1. that tax return shows the former CEO was paid almost 7M annually
2. sharing that on this post, they are probably insinuating that it was a mistake for Mozilla to pay their CEO that amount just for them to lose so much marketshare that they're now nearing an inflection point
The inflection point being where a negative feedback loop starts: FF loses marketshare, devs stop testing against it, sites break for users, users leave FF, FF loses marketshare, repeat
This post in particular shows that there are breakpoints where government and government-adjacent entities have policies stating that they test against all browsers with > some % of marketshare.
I think it’s a reminder of what Mitchell’s priorities were as CEO: lining her pockets and funneling money to her political projects.
She has deep ties at Google and after getting out of the Yahoo deal when Verizon bought them, she got a sweetheart deal from Google that was an 84% increase of revenue YoY. She then laid off 25% of the company that year. This last year she ran a budget surplus as she failed to hire as aggressively as we had planned to at the beginning of last year and she still cut 6% of the company (for reference we were behind more than 60 hires for the year which is the amount that was cut). Meanwhile she took a pay increase to 6.9M
Has she said anywhere that those were her priorities, or is that just conjecture? People on HN seem to forget that she was the CEO of Mozilla, not Firefox LLC, and Mozilla’s goals have long been broader than just providing life support to a browser that continues to grow more irrelevant every year.
I work at Mozilla, there is no Firefox LLC. Please don’t post stuff like this if you’re unfamiliar with the corporate structure.
There is Mozilla Corporation a for profit entity that is responsible for virtually all development of products under the Mozilla name. Then there is Mozilla Foundation, a non-profit that is the sole owner of Mozilla Corporation. Mitchell until stepping down as CEO a few weeks ago was both the chair of the foundation and the CEO of the corporation.
Yes, obviously, that’s the point I was making. She was responsible for more than just Firefox, but the only thing people here can focus on whenever her name comes up is… Firefox.
2a) Own the for profit corporation because MoCo makes too much money to be considered a nonprofit for tax purposes. (This legal structure predates B Corps.)
2b) Give money away. That’s it. It gives money to academics and activists. Is it wasted? Maybe. But that’s what do philanthropic organizations do.
You don’t understand how it works either. Mitchell is both the chair of the foundation and until like 2 weeks ago was the CEO. She had full control over where the money goes hence why she increased her pay so much. The foundation is sole owner of the corporation.
Example: Twitch still doesn't let me login from Firefox if I'm on Alpine Linux.
It only happens when I try from Alpine Linux, so they might be testing for some musl-specific quirk and denying access just for not being the Firefox from a different distro.
Brave is unsupported by a lot of websites, but almost always works (at least if you turn off shields).
"Unsupported" = "We don't test or develop with this browser in mind", not "This browser doesn't work." If that browser effectively mimics one that is supported, it usually works fine.
I'm not sure why this was voted so high or would be news to anyone. It's a single website and historically this is nothing new (IE used to be the only supported browser on nearly all sites, or the reverse became true once Chrome had enough traction while IE development languished).
Firefox is not that popular of a browser. Not news at 11.
For many people this is the power company. If you want electricity, you go through them. Needing to use specific browsers to get basic services is an accessibility problem.
PG&E is Pacific Gas and Electric. It provides utility services to tens of millions of people. They’re one of, if not the biggest single utility companies in the country.
They may as well be for a lot of us. I'd never heard of Kroger before a few months ago, and apparently they're one of the biggest grocery store chains. Their size doesn't mean that everyone knows about them.
5.2M households is roughly 15M people. 3% of that is 450k users. While not huge on the scale of the global browser install base, that is still a pretty sizeable chunk of users that this might impact.
Also, I'm not in CA and I know of PG&E - in fact many USA residents probably do because they make the national news cycle quite a bit. No need for such a patronizing comment.
It's a electricity and gas utility that serves San Francisco and the Bay Area. Many Hacker News readers are from this area.
People love complaining about PG&E since its prices are ludicrously high (one of the highest in the nation --- about 50 cents per kWh), while the service is quite poor (they famously caused some serious wildfires and have frequent power outages during storms, although admittedly the recent couple of storms were quite strong). Now that they stopped supporting a beloved browser, there is all the more reason for the Bay Area techies to complain.
Fast facts about PG&E
The company provides natural gas and electric service to approximately 16 million people throughout a 70,000-square-mile service area in northern and central California.
You're getting dogpiled on for not knowing this, but it's a reasonable question. If you're not one of the ~5% of the US population (0.2% of the global population) that lives in the part of California indicated on this map [0], the only interaction you might have had with PG&E is when they sparked a forest fire that caused smoke to cover most of the United States in 2018 [1].
It's more a case of they don't bother testing using firefox. It may incidentally work on firefox, as a side effect of being tested in browsers that people still commonly use in the 2020s.
It's more that they don't care if, say, an automated support chatbot doesn't work in Firefox. In which case they tell you to just use Chrome rather than submit a ticket telling one of their web devs to fix something.
Their website is SO SO bad. It is almost like they don't want you to easily be able to see your bill and investigate the rates. The only part of the website that is easy is making payments.
Every single ISP does this. Even both of Googles ISP brands do it. I've convinced myself it's to hide their coverage maps, forcing you to give address and get a single data point. In reality it just means I never wind up helping friends move ISPs because it feels.lile an abusive relationship no matter what move you make.
"Don't worry, though... Regardless of your browser choice, we'll still hijack 'alt+back_arrow' to show you supported browsers instead of navigating to the previous page."
That'll teach me to try to eat leftover bbq with my primary hand while using the other to browse HN over lunch.
> Regardless of your browser choice, we'll still hijack 'alt+back_arrow' to show you supported browsers instead of navigating to the previous page.
Frustrating. I'm using Mac, so the corresponding shortcut for returning to the previous page is command + left arrow (back arrow), now hijacked. command + [ does the same thing and isn't hijacked yet. If you're on Windows, backspace might work in Firefox, but you'll first need to change to change a flag in about:config [1]. I'd be reluctant to give backspace that behavior, since I've accidentally lost progress on online forms by accidentally navigating to another page.
> I've lived all over the US. Why are utility company websites SO BAD? All of them are terrible.
Utility companies are deliberately regional monopolies, without the threat of competition there's no incentive to do better. That's presumably reflected in but not limited to the quality of their web sites.
In California, PG&E refused to hand over legally-required documents, in addition to refusing to hand over ordinary information that they were not required to hand over. Subsequently, a pipeline in San Bruno (updt) area exploded, a dozen houses burned to the ground, and several people died. They established new legal precedent by being convicted of Murder One.
investigations subsequently determined that PG&E had falsified reports, and failed to conduct testing that was required by law.
> Subsequently, a pipeline in San Mateo area exploded, a dozen houses burned to the ground, and several people died.
I recall the San Bruno gas explosion[0] you're referring to. It happened at a time when I regularly drove down that leg of Skyline to access Pacifica and Ocean Beach coming from south bay via the peninsula/280.
We clearly need better solutions for how such utilities are delivered and their businesses operated. Though in the case of residential gas lines, we should probably just stop the practice, especially in seismically active regions like the bay area...
It doesn't reduce their income to have a bad website, and might save them a bit in dev costs (maybe not though? if not, there's an opportunity to sell them on better sites)
Consider what support mean. It doesn't mean "works with".
Supported likely means that they test with and design for. It also means that if a customer is using that browser and there's a problem (e.g., seeing their bill online) they will fix the problem if it's just in that browser.
Firefox is 3.3% of users [1]. When it comes to testing features with (including QA validation) and working around browser specific bugs, what % of usage should drive that?
I have a theory that Firefox gets under reported in a lot of stats because its users are more likely to use Adblockers. Statcounter for example is going to be blocked by most Adblockers; stats based on server logs will be more accurate.
It's not just client side trackers that get blocked -- any server side tracker that only counts specific resources being requested is going to be blocked by Adblockers too.
Well summarized. It's amusing to read Brave on their unsupported list, since it's just Chromium with privacy features built-in. They wouldn't be able to tell, non-invasively, since it self-reports as the most boring, common version of Chrome that it can. Actually, privacy features that break sites by default if you don't know how to adjust them. Works, guaranteed by our developers and customer support folks, should be a different bar.
So long as they don't active sniff and reject non-approved browsers.
I wish we didn't only measure (and pay for) five nines+ uptime, but also support. Remember how annoyingly often just 99.9% uptime means you're out of business?
Lots of other websites that don't have this disclaimer, but also have much worse support for Firefox (read: none, and it's likely perma-broken and wontfix)
self note: realize this when I login to the website to check my bill and now there is always an orange bar saying I am using unsupported browser, and a pop up every time I open the website.
The bigger problem I think is I cannot dismiss the bar. Of course I can use adblocker element match to block it but it is a hostile move imo.
At $0.60/kWh, I cannot afford a new excuse to hike my electric and gas bill.
I cannot stand this company. I don’t agree with the practice where people in San Francisco have to pay for mismanagement and neglect of this for profit corporation’s infrastructure in far flung rural areas - places that I have never been before - and have no connection to. If we forced PG&E to breakup after the last bankruptcy, and San Francisco had purchased the wire infrastructure and transmission lines that give us light in the City, we would be much better off. Proceeds would be reinvested… Municipal ownership is the only proper solution. Just a thought.
Whenever I mention a website's issue to tech support, they give me the "just use Chrome" song and dance. I have to actively protest for the right to use Firefox. If your company does this you are complicit in Google's monopoly control of the web and you probably don't support Linux either.
88 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 139 ms ] thread1. that tax return shows the former CEO was paid almost 7M annually
2. sharing that on this post, they are probably insinuating that it was a mistake for Mozilla to pay their CEO that amount just for them to lose so much marketshare that they're now nearing an inflection point
The inflection point being where a negative feedback loop starts: FF loses marketshare, devs stop testing against it, sites break for users, users leave FF, FF loses marketshare, repeat
This post in particular shows that there are breakpoints where government and government-adjacent entities have policies stating that they test against all browsers with > some % of marketshare.
She has deep ties at Google and after getting out of the Yahoo deal when Verizon bought them, she got a sweetheart deal from Google that was an 84% increase of revenue YoY. She then laid off 25% of the company that year. This last year she ran a budget surplus as she failed to hire as aggressively as we had planned to at the beginning of last year and she still cut 6% of the company (for reference we were behind more than 60 hires for the year which is the amount that was cut). Meanwhile she took a pay increase to 6.9M
There is Mozilla Corporation a for profit entity that is responsible for virtually all development of products under the Mozilla name. Then there is Mozilla Foundation, a non-profit that is the sole owner of Mozilla Corporation. Mitchell until stepping down as CEO a few weeks ago was both the chair of the foundation and the CEO of the corporation.
Yes, obviously, that’s the point I was making. She was responsible for more than just Firefox, but the only thing people here can focus on whenever her name comes up is… Firefox.
clap The clap Foundation clap Is clap Not clap The clap Corporation clap
what does it accomplish that excuses this level of waste?
2) The entire rationale for MoFo is:
2a) Own the for profit corporation because MoCo makes too much money to be considered a nonprofit for tax purposes. (This legal structure predates B Corps.)
2b) Give money away. That’s it. It gives money to academics and activists. Is it wasted? Maybe. But that’s what do philanthropic organizations do.
But somehow you think the foundation/corporation boundary is somehow relevant to Mitchell increasing her pay so much when she essentially leads both.
Why respond to this and not the other people asking what you're talking about?
My point is your post is highly opinionated, tangential to the posted topic (without explanation) and needlessly without context.
It would have been quite easy to say
"I think paying $6.5M in management last year[0] was actively harmful to Firefox's market position
[0] source"
One need not be a chronic HN comment reader to understand this version.
This news doesn’t mean that it just will stop working in Firefox, it’s just that they don’t test and they don’t care.
It only happens when I try from Alpine Linux, so they might be testing for some musl-specific quirk and denying access just for not being the Firefox from a different distro.
"Unsupported" = "We don't test or develop with this browser in mind", not "This browser doesn't work." If that browser effectively mimics one that is supported, it usually works fine.
Firefox is not that popular of a browser. Not news at 11.
For many people this is the power company. If you want electricity, you go through them. Needing to use specific browsers to get basic services is an accessibility problem.
It’s not like MomNPop, LLC.
Even worse, this news affects 3% of that 2%.
Try looking outside your bubble every now and then!
Also, I'm not in CA and I know of PG&E - in fact many USA residents probably do because they make the national news cycle quite a bit. No need for such a patronizing comment.
People love complaining about PG&E since its prices are ludicrously high (one of the highest in the nation --- about 50 cents per kWh), while the service is quite poor (they famously caused some serious wildfires and have frequent power outages during storms, although admittedly the recent couple of storms were quite strong). Now that they stopped supporting a beloved browser, there is all the more reason for the Bay Area techies to complain.
Fast facts about PG&E The company provides natural gas and electric service to approximately 16 million people throughout a 70,000-square-mile service area in northern and central California.
[0] https://www.pge.com/tariffs/assets/pdf/tariffbook/ELEC_MAPS_...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camp_Fire_%282018%29
What kind of exotic stuff is a utility company's public website doing that makes supporting an established browser engine impossible in 2024?
Now the Mozilla CEO knows where the money and it's salary comes from, and they know what they need to do to please the funder.
Thus the Firefox usage stats shows a perfect downtrend line, just as Google would want it to be.
No words need to be spoken, but everybody understands what the game is.
That'll teach me to try to eat leftover bbq with my primary hand while using the other to browse HN over lunch.
Frustrating. I'm using Mac, so the corresponding shortcut for returning to the previous page is command + left arrow (back arrow), now hijacked. command + [ does the same thing and isn't hijacked yet. If you're on Windows, backspace might work in Firefox, but you'll first need to change to change a flag in about:config [1]. I'd be reluctant to give backspace that behavior, since I've accidentally lost progress on online forms by accidentally navigating to another page.
[1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/keyboard-shortcuts-perf...
Utility companies are deliberately regional monopolies, without the threat of competition there's no incentive to do better. That's presumably reflected in but not limited to the quality of their web sites.
investigations subsequently determined that PG&E had falsified reports, and failed to conduct testing that was required by law.
Next, the Tubbs fires. "do better" ??
I recall the San Bruno gas explosion[0] you're referring to. It happened at a time when I regularly drove down that leg of Skyline to access Pacifica and Ocean Beach coming from south bay via the peninsula/280.
We clearly need better solutions for how such utilities are delivered and their businesses operated. Though in the case of residential gas lines, we should probably just stop the practice, especially in seismically active regions like the bay area...
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Bruno_pipeline_explosion
[00] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tNSjRKY7Ha8
Supported likely means that they test with and design for. It also means that if a customer is using that browser and there's a problem (e.g., seeing their bill online) they will fix the problem if it's just in that browser.
Firefox is 3.3% of users [1]. When it comes to testing features with (including QA validation) and working around browser specific bugs, what % of usage should drive that?
[1] https://gs.statcounter.com/
So long as they don't active sniff and reject non-approved browsers.
I wish we didn't only measure (and pay for) five nines+ uptime, but also support. Remember how annoyingly often just 99.9% uptime means you're out of business?
If we work to usage, we allow the browser market to be swallowed by one proprietary player.
That manufacturer can then call ALL the shots.
Engineers and development have a duty to work according to open standards to prevent this from happening.
Hardly thinking about their supposed duties.
And by "most major browsers", we mean Chrome, reskinned Chrome and Safari.
It wasn't part of browser matrix for acceptance delivery, we did it because we still cared, not because we had to.
The bigger problem I think is I cannot dismiss the bar. Of course I can use adblocker element match to block it but it is a hostile move imo.
At $0.60/kWh, I cannot afford a new excuse to hike my electric and gas bill.
I cannot stand this company. I don’t agree with the practice where people in San Francisco have to pay for mismanagement and neglect of this for profit corporation’s infrastructure in far flung rural areas - places that I have never been before - and have no connection to. If we forced PG&E to breakup after the last bankruptcy, and San Francisco had purchased the wire infrastructure and transmission lines that give us light in the City, we would be much better off. Proceeds would be reinvested… Municipal ownership is the only proper solution. Just a thought.
♡ Chrome Team