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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 deta

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.
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  - animal_spirits 3y ago
    Mitchell baker was making 6.2 million dollars a year at Mozilla in 2023. Source: https://www.theregister.com/AMP/2024/01/02/mozilla_in_2024_ai_privacy/ https://www.theregister.com/AMP/2024/01/02/mozilla_in_2024_a...
    - gkoberger 3y ago
      Yes, that's a lot of money. But if you're a CEO good enough to turn Mozilla around given the constraints... you could make a lot more elsewhere. If nothing else, you'd get stock, which would correlate with your performance.
      - Dylan16807 3y ago
        > But if you're a CEO good enough to turn Mozilla around given the constraints... you could make a lot more elsewhere. Why? Why does pointing mozilla in the right direction require such rare skills? Or is this because we're only looking at existing CEOs for hiring? If the rareness is about having the right industry knowledge and vision in a CEO, I bet you can get better results by hiring a company aimer and separate managerial co-CEO and using the money you save for 20 more devs and 5 more marketers.
- javajosh 3y ago
  >was good to Mozilla employees, but it's hard to square the picture you paint with the complete lack of direction Isn't there a fundamental tension between "be good to employees" and "strong sense of direction"? If you are focused as CEO, then you must neglect a fraction of your employees at any point in time. This is a side-effect of focusing on one direction, while maintaining capability to go in other directions in the future. If you don't neglect some of your employees and project, then you come off as being distracted and without a strong sense of direction. Is there some way to square this circle?
  - romanows 3y ago
    I would think you could have a company focused on one thing; e.g., "making the people's browser" (with more explanation so the goal is clear). Hire people who believe in that goal. Make it relatively easy for people to leave so they're not tied to their job; e.g., generous severance, active help networking with other prestigious tech companies. Maybe even force people to take a break and work elsewhere for a couple years every N years before coming back, to keep people from getting stuck in a rut. Keep the company relatively small so that it _has_ a primary direction.
- riversflow 3y ago
  It's pretty straight forward to me. "$CORPO_STOOGE does all the things that make you a great leader and talks in platitudes that seem genuine! That makes them a decent person!" Nah. I have a quote that I think about often on this topic, from none other than Bojack Horseman[1]: Bojack, "Well, do you think I'm a good person... deep down?" Diane, "That's the thing, I don't think I believe in deep down. I kind of think that all you are is the things that you do" $CORPO_STOOGE is just a sociopath who follow the suggestions of "Lean In" as a behavioral guide of motions to follow. That doesn't make them a good person, just maybe a more pleasant manipulator. [1] S1E12 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkG7x-hwqN8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkG7x-hwqN8
  - Geisterde 3y ago
    The most psychotic person ive ever known started his leadership by saving someones job after they made a mistake. Everyone assumed he would be a great leader, my skepticism proved right.
- chrsig 3y ago
  > Mitchell was a great community leader. That doesn't always translate to being a good CEO or leader of a business I think this statement from the parent addresses your point. Perhaps them stepping down as CEO will result in more focus? Time will tell.
- karmelapple 3y ago
  I think the "squirrel!" behavior has to do with getting revenue in the door. I'm not following extremely close, but it seems like Mozilla is chasing what can be turned into a product. Things that involve setting up a monthly subscription, whether it's VPNs, keeping your name out of certain tracking databases, etc. I wonder how Mozilla used to be funded vs how it's now funded? The web is a better place with a non-profit-driven group like Mozilla in it... but is Mozilla Corporation becoming more money-driven than it used to be, even if it can't turn a profit? Or can it turn a profit, because it's not the Mozilla Foundation [1]? 1. https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/moco/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/moco/
  - dralley 3y ago
    Mozilla Corp is allowed to turn a profit. Distributions of that profit are the primary source of funding for the Mozilla Foudnation.
  - stubish 3y ago
    Or is that backwards? Revenue comes in the door, and we must spend it, because empires must be built. No longer 100 developers working on a browser, but thousands working on all sorts of unrelated things and all the support staff. Whereas the alternative would be staying small and focused, sticking that money in the bank, and become financially independent. A new CEO could even do that. Conservatively invest one year's 600M revenue, rake off 20M per year, and the nestegg would still grow with inflation. And that is enough to develop a web browser provided you don't do it in silicon valley. Two or three years revenue and you can even market it. I think we see this a lot, with companies pulling in too much money from IPOs or venture capital, pissing it away on unfocused growth, and if they are lucky back where they started. Or unlucky and bankrupt.
- geoelectric 3y ago
  I also worked for Mozilla in that time period (I left just before they canceled FxOS) and found Mitchell to be an inspiring leader. OTOH, the track record over the last few years suggests she's not as great an executor.
  - paulryanrogers 3y ago
    It was an impossible situation. Chrome can be funded and promoted by some of the most dominant web properties in the world. Even Microsoft is struggling to get a foothold with Edge, and that's after turning it into a Chrome reskin. Not saying the comp package was justified. But it was a job doomed to fail.
    - acdha 3y ago
      Yeah, to the extent that I’d criticize her it’s for not calling more for antitrust enforcement and since that’s basically asking Google to cut the lifeline, I don’t see how that could have worked in the current climate.
      - paulryanrogers 3y ago
        Mozilla sold defaults to a variety of vendors, most notably Yahoo, and others outside the US. Arguably they should have refused Google money from the jump.
        acdha 3y ago
        The thing is, they’re in a really expensive place and almost everyone on the web has been trained to think of browsers as free. I don’t know what alternatives they could have picked at the time.
        paulryanrogers 3y ago
        My point is they had no way out. It was a glass cliff. Only regulations can stand up to competitors as powerful as Google and Apple.
- patientzero 3y ago
  I think people remember a Mozilla that never was. Mozilla was saved by Firebox which Mozilla the organization would have successfully blocked if their institutional processes were not the reason their community was frustrated. I don't think their processes have ever been better, they got initial and later injections of code from outside. Rust/servo was the moment when I thought they might turn it around, but their bus has always gone in the direction of the same cliff.
  - avar 3y ago
    > Rust/servo was the moment when I thought they might turn it around. Because greenfield parallel rewrites of giant production codebases have such a fantastic track record, that we might as well add "in a novel programming language we're inventing while we're at it" just to make it interesting?
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    - patientzero 3y ago
      They had decades to ship next and they didn't want to be bug for bug backwards compatible. Local optimums in hell don't have a path to heaven. I think demise by drastic jump stories work because the examples are few and notable. Most projects accumulate experts in moving around the wrong optimum who then block plans of getting free that aren't too conservative to possibly work.
    - dale_glass 3y ago
      But Rust is actually a successful language, and the idea of writing a web browser in it is actually a good one. Security is a huge concern for something like a web browser, which is a thing that keeps on increasing more and more in complexity. So far it seems Java is dead in the desktop space, and .NET has a very minimal impact, so it seems a compiled language is the way to go. And Rust's excellent support for multithreading is also a big boon since now multicore CPUs are a standard and keep on getting more and more cores. Overall the idea of building a very safe and performant browser seems like a great one.
- byAltAccts 3y ago
  Many serial killers are said to have gentle, gracious personalities. Except while doing all the killing anyway. It’s not hard to train oneself to act empathic, socially normal, but lack vision, ideas of your own. OP described how little it actually takes to make such a lasting impression; two conversations. In 2015 some colleagues and myself were invited to pitch an idea for an Instagram clone. The financier was recently widowed woman who was all kinds of generous with us. But she also mentioned she feels there’s plenty of nobodies in the world, Zuckerberg can share. They can peddle products on her platform as her husband wasn’t that rich. We learn to be a certain way publicly.
- woolion 3y ago
  They did lead on with some very cool ideas like panorama (now tab groups, still a Firefox exclusive feature!), Ubiquity, ... The problem is that they killed them with the rest (and got the good people behind to leave). With regards to be a good "community leader", it sounds like it might be true for the devs, but it is completely false with regards to its user base. Pocket and other commercial moves were made in a very underhanded way that angered many, for good reasons, and they repeated these types of mistakes many times over. Since a very long time the worst enemy of Firefox has been Mozilla, let's hope it changes.
kossTKR 3y ago
She gave herself 20-30 million dollars while the company tanked in every measurable way and devs got fired. She's the reason we have Firefox and the modern web? What in the actual flippin bizarro dimension? Besides being a member of the parasitic upper classes the leeches on all of our work while robbing to live on yachts and in mansions i don't see what she excelled at. It's depressing how much this class of people is filled with nepotism, favours, family and an almost aristocratic talentlessness besides the random figureheads appointed PR.
- baal80spam 3y ago
  I would also reply to emails when earning 30 million dollars. It's not THAT hard.
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  - FireBeyond 3y ago
    I'll even stay up late to write them!
- gkoberger 3y ago
  Oh my god, Google her. I also disagree with her salary while layoffs were happening, however recent raises don't negate the fact that she also built Mozilla from the start. She's not a member of the parasitic upper class. She was laid off from Netscape 20+ years ago, and just never stopped. She kept volunteering for free, and eventually lead the charge to spin it off into its own entity. You can dislike where Firefox is headed, or be upset about Firefox layoffs (I was: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24135032 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24135032). But to act like Mitchell lives in a mansion while leaching off people?? She started from nothing and worked hard on the same mission for 20+ years.
  - kossTKR 3y ago
    Straight from wikipedia: Negative salary-achievements correlation controversy In 2018 she received a total of $2,458,350 in compensation from Mozilla, which represents a 400% payrise since 2008.[15] On the same period, Firefox marketshare was down 85%. When asked about her salary she stated "I learned that my pay was about an 80% discount to market. Meaning that competitive roles elsewhere were paying about 5 times as much. That's too big a discount to ask people and their families to commit to." In 2020, after returning to the position of CEO, her salary had risen to over $3 million (in 2021, her salary rose again to over $5 million,[16] and again to nearly $7 million in 2022[17]). In August of the same year the Mozilla Corporation laid off approximately 250 employees due to shrinking revenues, after previously laying off roughly 70 in January (prior to the pandemic). Baker blamed this on the COVID-19 pandemic, despite revenue rising to record highs in 2019, and market share shrinking.[18] In other words, no she definitely is. She fired 250 devs while doubling her pay multiple times to live a luxurious life while lying about the cause. People have to feed their families, she doesn't need that much and this is not good community spirit. It gets even more interesting googling bit further and becomes a brilliant example of either "money corrupts people" or "i'm romanticising my upperclass upbringing", because she apparently went from patos filled stories about her dad paying just above minimum wage (lol) to firing 250 devs while she ran with the money: "[about her parents] So I would call them progressive. I would call them really focused on -- well, so for example, he would never pay minimum wage. They ran a small business. It was pretty-- Weber: Doing what? Baker: -- hand to mouth. A pewter factory, making wine goblets and gift items out of pewter. Not so easy to do in the Bay Area, which is expensive. And so he would hire someone at minimum wage. But he had a period of time -- it was six weeks, or two months, or three months, or whatever it was-- after a probationary period, and then he refused. He felt he needed to pay a living wage." https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/2015/10/102740019-05-01-acc.pdf https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/20...
dig1 3y ago
> 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. IMHO, this is far too stretched. Give me a single project or initiative she pushed successfully that became a part of "the web we have today".
- gkoberger 3y ago
  Mozilla was originally the Netscape browser, which was a paid browser. All browsers were paid at the time, until IE came along and was bundled for free with Windows. Firefox broke that chokehold, and make an open web possible. Mitchell was a lawyer at Netscape, and used those two things to (with others) spin Firefox off into a non-profit (controlling a for-profit). No, she didn't write any code, but she is directly responsible for forming a company that enabled Firefox to be free and open source.
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  - sitzkrieg 3y ago
    this kinda stuff is often way more important than any code of course!
    - Macha 3y ago
      Honestly, it sort of is. Someone who'd got it wrong would have opened the door for the kind of IP clawback we're seeing with the cloud tech startups wanting to pull people into their companion SaaS products.
      - EasyMark 3y ago
        and openai is definitely becoming less open every week
  - KingOfCoders 3y ago
    "Firefox to be free and open source. " And die. And spending >$6.000.000.000 to do it. As a 30 years user, it's just so sad to see Firefox going down down down. No innovation, no progress since the introduction of tabs. At least the sell-customer-data-for-marketing-experiments phase is done. And at least it's not unusable slow like it was for some years, so the bare minimum works. And it somehow survived the XUL/extension debacle. But it's 2024 and I'm through my 10th vertical tab extension (Tab Center Reborn for now) since using FF. How is FF supposed to work with >20 tabs open? The only reason to use it for me is it's open source and not owned by M$ or Google. Would there be another open source browser with traction, I'd be gone in a second.
panick21_ 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. Do you still have that? What was your reasoning?
- gkoberger 3y ago
  I don't, because it was on my corp email. I remember the gist being that we were trying to compete against the two biggest companies on the planet, and (outside of some concerns about security) nobody seemed to really be complaining about the two options. If our goal was to bet the company (financially) on it, it made no sense to try to undercut Android... at the time Android was open source and ran on dirt cheap phones. I remember a big part of it being "nobody wants a phone that doesn't have Angry Birds on it". I wasn't specifically worried about that one game (although it was insanely popular at the time), but rather all the apps – Uber, Facebook, etc. We had no ability to make parternships of that level happen. Especially since some of those companies (like Facebook) were trying to build their OWN phones at the time. I just didn't think there was a market for a phone with no apps, that was positioning itself as the "cheaper" version of an already cheap (and ubiquitous) competitor. And I wouldn't have cared, if it wasn't for the fact that we had to move the entire company towards building this – which we did for a few years.
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    Interestingly, though, FireFox OS was forked to become KaiOS which can now be found on just about every feature phone on the market that I've seen.
    - diggan 3y ago
      > FireFox OS was forked to become KaiOS Damn, I wasn't aware of this. I had a big interest in FirefoxOS when it was developed, so much that I named one of ours dogs after one component of it (Gaia). I was always sad that FirefoxOS (tried) to pivot to IoT instead of continuing to iterate on the idea, seems KaiOS is worth looking into.
binarymax 3y ago
I’m going to throw my hat in the ring to say FirefoxOS and the phone (of which I bought the first beta version) were IMO great ideas and they should have stuck with it. The iOS/Android duopoly really needed a web-SPA option. Maybe they were too early (rust & wasm would have helped a lot with the speed), maybe it was too difficult a task…but I really wish they had succeeded.
- bsimpson 3y ago
  They did in a way, just after they had given up. There's a whole series of popular phones in India that ship FirefoxOS. I think they're sold by Jio, a carrier there.
  - rjsw 3y ago
    Not just India, there are several Nokia/HMD models that run the same fork [1] of FirefoxOS, I am thinking of buying one in Europe. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KaiOS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KaiOS
    - fabrice_d 3y ago
      Unfortunately KaiOS is not in great shape currently.
      - rjsw 3y ago
        I was looking at the phone mainly to use it as a 4G WiFi hotspot. What is wrong with KaiOS itself?
        fabrice_d 3y ago
        KaiOS is struggling because business on the low-end segment is very hard. Which means that the technical side is cutting corners and you end up with a lacking product in important areas like security. (disclaimer: I worked there and left recently)
      - 3y ago
duped 3y ago
I feel like developing consumer software products that focus on privacy is like pouring a glass of water on a forest fire. If the goal is a free, fair, and private web then those need to be the most economical and profitable values for all software developed on the web. If Mozilla offered developer focused product suites that made it so it was super cheap and easy to develop a website that was private by default then markets would do the rest.
- VancouverMan 3y ago
  If Mozilla is truly going to be taking privacy seriously, they should start by reading the Firefox Privacy Notice: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/firefox/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/firefox/ Firefox could then be modified to remove the need to mention "Google", "Microsoft", "DuckDuckGo", "eBay", "our partners", "our third-party ad platform", "a third-party referral platform", "our campaign marketing vendors", "sends Mozilla", and any other companies/organizations/third-parties we find referenced in that document. A privacy-respecting browser would never collect nor send any data beyond that necessary to provide its core web browsing functionality. Any functionality that might compromise a user's privacy should not be bundled by default, and would instead have to be explicitly opted into by manually installing an extension that provides such functionality. This would include Firefox's/Mozilla's own "telemetry".
  - GartzenDeHaes 3y ago
    Somehow, "privacy" has come to mean protecting the spy data collected instead of not spying. It's quite literally newspeak.
    - schoen 3y ago
      I think this paper, more or less on this issue, is pretty worthwhile. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2321480 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2321480
phonon 3y ago
Counter-anecdote. She also wrote this incredibly rude and grotesque obituary for Gervase Markham after he died of cancer (working for Mozilla until the end). You are welcome to disagree, but Gerv contributed just as much to Mozilla as Mitchell did. https://blog.lizardwrangler.com/2018/08/07/in-memoriam-gervase-markham/ https://blog.lizardwrangler.com/2018/08/07/in-memoriam-gerva... And a well written reaction here https://lwn.net/Articles/762345/ https://lwn.net/Articles/762345/
- blashyrk 3y ago
  I didn't get that vibe from reading the post at all. On the contrary, I perceive it as a celebration of the person who had invested so much of their (unfortunately ultimately limited) time to their common cause.
  - phonon 3y ago
    "the damage and trauma he caused"? Really? That's a celebration?
    - blashyrk 3y ago
      I think it's just honesty. You don't have to pretend that the bad a person did ("bad" being defined by your own perspective, of course) didn't exist in order to celebrate the good. I think the article author managed to balance the feeling of gratefulness towards the person for their contributions, while obviously perceiving that person's worldview as unfathomable in comparison to their own. In that situation, what other choice did the author have? Lie (by omission)? I respect the fact that the author chose to be honest instead. And I think people should appreciate that choice or at least understand it without dismissing it as some kind of character assassination or rudeness. An ever increasing number of people nowadays seem to be very much guilty of the same things the author mentioned in their post (the black and white worldview), it's not exclusive to deeply religious or conservative people. It very much exists on the "other side" as well. They will usually cite their own favorite pieces of dogmatic gospel (e.g. the "paradox of tolerance") to justify dismissing a person outright, based on some "incompatible" worldview or statement. The author, however, didn't resort to this. As someone who obviously has no insight into what the article describes, to me it still absolutely comes across as balanced.
SentientOctopus 3y ago
I'm also an ex Mozilla employee and I 100% agree. Mitchell is a great human being and I respect her immensely!
- fabrice_d 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - mvdtnz 3y ago
    If you have something to say, say it. This hinting and assuming everyone knows what you're talking about is unhelpful.
    - gkoberger 3y ago
      https://blog.lizardwrangler.com/2018/08/07/in-memoriam-gervase-markham/ https://blog.lizardwrangler.com/2018/08/07/in-memoriam-gerva...
      - blashyrk 3y ago
        Thanks for posting this article. As expected, this article tells a much deeper story than the reductionist retort made by the parent poster. A very interesting one, too.
apapapa 3y ago
It would have been nice if they would have been successful with their OS
jacquesm 3y ago
It is very nice to see your inside view. For me as an outsider: Mozilla is FireFox and that that doesn't seem to have registered with Mozilla management is irritating me beyond measure because it means that (1) I don't have a way to sponsor just FF and not the rest of Mozilla and (2) that quite frequently FireFox suffers because of resource depletion or crazy experiments that benefit Mozilla but harm FF. To me that speaks volumes about the quality of management, and much as I'm sympathetic to your feelings I wonder what FF would have been like today if Mozilla had not been eternally distracted. I suspect that without FF Mozilla funding would dry up overnight and that alone is something they should respect.
- gkoberger 3y ago
  Back when I worked there (2010-2012), a lot of people thought Google wouldn't renew the deal. So there was a scramble to figure out how to make enough money to avoid layoffs. Basically, how do you make another ~$100M/yr in case Google money goes away? It's 2024, and Google still pays (more like ~$500M/yr from Google now) and Mozilla still exists. But it was hovering over people's heads back then, and still is.
  - pas 3y ago
    okay, but did they figure it out? it seems they are stuck between two worlds. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation#Finances https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation#Finances they are spending serious startup money every year on nothing. it's as if they got the google disease with the google funds. :/
    - Rapzid 3y ago
      Yeah you'd think if FireFox is their golden advertising goose they'd, you know, make it embeddable and add the ability to fully style scrollbars so it'd be suitable across the board for modern development. And you'd think 500m a year would be enough to do this. But here we are. And with FireFox fading I'm wondering how they plan on having a real impact with their mission.
jahnu 3y ago
I really want to thank you for this post. An upvote isn’t always enough.
redeeman 3y ago
> and, even if you don't currently use Firefox, a huge reason why we have the web we have today. and maybe especially if you dont use firefox :)
- gkoberger 3y ago
  I worked at Mozilla because I saw John Lilly (CEO at the time) speak in 2009. Someone snarkily asked him about Chrome, and he responded that Chrome was a victory for Mozilla – the mission was an open web, and choice was what Mozilla was fighting for. I thought it was a very healthy view. Source: https://wordpress.tv/2009/07/08/john-lilly-mozilla/ https://wordpress.tv/2009/07/08/john-lilly-mozilla/
  - redeeman 3y ago
    without having read that, I would agree, more competitors is better. It just seems like mozilla decided to not really fight to develop product, thus reducing the competitors in the arena
throwaway81523 3y ago
I know you didn't mean it that way but this sounds like you are blaming Baker for the current awful state of the Web.
rvba 3y ago
People in charge are not supposed to reply to emails of low level drones, but they are supposed to make good decisions.
jacknews 3y ago
I also agree with a focus on privacy and trust. It seems like the perfect time for it, with the other platforms enshitening.
jjtheblunt 3y ago
> a huge reason why we have the web we have today Could you explain this assertion?
dakial1 3y ago
She might still be a great CEO but maybe just not the CEO Mozilla needs right now. There are not "universal great CEOs", just CEOs that fit a company during a specific time. Best example: Steve Jobs

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.
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- animal_spirits 3y ago
  Mitchell baker was making 6.2 million dollars a year at Mozilla in 2023. Source: https://www.theregister.com/AMP/2024/01/02/mozilla_in_2024_ai_privacy/ https://www.theregister.com/AMP/2024/01/02/mozilla_in_2024_a...
  - gkoberger 3y ago
    Yes, that's a lot of money. But if you're a CEO good enough to turn Mozilla around given the constraints... you could make a lot more elsewhere. If nothing else, you'd get stock, which would correlate with your performance.
    - Dylan16807 3y ago
      > But if you're a CEO good enough to turn Mozilla around given the constraints... you could make a lot more elsewhere. Why? Why does pointing mozilla in the right direction require such rare skills? Or is this because we're only looking at existing CEOs for hiring? If the rareness is about having the right industry knowledge and vision in a CEO, I bet you can get better results by hiring a company aimer and separate managerial co-CEO and using the money you save for 20 more devs and 5 more marketers.
javajosh 3y ago
>was good to Mozilla employees, but it's hard to square the picture you paint with the complete lack of direction Isn't there a fundamental tension between "be good to employees" and "strong sense of direction"? If you are focused as CEO, then you must neglect a fraction of your employees at any point in time. This is a side-effect of focusing on one direction, while maintaining capability to go in other directions in the future. If you don't neglect some of your employees and project, then you come off as being distracted and without a strong sense of direction. Is there some way to square this circle?
- romanows 3y ago
  I would think you could have a company focused on one thing; e.g., "making the people's browser" (with more explanation so the goal is clear). Hire people who believe in that goal. Make it relatively easy for people to leave so they're not tied to their job; e.g., generous severance, active help networking with other prestigious tech companies. Maybe even force people to take a break and work elsewhere for a couple years every N years before coming back, to keep people from getting stuck in a rut. Keep the company relatively small so that it _has_ a primary direction.
riversflow 3y ago
It's pretty straight forward to me. "$CORPO_STOOGE does all the things that make you a great leader and talks in platitudes that seem genuine! That makes them a decent person!" Nah. I have a quote that I think about often on this topic, from none other than Bojack Horseman[1]: Bojack, "Well, do you think I'm a good person... deep down?" Diane, "That's the thing, I don't think I believe in deep down. I kind of think that all you are is the things that you do" $CORPO_STOOGE is just a sociopath who follow the suggestions of "Lean In" as a behavioral guide of motions to follow. That doesn't make them a good person, just maybe a more pleasant manipulator. [1] S1E12 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkG7x-hwqN8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkG7x-hwqN8
- Geisterde 3y ago
  The most psychotic person ive ever known started his leadership by saving someones job after they made a mistake. Everyone assumed he would be a great leader, my skepticism proved right.
chrsig 3y ago
> Mitchell was a great community leader. That doesn't always translate to being a good CEO or leader of a business I think this statement from the parent addresses your point. Perhaps them stepping down as CEO will result in more focus? Time will tell.
karmelapple 3y ago
I think the "squirrel!" behavior has to do with getting revenue in the door. I'm not following extremely close, but it seems like Mozilla is chasing what can be turned into a product. Things that involve setting up a monthly subscription, whether it's VPNs, keeping your name out of certain tracking databases, etc. I wonder how Mozilla used to be funded vs how it's now funded? The web is a better place with a non-profit-driven group like Mozilla in it... but is Mozilla Corporation becoming more money-driven than it used to be, even if it can't turn a profit? Or can it turn a profit, because it's not the Mozilla Foundation [1]? 1. https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/moco/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/moco/
- dralley 3y ago
  Mozilla Corp is allowed to turn a profit. Distributions of that profit are the primary source of funding for the Mozilla Foudnation.
- stubish 3y ago
  Or is that backwards? Revenue comes in the door, and we must spend it, because empires must be built. No longer 100 developers working on a browser, but thousands working on all sorts of unrelated things and all the support staff. Whereas the alternative would be staying small and focused, sticking that money in the bank, and become financially independent. A new CEO could even do that. Conservatively invest one year's 600M revenue, rake off 20M per year, and the nestegg would still grow with inflation. And that is enough to develop a web browser provided you don't do it in silicon valley. Two or three years revenue and you can even market it. I think we see this a lot, with companies pulling in too much money from IPOs or venture capital, pissing it away on unfocused growth, and if they are lucky back where they started. Or unlucky and bankrupt.
geoelectric 3y ago
I also worked for Mozilla in that time period (I left just before they canceled FxOS) and found Mitchell to be an inspiring leader. OTOH, the track record over the last few years suggests she's not as great an executor.
- paulryanrogers 3y ago
  It was an impossible situation. Chrome can be funded and promoted by some of the most dominant web properties in the world. Even Microsoft is struggling to get a foothold with Edge, and that's after turning it into a Chrome reskin. Not saying the comp package was justified. But it was a job doomed to fail.
  - acdha 3y ago
    Yeah, to the extent that I’d criticize her it’s for not calling more for antitrust enforcement and since that’s basically asking Google to cut the lifeline, I don’t see how that could have worked in the current climate.
    - paulryanrogers 3y ago
      Mozilla sold defaults to a variety of vendors, most notably Yahoo, and others outside the US. Arguably they should have refused Google money from the jump.
      - acdha 3y ago
        The thing is, they’re in a really expensive place and almost everyone on the web has been trained to think of browsers as free. I don’t know what alternatives they could have picked at the time.
        paulryanrogers 3y ago
        My point is they had no way out. It was a glass cliff. Only regulations can stand up to competitors as powerful as Google and Apple.
patientzero 3y ago
I think people remember a Mozilla that never was. Mozilla was saved by Firebox which Mozilla the organization would have successfully blocked if their institutional processes were not the reason their community was frustrated. I don't think their processes have ever been better, they got initial and later injections of code from outside. Rust/servo was the moment when I thought they might turn it around, but their bus has always gone in the direction of the same cliff.
- avar 3y ago
  > Rust/servo was the moment when I thought they might turn it around. Because greenfield parallel rewrites of giant production codebases have such a fantastic track record, that we might as well add "in a novel programming language we're inventing while we're at it" just to make it interesting?
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  - patientzero 3y ago
    They had decades to ship next and they didn't want to be bug for bug backwards compatible. Local optimums in hell don't have a path to heaven. I think demise by drastic jump stories work because the examples are few and notable. Most projects accumulate experts in moving around the wrong optimum who then block plans of getting free that aren't too conservative to possibly work.
  - dale_glass 3y ago
    But Rust is actually a successful language, and the idea of writing a web browser in it is actually a good one. Security is a huge concern for something like a web browser, which is a thing that keeps on increasing more and more in complexity. So far it seems Java is dead in the desktop space, and .NET has a very minimal impact, so it seems a compiled language is the way to go. And Rust's excellent support for multithreading is also a big boon since now multicore CPUs are a standard and keep on getting more and more cores. Overall the idea of building a very safe and performant browser seems like a great one.
byAltAccts 3y ago
Many serial killers are said to have gentle, gracious personalities. Except while doing all the killing anyway. It’s not hard to train oneself to act empathic, socially normal, but lack vision, ideas of your own. OP described how little it actually takes to make such a lasting impression; two conversations. In 2015 some colleagues and myself were invited to pitch an idea for an Instagram clone. The financier was recently widowed woman who was all kinds of generous with us. But she also mentioned she feels there’s plenty of nobodies in the world, Zuckerberg can share. They can peddle products on her platform as her husband wasn’t that rich. We learn to be a certain way publicly.
woolion 3y ago
They did lead on with some very cool ideas like panorama (now tab groups, still a Firefox exclusive feature!), Ubiquity, ... The problem is that they killed them with the rest (and got the good people behind to leave). With regards to be a good "community leader", it sounds like it might be true for the devs, but it is completely false with regards to its user base. Pocket and other commercial moves were made in a very underhanded way that angered many, for good reasons, and they repeated these types of mistakes many times over. Since a very long time the worst enemy of Firefox has been Mozilla, let's hope it changes.

kossTKR 3y ago

She gave herself 20-30 million dollars while the company tanked in every measurable way and devs got fired. She's the reason we have Firefox and the modern web? What in the actual flippin bizarro dimension? Besides being a member of the parasitic upper classes the leeches on all of our work while robbing to live on yachts and in mansions i don't see what she excelled at. It's depressing how much this class of people is filled with nepotism, favours, family and an almost aristocratic talentlessness besides the random figureheads appointed PR.

baal80spam 3y ago
I would also reply to emails when earning 30 million dollars. It's not THAT hard.
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- FireBeyond 3y ago
  I'll even stay up late to write them!
gkoberger 3y ago
Oh my god, Google her. I also disagree with her salary while layoffs were happening, however recent raises don't negate the fact that she also built Mozilla from the start. She's not a member of the parasitic upper class. She was laid off from Netscape 20+ years ago, and just never stopped. She kept volunteering for free, and eventually lead the charge to spin it off into its own entity. You can dislike where Firefox is headed, or be upset about Firefox layoffs (I was: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24135032 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24135032). But to act like Mitchell lives in a mansion while leaching off people?? She started from nothing and worked hard on the same mission for 20+ years.
- kossTKR 3y ago
  Straight from wikipedia: Negative salary-achievements correlation controversy In 2018 she received a total of $2,458,350 in compensation from Mozilla, which represents a 400% payrise since 2008.[15] On the same period, Firefox marketshare was down 85%. When asked about her salary she stated "I learned that my pay was about an 80% discount to market. Meaning that competitive roles elsewhere were paying about 5 times as much. That's too big a discount to ask people and their families to commit to." In 2020, after returning to the position of CEO, her salary had risen to over $3 million (in 2021, her salary rose again to over $5 million,[16] and again to nearly $7 million in 2022[17]). In August of the same year the Mozilla Corporation laid off approximately 250 employees due to shrinking revenues, after previously laying off roughly 70 in January (prior to the pandemic). Baker blamed this on the COVID-19 pandemic, despite revenue rising to record highs in 2019, and market share shrinking.[18] In other words, no she definitely is. She fired 250 devs while doubling her pay multiple times to live a luxurious life while lying about the cause. People have to feed their families, she doesn't need that much and this is not good community spirit. It gets even more interesting googling bit further and becomes a brilliant example of either "money corrupts people" or "i'm romanticising my upperclass upbringing", because she apparently went from patos filled stories about her dad paying just above minimum wage (lol) to firing 250 devs while she ran with the money: "[about her parents] So I would call them progressive. I would call them really focused on -- well, so for example, he would never pay minimum wage. They ran a small business. It was pretty-- Weber: Doing what? Baker: -- hand to mouth. A pewter factory, making wine goblets and gift items out of pewter. Not so easy to do in the Bay Area, which is expensive. And so he would hire someone at minimum wage. But he had a period of time -- it was six weeks, or two months, or three months, or whatever it was-- after a probationary period, and then he refused. He felt he needed to pay a living wage." https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/2015/10/102740019-05-01-acc.pdf https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/20...

dig1 3y ago

> 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. IMHO, this is far too stretched. Give me a single project or initiative she pushed successfully that became a part of "the web we have today".

gkoberger 3y ago
Mozilla was originally the Netscape browser, which was a paid browser. All browsers were paid at the time, until IE came along and was bundled for free with Windows. Firefox broke that chokehold, and make an open web possible. Mitchell was a lawyer at Netscape, and used those two things to (with others) spin Firefox off into a non-profit (controlling a for-profit). No, she didn't write any code, but she is directly responsible for forming a company that enabled Firefox to be free and open source.
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- sitzkrieg 3y ago
  this kinda stuff is often way more important than any code of course!
  - Macha 3y ago
    Honestly, it sort of is. Someone who'd got it wrong would have opened the door for the kind of IP clawback we're seeing with the cloud tech startups wanting to pull people into their companion SaaS products.
    - EasyMark 3y ago
      and openai is definitely becoming less open every week
- KingOfCoders 3y ago
  "Firefox to be free and open source. " And die. And spending >$6.000.000.000 to do it. As a 30 years user, it's just so sad to see Firefox going down down down. No innovation, no progress since the introduction of tabs. At least the sell-customer-data-for-marketing-experiments phase is done. And at least it's not unusable slow like it was for some years, so the bare minimum works. And it somehow survived the XUL/extension debacle. But it's 2024 and I'm through my 10th vertical tab extension (Tab Center Reborn for now) since using FF. How is FF supposed to work with >20 tabs open? The only reason to use it for me is it's open source and not owned by M$ or Google. Would there be another open source browser with traction, I'd be gone in a second.

panick21_ 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. Do you still have that? What was your reasoning?

gkoberger 3y ago
I don't, because it was on my corp email. I remember the gist being that we were trying to compete against the two biggest companies on the planet, and (outside of some concerns about security) nobody seemed to really be complaining about the two options. If our goal was to bet the company (financially) on it, it made no sense to try to undercut Android... at the time Android was open source and ran on dirt cheap phones. I remember a big part of it being "nobody wants a phone that doesn't have Angry Birds on it". I wasn't specifically worried about that one game (although it was insanely popular at the time), but rather all the apps – Uber, Facebook, etc. We had no ability to make parternships of that level happen. Especially since some of those companies (like Facebook) were trying to build their OWN phones at the time. I just didn't think there was a market for a phone with no apps, that was positioning itself as the "cheaper" version of an already cheap (and ubiquitous) competitor. And I wouldn't have cared, if it wasn't for the fact that we had to move the entire company towards building this – which we did for a few years.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  Interestingly, though, FireFox OS was forked to become KaiOS which can now be found on just about every feature phone on the market that I've seen.
  - diggan 3y ago
    > FireFox OS was forked to become KaiOS Damn, I wasn't aware of this. I had a big interest in FirefoxOS when it was developed, so much that I named one of ours dogs after one component of it (Gaia). I was always sad that FirefoxOS (tried) to pivot to IoT instead of continuing to iterate on the idea, seems KaiOS is worth looking into.

binarymax 3y ago

I’m going to throw my hat in the ring to say FirefoxOS and the phone (of which I bought the first beta version) were IMO great ideas and they should have stuck with it. The iOS/Android duopoly really needed a web-SPA option. Maybe they were too early (rust & wasm would have helped a lot with the speed), maybe it was too difficult a task…but I really wish they had succeeded.

bsimpson 3y ago
They did in a way, just after they had given up. There's a whole series of popular phones in India that ship FirefoxOS. I think they're sold by Jio, a carrier there.
- rjsw 3y ago
  Not just India, there are several Nokia/HMD models that run the same fork [1] of FirefoxOS, I am thinking of buying one in Europe. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KaiOS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KaiOS
  - fabrice_d 3y ago
    Unfortunately KaiOS is not in great shape currently.
    - rjsw 3y ago
      I was looking at the phone mainly to use it as a 4G WiFi hotspot. What is wrong with KaiOS itself?
      - fabrice_d 3y ago
        KaiOS is struggling because business on the low-end segment is very hard. Which means that the technical side is cutting corners and you end up with a lacking product in important areas like security. (disclaimer: I worked there and left recently)
    - 3y ago

duped 3y ago

I feel like developing consumer software products that focus on privacy is like pouring a glass of water on a forest fire. If the goal is a free, fair, and private web then those need to be the most economical and profitable values for all software developed on the web. If Mozilla offered developer focused product suites that made it so it was super cheap and easy to develop a website that was private by default then markets would do the rest.

VancouverMan 3y ago
If Mozilla is truly going to be taking privacy seriously, they should start by reading the Firefox Privacy Notice: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/firefox/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/firefox/ Firefox could then be modified to remove the need to mention "Google", "Microsoft", "DuckDuckGo", "eBay", "our partners", "our third-party ad platform", "a third-party referral platform", "our campaign marketing vendors", "sends Mozilla", and any other companies/organizations/third-parties we find referenced in that document. A privacy-respecting browser would never collect nor send any data beyond that necessary to provide its core web browsing functionality. Any functionality that might compromise a user's privacy should not be bundled by default, and would instead have to be explicitly opted into by manually installing an extension that provides such functionality. This would include Firefox's/Mozilla's own "telemetry".
- GartzenDeHaes 3y ago
  Somehow, "privacy" has come to mean protecting the spy data collected instead of not spying. It's quite literally newspeak.
  - schoen 3y ago
    I think this paper, more or less on this issue, is pretty worthwhile. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2321480 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2321480

phonon 3y ago

Counter-anecdote. She also wrote this incredibly rude and grotesque obituary for Gervase Markham after he died of cancer (working for Mozilla until the end). You are welcome to disagree, but Gerv contributed just as much to Mozilla as Mitchell did. https://blog.lizardwrangler.com/2018/08/07/in-memoriam-gervase-markham/ https://blog.lizardwrangler.com/2018/08/07/in-memoriam-gerva... And a well written reaction here https://lwn.net/Articles/762345/ https://lwn.net/Articles/762345/

blashyrk 3y ago
I didn't get that vibe from reading the post at all. On the contrary, I perceive it as a celebration of the person who had invested so much of their (unfortunately ultimately limited) time to their common cause.
- phonon 3y ago
  "the damage and trauma he caused"? Really? That's a celebration?
  - blashyrk 3y ago
    I think it's just honesty. You don't have to pretend that the bad a person did ("bad" being defined by your own perspective, of course) didn't exist in order to celebrate the good. I think the article author managed to balance the feeling of gratefulness towards the person for their contributions, while obviously perceiving that person's worldview as unfathomable in comparison to their own. In that situation, what other choice did the author have? Lie (by omission)? I respect the fact that the author chose to be honest instead. And I think people should appreciate that choice or at least understand it without dismissing it as some kind of character assassination or rudeness. An ever increasing number of people nowadays seem to be very much guilty of the same things the author mentioned in their post (the black and white worldview), it's not exclusive to deeply religious or conservative people. It very much exists on the "other side" as well. They will usually cite their own favorite pieces of dogmatic gospel (e.g. the "paradox of tolerance") to justify dismissing a person outright, based on some "incompatible" worldview or statement. The author, however, didn't resort to this. As someone who obviously has no insight into what the article describes, to me it still absolutely comes across as balanced.

SentientOctopus 3y ago

I'm also an ex Mozilla employee and I 100% agree. Mitchell is a great human being and I respect her immensely!

fabrice_d 3y ago
[flagged]
- mvdtnz 3y ago
  If you have something to say, say it. This hinting and assuming everyone knows what you're talking about is unhelpful.
  - gkoberger 3y ago
    https://blog.lizardwrangler.com/2018/08/07/in-memoriam-gervase-markham/ https://blog.lizardwrangler.com/2018/08/07/in-memoriam-gerva...
    - blashyrk 3y ago
      Thanks for posting this article. As expected, this article tells a much deeper story than the reductionist retort made by the parent poster. A very interesting one, too.

apapapa 3y ago

It would have been nice if they would have been successful with their OS

jacquesm 3y ago

It is very nice to see your inside view. For me as an outsider: Mozilla is FireFox and that that doesn't seem to have registered with Mozilla management is irritating me beyond measure because it means that (1) I don't have a way to sponsor just FF and not the rest of Mozilla and (2) that quite frequently FireFox suffers because of resource depletion or crazy experiments that benefit Mozilla but harm FF. To me that speaks volumes about the quality of management, and much as I'm sympathetic to your feelings I wonder what FF would have been like today if Mozilla had not been eternally distracted. I suspect that without FF Mozilla funding would dry up overnight and that alone is something they should respect.

gkoberger 3y ago
Back when I worked there (2010-2012), a lot of people thought Google wouldn't renew the deal. So there was a scramble to figure out how to make enough money to avoid layoffs. Basically, how do you make another ~$100M/yr in case Google money goes away? It's 2024, and Google still pays (more like ~$500M/yr from Google now) and Mozilla still exists. But it was hovering over people's heads back then, and still is.
- pas 3y ago
  okay, but did they figure it out? it seems they are stuck between two worlds. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation#Finances https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation#Finances they are spending serious startup money every year on nothing. it's as if they got the google disease with the google funds. :/
  - Rapzid 3y ago
    Yeah you'd think if FireFox is their golden advertising goose they'd, you know, make it embeddable and add the ability to fully style scrollbars so it'd be suitable across the board for modern development. And you'd think 500m a year would be enough to do this. But here we are. And with FireFox fading I'm wondering how they plan on having a real impact with their mission.

jahnu 3y ago

I really want to thank you for this post. An upvote isn’t always enough.

redeeman 3y ago

> and, even if you don't currently use Firefox, a huge reason why we have the web we have today. and maybe especially if you dont use firefox :)

gkoberger 3y ago
I worked at Mozilla because I saw John Lilly (CEO at the time) speak in 2009. Someone snarkily asked him about Chrome, and he responded that Chrome was a victory for Mozilla – the mission was an open web, and choice was what Mozilla was fighting for. I thought it was a very healthy view. Source: https://wordpress.tv/2009/07/08/john-lilly-mozilla/ https://wordpress.tv/2009/07/08/john-lilly-mozilla/
- redeeman 3y ago
  without having read that, I would agree, more competitors is better. It just seems like mozilla decided to not really fight to develop product, thus reducing the competitors in the arena

throwaway81523 3y ago

I know you didn't mean it that way but this sounds like you are blaming Baker for the current awful state of the Web.

rvba 3y ago

People in charge are not supposed to reply to emails of low level drones, but they are supposed to make good decisions.

jacknews 3y ago

I also agree with a focus on privacy and trust. It seems like the perfect time for it, with the other platforms enshitening.

jjtheblunt 3y ago

> a huge reason why we have the web we have today Could you explain this assertion?

dakial1 3y ago

She might still be a great CEO but maybe just not the CEO Mozilla needs right now. There are not "universal great CEOs", just CEOs that fit a company during a specific time. Best example: Steve Jobs