several more months? Why have a third person running things temporarily?

dexterjs 3y ago
In my experience interim CEO are used to make unpopular decisions in the company and then removed, kind of like getting New Coke and then as everyone gets mad you bring back Coke Classic but now with cheaper ingredients and everyone is happy.
duped 3y ago
When you fire someone you don't generally keep them around the office
- iowemoretohim 3y ago
  But she's still the Chairwoman of Mozilla Foundation.

AdmiralAsshat 3y ago

Still waiting for a Mozilla-branded email domain/provider. They've already got their Mozilla-branded partnerships with the VPN and now the data scrubber. Not sure why they're sleeping on email. That seems like an obvious thing that I would pay for.

tux3 3y ago
It's not the worst idea. The Linux foundation will let you buy a @linux.com email (for people who want to feel like an important Linux person). I like that it's not something like FirefoxOS where they need to invest years of R&D playing catch-up. Relatively simple to set-up. And free advertising for the Brand™ whenever someone sends an email, such marketing value, very viral.

lucideer 3y ago

> Mitchell Baker is stepping down as CEO to focus on AI & from her own blogpost on this announcement[0]: > I will return to supporting the CEO and leadership team as I have done previously as Exec Chair. In addition, I will expand my work [... to ...] more consistently representing Mozilla in the public [...] through speaking and direct engagement with the community. I cannot believe Baker doesn't read at least some notes on community sentiment around her various decisions at Mozilla; it must take an astounding level of cognitive dissonance for her to see herself as a suitable candidate for "direct engagement with the community". [0] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/a-new-chapter-for-mozilla-laura-chambers-expanded-role/ https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/a-new-chapter-for-mozill...

sicromoft 3y ago

https://archive.is/rmMEb https://archive.is/rmMEb

jokoon 3y ago

Well Finally! When you look at their latest products, it seems like they were starting to sell user data, it was quite scary since Mozilla is like the most respected company when it comes to privacy.

wolvesechoes 3y ago

One leech moves to leech elsewhere, another one rises in its place. There must be a leech. "What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun"

MentallyRetired 3y ago

I feel like data privacy is always the last throe of a company before hanging it up. I hope that's not the case with Mozilla. Not a big enough market cares about data privacy to make it a primary marketing message, unfortunately.

aaa_aaa 3y ago

Good riddance. State of mozilla shows she was not fit for the job. It is too late anyway. Years ago, she should have been fired for her post after the death of a veteran mozilla developer.

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wkat4242 3y ago

Oh wow. This is great. Mitchell Baker was not good for Mozilla at all. I don't know Laura Chambers but I hope she will do a better job.

davidguetta 3y ago

I'm an engineer. I have created some websites. I have worked at an personalized ad startup (criteo) I have read on crypto, own some. Despite it I have exactly ZERO F** IDEA of what privacy means and entails in context to web browsing. Last thing i read was that 'anonymous' stuff were actually not anonymous, and that anyway someone could track you even across IP. And yeah also there's the NSA it knows anything about you anyway. Could someone ELI5 ?

globular-toast 3y ago
This is why education matters.
tenebrisalietum 3y ago
> what privacy means and entails in context to web browsing The most private browsing you can have is when no other party besides you (A) and the site you are bringing up (B) are part of the communication. - TLS, formerly SSL, provides transport security - meaning eavesdroppers that might be listening in to A and B above will only see encrypted data. - DoH provides transport security for the system that resolves DNS names to IP addresses (needed for your browser to connect to a site). DNS is distributed and not authenticated by design, meaning the DNS server your browser talks to could be redirected or intercepted. DoH prevents at least your ISP or public Wi-Fi network provider from doing that. So those are things that increase privacy. The following decrease privacy. - Web sites themselves run code (Javascript) which can communicate back with the server in the background. - Javascript and HTML cookies allow websites to store arbitrary data on your computer - not typically too much data, but enough to store a unique identifier that can be used to recognize you. Other data your browser provides to Javascript, such as screen resolution, installed fonts, and mouse events, can also be used. - Websites often import code from other servers - such as gathering metrics, delivering ads, etc. The code these servers run often reports data back to them and stores their own persistent data such as cookies, etc. Adblocking is a popular way to reduce this impact. These are ways "tracking across your IP" can be done. This persistent data can also be used to correlate your visits, so that, even if you are not logged in to a site (e.g. anonymous), the website can still know who you are. None of the above really addresses what a website does with basic statistics and information it collects after it is transmitted and has made it completely out of the browser. In most cases you've given this data voluntarily and it's needed to conduct a service, such as purchase history from an e-commerce site. That's really a separate privacy thing and not possible to directly address using browser technologies.

hexagonwin 3y ago

> Mozilla now makes most of its almost $600 million in annual revenue from promoting Chrome as the default search engine on its home page. This isn't that related to the topic but isn't that supposed to be Google, not Chrome?

FireBeyond 3y ago
Leaving aside small business, are there (m)any larger organizations where the CEO makes >1% of revenue? Mitchell making $6.9M in cash compensation of a $600M revenue company is the equivalent of: - Chuck Robbins of Cisco making $655M/year - Mark Benioff of Salesforce making $360M/year Maybe let's look smaller: - Fidji Simo of Instacart making $29M/year - Patrick Collison of Stripe making $166M/year When you look at it like that, Baker's compensation is quite absurd. (And for more comedic value than anything serious, similar to Tim Apple making $4.4B/year...)
- toyg 3y ago
  Baker is just cashing in. Unlike CEOs who've been on Big Money from the start (or shortly after the start), she has toiled in relative obscurity for a very long time, arguably being severely underpaid for the responsibilities she took on. At some point she stopped believing in the long-term prospect of Mozilla, or in its mission, and decided she would get hers before it was too late. In a way, I humanly sympathise.

renewiltord 3y ago

Mozilla is back at trying to find PMF because what they set out to do they achieved: the web is now standards-compliant and almost all browser engines are almost entirely open-source. The web is truly cross-platform and open. This is a blinding success and entirely due to Mozilla's operations in the 2000s that brought standards-compliance and open-source to the forefront. What happens to an org with a goal when it hits the goal? It has to find a new goal or dissolve. It's tempting to say that dissolution is the right thing. But if you have accumulated resources, I imagine it's hard not to direct that at something else you care about. The standards-compliant web was a big deal. I cared about that a lot. Many of my friends were Firefox ambassadors or whatever. Kids were installing Firefox on computer lab machines and hiding the IE icon. It was a different time. I don't really care about data privacy like that, but maybe there are others who care about it like I cared about being able to view the web on a Linux browser with as much fidelity as IE on Windows. I find it unlikely since I think techno-optimism is a galvanizing goal and techno-pessimism is a limiting one. But that's just my opinion. Overall, I'm quite happy with what Mozilla did. It makes sense they have to cycle CEOs till someone finds out what sticks.

apapapa 3y ago

Can someone turn Mozilla around at this point? Hopefully...

BadHumans 3y ago

My biggest problem with the old CEO was her unnecessarily large salary while laying off the entire Servo team and then some. If this new CEO is still making nearly 3 million then I don't think we have fixed the problem.

peanuty1 3y ago
"According to the company's filings, Mitchell Baker's compensation went from $5,591,406 in 2021 to $6,903,089 in 2022."
- BadHumans 3y ago
  Oh I guess I missed a few raises. 7 million for the CEO of Mozilla is crazy.

DaOne256 3y ago

https://archive.ph/rmMEb https://archive.ph/rmMEb

ChrisArchitect 3y ago

Related: official Moz post https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/a-new-chapter-for-mozilla-laura-chambers-expanded-role/ https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/a-new-chapter-for-mozill...

speckx 3y ago

Can this new CEO please concentrate on the core product, which is the Firefox browser, and not all these other services like VPN and monitoring of personal data?

nikisweeting 3y ago

I hope new CEO re-invigorates Pocket, there haven't been new features in aaaages :'(

jml7c5 3y ago

A great goal for Firefox would be "the archiveable, downloadable internet". Make it easy to download stuff off a page, even if the site is adversarial. I should be able to right-click and download an Instagram photo or a YouTube video. Integrate something like archive-it (the Internet Archive tool) for full-page downloads. It fits with the goal of an open internet, is easy to sell to users, and it's unlikely that Chrome will add the feature, since Google owns YouTube. And there's an obvious route for monetization: sell cloud storage for archived pages.

kyleee 3y ago
Great product idea, maybe brave will implement it. Seems like more innovation than Firefox is willing to take on. There are thousands of crappy browser extensions cashing in on demand for downloading x from y website

neonate 3y ago

http://web.archive.org/web/20240208175632/https://fortune.com/2024/02/08/mozilla-firefox-ceo-laura-chambers-mitchell-baker-leadership-transition/ http://web.archive.org/web/20240208175632/https://fortune.co... https://archive.ph/rmMEb https://archive.ph/rmMEb

linuxandrew 3y ago

Does Mozilla even need a CEO and its weird company+foundation structure? They should run it more like KDE or TDF and use that $6M to pay a few dozen engineers.

manicennui 3y ago
$6 million does not pay a few dozen engineers.
- bmoxb 3y ago
  6,000,000 / 24 = 250,000 Seems like enough to me.
  - manicennui 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - olejorgenb 3y ago
      If they hired remote it's not a crazy estimate..
    - toyg 3y ago
      Well, it depends... in Eastern Europe you could probably hire 80 developers with that money, while in California 15-20. "A few dozen" seems like a fair approximation.
    - TheRealPomax 3y ago
      Perhaps you should look up how much Mozilla engineers get paid. You can hire a lot of P2 engineers (including the often overlooked extra cost for the employer to cover insurance, rrsp, 401k, etc) for six million united states dollars. Especially if your company already works highly distributed.
      - manicennui 3y ago

paulvnickerson 3y ago

Hopefully this person doesn't have the "wrong" ideological opinions [1] [1] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/brendan-eich-steps-down-as-mozilla-ceo/ https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/brendan-eich-steps-down-...

beretguy 3y ago

Can we pivot to tab groups?

dang 3y ago

Related ongoing thread: A New Chapter for Mozilla - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39302624 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39302624 - Feb 2024 (8 comments)

rnd0 3y ago

What does "pivots to data privacy" mean, in this case? They're getting out of software (firefox, seamonkey, etc)?

Pufferbo 3y ago
They have many more products which they can profit directly from, rather than just deals from other companies (i.e. Google as the default search). Firefox rely comes to mind (which is a great product that I personally use and pay for). They probably want to focus more on those areas.

shdh 3y ago

The one product that Mozilla made recently that I really enjoyed using was Lockwise, and they basically killed the product. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/end-of-support-firefox-lockwise https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/end-of-support-firefox-...

cpeterso 3y ago
All the Lockwise functionality has been integrated into Firefox’s password manager on Android and iOS, including password syncing and filling passwords into native apps’ login.

zitterbewegung 3y ago

Can they pivot back to the priority of making a good browser?

hsbauauvhabzb 3y ago

Haven’t Mozilla pivoted continually for years? At this point I’m unsure if I’d call it ‘pivoting’ rather than ‘continually turning in circles toward whatever the newest shiniest fad is’. I truly hope this stops with new management.

declan_roberts 3y ago

Good riddance. I simply cannot trust a CEO of a company who says outright that we need more deplatforming on the Internet. She needed to go. I wish it would’ve been sooner. https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/we-need-more-than-deplatforming/ https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/we-need-more-than-deplat...

ambichook 3y ago
> I simply cannot trust a CEO of a company who says outright that we need more deplatforming on the Internet. > We need more than deplatforming the article you've linked explicitly states that deplatforming is an incomplete solution and that what should really be happening is increasing transparency.
- bakchodi 3y ago
  She's advocating for something more like complete shunning for having the non-progressive opinions, which is ... something. Progressives are like 8% of the electorate, she probably wouldn't like what would happen if there were more censorship of political opinions

rvz 3y ago

> Mozilla Corp., which manages the open-source Firefox browser, announced today that Mitchell Baker is stepping down as CEO to focus on AI and internet safety as chair of the nonprofit foundation. Finally. After lining her pockets and running Firefox into the ground for 15 years. Quite hilarious Mozilla took this long to realize how she was slowly destroying the company to the point where it is beyond saving and incapable of making money other than being on Google's payroll.

WoodenChair 3y ago

This sounds like corporate speak covering up for a forced resignation. The red herring of the interim CEO doing anything serious on privacy is not real since: > Chambers says she won’t be seeking a permanent CEO role because she plans to move back to Australia later this year for family reasons. Here's my optimistic educated guess: The board finally caught on to the fact that Mitchell is an overpaid failed CEO for a "company" (e.g. weird for-profit entity that runs a "non-profit") propped up by its largest competitor to avoid anti-trust accusations. Its only real product has dwindling, barely mattering, marketshare (<5%)^. Chambers, being from the board and not the executive structure, is obviously a caretaker "for cover" while the new CEO search goes on. ^If you're curious about an expansion on this, my opinions on it based on their financial statements are in our podcast episode "How Does Mozilla Make Money?" from a year ago: https://pnc.st/s/kopec-explains-software/bdecab32/how-does-mozilla-make-money- https://pnc.st/s/kopec-explains-software/bdecab32/how-does-m...

hitekker 3y ago
I'd wager forced too. She didn't blog about this in https://blog.lizardwrangler.com/ https://blog.lizardwrangler.com/. Given that the last 3 blogposts are about company changes, the lack of a post about this event smells of resentment.
- hackernewds 3y ago
  or NDAs and gag clauses on the golden parachutes - which surely exists.
beirut_bootleg 3y ago
> (e.g. weird for-profit entity that runs a "non-profit") propped up by its largest competitor to avoid anti-trust accusations. Not totally unheard of. Sounds a bit like OpenAI for the most part. > Its only real product has dwindling, barely mattering, marketshare (<5%)^ While competing with browsers bundled with operating systems. A bit of nuance.
- lolinder 3y ago

NoboruWataya 3y ago

Now the people who have consistently put the blame for Firefox's declining relevance squarely on Mitchell will be vindicated or exposed. What market share do we think Firefox will have in a year's time? (Personally I'm not too hopeful.)

seshagiric 3y ago

Not that privacy is important, but in the age where everyone is thinking GPTs will become the new interface to internet, it does not look like the right strategy for a browser to pivot to privacy. Edge already has a copilot and looks like Chrome has something in the works too. I am afraid this strategy will only push Firefox more distance from prime time.

rvba 3y ago

All within family - the same people who ignored Firefox and didnt give the users what they want (customization & extensions) now just swap places around. Meanwhile Firefox marketshare is pathetic and money can dry up. Chrome killing extensions too! Google must be happy of installing those people in charge of Mozilla.

Madmallard 3y ago

Pivots >to< data privacy? I thought they were all for that the entire time? Sounds stinky.

ptman 3y ago

We need a direct way to fund firefox https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/ability-to-donate-money-to-the-firefox-development-team-directly/idi-p/198 https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/ability-to-donate-money...

grey_earthling 3y ago

Firefox's unique selling point was that you could trust it. Mozilla taught me that open source software was free from skeevy used-car-salesman commercial advertising tricks. This morning at work when I opened Firefox, instead of a blank tab it showed a popup advert saying “New device in your future?”. I found this string on bugzilla.mozilla.org, and apparently it's supposed to be an advert for setting up a Mozilla Account. This is too stressful. I need a tool I don't have to second-guess all the time. I've used Firefox for 20 years. I wish it would go back to behaving like a not-for-profit I can trust. (Also, if anyone from Fedora is listening, please consider whether having this sort of user experience in an app installed by default harms your reputation more or less than GNOME Web would.)

throwaway220033 3y ago

Who remembers the campaign they launched to kick Brendan Eich out?

rtz121 3y ago

I wish Mozilla would pivot to developing Firefox.

qwertyuiop_ 3y ago

They can focus their energy on one thing. Improve Firefox performance when compared to Chrome and see market share rise. They are distracted with Pocket, VPN among other things

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]