With revenue declining, Mozilla CEO gets a 20% raise

Mitchell Baker is frankly a moron, surrounding herself with even bigger morons who have taken Firefox every direction except a good direction. Frankly, it's impressive how much they've missed and how far they've shifted from their original mission. Yet her salary has more than quadrupled since she took her position.

Don't forget this phenomenal Baker quote from a few years ago:

In 2018 she received a total of $2,458,350 in compensation from Mozilla, which represents a 400% payrise since 2008. On the same period, Firefox marketshare was down 85%. When asked about her salary she stated "I learned that my pay was about an 80% discount to market. Meaning that competitive roles elsewhere were paying about 5 times as much. That's too big a discount to ask people and their families to commit to." [0]

I wonder whether Eich manages to turn around the Firefox decline if he hadn't been given the boot. It started under him, but his latest venture (Brave) is growing steadily - 65 million monthly active users [1].

Mozilla needs to be at the very heart of the free an open web. They need to have the biggest Mastodon instance that you can actually depend on. They need to have the biggest Matrix server. They need to have the biggest free blogging platform. They need to hire a few full time community managers to spearhead putting together a clear set of community guidelines and organizing volunteer moderators. People all the way up the chain, accountability and responsiveness all the way up the chain. The anti-big tech. They could easily afford this, too. If it's free and open on the internet, Mozilla needs to be there. But instead they take half-hearted stabs, abandon them, let Firefox linger, and pay their CEO millions upon millions of dollars.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitchell_Baker#Negative_salary...

[1] https://brave.com/transparency/

Mitchell Baker is frankly a moron

Mitchell Baker is a bloody genius, this is a woman who heads both the foundation and the corporation to make literally several millions while ostensibly claiming to champion the right to freedom of information and communications.

What she is doing is unethical and suspect as hell, but so long as she can keep getting away with it she is absolutely not a moron.

As the old saying goes: If it's stupid but it works, it ain't stupid.

Note that "works" here does not mean furthering Mozilla's mission, it means securing a fat paycheck off her fiefdom.

Not being able to create a success and instead making personal wealth by siphoning money through someone else's creation while it rots is not a quality I would label as genius.

Look, if I can make seven million god damn greenbacks while claiming to be the leader of the free peoples but actually doing nothing or maybe even something to subvert them, I will call myself a genius.

Sorry man, but I loathe people who think that way. Particularly since I've ( and many others) found a way to make a living without resorting to that sort of schemes.

To be clear: I don't support nor even agree with what she is doing. She is a key part of the disease Mozilla is suffering from.

But with that said, I am also willing to at least respect the fact someone is making an absolute killing of a living for next to nothing. Think about it: $7,000,000.00 for doing next to nothing at bare minimum. Most people would kill for that kind of income to work ratio.

Mitchell Baker is a woman who figured out how to game the system she's in and win big (bigly?), I can and will respect that even if I otherwise vehemently detest her. The first step to addressing a problem is figuring out the problem.

Hmm, me in particular I'd be extremely pissed (and am) to even know that such a person exists.

I'm not the absolute moral authority but I believe a great deal of what's keeping us back from being absolutely great as "humanity" has to do with those parasites and their negative influence.

a great deal of what's keeping us back from being absolutely great as "humanity" has to do with those parasites and their negative influence.

that's called the human condition. You would've done the exact same, when put in the same situation in all likelihood.

People are inherently greedy, and selfish. There's no changing it, as this is an evolutionary advantage. Those altruists would've died out, since they would've given way to those who are greedier (otherwise, how are they altruists?).

No, I wouldn't. And I've had the chance several times. Not 7M but still a buttload of cash.

that is Machiavellian or Ten Rules of Power or whatever; it is not clear that the position is being gamed, but that the results with the current players are certainly out of constructive balance

It's all about perspective. If your purpose is to make yourself millions without producing anything beneficial to the world...it's genius.

The purpose of a system is what it does.

If your purpose is to make yourself millions without producing anything beneficial to the world...it's genius.

they produce benefit to those that paid - namely in this case, google.

Perhaps the people that keep paying her are the morons then?

Aren't the people that keep paying her Google?

Yep:

“Most of the revenue of Mozilla Corporation comes from Google (81% in 2022)” [0]

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation

Someone who was a genius wouldn't strangle their cash cow just to have a steak dinner. She's ruthless, conniving, and short sighted. Perhaps she knows she's incapable of improving the business, in which case stealing more money from it before it goes under makes sense.

It’s not her cash cow, she’s just sucking on it. She’s not risking on getting the cow bigger and healthier and profit later as that window of opportunity may close.

It’s horrible destructive behavior if you ask me but why is she allowed to do it in the first place?

In other words, sly as a fox.

I mean, it's still stupid. It just works.

That doesn't make a person a genius. It makes them a sociopath. What they are doing is not intellectually difficult and actually requires low emotional intelligence usually.

I can't speak toward her specifically in all honesty. I would need to research it further. But a policy of reward/praising all the con-men (using that phrase loosely) in America is a bad policy.

Mozilla doesn't need any Mastadon instance. They need to stop pretending to be a social media company and focus all their resources on browser development.

Their only reason for being involved in social media in the first place is because it gives them a plaything for their forays into censorship and narrative engineering. This is one aspect of the cancer Mitchell Baker has been cultivating in Mozilla

Firefox engineering is in a pretty good spot. What they need now is clout and market share to bring in income and brand awareness. I'm not sure how else to achieve that? They need people to associate them with being the good stewards. Best way to do that is to be a good steward.

https://treeherder.mozilla.org/perfherder/graphs?timerange=3...

They need people to associate them with being the good stewards

nobody cares about good web stewardship.

Actual people care about performance, ease of use, integration, and capability. And chrome is already good enough now-a-days, which means it takes a huge improvement to firefox for people to switch (not to mention an advertising drive when those improvements come about).

There's a reason why Dvorak keyboard isn't more popular than qwerty, even tho Dvorak is slightly better.

Switching from chrome to Firefox isn't the same as switching from qwerty to Dvorak.

Agreed; it's more like turning caps lock into ctrl; not zero friction, but pretty close and much nicer.

nobody cares about good web stewardship.

The EU has passed many digital protection laws. Some US states have down the same. Trust in these big tech companies has cratered.

Firefox engineering is in a pretty good spot

It is strange that a moron surrounded by morons taking Firefox solely in non-good directions could accomplish that.

Firefox would be better off if it was technically a worse browser but more relevant. The function (and central marketing claim) of Mozilla and Firefox is that it is an alternative to big tech controlling the entire internet. It has completely failed at that mission. At one point, it was failing because engineering. 10 years later they've finally corrected that, about 8 years to late, and at the cost of tying themselves to Google and losing all their relevance. Again, this is a zero sum game. Firefox only has value as an alternative to big tech if it has enough relevance to prevent Google and Microsoft from abandoning standards. And it has failed spectacularly in that arena. It spent all its relevance, has failed to recoup it, and is now reliant on Google to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars solely to pay the bills. Mitchell has been at the helm for nothing short of an unmitigated disaster.

I don't understand this oft-regurgitated opinion that Mozilla needs to "focus all their resources on browser development." Mozilla does focus a large portion of their resources on browser development. Firefox is fast enough and has an interface that's largely similar to its main competitors. It works pretty well. This is a browser we're talking about. What special features do you think Mozilla could build that'll magically allow Firefox to claw back huge chunks of market share? And why do you think that Mozilla isn't building those features due to lack of focus - surely they build browser features and do other things simultaneously? In my opinion, building a killer non-browser thing might be one of the only ways to save Firefox - after all, the history of browsers shows us that successful ones typically piggyback off of successful non-browser things (Windows, Google, iPhone, etc.)

They removed XUL without providing an API to replace it, even for some very popular use cases (TabMixPlus comes to mind). I lost a few (to me) important extensions and had a hard time finding replacements. For me, extensions were the major thing that differentiated Firefox from other browsers, as I could customize it exactly as I liked.

I certainly respect your take. I just don't think that XUL is a killer feature that vast numbers of people are clamoring for.

I would have liked them to double down on that mobile OS they were working on a few years ago.

It still exists actually in the form of KaiOS. Used on a lot of feature phones now.

Other projects like the VR browser are also still alive under the name Wolvic.

Firefox as a browser is doomed no matter what Mozilla does. People installed Firefox because the default browser sucked. Now the default browser doesn’t suck.

Chrome still isn't the default on any major desktop OS (ChromeOS is far from major) and only on one of the two mobile platforms.

Yet people go out of their way to install it even over edge on windows which is kinda the same thing. Sorry this argument doesn't fly. Firefox really lost mainstream appeal.

When asked about her salary she stated "I learned that my pay was about an 80% discount to market. Meaning that competitive roles elsewhere were paying about 5 times as much. That's too big a discount to ask people and their families to commit to."

I was working at Mozilla when she made this comment -- shortly after laying off ~25% of the fucking company -- and it was the final straw for me. I can't speak to whether it was the final straw for others as well, but I can say that in the span of about 8-9 months after those layoffs every single person on my team, many who had been there 5+ years, quit and took "normal" tech industry jobs that typically paid 2-2.5x more than Mozilla. Apparently in Baker's mind it's OK to ask the people doing the actual work to take a massive discount to their compensation for ideological reasons, but when it interferes with her lavish lifestyle it's suddenly unthinkable.

She is truly an anchor around Mozilla's neck, and at this point I've just sort of grudgingly accepted that she'll only leave once she's drained every last drop of blood she can get from the company and from the well-meaning and dedicated people trying to make a genuinely independent web browser. All I can hope is that some sort of phoenix (get it?) manages to arise from the ashes when that finally happens.

She is truly an anchor around Mozilla's neck

perhaps it's because this is what google wants mozilla to be - a lame duck that cannot compete against chrome.

This is a really interesting possibility. A crippled competitor is ideal--keeps Chrome ahead, but still have a multi platform competitor to point at when the DoJ comes knocking.

Also interesting because once upon a time Microsoft did that with Apple.

Ding ding. We have a winner.

Hey, I guess if Google stopped shoveling money into Mozilla then they wouldn't have any money to pay her and she might leave then. I guess we can blame Google then!

Is there anyway we could blame Google also for the unrest in the middle east?

Does Google have any say on who is at the helm of Mozilla? A genuine question, not a rhetorical one.

No, in the same way MS didn't have say who is at the head of OpenAI.

You think the money bags come without strings?

Good idea. But if it's true, then who played the same trick with Google and Sundar Pichai?

Mozilla itself is a Phoenix (and I miss that) that arose from ashes so maybe!

Firefox was originally Phoenix until Phoenix Tech. made a stink over trademark. Hence why the fox has a flaming tail and the e-mail client is a thunderbird.

I applaud your decision! Need more people standing on principle

Please don't post personal attacks to HN, and please follow the site guidelines in general, including the one about not calling names, and also the one about not fulminating:

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

We particularly don't want mob dynamics here.

p.s. I have zero opinion about this person or this organization, just in case anyone is worried about that. I just care about preserving HN for curious conversation, which is what the guidelines are written to convey.

I think it's quite disappointing that dozens of replies are going to be silenced because this mildly insulting post was deemed a bridge too far; that hardly seems in the spirit of fostering curious conversation.

That is my fault, and I apologize. I'd edit the comment if I still could.

From @dang's other reply[0], you have nothing to apologize for. Your insult might've been a bit childish, but it's only being used as a flimsy excuse to silence "mob dynamics" (popular opinion going in a way that isn't approved).

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38850779

HN has had dozens if not hundreds of threads about this topic over the years, including a megathread a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38795308, and this megathread before that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38531104. No one is being "silenced". It's one of the most discussed topics on the site!

It's bog-standard moderation not to allow a comment beginning "so-and-so is frankly a moron" at the top of a HN thread.

As I said, we don't want mob dynamics here. Between your reply (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38850057) and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38849882, and the fact that the GP was upvoted to the top of the page, there were clear signs of that developing.

It's not about the individual or the topic. We don't want HN to be that kind of community.

It's hard to see how this is anything other than arbitrarily silencing a popular opinion. I can understand things getting out of hand and becoming the proverbial "two minutes of hate" may be worth quashing but it is frankly offensive to have my honest account of leaving Mozilla represented as contributing to "mob dynamics."

This genuinely makes me think less of HN.

I'm pretty surprised to be seeing this comment because I don't think this is a particularly personal attack since it's a public figure with measurable performance, and I feel as though I frequently see similar comments about Musk, Bezos, etc. Is it acceptable to change it to "is behaving like a moron" and "surrounded herself with people who make moronic decisions"?

Settled law on HN. See:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

Fair enough

I think he could have turned it around, but I'm glad Brave exists.

People hate BAT for reasons, but the idea of controlling the ad stream at the software level is a winning one to me. I can't think of any other platform where ads were given such free reign. Could you imagine watching TV, then a commercial comes on that either a) crashes the tv, or b) changes the channel multiple times so you can't get back, or c) installs malware onto the tv, or d) clones itself 20 times over the content you were watching, or any other fun stuff web ads have been known to do.

But Firefox can control the ad stream very well with ublock origin. Don't need bat tokens for that.

The advertising industry will never take that as an option anyway. They're addicted to big data now. They have to sell a hell of a lot of less-annoying non-data-mined BAT ads to compensate, or do with less profit. They're not going to be on board.

And these tokens don't really solve the issue. People hate ads. Trading their ads for slightly less annoying ones when they can do without them altogether is not going to work. How many of those 65M brave users actually opt in to the BAT ads?

It's just a non-starter and will always be that. Sorry. It's just another fairytale spun to dig into VC money pools.

People hate ads but they hate paying for content even more. There are startups that offer a pay per article integration for publishers but it never really caught on. Monthly subscriptions to one publisher work decently but people are tired of that too.

Ad revenue adds so much juice to the profit margins, just look at Netflix/amazon prime/etc. None of them could resist the ad tier.

I think about this a lot because I dislike the ad tech industry and would like to leave it (even though I currently work in it) but I honestly don’t know what the solution is besides ads.

I know, but BAT isn't going to transform the ad industry. It has nothing to offer to them that they don't have now and will only make things harder for them.

The only thing that will do that is a legal framework that forbids tracking so untracked ads are worth more because they no longer have to compete with the tracked ones. After all there will be no retargeting etc. It will have to be purely contextual.

The EU unfortunately stopped short of doing that and created the cookiewall plague in the process. For which they are rightfully blamed.

Ps I don't really hate paying for content but the "sign up for a recurring $20 monthly subscription just to read this one article" like most sites are doing now is complete BS too of course. Of course nobody wants that unless they are already a regular reader.

Eich was CTO of the Mozilla Corporation since its founding in 2005 until 2014, during which Firefox market share slid from its peak at 30% to 13%.

What would Eich have done as CEO to turn around Firefox that he wasn’t able to do as CTO for nine years? That said, Brave has innovated and had some VC-fueled success. I just don’t see him as the Firefox savior some people do.

https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share#yearly-2009-...

A lieutenant is not the captain.

As a lieutenant, I don't get to just go do whatever. I advise, I provide options, I make calls that don't to up to the CEO level.

I pick tech stacks, I pick how to do the things we decide to do. But the final call on what we are doing is the captain's. Especially about the fundamental direction like how to acquire users, markets we target, and how to acquire revenue.

What the above lacks is a finance model of how to make it work with real numbers.

$500M per year isn't enough to develop and market a browser?

Too many technical people talk without being capable of generating revenue.

Instead of developing that finance capability lets cry about how others are supposed to raise funds and hand it to us. Its pure nonsense.

Tech folk who get into details of raising cash are the only ones who have impact. The rest are useless loudmouths.

So how is doing all of this “free” stuff going to increase revenue?

I can't edit this one anymore, but in light of being reminded of the community guidelines, I will offer instead that Mitchell is not a moron, but is making decisions that are extremely questionable in light of the stated goals of the Mozilla foundation, and has failed to execute well enough and quickly enough to the point that it calls into question her competence.

It seems to me that Mozilla mission is more about doing 'just enough' to ensure Mitchell has a good Xmas every year.

Fire this Fox and go back to Mozilla minus One. If nothing else, the movie rights to this would make more sense than their current direction.

Is there some secret FAANG-driven effort to just mess with the Mozilla CEO every couple years? They’re a seemingly worthless company to attract so much heat for their executives.

Even if you’re not a Firefox user, Firefox and Safari are the only two things keeping Chrome from total dominance.

A lot of people don’t like Safari because it’s from Apple, the priorities they choose, or the fact that is not fully open source like Firefox is.

There are basically three rendering engines right now. One dominates massively and one looks not long for the world.

That doesn’t seem like a good situation to me. So I don’t want Firefox to die even though it’s not my daily browser.

You are forgetting Edge.

That doesn’t seem like a good situation to me.

Nothing is stopping alternate rendering engines from being created, but if the alternates are not better and not worth integrating with a browser the resources might be better spent being invested in the most popular one that way it improves the web for the most people.

but if the alternates are not better and not worth integrating with a browser

This is the problem. There is a MASSIVE sunk cost to get a modern browser off the ground compared to a static target.

Even if you could do it, Chrome is going to keep moving forward. And they have enough power to change things in incompatible ways that everyone will follow because they have the vast majority of the market.

Microsoft made a new modern browser engine. They gave it up because it was too hard to compete with Chrome.

When Apple is forced to let people replace Safari, I fear we’re going to get into an IE6 situation.

It doesn’t matter how good Chrome is, IE6 was great too. But when the company lets it stagnate for years because there’s no reason to invest, or decides to use it to push their advertising business to new heights, we are all screwed until a new competitor comes around.

Firefox only exists because it was built from the Netscape code base. And ‘a modern browser’ was a WAY easier target 20 years ago. What if no group/company can muster enough effort to dethrone a stagnate Chrome?

The web is in trouble. Even tagging along in 3rd place, Firefox is a good browser that could step up in such a situation. But only if development continues. If Firefox dies next year and Chrome stagnates five years from now we’ll be screwed.

IE6 was great too

Ouch. That hurts.

I was there, I was an IE user and proponent. It was a great browser. I think it was considered one of the best when it was released in 2001.

IE 7 came out in… 2006. So IE 6 just sat there for 5 years. And it’s not like ever upgraded to 7 immediately. Lots of corporate PCs kept 6 for many years longer.

That’s why it has the reputation it does. By 2006 IE 6 was horribly behind FF by every measure. Tons of security bugs had been found. By 2010 it was a total joke but developers were still having to make the modern web work on it, somehow.

If it had been replaced in 2003 or 2004 and MS never paused development no one would remember IE 6 as a dumpster fire.

But once you get a total stranglehold on the market, you can do stuff like that.

You are right in that it was way ahead of its competitors (mainly Netscape) when it launched. It had more features, much better performance, and it looked great in comparison.

But it also had an insanely huge amount of bugs, half-broken features and “I’ll just do it my way” stuff. This was also true already at launch.

Sure, if Microsoft had replaced it in 2003 or 2004, nobody would have such “fond” memories of it even today. But the bad reputation does not come only from the fact that it was not updated for a long time; it also comes from its many problems and issues.

Quite true. That’s one of the reasons that having to continue to support it for so long was so horrible. If it behaved nicely even if it had been stagnant it would’ve been quite as bad.

I guess I’m sort of assuming that if they kept new releases coming those bugs would’ve been fixed anyway in time. Which is certainly not a safe assumption.

Firefox was not the only competition back then. Opera was also around with its own engine, and it was very popular in Europe. But, yeah, this is when HTML and associated standards were a lot simpler.

You’re right. I always forget Opera. I’m an American and it’s basically never been a factor here so it just never enters my mind.

There is a MASSIVE sunk cost to get a modern browser off the ground compared to a static target.

You can incrementally improve the browser. Blink was not created from scratch.

But when the company lets it stagnate for years because there’s no reason to invest

There are 2 big differences. The first is that what the web is and how platforms work is better understood. Google continues to invest in Chrome despite their dominance. The second is that chromium is open source. This means that if Google stops investing heavily in Chrome then others can still contribute and improve the browser.

or decides to use it to push their advertising business to new heights, we are all screwed until a new competitor comes around.

If Google does something bad enough to make users stop using the browser that hurts them. Even taking that to be the case making a Chromium fork without that stuff would be possible given the demand for an alternative. You do not need a whole new browser engine just so you can make a policy change.

What if no group/company can muster enough effort to dethrone a stagnate Chrome?

They can build off of Chromium instead. There is no need to start from some basic browser and put in a ton of resources to modernize it.

If Firefox dies next year and Chrome stagnates five years from now we’ll be screwed.

If Chrome stagnates then competitor browsers will surpass them.

Edge is based on chromium

But it has a good chunk of market share which is was being talked about.

Did it get very big? I know it obviously never challenged Chrome but did it ever get up to like 10% before the switch?

Even if it didn’t it was an independent browser that could have been a competitor until they gave that up.

It currently is still a competitor. The switch of an internal browser engine doesn't make two products no longer competitors.

Right. Edge used to have its own rendering engine, but they ditched it. At this point it’s the same as Brave and some other browsers.

From a rendering point of view, it’s 100% Chromium. All of its customizations are above the engine, at least as far as I know.

Edge switched to Chromium under the hood and is no longer using its own engine. Got to be bittersweet for the engineers who worked so hard on it.

I felt so bad for them. They worked hard and made a really good engine. They got out the door, started to see usage, and were then told by management one day “never mind we don’t care”.

There are basically three rendering engines right now

Genially curious, which ones? I only know two:

1) khtml based - Chrome/Edge/Safari 2) Gecko based - Firefox

Third would be Servo? Any browser uses it?

I think they're counting Webkit (Safari) and Blink (Chrome) as two separate engines. Given that it's been 10 years since Blink forked from Webkit, I think that's fair.

Blink was 10 years ago! I feel old suddenly.

I was. Things have shifted enough (it’s been 10 years? Wow!) I think it’s fair to consider them separate. They also use completely different JS backends.

AFAIK Servo's very much active but not yet incorporated into a full-featured browser. You can try it out in a bare-bones browser at https://servo.org/download/ - and https://servo.org/blog/2023/12/18/this-year-in-servo/ has a lot more detail about the status of the project. https://fosdem.org/2024/schedule/event/fosdem-2024-2321-embe... will be trying to help the community have a better answer to this question!

Oh people are still working on it? I know FF wasn’t working on it anymore but I had thought development was basically stopped completely. It’s good to hear it’s still moving forward.

Neither rain nor snow nor sleet nor being-fired-from-Mozilla can stop Rust hackers from being Rust hackers :)

Chrome and Edge use the Blink rendering engine (except on iOS). Safari uses WebKit. Firefox uses Gecko.

(Edge used to use its own engine, EdgeHTML, but switched to Blink and EdgeHTML is no longer developed. EdgeHTML was derived from the Trident/MSHTML engine, which is also no longer developed.)

Blink and WebKit can both trace their history to khtml, but that was a very long time ago.

Chrome used to use WebKit (before Edge existed). Blink was forked from WebKit and they diverged about 10 years ago. They are now considered distinct rendering engines with different behaviours.

So the big three rendering engines today are: Blink, WebKit and Gecko.

All browsers in wide use today use one of those three.

On iOS, all browsers use WebKit due to OS policy restrictions. Chrome and Firefox use WebKit on iOS. This works, and different browsers continue to have their own respective featureson top.

It is widely thought that if Apple loses the power to limit the rendering engine on iOS due to changes in law, so many web devs will drop testing with WebKit browsers that they will pressure users to install Chrome on iOS instead: "Best viewed in Chrome. Some site features may not work using other browsers...". The same way many web devs already dropped testing on Firefox/Gecko. Those site features may become critical, such as abitiy to sign in or view some kinds of data. Apps will ship with parts of Chrome/Blink directly in the app, saving users the decision.

This is what people mean when they say Apple's rendering engine policy on iOS may be all that's preventing most of the web shifting to Chrome/Blink-only dominance, that you won't be able to avoid if you need essential services online.

I thought EdgeHTML was a clean sheet. I know they had a way to continue to run the old Trident engine under the hood for compatibility, but I didn’t think EdgeHTML was based on it.

Excellent description of the situation. I both think people should get to choose their own browser on iOS, and don’t want them to get to choose their own browser for the reason you stated.

Lumping WebKit (Safari) and Blink (Chrome/Edge/...) together stopped being meaningful quite a long time ago.

Firefox and Safari are the only two things keeping Chrome from total dominance.

Safari yes, but truthfully nobody gives a damn about Firefox at this point.

A lot of people don’t like Safari because it’s from Apple, the priorities they choose, or the fact that is not fully open source like Firefox is.

"A lot" meaning a minority of a minority of people. Lest we forget, iOS is superior to Android in at least the US and Japan, and MacOS continues to gain market share at the cost of Windows.

Most people like (or at least want) Apple.

Color me not most people as I hate and do not want apple and would rather castrate myself t han buy their products.

Thank you for proving why I added that comment about how Safari would not be acceptable to many people.

I agree. FF is a distant third. But it’s the only credible third I know of. Brave, Edge, and friends are just Chromium so they’re the same rendering engine as Chrome.

On the Safari topic I was going by the general sentiment I see on HN. The general public couldn’t care less what is or is not open source.

Over the years I’ve noticed a weird (to me) contingent here on HN who appeared to think the best thing for the Internet would be for Safari to be killed so everyone would be forced to use Chrome.

That doesn’t seem like a good situation to me. So I don’t want Firefox to die even though it’s not my daily browser.

...so make it your daily browser?

Seriously, there's no reason at all to still be using Chrome. There was a dip in the mid/late 2010s where FF was a joke in comparison, but they're more or less identical in performance at this point.

I don’t use Chrome. I use Safari. It is and has always been my choice since it was released.

But I still think it’s better if Firefox exists.

——

My experience has been kind of odd compared to most. I switched to the Mac before Chrome or Safari came out. When Safari arrived it was vastly faster than anything else at the time. So it became my browser.

People on Windows or Linux couldn’t use Safari (I tried the Windows version, let’s not talk about that, ouch). So when Chrome came out, and they left IE/FF, they got the same giant performance jump that I liked so much but associated it with a different product. I’m sure I would’ve done the same thing if I was still on Windows.

Firefox eventually got way better, becoming what it is today. But almost everyone had already moved to Chrome.

I’m left with this sort of weird view of the world. When I did try Chrome it wasn’t noticeably faster than Safari because it was using the same rendering engine at the time, but it had a really different UI design that I didn’t like.

So a huge amount of people really love Chrome because of their experiences, and I hate it for the same reason. All because of the order I ended up using browsers in.

A lot of people don’t like Safari because it’s from Apple

Also the fact that most people cannot use it. The vast majority do not have a MacOS computer or Ios phone/tablet.

Apple could release it for other platforms (let’s not talk about the original Windows release). Or others could build a browser on the engine.

You’re right most people couldn’t switch tomorrow. Right now Firefox is the only credible non-Chromium browser I’m aware of for Windows/Linux.

Honestly that comment was mostly there to try to forestall the people I expected would come out of the woodwork with vehement Apple hate. And if someone did in one of the replies below my comment.

It’s Safari doing it by way of iOS. If you remove that, neither Safari nor Firefox make much of a dent.

Sadly I think that’s about to happen in the name of “openness”.

I understand all the arguments against Apple getting to lock everyone into their browser.

But the practical effect, I fear, will be disaster when they’re forced to allow it.

Making firefox your daily browser would do a lot for making sure it doesn't die...

I’d prefer to support my favorite (Safari) when voting with my feet. I don’t want to be forced to give it up either.

I think many people here probably use Firefox to some degree and are concerned at the sustainability of the entity that makes it, especially since it seems to follow a for-profit trend of higher executive pay even though it's non-profit and not on the most stable, defensible grounds compared to competing software.

That’s the bit that really burns for me. I don’t know if they can make enough money for Firefox to survive.

But over the years they’ve spent money on an email client basically no one uses, trying to make a social network, trying to make a phone operating system, and who knows what else. Just huge amounts of money going to what often looks like a complete fools errand. I understand Thunderbird but a phone OS?

Money that could’ve gone to either make Firefox better or to advertise/promote it.

If FF was doing great in the market and they had millions of spare dollars, pursuing other things that match their goals would make sense. But that really doesn’t seem like where they are.

Instead it feels a lot more like if private equity bought an open source project.

But over the years they’ve spent money on an email client basically no one uses, trying to make a social network, trying to make a phone operating system, and who knows what else. Just huge amounts of money going to what often looks like a complete fools errand. I understand Thunderbird but a phone OS?

Keep in mind that both Firefox and Thunderbird started life as an evolution of the original “Mozilla Suite” which itself was an evolution of Netscape Communicator, which included a browser and an email client. So originally both were part of the core mission of Mozilla.

Thunderbird failed to gain much traction though and it was later spun off — it is now developed by a separate company (a Mozilla subsidiary).

but a phone OS?

Yes, this does not make much sense to me either.

Honestly I don’t expect that Thunderbird ever cost too much when they were still developing it, but even at the time I’m not sure it would’ve been worth it.

The other stuff is just me-too insanity from what I can tell. And now of course they’re talking about AI.

I think it makes perfect sense that money would be flowing from powerful entities in a way that cripples Mozilla. The CEO is getting rewarded for their lack of performance as a competitor to Google Chrome. Controlled opposition and so on.

It's not worthless; many people still want to like the product and would like the company to improve. Alas it seems to be a lost cause given what's discussed over the years, better move on and use the energy to support a browser focused on user experience that actually has a future.

Most companies aren't connected to a nonprofit, so don't need to publish their financial information in such detail.

They’re a seemingly worthless company to attract so much heat for their executives.

Most nerds used Firefox so they didn't use to be worthless, and those nerds care about what happened to the company.

Genuine question: can anyone explain CEO pay to me? I fail to understand why it is commonly accepted that one or a few people can earn n times more than the average worker actually responsible for creating value. It doesn't seem meritocratic at all... Even in software engineering where we are arguably spoiled to be able to do interesting work possibly from home for upwards of 100k a year, what is the incentive to actually want to do work, if someone else can unjustifiably make 7m a year? So how is it possible that we as humans collectively just accept this, also psychologically speaking?

What usually happens here is the board of a company say to themselves "Let's hire a professional CEO", the next answer then is how, you don't see these jobs advertised on LinkedIn, so they get a talent recruitment agency. For C level management positions there are usually 2 options that control the most of the market, these 2 options have rosters of people from well known business schools with experience ready to step in.

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.

This makes no sense. There are too many companies and too many boards that could just hire any old MBA off the street for non-CEO-cartel prices and get the job done.

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

They won’t for optics reasons, it looks incredibly foolish to shareholders to pluck any random MBA and call them a CEO. You have financial due diligence to uphold and this protects you, it shows you are conforming to industry practices.

Just name a damn engineer inside the company!

This is so frustrating.

Also when you buy a CEO you buy their old boys network with it. This is a big part of the high salaries and why it's such an in-crowd.

What are the two companies that control the market?

How can CEO pay increase “beyond market rates”?

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.

More responsibility. CEOs will be responsible for decisions that could make or break the company. Regular employees generally don't have to worry that something they do might cause the entire company to go out of business and lose everyone's jobs. If the company screws up and causes a scandal of some sort, the rank and file employees are not going to be called to testify before Congress about what went wrong and have the entire media shitting on them for weeks afterwards.

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.

But these board members and CEOs rarely get to face real consequences. At worst a golden handshake that sets them up for their retirement.

Having the leverage to negotiate high compensation means you also have the leverage to negotiate limited downside. If they were the kind of person who wasn't savvy enough to negotiate well for themselves, would you want them negotiating on behalf of the company?

There's a difference between negotiating well and being extremely greedy. The latter is not something you'd want at a company with a respectable image.

Nobody cares about being "extremely greedy" if the company succeeds. If the "extremely greedy" CEO negotiates hard on the company's behalf and gets price concessions from vendors and drives high profits, nobody is going to be lamenting about how it's not "respectable" when they're cashing their fat bonus checks.

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".

A good CEO can earn you way more than they cost.

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

Realtors is a bad example. https://www.forbes.com/advisor/legal/inflated-real-estate-co...

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

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.

There’s a huge downside to hiring a bad CEO (or a bad realtor, or even a bad plumber), so people want the best.

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.

Although I generally think most CEOs are overpaid, remember: they are legally accountable for the behavior of the organization. For example, David Drummond, who was Chief Legal Officer at Google (until it turned out he was impregnating people who reported to him) was convicted in a lawsuit in Italy, sentenced to prison, and there was a warrant for his arrest if he entered. This was over a video on a part of google that David had no real oversight on, where Google removed a video within only minutes of the issue being reported.

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.

That is a risk, just like you are at risk of being arrested if circumvent emissions standards...

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.

How many other examples do you have? I've yet to see anyone or anything even close to legally accountable for their behavior. Corporations get caught doing things all the time, and the most I can see is a fine that is typically much smaller than the laws they broke.

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.

If your company makes $1bln per year now and pays a CEO $1 mln, and then someone comes along who has much better ideas, better work ethic, and more experience and you (the board) are convinced they can add 5% of revenue as pure profit to your company per year. They will add $50 mln in value per year. If that person asks $5 mln as compensation would it be responsible to say no?

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.

if Elon Musk

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?

Supply:Demand ratio, like anything else.

Here’s a different way to think about it. Each level up makes 25-50% above the level below it. Maybe at director or VP the jump is a bit bigger.

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.

CEO pay is similar to other payments, where everyone is trying to claw themselves as much as they can, to certain personal limits. Powerful roles attract people who want power, and so, the higher up you go in a hierarchy, the more "dark"[0] traits you find, which equates to lessening personal limits to power / money gain. If you think of the ability, willingness and perseverance of one to further one's personal power as merit, then this is a meritocracy after all.

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

Basically, more responsibility = more money.

It seems perfectly meritocratic to me. I mean it’s consistent with how the word “meritocratic” is always used.

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.

average worker actually responsible for creating value

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.

Mozilla's corporate structure has the same problem OpenAI had. Because Mozilla is not a for-profit entity, management isn't accountable to shareholders with a financial stake. Because Mozilla isn't a charity, management isn't accountable to donors. Who is Mozilla management accountable to? A board; mostly made up Baker's associates. It is an incestuous arrangement. If Mozilla were serious, they would change the way management is held accountable. Baker needs someone who will actually hold her feet to the flames.

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.

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.

Improve in what sense? As a browser it has bern improving.

A browser that makes bold claims about privacy at every opportunity but still doesn't include uBlock Origin as a standard feature is a major problem.

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

This is itself a bold claim.

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.

the web is also used by grandma and grandpa

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.

The only people who currently use FF are those who also use uBlock Origin

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

These numbers may not be representative as anyone who installs uBlock Origin is unlikely to leave telemetry enabled.

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.

What non-advertising revenue model would pay for both Firefox development, and timely repairs and improvements to advertising blocks? It’d have to be a recurring or subscription model — one-time payments aren’t viable for recurring updates — with no free option (like there is today), as otherwise no one would pay for it (just like today). Solve this and perhaps they’ll make you the next CEO.

Exactly!

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.

Not disagreeing with your other points but keep in mind that "better addons support for android" was a self-inflicted problem and an arbitrary restriction. Addons worked to begin with if they weren't restricted to a small whitelist.

No it hasn't, and that's completely objective.

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.

Remember last week when we were all supposed to be switching to Firefox to advocate for them?

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

People need to pay some inconvenience for the better cause of web usability, privacy, software freedom, etc..

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 analogy doesn't apply to Firefox though because it is very far from "low funding" as the CEO pay reflects. Not to mention, Firefox was good and was at one point irreplaceable before mismanagement ruined it and continues to ruin it.

Still true. The reason for that is orthogonal to this.

Not to sound like snark, but where does the money even come from? I feel like you've ruled out either donors or investors, which really makes me confused over what's left.

A significant part is default search engines sharing revenue - primarily Google at the moment. There are also regular customers, for products like Mozilla VPN or Firefox Relay. And there are donors for the non-profit entity as well, as well as for the entity managing Thunderbird.

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

Mozilla is accountable to Google since Google pays the bills.

Hmm, I wonder what will be a good performance metric for a non profit entity CEO? DAU?

Not sure about the terms of the deal with Google, but it may be that she is trying to extract as much personal gain as she can before the termination date.

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

Mozilla continues to let its users down on privacy by relying on Google's money (>80% of its entire revenue) after the CEO promised that they would move away from them 15 years ago. [0] That did not happen.

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...

They have tried to move away from Google. The problem is none of their other ideas have worked out.

Here's an idea: provide a donations bucket that gives a guarantee that they'll be earmarked exclusively for Firefox development. Nothing off the top for CEO salaries, nothing siphoned off for random side projects—this bucket should be guaranteed to pay the salaries of Firefox developers.

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.

provide a donations bucket that gives a guarantee that they'll be earmarked exclusively for Firefox development

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

The tax problems were because of the Google deal, not the donations.

That'd work just as well for me. I just want a way to give Mozilla a clear signal that I pay them for Firefox, not for Pocket or a VPN or for whatever the flavor of the month is for the nonprofit. As is, there is no way for me to send them that signal, and I'm not prepared to endorse any of the non-Firefox projects Mozilla's put out.

Money is fungible. How should they guarantee your donation paid Firefox developers only?

You're correct, and this is a general problem with earmarking—there's nothing to stop the organization from just shifting unrestricted funds out of that bucket to compensate. I still would donate in this scenario, because the main point is that I want to be explicit about which activities Mozilla is engaging in that I find valuable. Donating to Mozilla right now would send the wrong message.

In fact they get chided around here for anything that isnt a firefox specific endevour.

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

The issue is: A browser engine is what is needed from them. VPN can be done by many organisations.

Mozilla VPN is done by Mullvad mostly.

Many (most?) non-Firefox endeavors of the Mozilla Foundation have been half-hearted flops for which they deserve chiding. I struggle to name any non-Firefox Mozilla project that has been successful and which they've continued to support.

Because they're harebrained ideas. I don't want to pay Mozilla for a limited version of mullvad when I can get the full mullvad for less.

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?

For starters that'd be a reason to cut cost and allocate an increasing proportion of current revenue into a diversified investment portfolio to eventually gradually shift towards being able to at a minimum know they can cost-cut and survive of that investment return should they need to.

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.

Mozilla's subscriptions and advertising grew from nothing in 2016 to 13% of revenue in 2022.

Here's an idea: an enterprise/power-user focused browser. The market for productivity tools is huge, and likewise for enterprise security snake oil. The browser, being at the front of most security threats would be a great place to implement security features that might not be entirely snake oil, and The Enterprise will gobble it up and pay up.

This might be poor framing. Maybe its for a job well done. A big reason for google funding is fears of monopoly lawsuits. From this perspective a firefox fewer people use is a good thing.

In 2020, after returning to the position of CEO, her salary had risen to over $3 million 2021, her salary rose again to over $5 million, 2022 her salary rose again to nearly $7 million

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

* ..her salary had risen to over $3 million 2021, her salary rose again to over $5 million, 2022 her salary rose again to nearly $7 million .. In August of the same year the Mozilla Corporation laid off approximately 250 employees due to shrinking revenues *

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.

Most workers actually welcome these practices because they're led to believe that they themselves could one day end up in that chair.

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

I don't think most workers have fallen for that scam, rather that most workers feel that they're powerless to change things.

They should revolt and this management "culture" of severely inflated compensation is decadent to the core. Especially since a CEO doesn't really create value at a company like Mozilla, nor are executive decisions too relevant.

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

So, people were stuck at their homes, with no other things to do than engaging electronically with the rest of the world, but this, somehow created problems for Mozilla, a company that builds a fucking web browser?

Are there penalties for ceos that knowingly issue false statements? Lots of execs lie these days.

Only if you mislead the investors, in a publicly traded company

IIRC, didn't they layoff the rust engineers who did all that work on quantum?

Rust code was a small part of Quantum. Did you mean Servo?

To be fair, she did a great job for who's actually paying (Google)

This is the correct answer here. The CEO blood-boilingly doesn't make sense, if looking at the organization as a technological steward of Firefox and maybe related technologies. But the CEO and Firefox are just there, year after year. So maybe it's not the organization that's wrong, but rather the way of looking at them.

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.

And how does that raise compare with other CEOs of similar organizations?

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.

While you’re right about that, the fact that they seem to have been trending downward for a very long time suggests they need someone new, whoever it is, and at a minimum should not be encouraging the current CEO with a raise.

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.

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 is another similar organization?

For all the valid criticism of the Wikipedia Foundation, their combined salaries of all "officers, directors, trustees, and key employees" (aka board and C suite) was $4.2 million in 2021

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

Mozilla deserves a lot of criticism. It doesn't need the anti diversity crowd for that. It's its own worst enemy right now (and it really starts with Baker). Diversity (which I really support) has nothing to do with it.

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.

How does that compare to a company which has lost 95% of their market share in the last 15 years?

Siding with a millionaire CEO to own the anti wokes is quite a take. Also, even if her peers were just as well paid, it's well known and normal for not for profits to pay a lot less than "private" for profit businesses. Expecting non profit CEOs to have a salary that trends similarly to those in big/mid tech is a bit weird, why not just go work for big tech if she is on the same level as her well paid peers? Also even for a non profit, it's a bit... brazen to still keep increasing the already massive salary even when clearly the organization is doing a lot worse in terms of meeting its own objectives than before.

The hate for Mozilla on HN has very little to do with diversity and almost everything to do with people who want Firefox to keep Chrome at bay and are frustrated at Mozilla's paying attention to everything but Firefox.

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.

Who sets the CEO pay for Mozilla?

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?

Her friends on the board. This isn't a joke, and you can easily look it up.

You say that as if its shocking.

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

Well technically they exist also to make sure the CEO does a good job.

Which in this case they're not doing.

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.

It's not that the board sets CEO compensation that's bad, it's the personal connections they have and the observation that they appear to set compensation more based those personal connections with the CEO, not based on any measure of performance or anything..

I was assuming that was hyperbole since if the public actually had evidence of the board violated its fiduciary responsibilities they would be in legal hot water.

I think the outrageous part of the claim is that the board is composed of personal friends, not that they set CEO compensation.

I don't think the comment you're replying to is 'shocked' by the detail you're talking about

Mozilla seems to be in a lose-lose situation with HN crowd.

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.

I’m way closer to paying for Kagi than I am to paying for Firefox. Sure “apples to oranges” and all that, but if Kagi slapped a coat of paint on a shitty electron app, gave me bookmarks, profiles (for dev testing a la containers in Firefox), and asked me to cough up $10-$15 / month for it? Done. Paid. Maybe even a tip on top.

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.

Kagi actually does make their own browser (Mac-only and Webkit-based): https://kagi.com/orion/

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

Thanks for the kind words! Note that Orion is macOS/iOS only for now (we had to start somewhere).

Well I use Firefox but I hate their harebrained monetisation schemes. And anyone with any idea of business knows they'll never pull in the money they need. Whatever the answer is, this isn't it.

Mozilla shut down the Rust team to focus on Firefox.

You're talking as though HN is a monolithic entity with a single opinion.

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.

Everyone that advocated for ousting technical Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich bears responsibility.

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

Uhhh no, sorry. Getting Eich to leave was one thing. Getting a completely incompetent replacement hired is not on those people.

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.

This is the timeline we're on. Ousting Eich directly led to our current Mozilla situation. He's not the only who could've ran it successfully. But we are where we are because people wanted him ousted and instead were ok with Mitchell Baker types. From a realist perspective that cares about actual outcomes, we are in the worse timeline with an incompetent Mozilla vs. whatever small negative affects Eich would affect in the grand scheme of Prop 8 related issues.

With the benefit of hindsight, yes.

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.

Ok so we have the benefit of hindsight, but I say, let's predict these things better. Principles are worthwhile to speak out for, but if we have better predictions on getting better outcomes, we should lean towards those better outcomes and not certainly dig our own grave by latching onto what may be a misguided principled stance. I'm quite sure that most of the people, that care about an independent successful Firefox and celebrated Eich's ouster, now regret that. We need to change our mindset when what happens is viciously descending on someone, years after the fact, for donating to what was a majority opinion in a liberal state. And yet ignoring or giving a pass to the years of continued actual malfeasance running Firefox thereafter. If it means actually accomplishing good things in the world, an independent web, I'm willing to give people leeway, nowhere close to what they're giving current Mozilla. The problem is people never gave a single thought to what possible futures ousting the technical CEO of Mozilla means, and unfortunately we now have to live it.

Regardless of what happened with him, there's literally no reason to believe that he wouldn't have had the same massive salary if he was still the CEO. Him being technical has nothing to do with taking a massive salary or not, the issue is cultural. Especially when you see the exact same thought process all over this thread, of thinking "But they are a CEO in tech! They deserve it!" instead of keeping in mind the completely different dynamics that apply to non profits. I don't think it has much to do with the CEO themselves

FTA, emphasis mine:

"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."

Also the part where they need data for AI, so turbocharge the telemetry engines...

(but am I wrong, downvoters? :))) what the hell bone do you have to pick with a fact? "As well as Teixeira's comments regarding advertising, Baker notes: "We need to be faster in prototyping, launching, learning, and iterating ... This requires rich data, and so we will be moving in that direction, but in a very Mozilla way."")

HN doesn't like some facts. Those disliked facts change over time. Don't overthink it. Downvotes in everything you post should be worrying, an ocasional downvote here and there is actually a good sign that you're not a part of a hive-mind.

I added the quote in case it was a citation thing.

Downvoting for complaining that downvoters think you're wrong, when downvoters just as likely think your comment is low effort. Even your defense of your comment is "I'm just regurgitating a sentence from the article and adding nothing".

If the CEO is being rewarded for declining revenue and users, then that's what the CEO was hired to do. Can't understand why the board wants lower revenue and user share.

The board knows the ship is sinking. You and I would work hard to keep it afloat. They’re working hard to loot the hold of everything they can cart off and sell before it sinks.

You might be downvoted, but "looting" matches my impression with regards to Mozilla and its current CEO. If I were to guess, they'll stay until it's this profitable, and when the Google money finally goes away, they will too, onto the next victim.

It is a non profit. Having less revenue is a win. Duh.

For all the valid criticism of the Wikipedia Foundation, their combined salaries of all "officers, directors, trustees, and key employees" (aka board and C suite) was $4.2 million in 2021

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

Yeah they just have some problem with handling the donations...

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

This is because Jimmy Wales is still around and even though he dont control wikimedia directly he is actually a public figure with massive recognition and authority. And certainly have more following and trust than majority of FAANG CEOs.

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

Most tech startups spend years and sometimes decades in net losses while CEO get raises because revenue isn't the one and only performance and potential indicator.

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

Well that's the thing. Mozilla is not a private for profit corporation, the money isn't from investors, and the goal isn't to make a profit at the end of the day. Non profit CEOs always have a much smaller salary, and much smaller increases. That's just how it usually works because the money they have is supposed to go into fulfilling their objective, not make people rich. Why does Mozilla get a pass for this? It's so weird to see this defensiveness whenever the subject is brought up, because you can clearly like and support Mozilla and still disagree with a non profit paying 1% of what it earns to an underperforming ceo. That sum would be weird even if Mozilla was doing well.

Using and advocating the use of Firefox, and objecting to this Mozilla leadership situation are two different things.

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.

Interesting contrast to the "everyone should use firefox in 2024" #1 article from a few days ago

I believe Firefox is a decent browser in spite of the CEO of the organisation.

It's 100% rational to hold the positions that the CEO has performed poorly and doesn't deserve anything like the salary they are paid (and should probably be removed), at the same time as believing that the people working on Firefox have managed to do a quite good job in spite of the terrible leadership.

Interesting contrast to the "everyone should use firefox in 2024" #1 article from a few days ago

Firefox is an unqualified good to the world. Mozilla (as the nonprofit we once all knew and trusted) ceased to really exist years ago.

Just another zombie corp bumbling along into discount acquistion/liquidation at this point. Once Google stops paying the bills, it'll be stripped for parts and join Netscape in heaven.

Guys. Mozilla set out to make the web standards compliant. Firefox was the tool they used. They won. It's done. The web is universally standards compliant.

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.

Someone else posted that they lost 95% of their market share in the last 15 years, that is quite literally the opposite of unchecked growth.

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

Let them burn their cash, who cares? None of us is paying them. They're never going to die, their true masters will just keep them afloat so nobody can cry monopoly. It's not an accident that most of their money comes from their biggest competitor.

We need to be faster in prototyping, launching, learning, and iterating... This requires rich data, and so we will be moving in that direction

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.

Honestly I don't care what Google, I mean Mozilla, does with their money. I gave up on caring about Firefox a long time ago.

Executive pay is the cancer of modern times. It's like paying only the conductor for the entire orchestra.

I like brave.

“This requires rich data” :facepalm:

All good things must come to an end...maybe it's just time that we accept that Mozilla is not an exception to the rule.

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?

Recent and related:

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)

I use Firefox and I have 0 intention of going back to chrome at all, I have adopted a strategy of Firefox by default with chrome as mere backup for what Firefox won't run.

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.

that's basically cumulative inflation since 2019.

What would you do if you were her? I'd deprecate firefox.

For younger readers - Mozilla is the company in charge of a web browser called Firefox, which was widely used from around 2004-2014.