Mozilla is two different entities - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38819284 - Dec 2023 (25 comments)

Mozilla 2023 annual report: CEO pay skyrockets, Firefox market share nosedives - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38795308 - Dec 2023 (331 comments)

Mozilla is entirely unimaginative, but is self sustaining as long as it keeps its advertisers. Mozilla is a shambling corpse that will continue to shuffle forward until it is no longer favorable for Google to buy search placement.

That’s the reason firefox will never improve.

The fact that Firefox usability and perfromance is improving, better addons support for android, unique useful features like containers and easy to configure network proxy/DoH/web protection levels, etc.. is already a big improvment.

How do people expect the market share to grow if the user isn't #1 priority.

At this point, even Windows itself includes antimalware software in the form of Windows Defender. Browsers should take note.

Firefox is in fact better in terms of privacy than rivals with higher market share, the home page of firefox addons store has uBlock Origin with "Recommended" label placed by Mozilla team.

It is important to recognize that the web is also used by grandma and grandpa who won't master any tech more recent than fax and installing uBlock origin by default will harm FF market share even more as usability will be impacted.

Safari works around that nicely - if you refresh a page it prompts you whether you want to reduce privacy protections (assuming you are refreshing because of something broken). Either way, the functionality can always be optional so people who are impacted can disable blocking.

> will harm FF market share even more as usability will be impacted.

The only people who currently use FF are those who also use uBlock Origin - if you don't there is really no point using it compared to Chrome.

Firefox marketshare will improve because there will finally be an actual selling point for it.

Mozilla's statistics say under 4%.[1][2]

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-origin...

[2] https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity

Either way my point stands - what's the selling point of using Firefox over Chrome for a non-technical user (who doesn't know what add-ons are and this won't install any)? uBlock Origin bundled by default would be an instant selling point.

Say "install this browser for instant ad-free browsing" and you've sold it to all non-technical users. Say "install this browser, dismiss 5 nag screens, navigate to the add-on store, find ublock origin, install it, tick 'enable in private browsing'" and your non-technical users would've ran away before you even finished that sentence.

The Enterprise pays a fortune for often dubious security products - the browser, being at the forefront of many security threats would be a great place to put some security features alongside things like centralized management, DLP, etc. Use that to subsidize the free version of the browser.

> timely repairs and improvements to advertising blocks

Volunteers that maintain uBlock Origin lists do that just fine already, but if they really wanted to fund it, they could just redirect the donations they currently piss away to the maintainers of filter lists and use that money for something useful.

> Solve this and perhaps they’ll make you the next CEO.

The reason this isn't "solved" isn't because it's some hard problem, it's because converting into a company making an actual paid product requires taking on risk, responsibility and actually doing something. Freeloading off the Google money while puffing hot air every so often about how much they care about privacy requires much less risk and effort, so why change anything?

They have ignored user requests every iteration.

Check the play store you can see their score is gamed. Most reviews are 1-3 stars and all have the same complaints for years.

It's been a steady downward trend since google started financing them to have someone to point at and say 'see we have competition, no monopoly here!'.

They removed almost all addons and are barley (like 10+ years later!) bringing some of them back.

Pocket spam. Collections. The list is ridiculous and getting to Google levels bad.

I especially love the part where she laid off hella employees and gave herself a 1/5 raise.

I would say proof that Firefox got objectively better is https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/releases/

In 2024, please switch to Firefox https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38806270

Everybody knows that Linux started with low funding a tiny userbase that had to accept the inconvenience over the year to avoid the project death, now Linux is irreplaceable technology that we rely on more than most popular software, it wouldn't reach that point if users quickly got annoyed and gave up on freedom of software.

The fact that the ceo of Mozilla gets paid handsomely doesn’t inconvenience me, but it makes it harder for me to justify donating to or supporting them like I would for haiku.

Perhaps Google will not continue to fund Mozilla and she will have to go looking for another Sugar Daddy.

But the big money maker is Google's revenue share.

In August of the same year the Mozilla Corporation laid off approximately 250 employees due to shrinking revenues, After previously laying off roughly 70 in January (prior to the pandemic). B

Baker blamed this on the COVID-19 pandemic, despite revenue rising to record highs in 2019, and market share shrinking.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitchell_Baker

So, as you say, if one shifts the perspective, to look at Google, using what's pocket change to them to keep a competitor alive, in order to keep them out of anti-trust and continue to let them dictate how the web is shaped, it suddenly makes sense.

This is the plague that is currently overtaking all large corporations, and I can't help but think the workers are going to revolt, and they're going to do it soon.

The UAW strike seemed very tame compared to what is to come.

Not saying Mozilla is in an easy position, but everyone could do her job without significantly influencing business results.

Of course the system is rigged but they don't know that.

In the case of Mozilla? Everyone can leave for months and nothing would look amiss - the occasional marketing puff piece about privacy can be ChatGPT'd and critical browser issues outsourced to contractors.

I'm not 100% convinced UBI is viable or even desirable, but I know that companies really don't want people to be free to quit jobs they hate and companies don't want workers being secure and comfortable while they look for a new job that better meets their needs.

Because the supply is constrained by these companies the CEO pay increases well beyond market rates, as each CEO will earn X% more than the one before it by faking competitiveness, then the former CEOs will complain (as the Mozilla CEO did here) about relative market rates of other CEOs, even though the market rates are set by the cartel that proposed them in the first place.

The board not wanting to rock the boat for the shareholders will generally agree to this extortion for optics, and round and round the merry go round goes.

They get paid what they get paid and that is by definition market rates.

The supply constraint is not due to recruitment companies somehow cornering the CEO market - the very idea is absurd.

It’s because large companies need someone with incredibly deep and broad experience to do a job that has a 50/50 chance of going well, a 100% chance of being blamed when things go wrong, a 1% of getting due credit when it’s due, and a 100% chance of copping flak from legions of armchair critics like you.

There is no constrained supply of people willing to be the Mozilla CEO for, say, $2M/year.

This is so frustrating.

I figure legal responsibility is about $1-2M in pay right there.

The CEO also plays a critical role (with the CFO) in finalizing the earnings reports, with severe penalties for mistakes. They make strategic decisions that many employees aren't even aware of, that can have $billion+ repercussions for the company.

Taken all together, it's not completely surprising that a CEO of a trillion dollar company makes $10M/year (or receives stock of that value).

No, it's not truly meritocratic. I keep coming back to a lesson I was taught as a kid: life's not fair, but you can use your brain to make it a little less unfair.

There's no reason for the compensation between executives and workers to be so great. It's rigged and you can see it right here in this article.

Oh right, only the engineers were charged in that one.

Also luckily for David, it was a 6 month suspended sentence. Meaning that he would have never had to serve any time that was overturned on appeal.

I mean, sure. a trillion dollar company, 10m dollar salary, that's not even 1 hundredth of a percent of the company.

Apparently the Mozilla foundation is around 2 billion in revenue a year. But how is that worth 70% of the above salary (I won't count stocks, it makes sense that if a company makes more money, shareholders make more money)? $we're already well beyond retirement levels of funding in a few years and they double it in 2 years.

CEOs actually are generally responsible for creating a lot of value, but most importantly, enabling a lot of value to be created by many others. When there is a causal link from you to a lot of created value, you tend to be paid proportionally well.

To believe that value is only actually created by average workers, and not the organizers of this work such as leaders or business owners, is quite short sighted. There are strong ideologies pushing this belief which I hope is not influencing your thought process.

Yes, there are bad CEOs out there, but they are not generally all bad.

most of the Fortune 500 don't seem to have much good to talk about. Let alone what justifies 8 figure compensation.

I guess we'll never truly know, but it does make one wonder how much change it'd be for those to be run by CEOs for a tenth of the compensation (which mind you, is still 7 figures).

Or to take a more concrete example, if Elon Musk decided to quit Tesla in a huff and focus entirely on X and stop dealing with the annoyance of public markets, the stock's would probably lose $75 bln in value overnight. If your legal goal is to maximize the company's value and it takes $500 mln pay per year to keep that from loss happening, it seems like it's probably a good deal to just pay the $500. As another example, Steve Jobs received hundreds of millions in stock options, and that was probably an excellent deal for Apple, though they probably could've hired someone cheaper.

I agree there are many cases where a more expensive CEO is actually worse. But I think it is very very easy to imagine cases where it makes a ton of sense to pay a large amount for an expensive CEO if they are the right person for the job and will add 10x more value than their pay.

This isn't a fair comparison to most companies as Musk has made Tesla largely about him, can you think of many other companies where if the CEO left a 75 billion dollar stock drop would happen?

The board of directors is willing to pay more for someone who will first, hopefully avoid such screw-ups and second, be able to deal with them if they happen.

On the other hand if the CEO leaves money on the table and doesn't negotiate hard because he's afraid randos on the Internet will call him "greedy" and subsequently profits fall and the company has to lay off thousands of people, nobody is going to pat him on the back and commend him on being "not greedy" and "respectable".

If senior engineers in the valley are making $500K TC, directors might clear $1M and VP’s $2M.

Above that it goes bonkers where you’ll see an SVP make $10M and a CEO $20M+.

Why do senior engineers make $500K? Well, they may be 2-5X more efficient than a junior, or you can look at how much value they are bringing in to the company.

I have never seen a system that was actually based on skill or effort be described as meritocratic. Likewise I have never seen a system described as meritocratic that was actually based on skill or effort.

The way meritocratic is usually used is to describe systems that could appear to be based on skill or effort at the surface, but is not actually if you look just a little deeper.

Why do Realtors earn 2.5% of a house they sell? Because sellers are nervous it'll cost them more not to pay.

Also, shareholders should be free to pay whatever they want, the same as homeowners.

If you tried to tell me what rate I should be paying my plumber based on some moral reasoning I’d nod and ignore you, and as a shareholder I likely don’t want your opinion either.

That's debatable.

Where I live realtors are seen as slimy as used car salesmen. It's an open secret that realtors will steer their clients away from low commission or independently listed properties.

With regards to accepting that, culture plays a big role. Governments effectively groom people into accepting the status quo, some stronger than others. They build on features of the human psyche that otherwise support this too, for example, in many cultures it's taboo to question elders, and also, many cultures observe different classes of people, where the different classes wield different levels of power by default. If you're interested in the psychology of this, I would suggest to look into how societies are organized over the recorded history of humankind.

The charisma and image of the well-off leaders also plays a part in making people accept, and support their advantage. This is also something that people are much cleverer about than in the past - the art that is currently called public relations. The idea here is that whatever people perceive, must make sense in their mind, somehow. If it makes sense, then it's accepted much easier, and if it doesn't, it's bothersome and makes people think about a story where it makes sense after all. So, one aspect of public relations is and making certain things observable, others obscured, and crafting a narrative about the observable things. This game is "history written by victors", but a bit backwards - whoever sells the most compelling narrative, comes out as the victor.

At the end of the day, the question is "what are you going to do about it?". Certain things just are because we're not doing anything about it. Doing about it is a ton of effort, might not be possible, might not worth it at all because the effort outweighs the results, might not worth it because the side effects are greater than the potential gains. Or maybe people care about other things. And because all of these concerns exist in all humans, those in power can exploit these too, in order to keep or further their power.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_triad

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_stratification

Page 12 of https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/1/14/Wikim...

Unfortunately Mozilla never had benevolent dictator to begin with and now there is not a single person who can call the bullshit loud enough.

https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/search?q=endowment&pa...

"Chief product officer Steve Teixeira notes in the report the rapid growth of AI and social networks, although warns that Mozilla.social is unlikely to move beyond the experimentation phase in 2024. He says that Mozilla would be "exploring ways to better integrate advertising while adhering to our focus on privacy and choice," including web browsing."

I firmly believe we need a strong nonprofit guiding standards and leading innovation in cross-platform technology, but is Mozilla still filling those shoes?

What truly innovative things have Mozilla done lately? They have been playing catch-up/follow-the-leader with various consumer-focused things like federated social networks, VPNs, VR, etc. Firefox is treading water but still slowly sinking every year. Firefox is great browser - it's not a technical reason why Mozilla is "losing" - it's cultural/hype/marketing/something else entirely. Bugzilla hasn't had a major release in 5+ years and has lost the battle of bug tracking to things like GitHub Issues. Thunderbird is back in active development and has had good improvements but has a very niche market. There's Rust, but Rust has it's own foundation now and extends far beyond Mozilla.

The MDN web docs are great, but wasn't that one of the teams hit hardest by "COVID Layoffs" in 2020?

I think it is - Firefox no longer has any selling points now that the competition has not only caught up but overtaken it. There are easy features they can add to make the browser appealing out-of-the-box to non-technical users but those would require courage and taking on some actual risk.

Every other product is useless - we don't need yet another VPN, or yet another password manager. Both those markets are already saturated by both shitty and good products, there is nothing Mozilla can bring to the table.

The way I understand it they upset the free speech abolutist, but to be honest I don't really care, I like the roadmap and what the devs have been doing to firefox lately, I also don't mind being in the minority. I like it here, i'm not one of the ones that's going to switch browsers unless some major shoe drops that slows firefox to a crawl.

Not that I think CEOs are worth their ludicrous salaries. It's just that the anti-diversity crowd loves to attack any organization they set their sights on for being "too progressive". So it's relevant to know whether this really is extraordinary.

Mozilla feels the need to jump on every new tech fad instead of focusing their efforts on making a really great, sustainable browser, which is what I personally wish was their core mission.

FF seems to be in serious trouble. The money mostly seems to go to a lot of different things that keep changing that are not the one thing that people use and want.

What do you believe they spend more on than Firefox?

What they have to do is put firefox back on the map. They deserve criticism for not doing that and for failing at their mission of an open web.

Page 12 of https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/1/14/Wikim...

Is there a board that actually looked at their performance and decided a raise was appropriate? Or is it due to some term in her contract?

Obviously the board sets ceo compensation. That is why boards exist.

Which in this case they're not doing.

I'm pretty sure they are doing, it's just that there is a big disconnect behind Mozilla's actual objectives and their claimed objective.

Mozilla's actual objective is to provide an antitrust shield to Google by pretending to develop a good browser and get paid handsomely for this service.

Mozilla's objective is not to actually develop a good browser - that's not only an unnecessary expense but would also bite the hand that feeds.

This is a debiliating disease of the software industry. People need software mostly as predictable tools, not some mystery magic entity that shapeshifts with each new profit incentive. To make it better, you can just ask them.

Massive success to the org. Right after the rebranding from Phoenix, things took off. Super BD effort to get standardization going. Huge community management effort to get all sorts of random people installing Firefox everywhere.

This is the biggest success story ever. And this is why everyone has to always be growing. It's not enough to do what you set out to do. You have to always grow. If you're a for-profit corp this is your partners or shareholders who care. If you're a non-profit it's the general public.

But whoever that person is, the moment you stop growing you're in trouble. Oh they'll say "unchecked growth is cancer" and so on but what they want is to say that while nonetheless you grow.

Growth is survival. Even reaching your objective (as a non-profit) is death.

Honestly, it seems like the problem is that the engineers let the business people in.

sure, when there's only 2 standards (down from 3 10 years ago. Probably down from 5 20 years ago), it's very easy to be compliant to the standards of 2.

But yeah, sad reality. What I want isn't necessarily what is most profitable. I'm tired of having to care about how much money my tools make to justify/chastise their ability to function.

I cannot find any benefit of the articles bashing Mozilla with hot claims - that aren't necessarily false but used in misleading contexts - other than Google, Microsoft and Apple.

I have used firefox for years because I believe in FOSS and privacy despite the shrinking market share and the poor addons market.

I am not going to leave Firefox after the recent and significant improvments in the weakness points for some conspiracy theories based on completely normal facts

That said, FF mobile is still far from parity with its old version from 3 years ago when it did its big break, so it becomes hard to sympathize when a CEO salary doubles and I'm arguably getting a worse experience despite that.

Of course we still have to use and prefer and advocate FF because there is no other serious option.

And this leadership problem is a real problem.

When they attempt to diversify their revenue with VPN, email tokenization, etc, (things not tied to Google revenue) … HN crowd ridicules them for not being focused on gaining browser share.

When it comes to Firefox, it seems few have even given it a fair try anytime recently.

(How can they gain share when HN doesn’t give them a try)

Irony is, HN loves Rust. And Rust was created at Mozilla.

Note: I have no ties to Mozilla and am a Safari user.

There are some HNers (myself included) who hate the direction that Mozilla is going under Baker. I want Mozilla to give me an option to put money into a bucket that will directly pay for browser development, the way that restaurants have a tip jar that goes directly to the employees. I want that because I use Firefox as a daily driver and want it to survive, and the way Mozilla spends the donations they get to the org as a whole isn't helpful to that end.

Separately, there are other HNers who still think of Firefox as the slow dinosaur that Chrome unseated. These HNers likely don't have a strong opinion about Mitchell Baker because they have no skin in the game.

And even more separately there are other HNers who love Rust. That Rust originally came from Mozilla may or may not even matter to these HNers. They probably do remember the day that Mitchell Baker laid off the whole Rust team, though.

What the hell does Firefox bring to the table? Sure they’re open source and “competition” to Google but come on… surely we can all see those aren’t features, they aren’t products, they’re bullet points.

It's everything that Firefox should be and misleadingly claims to be. Unlike Firefox, Orion actually has ad blocking by default.

Nothing has changed other than declining usage and revenue. But give the CEO another bonus over poor user usage, shrinking market share and destroying the browser, all done by themselves and now are being kept on life support by Google.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20120105090543/https://www.compu...

It might not make millions, but I'd donate in a heartbeat if I knew that my money would actually go to Firefox and not to one of the dozens of random side quests that Mozilla keeps picking up.

I've head that there are tax problems with that. So maybe there needs to be a paid "Firefox Pro" or whatever?

I mean, isn't that the problem? They made 500m this quarter so a

There simply isn't enough goodwill to maintain the living of even a single person operation without some sort of incentive (which ceases to be a "donation", but a subscription with a fancy coat).

Browser engines are not a money making business (if it was Microsoft would still be in the game)

If I was aiming to set up a company like Mozilla, I'd want all earnings to go into such a fund, and all costs to come out of buffered investment returns... Yes, significantly slows down the rate you can spend, but it also significantly increases the odds of longevity and independence.

Of course that presumes the goal is to build the organization, not to get personally rich off it.

I don't think they actually ever expected any of these ideas to work. In the meantime you can't even donate to firefox if you want to, only to the foundation.

I mean, I give money to KDE every month and they manage to build a whole desktop environment. Why can't I do that with Mozilla? Oh wait, how much money does KDE waste on a CEO?

Here's many of them: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7525198

We are where we are today because of people on this very forum. Especially ironic when it's the more lefty types that have helped kill the non-profit open source browser and many are themselves solely using the for-profit Chrome ran by a capitalistic advertising panopticon. Great job, much appreciated /s

Unless Eich was the one and only possible savior of Mozilla (as Steve Jobs arguably was to 1999's Apple - it does happen), these are two very different things.

You don't fold your principles just because you risk rocking the boat. And Mozilla is a pretty progressive organisation. You can't have a figurehead that isn't aligned with that.

If I were working at Mozilla it wouldn't affect how I'd act in the future though. Yes this turned out very poorly. But you can't predict these things. And principles are worthwhile to speak out for. And we don't even know if he'd have done a better job (though this is admittedly not hard)

Eich wouldn't have made a change to prop 8, no. But the culture at and image of Mozilla would have changed.

While Firefox market share and revenue is declining, Eich was able to a 200 person browser company from the ground up (based on Chromium). Huge difference between CEO caliber here.

I think we'd all be better off if those efforts would've been combined to making a strong 3rd browser contender, instead of Chrome, Safari, and the peanuts sprinkled across Firefox and Brave separately.