Devils advocate: you have to pay a top exec more if the company looks like its main product is in decline. Plus 2.4m/year isn't crazy in the scheme of tech salaries - that exec could potentially take other roles that pay even more.
Saving a declining company will bring enough revenue for future compensation for the CEO. And who wouldn't hire a CEO that saved a sinking company? On the other hand, if the company still goes belly up, well apparently that CEO wasn't so good after all. So high compensation wasn't needed.
Alternative: move the HQ and most development to Europe, where these ridiculous salaries are not common (see the example in the article of The Guardian boss), but there is still a strong privacy culture.
That might work but how often does that happen really?
SV companies relocate development but never the top brass to Europe as they would lose their pay, status and network.
Believe it or not, just like with dating and real estate, your monetary value is more dependent on where you are rather than how good you are. Shocking, I know.
Exec pay is usually tied to some metrics. Like market share or the revenue in case of Mozilla. (In the corporations it is usually done by offering CEO options with nonzero price.) If the company is not performing well, CEO only gets the basic salary (which is higher than engineer salary, but not too large.)
When Mitchell was given a raise for no reason, it is a sign of corruption in Mozilla board.
This really isn't crazy compensation given the role and the industry. There are many execs making orders of magnitude more [0]. I know there is a bit of sticker-shock for people who haven't heard about top-level compensation, but it's not unheard of, just usually unspoken.
The source doesn't say this isn't tied to metrics. The base salary is only $450k per year [0]. All the rest of the comp is paid out in other ways. I would wager that there are significant compensation thresholds that are tied to metrics (but we, as outsiders, couldn't know what they are or if they are being hit).
> There are many execs making orders of magnitude more
For that kind of negative growth? No, of course not.
> In its fiscal year ending January 31, 2019, for example, Snowflake had revenue of $96.7 million. A year later that number was $264.7 million, or growth of around 150% at scale.
I still don't get why companies pay ridiculous amounts of money to get execs from the outside. Every other role is (mostly) filled via promotions, why should executives be any different?
Admittedly, Baker specifically got her role by being "promoted" from a Netscape lawyer and then playing a role in the creation of Mozilla, so my complaint doesn't quite apply. I'd still see letting her go and promoting someone to fill her place as a better alternative to the pay raise.
This is why I like Balmer and Tim Cook. Their fortunes are tied to the success of their companies rather than leeching off of it as it dies. I'd posit that any CEO who is not in a Ride or Die relationship with their company does not have correctly aligned incentives for their performance.
$22 Billion to $77 Billion in annual revenue between when he became CEO to when he stopped in 2013. I think that's pretty decent. I think that it was growth in enterprise that they were successful with.
Microsoft's share price didn't go up much because they paid out large dividends. If you look at total return people who owned shares in Microsoft did very well.
(If you look at a company's share price, you will see a drop roughly equivalent to the dividend per share each time dividends are paid.)
In this case it probably is though. They have done everything else than focus on the core product since he left and they continue that trend today even if it's failing one.
She laid them because there was not enough money to pay them. Focusing on the core product is only option left when the company no longer has manpower to do everything.
It would be an achievement if she shifted focus as soon as she became CEO, but several years later is probably too late.
Also she killed MDN, and that’s a big loss for the internet.
Not sure about that, even if I have to admit correlation is quite strong in this case.
Firefox decline in the past decade can also be partly credited by chrome eating the world. Firefox has a huge responsibility too because it became bad (at least performance wise?) at some point (or was it a little over 10 years ago?) and lost users because of this and has trouble recovering even if it has become better at this again, because people either moved on, embraced chrome (or a chromium-based browser) or I don't know what.
I want mozilla to survive and can't really say I support them if I don't use firefox so I came back to firefox after years using vivaldi. But I can see myself going back to vivaldi any time actually. I'm missing vivaldi features, firefox is slower for some/many use cases (mostly because things have been optimized for chrome).
I want to believe but I don't see how firefox can get back its market share. Now everything you build for the web has to be optimized for chrome, many don't even care if it is utterly broken on firefox because it's so niche.
I honestly think that is the main reason though. They are like many others obsessed with identity politics and push away everyone else that disagree (like myself). They send money on worthless (and racist) diversity projects, feminist filmmakers, random projects that they hope to bring in another source of revenue etc.
For example, their VPN service is not actually theirs, it's a Swedish company called Mullvad that actually provides the service. I am already a user of Mullvad and I can't get Firefox VPN. Isn't that kind of strange? Even if I could get it, why would I pay Mozilla extra money for a service that I can get cheaper directly from the provider? Not only that, but Mullvad accepts cash and I believe Mozilla VPN probably won't. So the privacy aspect is already bigger with simply using Mullvad to begin with. They go into the VPN business because they want to make money but paint the picture of that they want to protect the privacy of consumers. It's just a dishonest picture they're painting and I think users sense that a mile away these days. It's the woke mindset that they pretend to care but doesn't really. They just follow like so many other tech companies what's popular to care about in California and completely forget that the world is larger than one US state. And even if they did care, really a VPN service? That market is so overly saturated by hundreds of services it doesn't require a genius to realize that this will be a hard thing to make any kind of dough on.
Their ventures into other things have mostly been failing ones and if they really want to get rid of google the obvious choice is to monetize Firefox itself. I, like many others, would gladly pay for Firefox if I knew it went to the development of Firefox and maybe to other projects that benefits it like Rust, MDN etc. But if I donate today, my money will most likely go to Bakers ridiculous salary.
> I honestly think that is the main reason though.
I am pretty sure this is your biases distorting your perspective. Of course I may be biased as well, but take note that the entire conversation on this comment section is about Firefox's failures, which are numerable, and very little of it has anything to do with what you're talking about. For instance the guy's crazy salary has nothing to do with wokeness, as you well know -- it has to do with all the other reasons this is a dramatic failure of capitalism.
Repeat after me: saying "correlation is not causation" "slippery slope fallacy" or "survivorship bias" doesn't amount to an argument. They are thought-stopping words primarily used by midwits who think it makes them sound smart. I see this all the time on HN and it's annoying. Furnish evidence or a solid argument for why he is wrong, otherwise you're no better than him.
The point is to get the person to actually supply real evidence instead of unfounded associations. If someone can't come up with a feasible way they actually are, or even could be causal in nature to discuss, then they probably should be shut down. If someone can't muster up the barest excuse for how their argument makes sense, then I won't be sad to see them stop talking about it.
If someone tried to shut down my argument with one of those excuses and I didn't know enough about each of them to either explain away their influence or revise my theory, my first step would be to figure out what they are. To dismiss them is to just admit ignorance of statistics, and thus the world.
If: “The point is to get the person to actually supply real evidence instead of unfounded associations.” then say “That’s an assertion that you provided no evidence for. Do you have any evidence?” - writing “correlation is not causation” is to make yourself sound smart, not to ask for evidence, which can be done in a much clearer and less passive aggressive way by just straight up asking for it.
If your point is to say that those shouldn't be used in isolation, I agree with you (but I think your point was poorly expressed). If it's to say they shouldn't be used at all, which is what I read your original comment as, then I don't.
Of course my point was that they shouldn't be used in isolation - re-read my original comment, which states: "Furnish evidence or a solid argument for why he is wrong." It wasn't poorly expressed, and you are nitpicking. Though had I known you'd nitpick, I would have said: "Furnish evidence or a solid argument for why he is wrong in addition to it."
Why in the world would you furnish evidence or a solid argument for why somebody is wrong when that somebody didn't bother furnishing evidence or a solid argument for why they are right? It was just a bald-assed claim, and commenting "correlation is not causation" rather than just drive-by downvoting is charitable.
I think the reason that Firefox failed is because of their logo. No, I will not explain, and if you dismiss me without a well-reasoned argument, you're a pretentious mid-wit(?).
edit: ah, "midwit" is a neologism from the intellectual dark web. You're just defending the comment because you agree with it, and pretending it's a question of reason or civility. Who could have guessed?
> Of course my point was that they shouldn't be used in isolation - re-read my original comment, which states: "Furnish evidence or a solid argument for why he is wrong."
Those responses are evidence for why it may be wrong. But in isolation they are needlessly terse. Lack of evidence is not the problem, lack of accompanying explanation of why they are evidence, and how they apply, is.
> Though had I known you'd nitpick, I would have said: "Furnish evidence or a solid argument for why he is wrong in addition to it."
And then it would be much clearer, not because I'm nitpicking, but because it's ambiguous otherwise, and open to the interpretation I came to. Since that's not what you intended, it's better to eliminate that misinterpretation.
The bottom line is that clarity is not a matter of intent, but of interpretation by others. At least one person (me) thought you were unclear, and I suspect others did as well. You can complain that they are nitpicking, or accept that you were misinterpreted, and expressing yourself differently might have avoided the problem. Only you can control that, so it doesn't make a lot of sense to blame other people if they aren't being purposefully obtuse (and I promise I'm not).
I really want Mozilla to succeed. But I just can't bring myself to use Firefox as a daily driver. Just open a few tabs on a top of the line macbook, and a twitch stream and things get very laggy.
I've seen numerous people craving for better container support, which is definitely a killer feature for people going forward towards a more private web. Why isn't Mozilla more actively developing this? Developers were the primary driver behind adopting Firefox during it's hayday - no reason why it can't be again if we have the resources to make a compelling case for it.
At least one thing: containers don't have separate settings. I.e. one can't disable adblocking for the shopping container. Or, the very contrary, have a special no-cookies casual browsing container for very limited tracking.
It sounds like you want separate profiles, not containers. The point of containers is that all the settings and addons and saved passwords are still there. If you don't want that, you can create a second profile with different settings and a different set of addons, etc.
Yes, that's what I use (and what I have used before containers). I have simply assumed that containers are - supposedly - a take on modernizing profiles and making them convenient to use.
TBH, those days I tend to use separate browsers, because profile management is significantly less convenient than just running a different program.
Read any HN thread here talking about containers. People love it, but want more features and flexibility - which is only available through third-party extensions at moment (which aren't always easy to find).
I have definitely seen something make the browser extremely laggy, but only the last few weeks. It does seem to be related to certain tabs/sites though, but I haven't figured out which.
For me it is Slack. Slack's JS leaks memory. Several times I notice Firefox really bogging down, I check about:memory and the Slack tab is eating 4GB of memory or more. Once it was nearly 7GB.
So I've had to install an auto-reload extension[1] which simply reloads the Slack tab once an hour, and that contains Slacks stupidity.
Now Firefox is nice and fast, even with hundreds of tabs across many windows.
I tried really hard to make FF my main browser. I really did. But I was disappointed by their "hybrid" approach to memory use, and I think that continues to make the difference between FF and Chromium-based browsers (to FF's detriment).
And now they switched back to shared memory again, and the moment they did, the browser started hanging again, like it used to do pre-Quantum days.
Chromium's "per process memory isolation" is the right approach, despite all the cries about memory use. I'd rather have that than have the browser hang on me, or have more security issues.
If anything, I think even the future of operating systems is complete process isolation and separation by virtualization tech and encrypting each process in RAM with a different key. The hardware is coming, but it may take another 10-15 years for this to be fully realized.
What version of Firefox are you running, and what Add-Ons do you have installed? n=1 anecdote: I'm on a 2016-vintage Macbook Pro, Firefox 81.0, 64-bit, with >1100 tabs spread across 6 windows. I'm pushing the limits trying to establish whether to commit to Firefox or Chrome, and so far while lots of people seem to like Chrome, I'm strongly preferring Firefox.
I could not get Chrome to stay stable enough with that much resource utilization, and the most important part I've learned is that Firefox's profiles storage formats are open enough that I've been able to recover from some pretty bad kernel panics (due to the graphics card switching on my laptop; disabling that fixed the panics).
Probably next Macbook Pro refresh cycle from Apple I'll upgrade to the latest they introduce, but Firefox-as-daily-driver has been able to take a lot of abuse from me.
Weird, in my experience on my mbp, Firefox handles the average 120 tabs I have opened much better than Safari. It didn't use to be that way, but they have improved a lot in the past 2-3 years.
I routinely have 100[+]'s of tabs open when working on a project and it has never been a problem so I suspect that this is due to one of the websites you are using or a plug-in.
[+] as in 500 or more. I use my browser windows to keep my 'state' of what I need to read and where I've left off, by the time they are all closed again I'm done preparing for an interview.
Better container support would be ace but dismissing FF because of that complaint when no other browser even has that feature is a little like cutting off your nose to spite your face.
Regarding performance on macOS, Firefox runs fine for me and I very very rarely have below 50 tabs open. Have you tried it recently? I had read there were some bugs with macOS but most of those were resolved a couple of years ago.
I feel bad because I've been using Firefox as a daily on both my desktop and mobile for a few months. I've just this week decided to ditch Firefox and accept Chrome, despite it's questionable Google-ness.
Firefox Mobile is generally fine, though I occasionally end up in a state where tabs refuse to load and I need to kill the whole app. Minor annoyance.
Desktop though, when I've got a bunch of tabs open and I close a bunch down by clicking the 'x's, I definitely notice how much Firefox speeds up as I close each tab. What drove the knife in was on the odd occasion that I needed Chrome, opening it up was like a breath of fresh air that was hard to ignore. Pages just seem to load faster and the Chrome seems more responsive under lots-of-tab situations.
Another part is peer pressure - the frontend guys all just use chrome, so pairing is a little bit more frictious. Though there is benefit to having someone in the team who uses something different to Chrome. I just don't want to be that guy.
I'm using Firefox on Linux as a daily driver and it's very snappy even with very many tabs opened, playing videos, multiple complex chat UIs and so on. Never really cared to use Chrome even when it was all hyped in the past and Firefox was indeed slower. Today it's a non issue, at least on Linux.
Even though it's how it is currently that's not how it should be. Chrome is extinguishing the web browser right now. This is netscape territory done in a smarter manner than utilizing exclusivity deals with websites and software makers.
> Mitchell Baker, Mozilla's top executive, was paid $2.4m in 2018
but doesn't offer any consideration or speculation as to why this is exaggerated. It's entirely possible that without that particular exec, Firefox would have been even worse off, or would have taken another direction with regards to privacy, etc.
My subjective feeling is that $2.4m does indeed seem too high for such a position. But I have no objective data to support or refute this. It's quite possible that the same person managing a comparable employee base at a FAANG would earn even more.
Why was your comment flagged? @dang I honestly would request that you look into who is voting down reasonable comments in this thread. They do not deserve voting rights.
I was under the impression he was let go not because of performance, but because of controversy and lack of confidence and/or respect from a significant and growing portion of staff. At least that's how I remember it being presented.
Employees are judged routinely (quarterly, bi-annual, annually) all the time with high confidence, WITHOUT such "objective" data you are referring to. It seems like OP is simply applying the same measuring stick every other average employees are measured on.
CEO pay is much too high independent on the industry. It would be justified if personal responsibility was on the line, but it isn't anymore. CEOs are just employees by now.
Granted, you have to deal with pressure, but today CEO can just switch companies like underwear. They press KPI on every employee but are themselves nearly exempt from any quantifiable metric aside from turnover.
But in general CEO pay is rising with falling results and falling pay for everyone else.
Does there exist a "market" for CEOs of failing browser companies? I'm not aware of it. Her position would roughly map to that of a junior VP in Google or Microsoft nomenclature. I strongly doubt those people make anywhere near $2.4M/yr.
How did you come up with that comparison? Running a standalone company from the top is very different than the responsibilities of a junior VP in a trillion-dollar organization.
And, not to mention, a VP of engineering at Google probably does make something like that amount of money (possibly more). Directors make ~800k-1m, and VP is two levels higher.
I can cite much much more people there if they want to discuss fairness, they better forget and act this line of argument never existed!
I believe they should justify the value they create in this high paid positions compared to all other people making and disseminating the product. There is no justification for this level.
There are lots and lots of families there living on a less fair level of salary but produce much more value (and no damages).
Let's says it's the half after taxes: 1.25M. Spending 3424 a day for 365 days should get you there. You have to realize it's our fault to not understand these poor people.
You take loan for a mansion that can suck such an income dry. Or two, or 5. Add some luxury lifestyle (cars, clothing, vacations, gadgets, expensive restaurants) and you are losing money.
That excludes purely burning cash ie on drugs/alcohol, hookers or living in super-high rental place.
No tax lawyer but the principle this works on, as I understand it, is having a lot of deductible costs to lower your taxable salary. It works for anyone, just the degree to which you have to invent expenses differs.
There's lots of info about this online but it really depends on your country. For me, things like my commute to work, expenses for my home office (even though I worked in an actual office until corona), and other things can be deducted. The most ironic category is expenses necessary to file taxes.
Most countries also seem to have savings plans where you put money away until retirement and pay taxes only when you're allowed to take it out, after retirement age (after retirement, you have a lower income, so pay a lower tax rate). Of course, you still pay those taxes (wouldn't be a certainty of life, now, would it?), but they're lower.
Tax evasion is illegal. What these people do is not (but maybe morally questionable?). Please don't go to an accountant asking to help you in "tax evasion schemes" :)
The point isn't to spend it, the point is to make so much money that investments self replicate. At that point, they can stop worrying about money forever and just live off the interest.
Then, you have trust funds for your children so that none of them ever have to work. And when you die, your children will inherit the fortune, so they can do the same for their children, ad infinitum. And if they want a "job" you can start a nonprofit that they can run, so they can be known as successful administrators while you are recognized as a selfless philanthropist who gave away so much money.
I guess it would be hard on their families because they would move off the fast track of multi-generational absolute financial security.
I'm not defending her argument or agreeing with it, I just think that the rest of the quote adds important context. Quoting that last sentence alone almost makes it seem like the bad excuse a child would make. Her actual point is that asking executives to take an 80% pay cut to go work at Mozilla is going to make it difficult to attract talented people, not that lowering the current compensation would cause the current executive team's families to suffer.
Again, I don't agree with that since clearly the higher salaries are not attracting any talented executives either.
Given that she is barely even worth the lower, 80%-discounted salary, I don't find that a compelling argument.
I would much rather a lower-salary, less-experienced CEO who actually cares about the mission enough to accept that salary, than someone who has presided over an erosion of Firefox's market share and significant layoffs, while still increasing her own salary. Clearly the system is not working by paying their CEO a market rate.
Seriously. The only reason they can say that is because they're in charge of the company and get to make decisions. How fair have Mozilla's layoffs been on the families of the laid-off workers? I bet not all that fair.
The Google money is what enabled them to let their core product wither and nearly die without any short-term consequences. They spent a pretty long time with it in that state while pursuing things like a phone OS. Without the Google money they would have had more incentive to keep Firefox competitive.
5% of a few billion users is not nothing. Mostly the decline of Mozilla has little to do with the browser functionality or marketing but with the fact that there are several competing browsers out there that have caught up. E.g. MS ditched IE in favor of Edge. Apple has continued investing in Safari which they also force the usage of exclusively on IOS. And of course Google has similar control point in the form of Chrome. I am a happy Firefox user BTW. But I can see lack of incentive for other people to switch. Any of those browsers gets the job done for any user.
IMHO, 5% is actually fine. That's a robust user base of a few tens to hundreds of million users. Nothing to sneeze at and a good basis for long term existence of the project.
Where Mozilla went the wrong direction is with their commercial activities. Their core problem is that their product is a commodity. It's just not going to bring in a lot of revenue. Apple and Google use their respective browser as a control point for the app store and ads. It's an expense worth making because they both exploit the large number of users using their browsers via other channels. Most of what Google does is motivated by this. Likewise, Apple is selling hardware, apps, and subscriptions.
Mozilla does not have a similarly viable way of generating revenue from their user base. It's an OSS product that users install and use for free. Their core value is actually protecting users against that kind of thing which is a noble thing to do but not a business plan.
That's why Mozilla was initially styled as a foundation. The commercial branch came later and its the commercial branch that is failing; not the foundation. They have no money maker of note other than their search traffic deals. Everything else, including (I'll just call this right now), their recent VPN offering is never going to come close to bankrolling their operation. This follows a long line of failed investments in a mobile strategy that never panned out, various "experiments' that never got off the ground, misc services that they launched and that people promptly forgot about, etc. None of it engaged more than a fraction of their user base. None of it wowed anyone. None of it was more than a me too effort of replicating things that already existed and already were commodities. Mozilla as an investment vehicle for new products only loosely connected to Firefox has failed.
The way out is back to basics. Pull the plug on the Mozilla corporation as soon as convenient for investors and setup the foundation for success and untangle it from the VCs. It will need donations, the search engine revenue looks good as well and ought to be allocated 100% to keeping the browser going. There should be enough to keep an engineering team going. It doesn't need a marketing department, offices in London, Paris, San Francisco, Mountain View, etc. Hell, the rent for that alone could keep a development team going for a very long time. Much bigger things have been built with far less. That shit only ever made sense when Mozilla was styling itself as an incubation vehicle for turning VC money into products. Now that that has definitely failed, time to walk away from that.
And then there's the Rust part of the company. IMHO that's a valid asset where Mozilla has a lot of influence in a rapidly growing community. There's an opportunity there to grow some healthy business around that supporting the many companies looking to leverage that. So far, they run it like a charity. That's a mistake. Aside from Firefox, that's actually the single most valuable IP they ever created. And like Firefox, it lacks a plan for revenue. Rust almost happened by accident. But MS and Apple are now looking to use it and it seems people are doing Rust things in the Linux kernel as well.
I agree with most of this, however I think graphic design and some marketing is still very important. In fact, now more than ever they need that. Engineering should still be the primary focus, though.
> Their core problem is that their product is a commodity.
Even worse, the cheapest comparable alternatives are free. At least commodities can be sold at the market price if you can't differentiate yours enough.
The Mozilla execs could all make more money at FAANG companies just down the road from Mozilla HQ. If they left, it would probably be pretty hard to replace them with anyone capable of saving Firefox who would settle for less.
The same is true for most of the engineers at Mozilla. They could go to FAANGs and increase their compensation quite a bit.
So while I agree that the leadership has been bad, executive pay was not the problem. Executive decision-making was the problem. Hiring leaders who could make better decisions certainly won't be any cheaper.
Nothing will kill morale as much as executive pay going up while your colleagues are being given their pink slips. That is an executive decision making problem but it directly impacts morale.
> The Mozilla execs could all make more money at FAANG companies just down the road from Mozilla HQ.
I mean, really? After their record of poor performance at Mozilla?
> Hiring leaders who could make better decisions certainly won't be any cheaper.
It's been blindly obvious for years what they should do, but let's state it again: (1) Build up a fund instead of throwing away the money, so they can be financially independent. (2) Concentrate on the browser and users.
Fortunately, Mozilla has been doing #1 for years, as they mention in their public financial statements.
#2 is a matter of opinion in a couple ways. Work on the browser for the betterment of users has never stopped. Intent has always been there, but we can debate quality of plan and execution.
Worth mentioning is how hard it is to rate performance given lack of counterfactuals. Is there even any golden path of success in all of the solution space? All we know is that what was tried hasn't worked.
> If they left, it would probably be pretty hard to replace them with anyone capable of saving Firefox who would settle for less.
Its an open source project people believe in. Reduce the pay and you are probably actually more likely to cut out the worst execs and focus only on smart people who want to contribute.
Open source projects are full of smart people who want to contribute and are still often organisational clusterfucks. Unfortunately being smart and passionate alone doesn’t necessarily make you an effective leader.
True, but why is leadership at such an economic premium to development? It's not like the CEO writes a pile of code for 40 hours a week and then puts in another 30 hours on top doing all the corporate administration. It's an necessary but distinct job that complements the technical one but isn't so superior to it.
Yes, indeed a good CEO has offers from elsewhere. But...why isn't the business and governance open-sourced like the codebase?
At the most basic level leadership is at a premium because there are fewer truly good leaders than there are developers.
Now, is every well paid CEO a truly good leader? No. But I’d argue it’s a lot more difficult to assess a good leader than a good developer. There’s a lot more people management, marketing and other soft skills involved. Not to mention the time scales for success are much larger.
I'd say it's actually easy to evaluate a leader, at least one with experience under their belt. You look at the performance of their organization. If they're a CEO, it's especially trivial: you look at the performance of the entire company. If they're a VP or Director of a smaller section of the org, you can still measure that section's performance, though it does get a little muddier.
At a decent-sized org it is nearly impossible to measure an individual developer's impact with any granularity.
I think this should also illustrate that evaluating a leader and evaluating a developer are two entirely different things that can't be directly compared anyway.
The thing is, it benefits the people in professional management roles to promote this point of view and institutionalize practices like outside hires in order to make it a self-fulfilling prophecy. They don't need to conspire about this (in the Adam Smith sense), just echo the notion of corporate management as such a distinct skillset that it needs to be sought out rather than grown and that will eventually come to have its own moat effect.
Eventually you get CEOs making statements that amount to 'I deliver 10x or 20x more value to this company than you, all my CEO peers say so.'
> it would probably be pretty hard to replace them with anyone capable of saving Firefox who would settle for less.
That's just baseless assumptions. And considering that this "saving" did not work out so far, it seems they are not even worth the money at all.
On another side, for the money of one of this managers, you could probably get a dozen or more semi-competent people who are more eager to make money and save the project.
I think you highlighted another problem. Why Mozilla HQ is located in such an expensive place? There are plenty of cheaper places in the world (even US...).
> The Mozilla execs could all make more money at FAANG companies just down the road from Mozilla HQ. If they left, it would probably be pretty hard to replace them with anyone capable of saving Firefox who would settle for less.
Eich. But you'll have to kick out the idpol activists still left at Mozilla, the people who ditched FirefoxOS and contributed to the destruction of Firefox.
Why are you so sure that a) Eich would do the job for less, or that b) he'd be able to single-handedly defeat Google on a budget.
Just because someone opposes gay marriage for religious reasons doesn't make them a superhero or saint. Is Brave browser doing better than Firefox with his miraculous help?
Seems like the people angry about this political issue are one key factor in us heading towards an internet monoculture.
> Why are you so sure that a) Eich would do the job for less, or that b) he'd be able to single-handedly defeat Google on a budget.
a) Eich publicly called out Mozilla's current CEO compensation. b) well the current CEO isn't doing that either.
> Just because someone opposes gay marriage for religious reasons doesn't make them a superhero or saint. Is Brave browser doing better than Firefox with his miraculous help?
Exactly, it had nothing to do with anything but people who wanted Eich's head. The same people that are now sinking Mozilla because they have no vision for the company, just virtue signalling.
Firefox lost market the whole time period during which I started Brave and led the team that grew it from 0 to ~20M MAU. Something worked. Of course it couldn't have had anything to do with me :-/.
> The same is true for most of the engineers at Mozilla. They could go to FAANGs and increase their compensation quite a bit.
What % of engineers at Mozilla are in SV and other places where Mozilla competes with FAANG? I thought quite a lot of the employees were remote all over the world.
Firefox engineers do literally the same jobs as their counterparts at Google. Indeed, most of my ex-colleagues and ex-execs have gone to Google, Facebook, and Apple. (in roughly that order) It's no secret that they appreciate the increased compensation, too!
While I understand the frustration, it's unclear to me what the expected solution is for Mozilla. Pay the CEO less until the company does better? Ok but the CEO will presumably just find a higher paying job elsewhere. Then what? Find a cheaper CEO? How does that help fix the slipping market share for Firefox?
Better align executive pay with business performance from the beginning. If the business is failing then parting company with the CEO is working as intended.
I agree, I dont think this CEO is special. His argument is flawed on that premise alone. I think they should pull an MS and promote the CIO or a lead engineer.
With her doubtful record of success, it is questionable that the CEO really could find a higher paying job elsewhere.
And Mozilla's poor track record suggests that if Mozilla insists on paying the same CEO salary, they might do well to find a different CEO to give it to.
I think the point is less that this CEO should take a pay cut — although she probably should — but more that the mediocrity + layoffs + exorbitant-CEO-salary situation here reeks of self-dealing.
Find a CEO whose motivation is more "make the world a better place" than "make millions of dollars a year". $500k is a large enough salary to live well just about anywhere. After that it's just "victory points" in the game of careerism.
Mozilla's last three CEOs (Baker, Beard and Eich) all had worked at Mozilla before. Mozilla appears unable to recruit outside CEOs even with its current CEO compensation.
I agree to me it seems like they're admitting that the ship is sinking. The CEO is over 60yo, unlikely to take on another gig after this. The simplest explanation is often the correct one, she's lost her way and needs a nice cushion before retirement. Greed is s very human thing.
> Isn't that pretty much admitting that they're on a sinking ship?
Yes.
They are admitting they are solely reliant on Google's money. Given that Google Chrome is a direct competitor to Firefox and has gained more market share, Google can justify to either reduce spend or stop paying for being the default search engine in Firefox due to its shrinking market share and instead pay more for Apple Safari as the default in iOS, macOS, etc instead.
Mozilla and Firefox will be another geek's relic in this decade if it doesn't find another revenue source apart from relying on Google - A direct competitor in all areas.
If you look at the history of Mozilla's revenue, this conspiracy is ridiculous. Why would Yahoo compete over the Firefox contract if they serve as a hedge against a lawsuit?
Why would you (Google) not prefer for someone else (yahoo!) to pay for something that benefits you? That Yahoo! leadership didn't renew the contract should tell you how much being a default search engine is actually worth. Why would you (actual you) believe that Google would provide nearly all of a "competitor's" revenue? that somehow makes more sense? The pontificating about privacy Mozilla does is total nonsense. They serve their users up to Google's surveillance enterprise without hesitation. They're a puppet to fool gullible hipsters with fashionable social statements.
Yahoo was bought out during the term of the contact. And I don't know the details, but I believe Google pays Apple for the same thing, paying Mozilla isn't surprising.
That chart shows a pretty beautiful 10 year trend. Yep, they are on a sinking ship.
'Failures' on the other hand - that is a loaded word. They are failures, they have failed at making Firefox popular. But what needed to happen to build an alternative world where they succeeded? The browsers that succeeded were Chrome and Safari - browsers sponsored by the owners of the two major platforms for accessing the internet, backed by billions of dollars of corporatyness.
What is Firefox meant to do? Charities aren't innovation engines. Back in the day when they were making progress on market share, the options were Firefox or IE6. The strategy of the Chrome web team is slightly different than the IE6 web team. I'm sour about Firefox wiping out their value proposition when they canned the good extensions - but that happened circa 2017 so it isn't the problem for adoption. They need something radical to be relevant and that isn't a fair ask of a nonprofit.
The unique selling point of Firefox (and especially: mobile Firefox) was ability to heavily customize it and use third party extensions.
Those extensions were the ones bringing in the innovation -> most ideas came from third parties (on a side note: usually for free, since extensions are hard to monetize).
The system just worked and gave many popular extensions like Tab Mix Plus, Ad-Block, Noscript... through basic customization extensions like Classic Theme Restorer (have you ever setup new browser for a grandmother who does not need 50 options everywhere when you right click? can you even do this now in new Firefox? or the new extension model does not allow it) through countless small extensions that changed users' workflows how they wanted. This ecosystem is all gone.
Developers inside of Firefox completely ignored it - they killed the old extension system because they didn't like it, while they did not provide anything that is even 25% as good. I understand that creating a new, better system is hard, but that is their job and core product. Firefox could have been providing the framework on which extensions would sit.
Also, they earned 500 million dollars per year, for years; had over 1000 employees. They couldnt find people who could solve hard problems?
Or maybe it is a failure of project management: developers ignored hard problems, they preferred to work on new, shiny green-field projects. Those new toys are great: they boost the CV, allow to play with new technologies, often are left in half baked state so you dont care about bugs. They also have no users, so nobody will complain, basically no accountability for a project that is never finished and killed after 1-2 years.
We saw many of such side projects in Firefox - all shifting away resources from the core product that is neglected.
Firefox’s decline was already well in progress before anything changed with extensions. The problem was that Google’s ad profits allowed them to pour money into Chrome without needing the browser to be profitable, and their advertisements of Chrome on the most popular websites were hard to counter. Extensions weren’t moving the needle on that and, as many people involved have explained, the old design was a substantial maintenance cost preventing other important changes to remain competitive with Chrome.
The big question is whether there’s a model for browser development which isn’t subsidized by huge companies which profit elsewhere. Short of government support (antitrust, direct funding, etc.) I’m not sure there is a viable path forward.
No, they succeeded at making it impopular. FireFox was popular they had a shot at cementing market dominance. The were more popular than Chrome and MS's product combined.
But now they are a fringe browser, that already has problems keeping up with the developments on the web.
Note that for Google they are only a fig-leaf in their upcoming anti-trust case. Note that Google pulled a lot of underhanded tricks to get people to switch to Chrome and paying FF may have been just enough to keep Mozilla quiet about this. If it had been a for-profit situation and with a different source of revenues for Mozilla then there is a fair chance Mozilla would have made a case for anti-competitive behavior by Google.
So that money may have acted to Google's benefit in more than just one way.
Operating systems are basically a commodity. Browsers? Doubly so. I don't care who's in charge of Mozilla - if your "product" is your browser, you better hope your "customers" feel charitable. "If everyone donated $2.99.." and etc.
Maybe you just can't run a successful business in the browser space in 2020. It was already plenty difficult in the mid-90's, wasn't it?
Let's say I'm hired as a coach of a team that's second best in the world (Being the second used browser in the world is NOT a rough hand, other browsers are clawing for >1% for ever and are not coming close). I'm not saying it's easy at all but after 5 years I manage to do NOTHING to stop the bleeding, lose 250 highly skilled people and RAISE MY OWN SALARY 5x...
I'm pretty sure people would throw rocks at me on the street at that point. The cult of the CEO needs to die.
Let's assume good faith and that executive pay in general at Mozilla was not competitive.
That would be similar to a company noticing that it has been underpaying software engineers and then choosing to bump up compensation significantly.
A question that raises is: do executives (and software engineers?) bring the value that is associated with those pay grades, given that they seem increasingly detached from other roles?
I don't know - are many people here on HN familiar enough with executive-level strategy, connections and work practices to discuss whether that value is justified?
In honesty I believe that some executives are probably capable of using their personal networks to bring on-board significant expertise, industry influence, negotiating power and other talents (such as, frankly, the ability to dominate conversations and sway opinions, for better or worse - as long as it doesn't hurt the company) that are typically hard to quantify or certificate.
If the tech industry continues consolidating into a smaller number of more important companies then it seems understandable that those influence and network effects become more important in order to stay competitive.
I'm not sure if that's fair - those might not be the kind of skills that can necessarily be learned; I'd argue they're frequently side-effects of people's upbringing, social networks, and psychological profiles (including some dark/problematic personality types). But it explains the realpolitik of the situation without demonizing individual decision-makers for what may be rational choices in the environment.
> Let's assume good faith and that executive pay in general at Mozilla was not competitive.
The problem is that this is a very subjective claim. If you think of mozilla as belonging to the same category as tech giants or successful tech startups, and believe it needs to compete with them to attract talent then it's not unreasonable. If you think of firefox as a charity then it's completely insane.
Compensation for charity CEOs, even tech focussed ones (like the EFF, TOR, wikimedia, khan academy) are lower, usually much lower. A number of charities have managed to attract impressive CEOs despite not paying 'market' rates.
It's pure conjecture but I'd imagine that the compensation culture in this case started near the top of the company (given that it appears executive-centric) - perhaps based on conversations with potential hires, vendors, competitors, and so forth.
Given the nature of Firefox, I'd expect many of those third parties would have been anchored in the 'tech giant' world -- perhaps leading compensation policy astray.
overall comp is heavily biased towards stock performance. Given AMD's exceptional performance in recent years it's natural to expect her overall comp to also be quite good.
Can you even compare Mitchell Baker to Lisa Su in terms of achievement?
Su revived a company on the verge of bankruptcy. Since she was appointed CEO, AMD's stock has soared and they've made themselves a viable competitor against Intel. This has been a massive boon to the market.
It's worth noting that Su has a deep understanding of the underlying technology that the company works on (she's an electrical engineer), which was essential to her success at the company.
Su is an example of merit-based compensation. Baker is not.
Imagine saying, "well, I know he gunned 20 kids in a school down, but he had such a bad day, he's just couldn't take it." Sure it's probably true, but it's definitely not right.
>There's a quote from the CEO saying that they looked at the market and felt like they were being underpaid.
And they can't reduce their salary now because it'd be unfair on their families. Firefox has a problem.
Yes. The exec team and CEO.
They should be ousted.
"Unfair to their families"? What BS, what about the families of the laid-off?
> There's a quote from the CEO saying that they looked at the market and felt like they were being underpaid. And they can't reduce their salary now because it'd be unfair on their families.
Yes I read that too, I couldn't believe it.
She can decide to work for a non-profit, work for the good of the Internet and its users. Accept to earn 500k, which put her well in the top 5% earners and let her and her family live a comfortable life even in Silicon Valley.
Or she can go work as an exec for Google/Apple/Facebook, accept that she's just working for a group of people against others, and be aware she'll be actively doing harm to people's privacy and freedom, but rake in a multi-million dollar salary every year.
I'm sure there are plenty of skilled and talented people who would be happy to work as an exec for Mozilla for the meager salary of 500k.
The claim was not that they can't reduce but that an 80% discount was too much to ask of people (and thus also their families). I don't think anyone at any pay level would be happy being paid 20% of similar roles. Perhaps the problem was putting people in these roles in the first place that would accept 20% of market rate. Raising their pay subsequently doesn't make them better at their job!
The quote is not really crazy:
"Executive compensation is a general topic -- are execs, esp CEOs paid too much? I'm of the camp that thinks the different between exec comp and other comp is high. So then i think, OK what should mozilla do about it? My answer is that we try to mitigate this, but we won't solve this general social problem on our own.
Here's what I mean by mitigate: we ask our executives to accept a discount from the market-based pay they could get elsewhere. But we don't ask for an 75-80% discount. I use that number because a few years ago when the then-ceo had our compensation structure examined, 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."
Not everyone wants to do volunteer work in the first place. They want to be compensated, perhaps so they could support a family instead of living with their parents. Can't do that if you're working for free or minimum wage
I took a major financial hit to be a CEO, and as a CEO I feel personally responsible for the company's success. My compensation is primarily in ownership and stock - I would never take a massive pay raise if my company were failing, let alone repeated massive raises over years of company downturn.
And then to wipe out a massive portion of your employee base? I find it abhorrent, personally.
I'm certainly curious as to why, they have a board and shareholders, no? Regardless, it changes little about my point. I'm not saying a CEO shouldn't earn a nice salary, but to repeatedly take raises during a downturn, a downturn so severe you had to completely gut projects, is gross.
I use that number because a few years ago when the then-ceo had our compensation structure examined, I learned that my pay was about an 80% discount to market. Meaning that competitive roles elsewhere were paying about 5 times as much.
Exactly. The right thing to do here if that bothers you, isn't to hollow out Mozilla, it's to go and take one of those other jobs that you believe you can get.
Perhaps they should find someone skilled who is willing to take that 80% discount from market.
Baker has clearly not been worth her increased salary; I don't even think she's worth the original 20%-of-market salary, given how Firefox's market share has dropped precipitously, and Mozilla has been forced to lay off staff.
Sure, you're probably not going to get a 100%-of-market-rate CEO for a 20%-of-market-rate salary, for CEOs who only care about compensation. But I think that's ok, especially given that some CEOs aren't even worth 20%. And you're much more likely to get someone who actually cares about the mission.
When I make this argument to tech companies in Vancouver (where typically compensation is an 80% discount from right across the border in Seattle), the response is usually that I can move if I want to.
Couldn't she just have gone and become CEO at a different company if she wanted to make more, like the rest of us do?
Isn't the CEO pay here a classic example of principal-agent problem?
In a commercial company, there would be activist investors pushing to cut manager's pay and change management. But I'm not familiar with this type of NGOs so well; who is supposed play the role of principal here? And are they not playing it properly?
In an NGO they need to secure funding, too much bloat (including director-level pay) could make fundraising more difficult.
...I guess if you get your money from a disinterested Google rather than fundraising there really isn't anyone to push back against inefficiency/poor performance.
Really the board should have been pushing back/course correcting, but sadly even in private companies boards are usually weak af (simply doing the ceos bidding).
The for-profit entity (Mozilla Corporation) is wholly owned by the non-profit entity (Mozilla Foundation) and Mitchell Baker leads both organizations. That is a conflict of interest. She should resign from one entity, but there is a compelling argument that she is a failure at leading both organizations.
FYI -- The foundation owns the IP, while the corporation manages software engineering and the Google search deal.
If it's unfair on your families to be making only a million dollars a year instead of two and a half, what does that say about the ~99% of America who makes less than a million dollars a year?
Also it's just a weird point. Is the point of CEO pay to keep their family in the highest order of lavishness? How is their financial irresponsibility anyone else's concern when it comes to discussing the adequate salary of the position?
I'm using Edge since it saves on battery life, maybe I should just stop with Firefox for a while till they get a new CEO and get their crap together. I never stopped using Firefox, I wasn't somebody who started using it again after Quantum, I just never liked Chrome much, but only ever used it for development purposes.
You'll find me criticizing them a lot but in their defense: I would probably not have been able to renegotiate that Google deal earlier this year given how Google basically does whatever they want in the browser space for now, so it seems they do something.
That said: to me it comes off as a bit done deaf to raise salaries for top execs in a non profit while firing the people who does the work and also I cannot see how anything should be prioritized if the situation is critical except:
- the main revenue driver and simultaneously their biggest contribution to fulfilling their mission, Firefox.
- initiatives to add more reliable sources of income for the long run.
Deprioritizing Firefox seems crazy in such a situation.
(I know nothing about their actual plans but I could come up with is if they are cutting spending to save up money for an endowment fund, but I guess that is just wishful thinking.)
> Firefox has a problem. It gets most of its revenue from Google. They need a different revenue stream but their ideas haven't worked.
It's not just that they get most of their revenue from Google -- it's that they're getting most of their revenue from a company that also runs their biggest competitor and has every incentive to push their own product over someone else's.
Apple and Mozilla both have uncomfortable dependencies on Google nowadays, so I wonder if one of them (if not both) are looking to buy DuckDuckGo.
Google may want to do with Mozilla the same thing Microsoft did with Apple during their antitrust case: keep it alive to keep the regulators off their back.
I'm not a native english speaker, and I'm curious. Mozilla's CEO is a woman. Why are you referring to her as they? I know about the gender pronouns debacle... But isn't it OK to call her a woman?
I think he's just bypassing the need to specify one way or another. It's a person holding the CEO office - the gender of the person is not relevant to the point being made or the discussion.
It is strange that corporations like Mozilla give me some communism flashbacks. In the communist times of Romania, the earnings were privatized (meaning that the party took all the profits and stored them abroad in fiscal paradises) while the losses were socialized and the party imposed austerity measures on the proletariat[1] because of their management failures. I draw a parallel between what happens with the raise of their executives salaries and the layoffs that affected the engineering department. Nassim Taleb wrote a good article about Corporate Socialism[2].
I was looking for the source of this quote and it's from an interview in June 2020:
"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."
It would be immoral to to place figurative death on a living persons social status due to actual acts
But it’s moral to let people starve, die of preventable disease due to sitting on your ha day
Welcome to America’s emotional prison
Old people have convinced young people to pander to them until they’re the grave, they’re locking up the judiciary to force themselves on the future
And Americans sit here like coddled children
Isn’t that pretty much living in a sinking ship of a country?
No one here going to admit the top down political failures of the past aren’t able to handle modern reality?
There is no artificial shortage of code anymore. GitHub and GitLab are gutting that labor market. Who cares if they can’t make new code shapes? Business only cares that the machines keep sorting. Self aggrandizing nerds care about code shapes.
Meh. Have a floor of 3x average employee and let the pay be proportional to performance. There are natural limits to growth anyway.
HN crowd is a sucker when it comes to Mozilla. These bleeding hearts don’t bleed for furloughed and fired Mozilla drones. They only care about their political agenda not business or technological value.
The reason CEOs are paid well is because they have an important and risky job. And if they bring success by their actions, they totally deserve their millions.
But if the company/organization is doing poorly, the CEO doesn't deserve the high pay. And having the pay reduced, or even not being paid at all for a time if it can help the company is one of the risks CEO should be able to take. It is not unfair for their families if they planned for it in advance instead of taking their high pay for granted. You can save a lot when you are being paid millions.
I wish Mozilla created a fundation so people can give to Firefox specifically, as opposed to Mozilla, the same way they did with Thunderbird. I for sure won't be giving to Mozilla until they change to reasonable leadership with reasonable compensation.
Shit like this pisses me off. I care for Firefox and the team behind it but how do you get rid of these vampires sucking the company dry? You've got executive pay going up, usage going down. Pivotal leaders being ousted, good workers being released, good features being removed and shit features being added. It's like managers and executives somehow dig their bureaucratic teeth into a successful company/project and then suck it dry while proclaiming "It's ok, everything will be alright. Here, have some AVX-512 or some MEGA OMNIBAR." As if this shit actually matters.
Why is there no system for calling them out on this, swiftly kicking them out and staunching the bleeding?
The tale is as old as time, something starts out as open source, gets popular, gets bought and is drained by the "corporate vampires" you're alluding to, either through acquisition or other means.
The only silver lining here compared to any other type of software, is that legally, this software can never be anything but open source -- so we are all free to fork and attempt to do a better job, and make a valiant try in not repeating history.
Lots of people on this thread are complaining about Mozilla doing too many "unrelated side projects".
Honestly as a dev that sounds to me like a culture where engineers are too able to run free. If anything.
But of course swiftly kicking people out to staunch the bleeding - as happened recently - can cause a lot of pain and backlash too. New executives usually cause strategy/org thrash which sucks for everyone at the bottom.
Just saying these things are hard. Executives have to make decisions that suck, doesn't mean they're vampires. May be very painful for them too.
This is not a case of gallivanting engineers running free.
All of the moonshot projects are done at the direction of executive leadership in the hopes to open new profit streams.
In fact some of the more technically promising projects (like Servo) had their whole entire team laid off recently to "refocus" on more of these executive-sourced profit grab moonshots
The desire to see consistent behavior as incompetence is a shield. Firefox was intentionally destroyed, and gets all of its revenue from the company who replaced it.
It's like Nokia all over again; the plurality of people who are watching this failure predict every step of it, but are denigrated as antisocial, selfish, mentally-ill trolls. As they leave, the ones who remain are attacked more, because now they're outnumbered in every conversation. Then the company fails.
Of course, in this case firefox will never disappear, but stumble along like a zombie, forever, because google needs it for antitrust purposes. Mozilla will do anything but work on its browser, at high salaries, rife with self-dealing and cush jobs handed out to the most connected, while claiming the languishing firefox as its emotional core and charitable mission. The work done on firefox will consist of tests for things that chrome is thinking of doing, or the non-disableable incorporation of acquired companies or partners into its functionality.
There's no system for calling them out on this other than just calling them out on this. They don't have any duty to us.
I'm two fences on Firefox doing "too many unrelated things" as the article suggests.
Firefox OS has been pretty much unsuccessful, but it sort of made sense? It started to be made when Firefox was still on top on desktop, but mobile started eating its lunch; and it was clear that Firefox need to do something about it, or the future will be all Chrome and Safari, on the two locked-down platforms.
Which eventually happened, of course, and Firefox share is neglible nowadays on mobile.
The identity management with Persona or what was the name also made sense. People at that time started using Google and Facebook for unified identity, and it made sense to make a decentralized identity.
None of these project ultimately worked, but they made sense?
What never made sense to me was Pocket or Send, or even the teleconferencing they had, but it seems that Firefox doubles down on Pocket now.
Firefox OS never made sense unless Mozilla was prepared to pay the backroom bribes and incentives to get it preinstalled on hundreds of millions of phones. And they weren't.
Maybe maybe not. But it's also good to keep in mind who else failed in that space from many different angles. MS, Nokia, Blackberry, etc... If MS with infinite cash on hand could not get into that market then it is likely that chances of success were always very low. And it still might have been the right thing to try despite the chance being low.
You are right that it was a very difficult endeavor.
I think the main bottleneck is not the installation by the vendors, but the apps available.
I believe, what is missing is an abstraction layer between the apps and the OS. If it was possible to create apps for Android and Apple in a generic way and, it was easy to add a third OS, so all the apps could be made available to the new system, a new OS would be not so limited. I know, I know, that is itself a very difficult endeavor.
PWA's do work, but they are hard to install (not available in the appstore, the user has to go through a non-obvious sequence of steps they won't discover unless they Google it). They are slow (because safari refuses to implement caching of compiled JavaScript or webassembly). They can't store persistent data, so the user experience is terrible (yay - who wants a notekeeping app that deletes all your notes every 30 days?). The data doesn't sync to iCloud. It doesn't integrate with the rest of the OS (no way to share a picture to a PWA for example). The Safari browser engine they must run in is ~3 years behind desktop and Android browsers with supporting web standards. There is no way to do background stuff like playing music, using the GPS for directions, etc.
correct me but those features are denied by apple and mozilla for very good reasons (privacy and security) besides beeing anything but 'basic' (midi anyone?)
If you're scared of something, sometimes it's best to invent it and then not invest in it than to let someone else invent it and do a decent job of it.
Classic example: Oil companies "investing" in clean tech in the 90's, sucking up government grants and public attention and never really getting anywhere probably slowed down the switch to renewables by 10+ years.
> And it still might have been the right thing to try despite the chance being low.
This is exactly my take on it.
I think timing was a big part of it, too. They were too late to get a foothold on the current market, but too early to take advantage of the more open platforms coming out nowadays like the PinePhone.
On the contrary I kinda see the point in the pocket and send to bridge the gap between desktop and mobile for the users that own both.
But the small brainless degradations of the UI in Firefox make me worry about its future.
For example it’s not possible to permanently add exclusions to the privacy shield. Because of it the sites are often broken.
And this is a feature that is directly user facing on the main screen!
Formerly known as "Read It Later", it's a reading list service. You save pages for later reference. There's subscriptions to unlock features.
I loved RIL but Pocket is but a shadow of what it once was.
Similar to Evernote web clips, or Instapaper. I now use OneNote instead with the webclipper plugin, mostly because it puts the clips in a place where I can also add my own notes.
I switched to Joplin. It's completely seamless once I authenticate with the service I sync with and toggle the web clipper support in the desktop app. You can even clip those pages where the site blocks the Evernote and OneNote crawler since it all happens in your browser and on the local clip server.
Best of all, it's all in Markdown. There's a beta rich text editor, but the Markdown editor has a preview and a little button bar for common stuff like lists and formatting.
We can’t even get developers to use FF, the times I read about it here (and maybe it is a vocal minority idk) that a developer doesn’t like a certain feature. Or they are missing feature X from chrome.
I think it would be a valid strategy if you do go after developers and sysadmins. So pour resources in getting parity where devs think they would switch.
In general whenever I help installing software for someone, I install FF, and I think I have installed in at least a couple dozen computers now.
Aka do a Blender. Blender has gained momentum by getting things right, not adding features nobody wants, or Blender sidegigs.
There is also the problem of addon monetization, Chrome has a whole ecosystem of people earning revenue from add ons. That’s a invested network you have to deal with at some point.
> Aka do a Blender. Blender has gained momentum by getting things right, not adding features nobody wants, or Blender sidegigs.
There is a parsimoniousness about Blender that is really quite incredible. I have rarely used an app that has so successfully resisted feature-creep and bloat. E.g. unlike almost all other 3D apps, it has no radial array tool or feature. Why not? Because you can cook your own using a simple linear array.
Screw modifier is similar, but not the best route for a radial array.
I not knocking blender. I love its austere design philosophy. The add-ons are a case in point. Some very important functionality is not loaded by default (e.g. loop tools and copy attributes). But the devs seem to be saying, 'if we can live without something in the default load, then we should'. Huge difference to bloatware like 3DS Max.
That's a side effect of not listening to developers.
---
Dramatization:
Web Developer: I need non-standard feature that works in IE and Chrome
Firefox: But that's non-standard, you'll be able to use standard alternative in the future
Web Developer: When?
Firefox: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ it's still in draft
Web Developer: But I need to finish my project this quarter
Firefox: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Web Developer: -webkit-something: 1
* 3 years later *
Firefox: The web is full of -webkit-something and everyone thinks Firefox is broken because we support the standard something but not -webkit-something
Firefox: Please remove the -webkit- prefix
Web Developer: I don't support that project anymore
Firefox: But you only need to remove the -webkit- prefix
Web Developer: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
* 1 year later *
Firefox: We will support -wekit-something because nobody fixes their websites for Firefox even when they only need to remove the -webkit- prefix
Web Developer: So you're telling me that we can get away with not supporting Firefox and you'll eventually follow suit?
Firefox: That's not what I meant
Web Developer: -webkit-something-something: 1
---
To be honest I think that Firefox has already crossed the point of no return, in the past Firefox used to have a share of about 30% of the market and supporting Firefox was justified even if that meant writing twice the lines of code, but nowadays the share is less than 3%. Firefox doesn't have enough resources to compete against Chrome with features, and people doesn't care enough about security to justify a broken web for the sake of security.
I don't know whether it's a good idea or not, but rather than pitching Firefox for the mainstream web, I would push Firefox to become the de-facto browser for security sensitive scenarios (ex. online shopping, online banking, taxes, etc.). Supporting a subset of the web makes more sense in a resource-constrained scenario especially because the Servo experiment and the Rust project exist to tackle the security issue.
The problem seems to me, that Mozilla does not have a platform of users to market to, whereas all their competitors do. It's really the marketing part where Firefox is falling short and I am not sure they can ever do much better on that front.
Regarding Send/Teleconferencing, I think that made sense to. In theory you don't need anything as complicated as Skype or Teams or Zoom and lots of people, me including, use VOIP a lot. It would have been nice to have a simple click to call on the browser itself. Same goes for sending files with a click. Utilities that lots of people use and would give the browser a boost. Unfortunately I think these products failed because the sort of person who needs them is the sort of person who does not like learning new things so even if their current method is 8 steps and takes addition software and is not free, they will keep with what is currently working for them.
Again this might also be Mozilla's marketing falling short.
I have an LG WebOS television and it runs extremely smoothly. VS Code is an electron app and nobody complains about its performance.
Ultimately webOS didn't lose because it was web tech. It lost because Android and iOS already captured the market. Windows Phone was a .NET runtime with similar performance to Java, but it failed to capture the market even with billions in Microsoft subsidies.
People don't complain about VSCode because microsoft tried hard with optimizing performance. But see any discussion about Atom, its "predecessor", or Slack (at least the older version, that was really memory hungry).
WebOS is smooth but it’s also half-dead. Nobody uses it except LG, and I wonder how long even them will bother with it (I mean, to get an app in their marketplace you have to basically send in a slide deck with all sorts of bureaucracy, it looks like something a low-rent manager would come up with, they cannot be serious about long-term success). It effectively recommends not to use its local APIs, but rather consider the device as a dumb kiosk.
Half-dead is a huge stretch, it's one of the best and most popular TV OS's. It might be hard to develop for, but it has all the apps and features 99% of people want with an amazing cursor concept.
It’s actually not hard to develop for, in my experience. What is hard is having to deal with the commercial silliness - Developer Mode disappearing after a few days? A manual submission process for a very mediocre store? A “recommended” payment gateway? I’ve been holding out on investing serious time on it because I have PTSD from Nokia/Maemo and the parallels with the current webos are (sadly) stark.
Out of all the Smart TVs I've tried (Samsung, Sony, LG), webOS is probably the best in user experience. Naturally, more expensive TVs with better processors run smoother, but my budget UHD TV from LG with webOS 3.0 ran pretty great.
> I have an LG WebOS television and it runs extremely smoothly.
To counter that anecdote, I have an LG WebOS television and it is constantly freezing, I frequently have to power cycle it just to launch Netflix, it automatically updates itself without my consent, and each update seems to make it slower, or break something. Simply navigating the menu is a pain because of how unresponsive and slow it is, and setting it up required me to agree to a bunch of privacy policies.
To be fair, I blame LG for that more than WebOS. I don't really know anything about WebOS and how it relates to web tech, but I do remember using it many years ago on an HP TouchPad tablet. That was a great tablet experience at the time; way better than anything Android had to offer (except for the larger catalog of apps)
The basic idea of Firefox OS was actually great, they just didn't quite get the market right. Kai OS is a very successful fork which runs on feature phones.
Kai OS is fundamentally irrelevant though, in the great scheme of things. Mozilla can do billions of irrelevant but self-sustainable projects; that’s not the point. The point of Mozilla is to move the needle in the web ecosystem at large.
It was clear from the start that Mozilla did not have enough to move the needle in the mobile market all by itself. FFOS was a massive waste of time, effort, and money, that even resulted in a loss of prestige for the brand. It sucked the air out of more relevant priorities, diverted (and eventually often lost) their best talent, and wasted time and focus at a critical juncture.
While back Twitter recommended me a tweet from one of Firefox female engineers saying that she was responsible for pocket and updating pocket. many people complain that pocket sucked she claimed them all being misogynists so there's clearly cultural issues at Mozilla.
That's a really big leap you're making there, going from a context free anecdote about someone who got wound up on Twitter to that. And she was claiming that everyone complaining about Pocket was misogynistic? I'm not convinced that's completely true
Firefox OS kind of make sense, yet could they implemented ecosystem?
* There are Firefox browser users shocked by spyware addons, it is a norm on mobile. There are no paid Firefox addons. This does not work in "pay or product" reality. Open source and freeware is a small (and awesome) niche.
* There is a Mozilla stance against DRM. There is a lot of paid books, movies, music on Google Play.
* DOM is slow. Javascript has good parts. Google decided in favor of Android apps, not Chrome apps. Also Google Fuchsia.
* Bluetooth, Contacts, NFC, SMS, Wifi [1] access can be asked from OS.
Firefox was not default Windows browser, yet it succeeded. The reason I've never tried Firefox on Android is the loss of Firefox reputation on desktop. Memory bloat, falling behind Developer Tools, constant UI changes, not so snappy UI. Firefox was slow on desktop how could one expect it to perform well on mobile?
I agree FF OS & Persona were tackling the right problems at the time.
I'm not sure about the solutions they proposed, especially for Persona.
Maybe to tamed.
As someone who likes sites like reddit for the content sharing but hates the time sink the comments section becomes I love Pocket for delivering me highish quality articles and news that I don't have to worry about gettin sucked into some flame war over.
The main difference here is a US tech Vs UK corporate culture.
Mozilla's approach is "spend lots of cash and grow fast like a VC backed company".
The guardian is a "let's try and have a stable user base and keep the company alive for another 100 years".
In this case, Mozilla's approach has failed badly. I think it's unlikely they'll turn it around without the help of another big tech company making a strategic purchase.
They only survived at all because they owned a stake in Auto Trader Group which was sold off for £600m, allowing their non-profit parent to continue operating. Since then they are just about breaking even with subscriptions. They also (very controversially) employ many unpaid interns to do journalist jobs.
Lots of industries employ lots of unpaid interns. Journalism, Acting, Museums, Charities, Sports teams, Political parties, etc.
On one hand, if people are happy to do work for free, a company would be stupid not to make use of it. On the other hand, governments should probably outlaw it since it really is just a loophole to pay less than minimum wage. ("Volunteer for 2 years for free, and then we'll give you a minimum wage paid position" = "On average over your career, you get less than minimum wage")
Their news operations are subsidised to the tune of ~£30m/yr by the charitable trust that owns them. Not in and of itself problematic, but accumulating a sizeable enough endowment to sufficiently fund operations isn't an option for most orgs.
Mozilla corporation is owned by a non profit. Having a sizeable endowment is hard, but that sweet sweet google money has totaled over a billion dollars so its not like they didn't have the opportunity.
Yes, that totals a couple billion dollars at this point. Mozilla's mismanagement of that money is really unfortunate. Up until 2012 Mozilla ran just fine on about 100MM a year. Why they didn't care to save any significant portion of the Google dollars is beyond me. If they had simply been a somewhat leaner organization they would be in a far better place right now.
> ...accumulating a sizeable enough endowment to sufficiently fund operations isn't an option for most orgs.
And one of the claims / complaints of TFA is that Mozilla had a massive income for many years, and could have built up an endowment; but instead chose to live "hand-to-mouth", spending their income on useless failed projects that have nothing to do with Firefox. (And CEO pay of course.)
Not arguing against the overall point but Thunderbird has nothing to do with Firefox either and is still a thing Mozilla's reason for existing is not just their browser.
I get the point you're putting across, but you chose a terrible example. Mozilla cut thunderbird loose years ago, after neglecting it (Thunderbird remained XUL-based long after Mozilla decided that XUL was a technological dead-end). Yes, Mozilla's mission to to make the internet better for all users - not just the web. But I think they forgot what their mission is sometime back.
Exactly. Asking for donations isn't good enough for the likes of Mozilla.
From the post:
> Mozilla should probably just ask their users for money. For many years the Guardian newspaper (a similarly sized organisation to Mozilla in terms of staff) was a financial basket case. The Guardian started asking their readers for money a few years ago and seems to be on firmer financial footing since.
This comparison doesn't make sense. First of all, nearly all these publishers are moving towards subscriptions. This clearly works for them to give readers other incentives like say remove ads and paywalled content, weekly hard copies, etc. Asking users to donate to a free browser when the alternatives are also completely free to use isn't sustainable for Mozilla.
Given that the closest equivalent replacement is Chromium or ungoogled-chromium which is completely free to use and the latter addresses privacy by removing Google on everything, how can 'donations' work for Mozilla if there are other browsers that exist that users can be used for free?
Replace 'Guardian' with every other online news publisher and you will also get to my disclaimer on where I said 'nearly', especially on subscriptions.
The Guardian knows that they will eventually add paywalls and require subscriptions just like every other publisher as everyone knows 'donations' are not sustainable to fund their 'journalism'. It's all about subscriptions, paywalls, etc.
EDIT: To downvoters: Oh so donations 'are sustainable' for the likes of the Guardian, such that they are still asking their users for years to donate whilst ramping up the registrations and adding a soft pseudo-wall on their content, and the suggestion is to get Mozilla to also ask its users for donations?
What happens if Google decides NOT to renew that contract in the future due to Mozilla's declining market share?
Explain how surviving off of user's 'donations' is sustainable for Mozilla to survive, given that Google is its direct competitor and offers a browser for free (and a similar one without the Google stuff is also free).
downvoter: You made an excellent case for criticizing a different passage in a similar article. The passage you quoted, and the only organization referred to in the article, was the Guardian.
Now you're just generally (and angrily) defending mozilla against a donation model, and ignoring the passage you quoted entirely. A passage which iirc was the entirety of references to a donation model in the entire article.
Well, I wonder if you think it makes sense economically for Mozilla to go through that model for asking its users for money - For a browser. Be honest.
Pretty sad because it is the only privacy oriented browser left.
Safari has dropped support for any privacy oriented extensions, and while Chrome might support them, everything you do with it goes through Google anyway.
That while Firefox can run uBlock Origin, has the Facebook container built in and you can even install a 3rd party Google container.
The article suggests that Mozilla should invest in building financial independence. One suggestion would be to build an endowment. Would you have other suggestions on how Mozilla and open-source organizations in general could do to achieve that?
Could Mozilla exist without Firefox? It's not like that's the only thing they do there. It's by far the easiest thing for them to generate revenue from (by driving Google searches) but the corporation could still exist by monetizing Bugzilla, Rust, Gecko, etc somehow.
There are no breaks on the exec comp train, only the end of the line. If the company is doing well the comp goes up, if it fails the comp goes up as a reward to compensate for the risk and attract talent. Until the company goes belly up.
containers in firefox changed the game for me. as well as lttp multithreading. it’s unfortunate that they appear to being mismanaged out if existence, as right now as a mac user, I have by far the best experience with it. really disappointing.
You also run into the issue of finding a replacement. Given that firefox appears to be sinking who will come in? If someone chooses to come in your going to have to pay a lot more them, and the team they want to bring in. So it will cost a lot more than keep the current staff, and you want the current staff to avoid the increase costs. The only reason firefox staff would be thrown out is if they can't turn it around after everything they tried. Look at yahoo, they were a sinking ship, current staff had no vision, then they hired a new CEO, who spent a ton of money, and it didn't help their situation, and bam a few years later you are sold. It works only if you bring in the right people, like AMD did. It is an uphill battle too. Imagine your career, now in 5 years, your career is gone, now what are you going to do? (This is how mining towns, etc died).
We have an organization where, at the same time they don't have revenue enough for keeping its workers, the decision makers increase their salary. Never mind the legal structure of the organization, that doesn't look to me very ethical.
At the same time, non-profits are suppose to have the mission of improving the world. I understand that the janitor doesn't care about the mission and just want to be payed, but the management should care, at least, about the optics. I, for sure, would not donate (1) to a non-profit if I think that my money is going to be used for buying Ferrari or houses in the Hamptons.
Non-profit just means that the company cannot make / pay out profit. It can still pay its employees a lot of money. It can still own for-profit corporate entities, take their profit, and spend it on other (non-money-making) causes.
the context is "for-profit" ... if a company is for-profit and somebody is contributing for free then that is a very personal choice - but there are more obvious reasons for not doing so.
No, the problem is that people don't understand what non-profit means. It has nothing to do with the internal structure of the company, employee salary (CEO is also an employee) etc. It has to do with external structure, i.e. ownership and distribution of profits (which there cannot be any).
Mozilla CEO's salary isn't even that big, in the large scheme of things.
Mozilla Foundation has a staff of 80 and "manages" about 1000 volunteers. It's unclear how much donations it gets as they published a consolidated report that includes the corporation. I expect that very little.
Mozilla Corporation has a staff of 750 and $400M revenue (I expect most from the Google search deal).
Donations go to the Mozilla Foundation, which largely does advocacy. The CEO works for the Mozilla Corporation, which makes far more money than the donations.
If you donate to the Mozilla Foundation, then by law that donation can only be used toward the non-profit activities of the Foundation. It cannot go toward Mozilla Corporation activities.
I’m not arguing the law, I’m arguing that Firefox should be a beneficiary of those donations. There is currently no way for anyone to donate to Mozilla for Firefox development, even though that is the main product that people derive value from.
To me, it seems like Mozilla Corporation should not have existed, and everything should have been part of the non-profit foundation.
IIRC if you write what something's for on a check in the memo/for line, it legally has to be used for that purpose for nonprofits, but I can't find a source and I doubt something like that would be a high-priority thing to audit for the IRS.
I think it's a one-dimensional view, assuming that there is no compensation. For starters, most of us work for for-profit companies and use open source to do our jobs.
I mean contributing as an outsider. I really have a problem contributing to open source projects of a company where I get the feeling that the upper management is simply filling its pockets.
I'm from Spain, so my knowledge may not be translatable, but I will give it a crack.
A business that is set up as a "non-profit" means that it can't pay dividends. If the business earns one million dollars, I can't profit from it. This does not mean there aren't people in the organization with salaries. Sometimes big salaries.
You can have a "for-profit" company owned by a "non-profit" one. The dividends paid by the "for-profit" go to the "non-profit" but those can only be reinvested. In a way, yes, "non-profitness" is inherited.
I guess that the "for-profit" organization provides legal benefits. If one of your child companies goes bankrupt, it shouldn't affect the other ones nor the parent company. I have a few more guesses but I am not confident enough to write about them, especially when I am not from the US.
Non-profits can have business activities that support their non-profit mission, and many of those business activities are subject to income tax.
So many non-profits split out the profit-making activities into a separate (for-profit) company so that they can keep non-profit financial streams separate from the for-profit ones.
It’s the converse that is not possible. A non-profit could reasonably have an investment arm that tries to maximize return on endowment (or likewise a for-profit subsidiary, by analogy) and various projects which are funded from the generated surplus.
A for-profit entity owning/operating a non-profit entity would be more difficult to justify without calling on other goals.
Eich is one of the worst humans in the software industry. Put aside all the social and political problems with him even technically (Brave) he values profit over human decency.
Sure - 20-40 jobs are absolutely valuable. The bigger point is that the indignation towards this CEO is a bit of a strawman, since it's easier to be angry at a greedy CEO than accept the idea that Mozilla may not be viable.
If the numbers in these threads are correct (CEO compensation at $2.5m/year, 250 employees laid off) then the entirety of executive compensation would only cover $10k/year of each laid off worker's compensation.
The point is not so much that the CEO's pay directly matches the salaries of the sacked employees, more that the CEO is clearly focused on their personal goals, rather than the organisational goals.
CEO's who reduce their salary in order to keep more staff on in lean times are servants of their organisation. CEO's who sack staff to save money so they can increase their own salary see the organisation as their servant.
It's not a crime to be greedy, but being greedy is a clear signal of your values and goals.
They couldn't keep on all the developers they fired, but they could keep some of them. On top of that, the optics of the situation aren't good for the company brand. Increasing executive pay while firing productive workers, particularly at a non-profit, seems generally frowned upon.
It's shameful period, non-profit or for-profit. But - don't hate the player, hate the game.
Our entire system has been setup like this for decades. 99% of earnings have been going to the top 1% for decades now.
I understand people who don't want to get behind BLM - I might not agree with them, but I "get" them.
But the fact that the country looked at Occupy Wallstreet and collectively shrugged its shoulders and said "I don't see a problem here" - well, here we are - slowly building back a feudal society while blaming the poorest amongst us for our troubles.
This makes me sad. I hope this doesn't mean the demise of Firefox, my personal browser from before it was called "Firefox".
I know many of us will pay for privacy, and even help subsidize those who can't, but they have to be alive first.
At work, I replaced Chrome with Brave, but I still trust FF as the browser for my personal life (in addition to, of course, Pi-Hole, Algo VPN, and a number of plugins; or QubesOS + Whonix when things are really serious).
Javascript has many faults, but go look into the history of how/why it was created and given that context, it's likely many would do far worse than he did.
The pigs that separate themselves in status from the rest of the farm animals horde more resources for themselves even in the face of worsening conditions on the farm (their grain windmill gets destroyed at some point).
The pigs serve as placeholders for Stalinists, but the general dynamic exists in any political situation that accepts inequality, like corporate capitalism in the case of Mozilla.
Mozilla bug tracker has lots of bugs which are open for decades.
I live outside of US and I’m annoyed that Firefox does not fill addresses in forms, for example. Because Mozilla does not bother finishing this feature for the rest of the world.
Similarly they have released credit card auto fill recently, and again, US only.
That’s just one of many example.
I still use Firefox, but mostly because it’s hard to switch (reconfigure all extensions, get used to new UI etc).
For people who don't particularly care about privacy, Firefox has nothing to offer and has a worse overall experience to Chrome.
I made the switch from Chrome to Firefox a year ago when for whatever reason Chrome started stalling. A year in, Containers all the rage, I still hate Firefox because its autocomplete sucks and if I type a/b in the search bar it tries to load http://a/b, what kind of logic is that? This isn't 1995. They literally fixed only this 2 versions ago.
Firefox market share is certainly down but is usage really down 85%? I thought the market share was down partly because of smart phones and the browser market has expanded a lot of the last 10 years, especially in poorer countries were more and more people get internet access.
It's pretty simple - for regular users Chrome is faster, has more features, uses less power, and has better website support. It is also aggressively marketed by the largest advertising company on the planet.
It wasn't always this way. For example, FF beat Chrome in battery life until a few years ago, and FF extensions used to be superior in functionality Chrome extensions. Chrome eventually caught up in the few areas they were seriously lagging in, or Firefox shot itself in the foot trying to morph itself into a copy of Chrome (eg. multiprocess architecture, WebExtensions).
Today there is little reason to use any browser other than Chrome / Chromium or Safari (which is still superior on Mac / iOS in a few aspects).
1,369 comments
[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 308 ms ] threadWhether they need someone that expensive is up to the organization to decide.
What about having a decent base salary, and a bonus of extra millions if your results align with the organization goals?
SV companies relocate development but never the top brass to Europe as they would lose their pay, status and network.
Believe it or not, just like with dating and real estate, your monetary value is more dependent on where you are rather than how good you are. Shocking, I know.
If he would do that, maybe better leadership would improve Mozillas situation.
When Mitchell was given a raise for no reason, it is a sign of corruption in Mozilla board.
https://usanewssite.com/news/the-unconventional-ceo-of-33-3-...
[0] https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/200...
For that kind of negative growth? No, of course not.
> In its fiscal year ending January 31, 2019, for example, Snowflake had revenue of $96.7 million. A year later that number was $264.7 million, or growth of around 150% at scale.
Admittedly, Baker specifically got her role by being "promoted" from a Netscape lawyer and then playing a role in the creation of Mozilla, so my complaint doesn't quite apply. I'd still see letting her go and promoting someone to fill her place as a better alternative to the pay raise.
(If you look at a company's share price, you will see a drop roughly equivalent to the dividend per share each time dividends are paid.)
It would be an achievement if she shifted focus as soon as she became CEO, but several years later is probably too late.
Also she killed MDN, and that’s a big loss for the internet.
Firefox decline in the past decade can also be partly credited by chrome eating the world. Firefox has a huge responsibility too because it became bad (at least performance wise?) at some point (or was it a little over 10 years ago?) and lost users because of this and has trouble recovering even if it has become better at this again, because people either moved on, embraced chrome (or a chromium-based browser) or I don't know what.
I want mozilla to survive and can't really say I support them if I don't use firefox so I came back to firefox after years using vivaldi. But I can see myself going back to vivaldi any time actually. I'm missing vivaldi features, firefox is slower for some/many use cases (mostly because things have been optimized for chrome).
I want to believe but I don't see how firefox can get back its market share. Now everything you build for the web has to be optimized for chrome, many don't even care if it is utterly broken on firefox because it's so niche.
For example, their VPN service is not actually theirs, it's a Swedish company called Mullvad that actually provides the service. I am already a user of Mullvad and I can't get Firefox VPN. Isn't that kind of strange? Even if I could get it, why would I pay Mozilla extra money for a service that I can get cheaper directly from the provider? Not only that, but Mullvad accepts cash and I believe Mozilla VPN probably won't. So the privacy aspect is already bigger with simply using Mullvad to begin with. They go into the VPN business because they want to make money but paint the picture of that they want to protect the privacy of consumers. It's just a dishonest picture they're painting and I think users sense that a mile away these days. It's the woke mindset that they pretend to care but doesn't really. They just follow like so many other tech companies what's popular to care about in California and completely forget that the world is larger than one US state. And even if they did care, really a VPN service? That market is so overly saturated by hundreds of services it doesn't require a genius to realize that this will be a hard thing to make any kind of dough on.
Their ventures into other things have mostly been failing ones and if they really want to get rid of google the obvious choice is to monetize Firefox itself. I, like many others, would gladly pay for Firefox if I knew it went to the development of Firefox and maybe to other projects that benefits it like Rust, MDN etc. But if I donate today, my money will most likely go to Bakers ridiculous salary.
I am pretty sure this is your biases distorting your perspective. Of course I may be biased as well, but take note that the entire conversation on this comment section is about Firefox's failures, which are numerable, and very little of it has anything to do with what you're talking about. For instance the guy's crazy salary has nothing to do with wokeness, as you well know -- it has to do with all the other reasons this is a dramatic failure of capitalism.
If someone tried to shut down my argument with one of those excuses and I didn't know enough about each of them to either explain away their influence or revise my theory, my first step would be to figure out what they are. To dismiss them is to just admit ignorance of statistics, and thus the world.
I think the reason that Firefox failed is because of their logo. No, I will not explain, and if you dismiss me without a well-reasoned argument, you're a pretentious mid-wit(?).
edit: ah, "midwit" is a neologism from the intellectual dark web. You're just defending the comment because you agree with it, and pretending it's a question of reason or civility. Who could have guessed?
Those responses are evidence for why it may be wrong. But in isolation they are needlessly terse. Lack of evidence is not the problem, lack of accompanying explanation of why they are evidence, and how they apply, is.
> Though had I known you'd nitpick, I would have said: "Furnish evidence or a solid argument for why he is wrong in addition to it."
And then it would be much clearer, not because I'm nitpicking, but because it's ambiguous otherwise, and open to the interpretation I came to. Since that's not what you intended, it's better to eliminate that misinterpretation.
The bottom line is that clarity is not a matter of intent, but of interpretation by others. At least one person (me) thought you were unclear, and I suspect others did as well. You can complain that they are nitpicking, or accept that you were misinterpreted, and expressing yourself differently might have avoided the problem. Only you can control that, so it doesn't make a lot of sense to blame other people if they aren't being purposefully obtuse (and I promise I'm not).
I've seen numerous people craving for better container support, which is definitely a killer feature for people going forward towards a more private web. Why isn't Mozilla more actively developing this? Developers were the primary driver behind adopting Firefox during it's hayday - no reason why it can't be again if we have the resources to make a compelling case for it.
What's wrong with the support it has? [1]
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account...
TBH, those days I tend to use separate browsers, because profile management is significantly less convenient than just running a different program.
So I've had to install an auto-reload extension[1] which simply reloads the Slack tab once an hour, and that contains Slacks stupidity.
Now Firefox is nice and fast, even with hundreds of tabs across many windows.
[1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/reloadmatic/
And now they switched back to shared memory again, and the moment they did, the browser started hanging again, like it used to do pre-Quantum days.
Chromium's "per process memory isolation" is the right approach, despite all the cries about memory use. I'd rather have that than have the browser hang on me, or have more security issues.
If anything, I think even the future of operating systems is complete process isolation and separation by virtualization tech and encrypting each process in RAM with a different key. The hardware is coming, but it may take another 10-15 years for this to be fully realized.
I could not get Chrome to stay stable enough with that much resource utilization, and the most important part I've learned is that Firefox's profiles storage formats are open enough that I've been able to recover from some pretty bad kernel panics (due to the graphics card switching on my laptop; disabling that fixed the panics).
Probably next Macbook Pro refresh cycle from Apple I'll upgrade to the latest they introduce, but Firefox-as-daily-driver has been able to take a lot of abuse from me.
[+] as in 500 or more. I use my browser windows to keep my 'state' of what I need to read and where I've left off, by the time they are all closed again I'm done preparing for an interview.
Regarding performance on macOS, Firefox runs fine for me and I very very rarely have below 50 tabs open. Have you tried it recently? I had read there were some bugs with macOS but most of those were resolved a couple of years ago.
Firefox Mobile is generally fine, though I occasionally end up in a state where tabs refuse to load and I need to kill the whole app. Minor annoyance.
Desktop though, when I've got a bunch of tabs open and I close a bunch down by clicking the 'x's, I definitely notice how much Firefox speeds up as I close each tab. What drove the knife in was on the odd occasion that I needed Chrome, opening it up was like a breath of fresh air that was hard to ignore. Pages just seem to load faster and the Chrome seems more responsive under lots-of-tab situations.
Another part is peer pressure - the frontend guys all just use chrome, so pairing is a little bit more frictious. Though there is benefit to having someone in the team who uses something different to Chrome. I just don't want to be that guy.
I think the writing is on the wall.
> Mitchell Baker, Mozilla's top executive, was paid $2.4m in 2018
but doesn't offer any consideration or speculation as to why this is exaggerated. It's entirely possible that without that particular exec, Firefox would have been even worse off, or would have taken another direction with regards to privacy, etc.
My subjective feeling is that $2.4m does indeed seem too high for such a position. But I have no objective data to support or refute this. It's quite possible that the same person managing a comparable employee base at a FAANG would earn even more.
Maybe a good CEO isn't defined just by the salary he or she receives?
It’s not possible to get from 0 users to 20% market share overnight. Brave is doing great.
What about US based NGO's? I don't know where to find this data.
Lastly, a FAANG may or may not pay more, but they're certainly in a much better financial position than Mozilla to pay a high salary.
> James Skogsbergh, Advocate Aurora Health Title:Chief Executive Officer , Director Amount:$8,511,609 % Revenue:14.9% Revenue:$56,950,972
~1/7 of the revenue of charity goes to CEO's pay? Is that even legal?
Granted, you have to deal with pressure, but today CEO can just switch companies like underwear. They press KPI on every employee but are themselves nearly exempt from any quantifiable metric aside from turnover.
But in general CEO pay is rising with falling results and falling pay for everyone else.
And they can't reduce their salary now because it'd be unfair on their families.
Firefox has a problem. It gets most of its revenue from Google. They need a different revenue stream but their ideas haven't worked.
Their executives are clearly failures. But with such high pay, they're cashing out. Buying themselves mansions etc.
Isn't that pretty much admitting that they're on a sinking ship?
This kind of bullshit infuriates me to no end.
I believe they should justify the value they create in this high paid positions compared to all other people making and disseminating the product. There is no justification for this level.
There are lots and lots of families there living on a less fair level of salary but produce much more value (and no damages).
I don't get it.
(I don't even make that much in a month (after taxes)).
That excludes purely burning cash ie on drugs/alcohol, hookers or living in super-high rental place.
If you make that much money, you're not paying more than 25% taxes. Or you are not using the right lawyers.
Most countries also seem to have savings plans where you put money away until retirement and pay taxes only when you're allowed to take it out, after retirement age (after retirement, you have a lower income, so pay a lower tax rate). Of course, you still pay those taxes (wouldn't be a certainty of life, now, would it?), but they're lower.
I also think I still have some legal headroom for optimizing my tax return forms. Maybe I'll have to try an accountant next year.
I don't think this is controversial. Warren Buffett talked about how he pays a lower tax rate than his secretary. There is also the famous curve of tax vs income group: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/10/06/opinion/incom...
Then, you have trust funds for your children so that none of them ever have to work. And when you die, your children will inherit the fortune, so they can do the same for their children, ad infinitum. And if they want a "job" you can start a nonprofit that they can run, so they can be known as successful administrators while you are recognized as a selfless philanthropist who gave away so much money.
I guess it would be hard on their families because they would move off the fast track of multi-generational absolute financial security.
You go from a $1 million dollar home, to a $10 million dollar home.
Instead of one $50k car, you now own 2-3 $150k cars.
Tens of thousands of dollars will go towards your kids education, every single year.
You hire people to do work for you (tutors, nannies, maids, whatever), these cost tens of thousands of dollars.
Maybe you buy some vacation property - that's more money to spend.
And, in the end, you're not some kind of high-rolling baller that jet sets around the world in a private jet or yacht, spending fortunes on vanity.
You're really "just" living the very upper-middle class life.
A clear problem, should address it, but probably won't. And will make up some phoney reason to justify it.
Doesn’t seem to be much of a misquote. Poor Mitchell Baker. She’ll just have to suffer with her non-discounted salary.
Again, I don't agree with that since clearly the higher salaries are not attracting any talented executives either.
I would much rather a lower-salary, less-experienced CEO who actually cares about the mission enough to accept that salary, than someone who has presided over an erosion of Firefox's market share and significant layoffs, while still increasing her own salary. Clearly the system is not working by paying their CEO a market rate.
IMHO, 5% is actually fine. That's a robust user base of a few tens to hundreds of million users. Nothing to sneeze at and a good basis for long term existence of the project.
Where Mozilla went the wrong direction is with their commercial activities. Their core problem is that their product is a commodity. It's just not going to bring in a lot of revenue. Apple and Google use their respective browser as a control point for the app store and ads. It's an expense worth making because they both exploit the large number of users using their browsers via other channels. Most of what Google does is motivated by this. Likewise, Apple is selling hardware, apps, and subscriptions.
Mozilla does not have a similarly viable way of generating revenue from their user base. It's an OSS product that users install and use for free. Their core value is actually protecting users against that kind of thing which is a noble thing to do but not a business plan.
That's why Mozilla was initially styled as a foundation. The commercial branch came later and its the commercial branch that is failing; not the foundation. They have no money maker of note other than their search traffic deals. Everything else, including (I'll just call this right now), their recent VPN offering is never going to come close to bankrolling their operation. This follows a long line of failed investments in a mobile strategy that never panned out, various "experiments' that never got off the ground, misc services that they launched and that people promptly forgot about, etc. None of it engaged more than a fraction of their user base. None of it wowed anyone. None of it was more than a me too effort of replicating things that already existed and already were commodities. Mozilla as an investment vehicle for new products only loosely connected to Firefox has failed.
The way out is back to basics. Pull the plug on the Mozilla corporation as soon as convenient for investors and setup the foundation for success and untangle it from the VCs. It will need donations, the search engine revenue looks good as well and ought to be allocated 100% to keeping the browser going. There should be enough to keep an engineering team going. It doesn't need a marketing department, offices in London, Paris, San Francisco, Mountain View, etc. Hell, the rent for that alone could keep a development team going for a very long time. Much bigger things have been built with far less. That shit only ever made sense when Mozilla was styling itself as an incubation vehicle for turning VC money into products. Now that that has definitely failed, time to walk away from that.
And then there's the Rust part of the company. IMHO that's a valid asset where Mozilla has a lot of influence in a rapidly growing community. There's an opportunity there to grow some healthy business around that supporting the many companies looking to leverage that. So far, they run it like a charity. That's a mistake. Aside from Firefox, that's actually the single most valuable IP they ever created. And like Firefox, it lacks a plan for revenue. Rust almost happened by accident. But MS and Apple are now looking to use it and it seems people are doing Rust things in the Linux kernel as well.
This. So much this. Besides, if they moved their HQ outside the Valley, they could probably also hire new people for much less…
Even worse, the cheapest comparable alternatives are free. At least commodities can be sold at the market price if you can't differentiate yours enough.
My phone browser is like a snack, my desktop browser is what I care about.
It's bad for the organization, but the leadership doesn't really care about that.
The CEO's yacht won't pay itself.
The same is true for most of the engineers at Mozilla. They could go to FAANGs and increase their compensation quite a bit.
So while I agree that the leadership has been bad, executive pay was not the problem. Executive decision-making was the problem. Hiring leaders who could make better decisions certainly won't be any cheaper.
I mean, really? After their record of poor performance at Mozilla?
> Hiring leaders who could make better decisions certainly won't be any cheaper.
It's been blindly obvious for years what they should do, but let's state it again: (1) Build up a fund instead of throwing away the money, so they can be financially independent. (2) Concentrate on the browser and users.
#2 is a matter of opinion in a couple ways. Work on the browser for the betterment of users has never stopped. Intent has always been there, but we can debate quality of plan and execution.
Worth mentioning is how hard it is to rate performance given lack of counterfactuals. Is there even any golden path of success in all of the solution space? All we know is that what was tried hasn't worked.
Its an open source project people believe in. Reduce the pay and you are probably actually more likely to cut out the worst execs and focus only on smart people who want to contribute.
Yes, indeed a good CEO has offers from elsewhere. But...why isn't the business and governance open-sourced like the codebase?
Now, is every well paid CEO a truly good leader? No. But I’d argue it’s a lot more difficult to assess a good leader than a good developer. There’s a lot more people management, marketing and other soft skills involved. Not to mention the time scales for success are much larger.
At a decent-sized org it is nearly impossible to measure an individual developer's impact with any granularity.
I think this should also illustrate that evaluating a leader and evaluating a developer are two entirely different things that can't be directly compared anyway.
But over what timescale? For startups especially it is not easy to evaluate a job that involves long term planning in the short term.
Eventually you get CEOs making statements that amount to 'I deliver 10x or 20x more value to this company than you, all my CEO peers say so.'
If this counts as "saving Firefox" I'm not sure I want to know the alternative.
That's just baseless assumptions. And considering that this "saving" did not work out so far, it seems they are not even worth the money at all.
On another side, for the money of one of this managers, you could probably get a dozen or more semi-competent people who are more eager to make money and save the project.
Eich. But you'll have to kick out the idpol activists still left at Mozilla, the people who ditched FirefoxOS and contributed to the destruction of Firefox.
Just because someone opposes gay marriage for religious reasons doesn't make them a superhero or saint. Is Brave browser doing better than Firefox with his miraculous help?
Seems like the people angry about this political issue are one key factor in us heading towards an internet monoculture.
a) Eich publicly called out Mozilla's current CEO compensation. b) well the current CEO isn't doing that either.
> Just because someone opposes gay marriage for religious reasons doesn't make them a superhero or saint. Is Brave browser doing better than Firefox with his miraculous help?
Exactly, it had nothing to do with anything but people who wanted Eich's head. The same people that are now sinking Mozilla because they have no vision for the company, just virtue signalling.
What % of engineers at Mozilla are in SV and other places where Mozilla competes with FAANG? I thought quite a lot of the employees were remote all over the world.
So let them.
> The same is true for most of the engineers at Mozilla. They could go to FAANGs and increase their compensation quite a bit.
So let them.
To both your assertions, I highly doubt it. Maybe 1 or 2, but for the vast majority, no.
And Mozilla's poor track record suggests that if Mozilla insists on paying the same CEO salary, they might do well to find a different CEO to give it to.
I think the point is less that this CEO should take a pay cut — although she probably should — but more that the mediocrity + layoffs + exorbitant-CEO-salary situation here reeks of self-dealing.
Find a CEO whose motivation is more "make the world a better place" than "make millions of dollars a year". $500k is a large enough salary to live well just about anywhere. After that it's just "victory points" in the game of careerism.
These theories are untested, except that we now know for certain that paying $2.5M doesn't guarantee that the CEO is any good.
I would bet you can hire an excellent, technically competent CEO for Mozilla for $250k a year.
But how long would they stay after other companies learn this new person is actually competent and start throwing money at them.
Yes.
They are admitting they are solely reliant on Google's money. Given that Google Chrome is a direct competitor to Firefox and has gained more market share, Google can justify to either reduce spend or stop paying for being the default search engine in Firefox due to its shrinking market share and instead pay more for Apple Safari as the default in iOS, macOS, etc instead.
Mozilla and Firefox will be another geek's relic in this decade if it doesn't find another revenue source apart from relying on Google - A direct competitor in all areas.
When you see Mozilla as a Big Tech trust-fund baby struggling with cognitive dissonance, then their behavior makes sense.
'Failures' on the other hand - that is a loaded word. They are failures, they have failed at making Firefox popular. But what needed to happen to build an alternative world where they succeeded? The browsers that succeeded were Chrome and Safari - browsers sponsored by the owners of the two major platforms for accessing the internet, backed by billions of dollars of corporatyness.
What is Firefox meant to do? Charities aren't innovation engines. Back in the day when they were making progress on market share, the options were Firefox or IE6. The strategy of the Chrome web team is slightly different than the IE6 web team. I'm sour about Firefox wiping out their value proposition when they canned the good extensions - but that happened circa 2017 so it isn't the problem for adoption. They need something radical to be relevant and that isn't a fair ask of a nonprofit.
The unique selling point of Firefox (and especially: mobile Firefox) was ability to heavily customize it and use third party extensions.
Those extensions were the ones bringing in the innovation -> most ideas came from third parties (on a side note: usually for free, since extensions are hard to monetize). The system just worked and gave many popular extensions like Tab Mix Plus, Ad-Block, Noscript... through basic customization extensions like Classic Theme Restorer (have you ever setup new browser for a grandmother who does not need 50 options everywhere when you right click? can you even do this now in new Firefox? or the new extension model does not allow it) through countless small extensions that changed users' workflows how they wanted. This ecosystem is all gone.
Developers inside of Firefox completely ignored it - they killed the old extension system because they didn't like it, while they did not provide anything that is even 25% as good. I understand that creating a new, better system is hard, but that is their job and core product. Firefox could have been providing the framework on which extensions would sit. Also, they earned 500 million dollars per year, for years; had over 1000 employees. They couldnt find people who could solve hard problems?
Or maybe it is a failure of project management: developers ignored hard problems, they preferred to work on new, shiny green-field projects. Those new toys are great: they boost the CV, allow to play with new technologies, often are left in half baked state so you dont care about bugs. They also have no users, so nobody will complain, basically no accountability for a project that is never finished and killed after 1-2 years. We saw many of such side projects in Firefox - all shifting away resources from the core product that is neglected.
The big question is whether there’s a model for browser development which isn’t subsidized by huge companies which profit elsewhere. Short of government support (antitrust, direct funding, etc.) I’m not sure there is a viable path forward.
But now they are a fringe browser, that already has problems keeping up with the developments on the web.
Note that for Google they are only a fig-leaf in their upcoming anti-trust case. Note that Google pulled a lot of underhanded tricks to get people to switch to Chrome and paying FF may have been just enough to keep Mozilla quiet about this. If it had been a for-profit situation and with a different source of revenues for Mozilla then there is a fair chance Mozilla would have made a case for anti-competitive behavior by Google.
So that money may have acted to Google's benefit in more than just one way.
Maybe you just can't run a successful business in the browser space in 2020. It was already plenty difficult in the mid-90's, wasn't it?
Let's assume good faith and that executive pay in general at Mozilla was not competitive.
That would be similar to a company noticing that it has been underpaying software engineers and then choosing to bump up compensation significantly.
A question that raises is: do executives (and software engineers?) bring the value that is associated with those pay grades, given that they seem increasingly detached from other roles?
I don't know - are many people here on HN familiar enough with executive-level strategy, connections and work practices to discuss whether that value is justified?
In honesty I believe that some executives are probably capable of using their personal networks to bring on-board significant expertise, industry influence, negotiating power and other talents (such as, frankly, the ability to dominate conversations and sway opinions, for better or worse - as long as it doesn't hurt the company) that are typically hard to quantify or certificate.
If the tech industry continues consolidating into a smaller number of more important companies then it seems understandable that those influence and network effects become more important in order to stay competitive.
I'm not sure if that's fair - those might not be the kind of skills that can necessarily be learned; I'd argue they're frequently side-effects of people's upbringing, social networks, and psychological profiles (including some dark/problematic personality types). But it explains the realpolitik of the situation without demonizing individual decision-makers for what may be rational choices in the environment.
The problem is that this is a very subjective claim. If you think of mozilla as belonging to the same category as tech giants or successful tech startups, and believe it needs to compete with them to attract talent then it's not unreasonable. If you think of firefox as a charity then it's completely insane.
Compensation for charity CEOs, even tech focussed ones (like the EFF, TOR, wikimedia, khan academy) are lower, usually much lower. A number of charities have managed to attract impressive CEOs despite not paying 'market' rates.
It's pure conjecture but I'd imagine that the compensation culture in this case started near the top of the company (given that it appears executive-centric) - perhaps based on conversations with potential hires, vendors, competitors, and so forth.
Given the nature of Firefox, I'd expect many of those third parties would have been anchored in the 'tech giant' world -- perhaps leading compensation policy astray.
What ideas though?
WTF of an excuse that is?!
afair AMD CEO is paid 4x less than Mozilla CEO.
AMD's Lisa Su was the highest-paid CEO of a company in the S&P 500 last year. Su earned a total of $58.5 million in 2019 [0]
Mitchell Baker, Mozilla's top executive, was paid $2.4m in 2018 [1]
[0] https://edition.cnn.com/2020/06/01/tech/lisa-su-amd-highest-...
[1] http://calpaterson.com/mozilla.html
So not 4x, but 2x based on base salary.
Su revived a company on the verge of bankruptcy. Since she was appointed CEO, AMD's stock has soared and they've made themselves a viable competitor against Intel. This has been a massive boon to the market.
It's worth noting that Su has a deep understanding of the underlying technology that the company works on (she's an electrical engineer), which was essential to her success at the company.
Su is an example of merit-based compensation. Baker is not.
Imagine saying, "well, I know he gunned 20 kids in a school down, but he had such a bad day, he's just couldn't take it." Sure it's probably true, but it's definitely not right.
Yes. The exec team and CEO.
They should be ousted.
"Unfair to their families"? What BS, what about the families of the laid-off?
Yes I read that too, I couldn't believe it.
She can decide to work for a non-profit, work for the good of the Internet and its users. Accept to earn 500k, which put her well in the top 5% earners and let her and her family live a comfortable life even in Silicon Valley.
Or she can go work as an exec for Google/Apple/Facebook, accept that she's just working for a group of people against others, and be aware she'll be actively doing harm to people's privacy and freedom, but rake in a multi-million dollar salary every year.
I'm sure there are plenty of skilled and talented people who would be happy to work as an exec for Mozilla for the meager salary of 500k.
The quote is not really crazy:
"Executive compensation is a general topic -- are execs, esp CEOs paid too much? I'm of the camp that thinks the different between exec comp and other comp is high. So then i think, OK what should mozilla do about it? My answer is that we try to mitigate this, but we won't solve this general social problem on our own. Here's what I mean by mitigate: we ask our executives to accept a discount from the market-based pay they could get elsewhere. But we don't ask for an 75-80% discount. I use that number because a few years ago when the then-ceo had our compensation structure examined, 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."
https://answers.thenextweb.com/s/mitchell-baker-aGY62z?comme...
First, an 80% discount would still leave the CEO on a very comfortable salary. They're not going to have to dumpster-dive for dinner.
Second, what about doing the job on principle? Plenty of people volunteer their time to good causes for no money whatsoever.
And then to wipe out a massive portion of your employee base? I find it abhorrent, personally.
This would be impossible for Mozilla's structure
Well...bye.
Baker has clearly not been worth her increased salary; I don't even think she's worth the original 20%-of-market salary, given how Firefox's market share has dropped precipitously, and Mozilla has been forced to lay off staff.
Sure, you're probably not going to get a 100%-of-market-rate CEO for a 20%-of-market-rate salary, for CEOs who only care about compensation. But I think that's ok, especially given that some CEOs aren't even worth 20%. And you're much more likely to get someone who actually cares about the mission.
Couldn't she just have gone and become CEO at a different company if she wanted to make more, like the rest of us do?
In a commercial company, there would be activist investors pushing to cut manager's pay and change management. But I'm not familiar with this type of NGOs so well; who is supposed play the role of principal here? And are they not playing it properly?
...I guess if you get your money from a disinterested Google rather than fundraising there really isn't anyone to push back against inefficiency/poor performance.
Really the board should have been pushing back/course correcting, but sadly even in private companies boards are usually weak af (simply doing the ceos bidding).
FYI -- The foundation owns the IP, while the corporation manages software engineering and the Google search deal.
But for execs it's about their need.
Once again, it's down to rich vs poor. Rules for thee but not for me.
That's downright appalling.
That said: to me it comes off as a bit done deaf to raise salaries for top execs in a non profit while firing the people who does the work and also I cannot see how anything should be prioritized if the situation is critical except:
- the main revenue driver and simultaneously their biggest contribution to fulfilling their mission, Firefox.
- initiatives to add more reliable sources of income for the long run.
Deprioritizing Firefox seems crazy in such a situation.
(I know nothing about their actual plans but I could come up with is if they are cutting spending to save up money for an endowment fund, but I guess that is just wishful thinking.)
It's not just that they get most of their revenue from Google -- it's that they're getting most of their revenue from a company that also runs their biggest competitor and has every incentive to push their own product over someone else's.
Apple and Mozilla both have uncomfortable dependencies on Google nowadays, so I wonder if one of them (if not both) are looking to buy DuckDuckGo.
Respectable.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980s_austerity_policy_in_Roma... [2] https://medium.com/incerto/corporate-socialism-the-governmen...
I also suspect Firefox engineers are underpaid relative to Google SWEs working on Chrome.
"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."
https://answers.thenextweb.com/s/mitchell-baker-aGY62z
But it’s moral to let people starve, die of preventable disease due to sitting on your ha day
Welcome to America’s emotional prison
Old people have convinced young people to pander to them until they’re the grave, they’re locking up the judiciary to force themselves on the future
And Americans sit here like coddled children
Isn’t that pretty much living in a sinking ship of a country?
No one here going to admit the top down political failures of the past aren’t able to handle modern reality?
There is no artificial shortage of code anymore. GitHub and GitLab are gutting that labor market. Who cares if they can’t make new code shapes? Business only cares that the machines keep sorting. Self aggrandizing nerds care about code shapes.
BUT... key point here, I totally agree with them regarding their compensation.
Even non-profits have to be competitive.
Imagine it's YOU... everyone you know is making 350-400k at Google and you're stuck making 180 or whatever at FF. Would you stay?
And sure, say YOU would, what % of your colleagues do you think would stay?
Oh heaves their family!
Exec Compensation should be linked to performance not to garbage like market value.
Fuck Mozilla and its execs
HN crowd is a sucker when it comes to Mozilla. These bleeding hearts don’t bleed for furloughed and fired Mozilla drones. They only care about their political agenda not business or technological value.
But if the company/organization is doing poorly, the CEO doesn't deserve the high pay. And having the pay reduced, or even not being paid at all for a time if it can help the company is one of the risks CEO should be able to take. It is not unfair for their families if they planned for it in advance instead of taking their high pay for granted. You can save a lot when you are being paid millions.
Today: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/leadership/
One year ago: https://web.archive.org/web/20190923050403/https://www.mozil...
Two years ago: https://web.archive.org/web/20180923185143/https://www.mozil...
Specifically for criticism of the CEO, I wish people would keep in mind that Chris Beard was CEO from 2014 through 2019.
https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2019/08/29/thank-you-chris/
https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2020/04/08/mitchell-baker-name...
(Disclaimer: I work for Mozilla)
> And they can't reduce their salary now because it'd be unfair on their families.
To give context, Baker's annual salary is $2.5 million.
That's fucking bullshit. They make millions.
Why is there no system for calling them out on this, swiftly kicking them out and staunching the bleeding?
The only silver lining here compared to any other type of software, is that legally, this software can never be anything but open source -- so we are all free to fork and attempt to do a better job, and make a valiant try in not repeating history.
Honestly as a dev that sounds to me like a culture where engineers are too able to run free. If anything.
But of course swiftly kicking people out to staunch the bleeding - as happened recently - can cause a lot of pain and backlash too. New executives usually cause strategy/org thrash which sucks for everyone at the bottom.
Just saying these things are hard. Executives have to make decisions that suck, doesn't mean they're vampires. May be very painful for them too.
All of the moonshot projects are done at the direction of executive leadership in the hopes to open new profit streams.
In fact some of the more technically promising projects (like Servo) had their whole entire team laid off recently to "refocus" on more of these executive-sourced profit grab moonshots
IMO We desperately need socialism and an end to rent-collection in totality.
As a private company it is their right to fail.
It's like Nokia all over again; the plurality of people who are watching this failure predict every step of it, but are denigrated as antisocial, selfish, mentally-ill trolls. As they leave, the ones who remain are attacked more, because now they're outnumbered in every conversation. Then the company fails.
Of course, in this case firefox will never disappear, but stumble along like a zombie, forever, because google needs it for antitrust purposes. Mozilla will do anything but work on its browser, at high salaries, rife with self-dealing and cush jobs handed out to the most connected, while claiming the languishing firefox as its emotional core and charitable mission. The work done on firefox will consist of tests for things that chrome is thinking of doing, or the non-disableable incorporation of acquired companies or partners into its functionality.
There's no system for calling them out on this other than just calling them out on this. They don't have any duty to us.
Firefox OS has been pretty much unsuccessful, but it sort of made sense? It started to be made when Firefox was still on top on desktop, but mobile started eating its lunch; and it was clear that Firefox need to do something about it, or the future will be all Chrome and Safari, on the two locked-down platforms.
Which eventually happened, of course, and Firefox share is neglible nowadays on mobile.
The identity management with Persona or what was the name also made sense. People at that time started using Google and Facebook for unified identity, and it made sense to make a decentralized identity.
None of these project ultimately worked, but they made sense?
What never made sense to me was Pocket or Send, or even the teleconferencing they had, but it seems that Firefox doubles down on Pocket now.
Look at the Chinese Manufacturers having trouble to deploy Android due to tech embargos.
If those could just install a free os made by an indendent Organisation...
It would not help to overcome embargoes if said independent organization is established in California.
The only issue with Android is that it isn't really opensource - users expect the Google apps, and those are closed source.
I think the main bottleneck is not the installation by the vendors, but the apps available.
I believe, what is missing is an abstraction layer between the apps and the OS. If it was possible to create apps for Android and Apple in a generic way and, it was easy to add a third OS, so all the apps could be made available to the new system, a new OS would be not so limited. I know, I know, that is itself a very difficult endeavor.
The thing holding them back is apples deliberate crippling of them to make them hard to install, slow, buggy, and not having basic platform features.
I believe Apple is deliberately doing that because if they supported PWA's properly, they'd loose all vendor lock in.
imo pwa's on webkit are only crippled in regards to the google extensions that make no sense for most usecases but ad-tracking.
Classic example: Oil companies "investing" in clean tech in the 90's, sucking up government grants and public attention and never really getting anywhere probably slowed down the switch to renewables by 10+ years.
This is exactly my take on it.
I think timing was a big part of it, too. They were too late to get a foothold on the current market, but too early to take advantage of the more open platforms coming out nowadays like the PinePhone.
But the small brainless degradations of the UI in Firefox make me worry about its future. For example it’s not possible to permanently add exclusions to the privacy shield. Because of it the sites are often broken. And this is a feature that is directly user facing on the main screen!
I loved RIL but Pocket is but a shadow of what it once was.
Similar to Evernote web clips, or Instapaper. I now use OneNote instead with the webclipper plugin, mostly because it puts the clips in a place where I can also add my own notes.
Best of all, it's all in Markdown. There's a beta rich text editor, but the Markdown editor has a preview and a little button bar for common stuff like lists and formatting.
I think it would be a valid strategy if you do go after developers and sysadmins. So pour resources in getting parity where devs think they would switch.
In general whenever I help installing software for someone, I install FF, and I think I have installed in at least a couple dozen computers now.
Aka do a Blender. Blender has gained momentum by getting things right, not adding features nobody wants, or Blender sidegigs.
There is also the problem of addon monetization, Chrome has a whole ecosystem of people earning revenue from add ons. That’s a invested network you have to deal with at some point.
There is a parsimoniousness about Blender that is really quite incredible. I have rarely used an app that has so successfully resisted feature-creep and bloat. E.g. unlike almost all other 3D apps, it has no radial array tool or feature. Why not? Because you can cook your own using a simple linear array.
I not knocking blender. I love its austere design philosophy. The add-ons are a case in point. Some very important functionality is not loaded by default (e.g. loop tools and copy attributes). But the devs seem to be saying, 'if we can live without something in the default load, then we should'. Huge difference to bloatware like 3DS Max.
The only place left for them is webapps like some of the electron based apps.
That's a side effect of not listening to developers.
---
Dramatization:
* 3 years later * * 1 year later * ---To be honest I think that Firefox has already crossed the point of no return, in the past Firefox used to have a share of about 30% of the market and supporting Firefox was justified even if that meant writing twice the lines of code, but nowadays the share is less than 3%. Firefox doesn't have enough resources to compete against Chrome with features, and people doesn't care enough about security to justify a broken web for the sake of security.
I don't know whether it's a good idea or not, but rather than pitching Firefox for the mainstream web, I would push Firefox to become the de-facto browser for security sensitive scenarios (ex. online shopping, online banking, taxes, etc.). Supporting a subset of the web makes more sense in a resource-constrained scenario especially because the Servo experiment and the Rust project exist to tackle the security issue.
Regarding Send/Teleconferencing, I think that made sense to. In theory you don't need anything as complicated as Skype or Teams or Zoom and lots of people, me including, use VOIP a lot. It would have been nice to have a simple click to call on the browser itself. Same goes for sending files with a click. Utilities that lots of people use and would give the browser a boost. Unfortunately I think these products failed because the sort of person who needs them is the sort of person who does not like learning new things so even if their current method is 8 steps and takes addition software and is not free, they will keep with what is currently working for them. Again this might also be Mozilla's marketing falling short.
Native is by nature faster, which makes sense on the resource sensitive devices.
webOS (the Palm thing) did the same mistake, I think.
It makes sense on desktop, and even there people keep complaining about Electron performance.
Ultimately webOS didn't lose because it was web tech. It lost because Android and iOS already captured the market. Windows Phone was a .NET runtime with similar performance to Java, but it failed to capture the market even with billions in Microsoft subsidies.
People don't complain about VSCode because microsoft tried hard with optimizing performance. But see any discussion about Atom, its "predecessor", or Slack (at least the older version, that was really memory hungry).
To counter that anecdote, I have an LG WebOS television and it is constantly freezing, I frequently have to power cycle it just to launch Netflix, it automatically updates itself without my consent, and each update seems to make it slower, or break something. Simply navigating the menu is a pain because of how unresponsive and slow it is, and setting it up required me to agree to a bunch of privacy policies.
To be fair, I blame LG for that more than WebOS. I don't really know anything about WebOS and how it relates to web tech, but I do remember using it many years ago on an HP TouchPad tablet. That was a great tablet experience at the time; way better than anything Android had to offer (except for the larger catalog of apps)
Electron is bad because it uses a separate browser engine per app. Webviews don't have that problem.
It was clear from the start that Mozilla did not have enough to move the needle in the mobile market all by itself. FFOS was a massive waste of time, effort, and money, that even resulted in a loss of prestige for the brand. It sucked the air out of more relevant priorities, diverted (and eventually often lost) their best talent, and wasted time and focus at a critical juncture.
* There are Firefox browser users shocked by spyware addons, it is a norm on mobile. There are no paid Firefox addons. This does not work in "pay or product" reality. Open source and freeware is a small (and awesome) niche.
* There is a Mozilla stance against DRM. There is a lot of paid books, movies, music on Google Play.
* DOM is slow. Javascript has good parts. Google decided in favor of Android apps, not Chrome apps. Also Google Fuchsia.
* Bluetooth, Contacts, NFC, SMS, Wifi [1] access can be asked from OS.
[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Archive/B2G_OS/API
----
Firefox was not default Windows browser, yet it succeeded. The reason I've never tried Firefox on Android is the loss of Firefox reputation on desktop. Memory bloat, falling behind Developer Tools, constant UI changes, not so snappy UI. Firefox was slow on desktop how could one expect it to perform well on mobile?
Mozilla's approach is "spend lots of cash and grow fast like a VC backed company".
The guardian is a "let's try and have a stable user base and keep the company alive for another 100 years".
In this case, Mozilla's approach has failed badly. I think it's unlikely they'll turn it around without the help of another big tech company making a strategic purchase.
On one hand, if people are happy to do work for free, a company would be stupid not to make use of it. On the other hand, governments should probably outlaw it since it really is just a loophole to pay less than minimum wage. ("Volunteer for 2 years for free, and then we'll give you a minimum wage paid position" = "On average over your career, you get less than minimum wage")
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2019/aug/07/guardian-broke...
And one of the claims / complaints of TFA is that Mozilla had a massive income for many years, and could have built up an endowment; but instead chose to live "hand-to-mouth", spending their income on useless failed projects that have nothing to do with Firefox. (And CEO pay of course.)
Not arguing against the overall point but Thunderbird has nothing to do with Firefox either and is still a thing Mozilla's reason for existing is not just their browser.
From the post:
> Mozilla should probably just ask their users for money. For many years the Guardian newspaper (a similarly sized organisation to Mozilla in terms of staff) was a financial basket case. The Guardian started asking their readers for money a few years ago and seems to be on firmer financial footing since.
This comparison doesn't make sense. First of all, nearly all these publishers are moving towards subscriptions. This clearly works for them to give readers other incentives like say remove ads and paywalled content, weekly hard copies, etc. Asking users to donate to a free browser when the alternatives are also completely free to use isn't sustainable for Mozilla.
Given that the closest equivalent replacement is Chromium or ungoogled-chromium which is completely free to use and the latter addresses privacy by removing Google on everything, how can 'donations' work for Mozilla if there are other browsers that exist that users can be used for free?
The Guardian knows that they will eventually add paywalls and require subscriptions just like every other publisher as everyone knows 'donations' are not sustainable to fund their 'journalism'. It's all about subscriptions, paywalls, etc.
EDIT: To downvoters: Oh so donations 'are sustainable' for the likes of the Guardian, such that they are still asking their users for years to donate whilst ramping up the registrations and adding a soft pseudo-wall on their content, and the suggestion is to get Mozilla to also ask its users for donations?
What happens if Google decides NOT to renew that contract in the future due to Mozilla's declining market share?
Explain how surviving off of user's 'donations' is sustainable for Mozilla to survive, given that Google is its direct competitor and offers a browser for free (and a similar one without the Google stuff is also free).
Now you're just generally (and angrily) defending mozilla against a donation model, and ignoring the passage you quoted entirely. A passage which iirc was the entirety of references to a donation model in the entire article.
I do share your wish in retrospect that they'd saved more cash...
Safari has dropped support for any privacy oriented extensions, and while Chrome might support them, everything you do with it goes through Google anyway.
That while Firefox can run uBlock Origin, has the Facebook container built in and you can even install a 3rd party Google container.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12590287
No company likes to say publicly it fired someone (it's bad for hiring new people).
Someone who believes the ship is not sinking, who has a vision how to save the ship, and who agrees to be paid only if ship continues floating.
Hiring a CEO who believes the ship is going to sink is a straight way to sink that ship.
"Mitchell Baker, Mozilla's top executive, was paid $2.4m in 2018, [..]. Payments to Baker have more than doubled in the last five years."
and this at the same time:
"Mozilla recently announced that they would be dismissing 250 people."
It's shameful. Specially for a "non profit".
We have an organization where, at the same time they don't have revenue enough for keeping its workers, the decision makers increase their salary. Never mind the legal structure of the organization, that doesn't look to me very ethical.
At the same time, non-profits are suppose to have the mission of improving the world. I understand that the janitor doesn't care about the mission and just want to be payed, but the management should care, at least, about the optics. I, for sure, would not donate (1) to a non-profit if I think that my money is going to be used for buying Ferrari or houses in the Hamptons.
(1) - https://donate.mozilla.org/en-US/
Non-profit just means that the company cannot make / pay out profit. It can still pay its employees a lot of money. It can still own for-profit corporate entities, take their profit, and spend it on other (non-money-making) causes.
The fact that one of the subsidiaries is structured as a for-profit is a red herring. Just a legal structure. The whole organisation is non-profit.
Mozilla CEO's salary isn't even that big, in the large scheme of things.
https://www.erieri.com/blog/post/top-10-highest-paid-ceos-at...
I agree, though, that non-profit shouldn't automatically be conflated with beneficial or working for the common good, as is common.
Mozilla Foundation has a staff of 80 and "manages" about 1000 volunteers. It's unclear how much donations it gets as they published a consolidated report that includes the corporation. I expect that very little.
Mozilla Corporation has a staff of 750 and $400M revenue (I expect most from the Google search deal).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Foundation
To me there seems there is something fundamentally wrong with the way Mozilla is set up.
To me, it seems like Mozilla Corporation should not have existed, and everything should have been part of the non-profit foundation.
A business that is set up as a "non-profit" means that it can't pay dividends. If the business earns one million dollars, I can't profit from it. This does not mean there aren't people in the organization with salaries. Sometimes big salaries.
You can have a "for-profit" company owned by a "non-profit" one. The dividends paid by the "for-profit" go to the "non-profit" but those can only be reinvested. In a way, yes, "non-profitness" is inherited.
I guess that the "for-profit" organization provides legal benefits. If one of your child companies goes bankrupt, it shouldn't affect the other ones nor the parent company. I have a few more guesses but I am not confident enough to write about them, especially when I am not from the US.
So many non-profits split out the profit-making activities into a separate (for-profit) company so that they can keep non-profit financial streams separate from the for-profit ones.
A for-profit entity owning/operating a non-profit entity would be more difficult to justify without calling on other goals.
There should be more uproar about an indefensible salary like that but the CEO is a woman with asymmetric hair and conformist opinions.
The point is not so much that the CEO's pay directly matches the salaries of the sacked employees, more that the CEO is clearly focused on their personal goals, rather than the organisational goals.
CEO's who reduce their salary in order to keep more staff on in lean times are servants of their organisation. CEO's who sack staff to save money so they can increase their own salary see the organisation as their servant.
It's not a crime to be greedy, but being greedy is a clear signal of your values and goals.
Our entire system has been setup like this for decades. 99% of earnings have been going to the top 1% for decades now.
I understand people who don't want to get behind BLM - I might not agree with them, but I "get" them.
But the fact that the country looked at Occupy Wallstreet and collectively shrugged its shoulders and said "I don't see a problem here" - well, here we are - slowly building back a feudal society while blaming the poorest amongst us for our troubles.
I know many of us will pay for privacy, and even help subsidize those who can't, but they have to be alive first.
At work, I replaced Chrome with Brave, but I still trust FF as the browser for my personal life (in addition to, of course, Pi-Hole, Algo VPN, and a number of plugins; or QubesOS + Whonix when things are really serious).
https://www.forbes.com/sites/georgeanders/2015/11/30/mozilla...
Also interesting to note that Brendan Eich too plotted a chart showing Baker's pay vs Mozilla stock's performance: https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1217512049716035584
How anyone can claim that sort of pay hike when showing very poor results is beyond me.
This was on HN just a few months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22058629
He was 11 days on the job, so, not so bad.
https://auth0.com/blog/a-brief-history-of-javascript/
Did you ever read animal farm?
The pigs serve as placeholders for Stalinists, but the general dynamic exists in any political situation that accepts inequality, like corporate capitalism in the case of Mozilla.
The pigs were swept into power on an anti-inequality/equity platform. Could be a lesson there…
Stock?
https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/difference-between-...
I live outside of US and I’m annoyed that Firefox does not fill addresses in forms, for example. Because Mozilla does not bother finishing this feature for the rest of the world.
Similarly they have released credit card auto fill recently, and again, US only.
That’s just one of many example.
I still use Firefox, but mostly because it’s hard to switch (reconfigure all extensions, get used to new UI etc).
I made the switch from Chrome to Firefox a year ago when for whatever reason Chrome started stalling. A year in, Containers all the rage, I still hate Firefox because its autocomplete sucks and if I type a/b in the search bar it tries to load http://a/b, what kind of logic is that? This isn't 1995. They literally fixed only this 2 versions ago.
It wasn't always this way. For example, FF beat Chrome in battery life until a few years ago, and FF extensions used to be superior in functionality Chrome extensions. Chrome eventually caught up in the few areas they were seriously lagging in, or Firefox shot itself in the foot trying to morph itself into a copy of Chrome (eg. multiprocess architecture, WebExtensions).
Today there is little reason to use any browser other than Chrome / Chromium or Safari (which is still superior on Mac / iOS in a few aspects).