I worked at Mozilla back in 2012, as we were pivoting to FirefoxOS (a mobile OS). I was very low in the company, but for some reason sent Mitchell an email detailing why I thought it was a bad idea.
She not only responded in a very gracious way, but also followed up months later to check if my feelings had changed. While they had not, she didn't owe me anything and I really appreciated her attentiveness. Mitchell really cares about Mozilla and its community.
Mitchell was a great community leader. That doesn't always translate to being a good CEO or leader of a business, however Mitchell is a huge reason (if not THE reason) why we have Firefox today – and, even if you don't currently use Firefox, a huge reason why we have the web we have today.
So, while I haven't been the biggest fan of Mozilla's decisions the past few years, I do want to give credit to Mitchell for everything she did for the open web and open source. She was a supporter before anyone really cared, and played a huge part in getting is to where we are now over the past 20+ years.
(I am glad this is the direction they have chosen! Here's a 2015 post where I write about how I think Mozilla should focus on data privacy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10698997)
It's interesting to hear this, because from the outside Mitchell's tenure has seemed to be a disaster, with a complete inability to stay focused on one thing for long enough to make a difference.
Mozilla in recent memory has reminded me more than anything of the dogs in Pixar's Up ("squirrel!"), constantly chasing after the latest shiny tech fad while neglecting the fundamentals. They've been a follower on everything and have failed to lead on anything. Mitchell's justification for stepping down as CEO seems to me to follow this same pattern: she's stepping down in order to focus on AI and internet safety.
It's good to know that she's a decent person and was good to Mozilla employees, but it's hard to square the picture you paint with the complete lack of direction I've seen during her tenure. Maybe Mozilla was in a much worse situation than I thought at the time she took the position?
I agree with everything you said. All I can say in response is that being a great community leader and open web advocate doesn't always square with someone who has to make a profit for hundreds or thousands of employees.
I have no inside information, but here's my guess at what happened. John Lilly was a great CEO. When he left, there was a gigantic void. They hired Gary Kovacs, who started the "squirrel!"-ing. He wasn't well-liked, and used Mozilla as a stepping stone. So going forward they only hired from the Mozilla community, which is a small pool – both of people who could do it and people who wanted to do it. I'm not sure if Mitchell wanted it or not, but I don't think there was a lot of competition.
Being the CEO of Mozilla is not a good job, and I imagine it's really hard to fill. There's a ton of pressure, relatively low salary, no equity, no exit.
Mitchell baker was making 6.2 million dollars a year at Mozilla in 2023.
Source: https://www.theregister.com/AMP/2024/01/02/mozilla_in_2024_a...
Yes, that's a lot of money.
But if you're a CEO good enough to turn Mozilla around given the constraints... you could make a lot more elsewhere. If nothing else, you'd get stock, which would correlate with your performance.
Why? Why does pointing mozilla in the right direction require such rare skills?
Or is this because we're only looking at existing CEOs for hiring?
If the rareness is about having the right industry knowledge and vision in a CEO, I bet you can get better results by hiring a company aimer and separate managerial co-CEO and using the money you save for 20 more devs and 5 more marketers.
Imagine running a company. That's hard enough.
Now imagine your market share is down a ton (and decreasing), and there's no clear way to change that trajectory.
Then imagine that despite being CEO, you're owned by a non-profit. So, you have a boss, and your boss has different goals than you do.
Then imagine attracting and retaining top talent, while not being able to give out equity.
Then imagine that your product is free. You can't charge more for it; you give (almost) everything away for free and there's no clear path to monetization.
And then imagine that almost all of your money comes from your biggest competitor, and your only lever is to negotiate (from a position of weakness, because they're much bigger) a deal every 3 years in order to keep paying your employees.
That sounds really hard!
But I don't see why it needs particularly rare skills.
And lots of people do really hard jobs for much much much less money.
I don’t either! But apparently they’re rare. One pays dearly when trying to go cheap, or broaden the pool in seemingly innocuous ways, in executive recruiting.
Fortitude is necessary, but by itself insufficient.
Do we have good evidence for that, or is it just what the people that hire CEOs tend to think?
When I think of disastrous CEOs that I've managed to hear about, they weren't cheap. They got paid huge amounts to cause their disasters.
There is the problem. There is evidence a great CEO can make a difference. And if a great CEO wants millions they are worth it. However nobody knows how to tell a great CEO from bad.
That sounds like the old advertising idiom, “Half of all advertising works, but you will never be certain which half,” or something similar anyway. I think there is a very distinct “lightning in a bottle” component to great and/or successful companies. Combinations of effective teams, aligned motivations, good timing, a leader who can identify and leverage all of those elements to great effect, and some X factors that are simply unknowable. That may be just a slightly more nuanced way of saying they’re lucky, but also good fortune in externally changing scenarios is certainly one of those unknown factors. I think the ability to recognize, organize, and effectively leverage all of the elements such that a company is well-positioned if/when the external factors line up in their favor is what defines a great CEO. I think that ability is akin to naturally talented musicians. Most people can, with enough time and effort, learn to play a guitar very well. They still won’t be Jimi Hendrix. The downside is, you can’t force it or fake it (at least not for very long). I think of parallels with the difference between the British and American versions of the TV show “Top Gear” that was being produced in the mid ‘00s. The original British show was the lightning in a bottle, and became one of the most successful TV series on the planet. The lifeless copy they attempted in the US followed the recipe meticulously, and was cringeworthy.
(Edit: Missed the word “never” up top)
Watching The Grand Tour[1] season 1 it feels stilted, awkward, like they are reciting their lines for some forced humor while Amazon showers cash and flashy cars all around trying too hard. If it was like this with three unknown people I wouldn't bother - I'm only watching on the hope that the lightning in a bottle sparks up again as they settle in, because the highs of Top Gear were good - friends messing about for a laugh, daring bold ideas, beautiful filming and settings.
e.g. scaling the Guallatiri volcano https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOcJOn0nxnU
Crossing salt flats in Botswana: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OETj9aTYO2Q
Driving to the North Pole: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WNkvASxfEWQ
Driving the Bolivian Death Road: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=daQcxVqQJsI
Building their own amphibious cars and crossing the English Channel in them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WTVPPTV-bQM
Trying to run out of fuel before arriving at the Chernobyl exclusion zone: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YtVV1VJ4f8
Getting lost trying to leave a traditional Italian city: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c_eLViH7_YI
Budget Italian Supercars: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GuCff8nCxBU
[1] When they stopped Top Gear, Amazon snapped up Clarkson Hammond and May to make a Top Gear knockoff for Amazon Prime, that's The Grand Tour.
I think so, and it’s largely in the attrition of start-ups due to executive leadership breaking down. Start-up founders are already a rarefied group; that so many break down or flip out or can’t handle all the balls in the air is telling. (There is plenty of academia on the topic. It doesn’t support massive paydays. But certainly single-digit millions, i.e. life-changing money for someone who may already be rich.)
Look at the state of the company they took over. Golden parachutes are often required to woo top talent to a trash pile because top talent knows the world is stochastic.
Yes, I'm specifically thinking of companies that were doing fine when they took over.
The necessary skills are not rare, but the roles are rare so people start to think the skills are rare. I get a lot of grief for this opinion but I think most HN'ers could do the job of "CEO of whatever company they currently work for". It's not rocket science. We have this mythology around CEOs that they are such outlier smart, special, hardworking people, but really it's just that the top of the pyramids contain few people.
Shadow the CEO of a well-run large company around for a couple of weeks.
I wouldn't want that job, and I'm not sure I could do it.
Always being on-call, and having to constantly context switch and synthesize questionably-accurate material from reports, to make important decisions.
(And that's not even broaching the political tasks... which are required, because it's the only way to become and remain CEO)
Definitely wanting the job is separate from can do the job, although to be honest, I would be happy to get paid $6+ million for the job "Fail to turn around Mozilla". Heck, I'd be willing to do it for 10% of that compensation.
That's glib.
No one is hired to fail, and no one tries to fail.
They're hired to try and succeed, and sometimes it doesn't go that way.
It is not glib. Here is how I would put it.
Remember as a tech lead, if you are heroically writing a lot of code burning the midnight oil, banging out tickets and completing sprints by yourself, you are failing. As a CEO, the more you are doing the more you are failing. This is probably why it is so hard for people like us to he leaders. It is very difficult to delegate and not meddle with things. It is easy to say let go but very hard to actually do so.
Remember that even Steve Jobs delegated all operations and supply chain stuff to tim cook. And that's Steve Jobs! We are not Steve Jobs.
There is no reason why my manager should make more money than me.
There are many jobs that I wouldn't want and that are not paid 6M a year. There are some things that I can do that not everybody can do, and still I am not paid 6M.
You can try reverting it: a CEO earning 6M a year could not necessarily be a firefighter. Yet firefighters are not paid 6M a year. And they actually risk their life.
I would consider most min wage jobs harder than what i (computer programmer) do. Compensation is often inversely correlated with how shitty the job is.
Hard as in "undesirable" isn't the same as in "the skills to do it are rare", though.
Why would those skills not be rare? How many people do you know that can do all that? I know vanishingly few and I suspect most do too.
I think that the "it's paid a lot because it's super hard" is generally a bad excuse. Many things are super hard, many people make a lot of sacrifices to be among the bests at what they do. Yet they don't earn that much.
When the thing you are good at is being a CEO (as opposed to, say, being a teacher), then you are very lucky. Because other CEOs before you managed to make it acceptable to earn an indecent salary for just doing a job. Ok, let's say they don't sleep at all, so they can work 2-3x as much as the average people. Are they paid 2-3x more? No! They're paid orders of magnitudes more. That's indecent.
So what solution are you proposing?
Right now, you’re simply complaining about a perceived problem without offering any logical argument for an alternative.
I do not mean to sound flippant, I’d like to hear what your alternative ideas are.
To the problem of human beings receiving way too much money for the time they spend doing their job?
Easy: crazy taxes. If the company really wants to increase the salary up to some limit, knowing that 95% of that increase will go into taxes, then good for them. Otherwise they can do something else, like increasing other salaries or hiring people.
Also if you ask me, there should be laws for the difference between the lowest and the highest salary in a company. I.e. "the highest salary cannot be more than X times the lowest salary". Which means that if the CEO wants to earn more, they need to raise the lowest salaries.
To a first order approximation you’re advocating for communism over capitalism in that you believe the will of the State (funded by “crazy taxes”) takes precedence over the will of the People, represented by local decisions made in a free market.
Consider that you could attempt to solve your perceived problem in multiple ways within the existing structure. 1) Garner public support and lead a campaign to change our laws to be more inline with the thoughts you have around increasing taxes; 2) Exploit the market opportunity you’ve identified (of paying CEO’s less to pay others more) by starting companies that follow this ethos, attract talent, and deliver value to consumers; 3) Attain a leadership position as CEO or in the Board of Directors for a company where you can take responsibility and change these perceived compensation problems; so on and so forth.
The responsibility lies with you to bring the change you seek.
Do you even know what communism is? Or are you one of those people who calls everything that is on the left of the current US president "communism"?
There has never been real communism so how could anybody hope to know what is? Literally.
It is an ideology, it can perfectly exist only in books.
I'm not sure how increasing CEO taxes helps Mozilla's position at all. I feel like something has taken a left turn in this thread.
Such taxes would apply to their competitors too and level the playing field
Who said it would? Though I may argue that it is not clear at all if you really get the best person for the job when you make them rich just by getting the job. Not saying that all the CEOs are here "just for the money", but... well if they are not here for the money, why do they get that kind of salaries?
I feel like when people are talking about the salary of a CEO and whether they "earned it" or not, I am entitled to say that no human being can ever deserve that kind of salary. Just like a liberal could say "they don't deserve it because they did not please the shareholders that much".
I'd imagine that at a place like Mozilla (effectively a high-tech nonprofit primarily staffed by white-collar workers), this difference in compensation is actually not that big, compared to, say, a business that hires hourly workers.
You're right, you probably need the law to also include contractors for it to have teeth.
Brendan Eich (former CTO & CEO of Mozilla) managed to get 1% of marketshare for Brave from zero.
FF has 3.3%.
I think FF would have done mych better under his leadership.
Imagine being both the CEO of the corp and the chairwoman of the non profit. Damn!
Remember Mitchell killed FirefoxOS (I know you were likely happy about that @gkoberger), and now Mozilla is complaining about not getting level playing access to other OSes. Guess what, when you have no platform, you'll be forever a second class citizen.
Baker is a good motivational speaker, but should never have been allowed to made any operational decision.
Technically FirefoxOS is still around: https://www.kaiostech.com/ . It's now an OS for feature phones. It's no longer owned by Mozilla but they did have a lasting impact, that's what I mean. And many of their throwaway projects have gone that way. For example Firefox VR browser is now Wolvic. https://wolvic.com/en/ . It's the great thing about open source, the work is not lost.
But Mozilla had no chance in the real smartphone market. If Microsoft couldn't manage to attract developers with their billions and dedicated hardware, Firefox supplying only the OS and no hardware just had zero chance to make it mainstream. It would have been relegated to the same position as Sailfish: A cool curiosity but not interesting enough for anyone but some hobbyists to develop for.
I don't think it was a bad idea trying: At that time the duopoly in the smartphone market was not as firmly established and there were other open projects like Ubuntu as well. They might have attracted a huge party like Samsung (after all, they did go for Tizen in the end!) and things might have worked out differently. But the choice to drop it was inevitable at that point.
FxOS failed commercially because it tried to be a "me too" product, with the same distribution strategy as Android that relies a lot on carriers. For that to work you need to get support from key apps in the carriers markets, and FxOS never managed to get Whatsapp on board.
KaiOS got Whatsapp support thanks to shipping in India with a single carrier (Jio) that has a very large user base. Deployment in the rest of the world has been a struggle and the company is not in great shape.
All that to say that Mozilla could have kept the lights on for a couple more years and get access to large markets. Hard to predict what would have happened but we certainly would have more diversity in the OS space.
The only path to FirefoxOS success would have been if someone like Samsung hitched their wagon to it.
Which would have been because they thought they could make more money using it than Android.
Which probably wouldn't have bode well for user-friendly changes to the base image.
Android's value prop to manufacturers was "Was to sell a lot of mobile phones, but not have to pay for most of the development? And get a working Maps solution? Here you go." Which Google could afford to torch money on.
I think you're wrong but we'll never know :) What is true is that some of the interest from carriers for alternative OSes was indeed that they didn't like to be handcuffed to Android and iOS.
Are we using carrier and manufacturer differently?
And I'd imagine carriers don't, as they'd no doubt love to go back to the feature-phone days, but they're all (individually) too weak to do anything about it.
Only aggregated can they offer the resources to support an alternative.
I use Kaios every day and I'm happy it exists but I'd have been even happier if it had just been stock Ubuntu with some phone specific bits thrown in. I actually bought a phone like that but it eventually stopped being serviced. But that was the best phone I ever had, this one is a distant 3rd after all my previous Nokias.
so, you want mobian
Or possibly PureOS.
Worth noting Fabrice was one of the primary devs on FxOS, and I believe the primary dev on KaiOS. I'm pretty sure he's familiar with the history.
FirefoxOS was a moon shot. The sort of project a profit making company burns a few 10s of million on in the hope it somehow works out.
Mozilla should have been focusing on the one thing anyone cared about, the browser. Rust and Servo were the correct risks to take. But I know, hindsight is 20/20.
No, I'm not happy. I was gobsmacked by how smart the people working on it were (you included), and was so proud to work a few desks away from such amazing engineers.
My thoughts that FirefoxOS was mismanaged from an executive level are in no way a reflection of the work I saw coming out of your team, and I took no pleasure in it shutting down. I felt the executive team got caught up too much with things like presenting at Mobile World Congress, at the cost of a ton of focus.
Even if Mozilla reallocated all their resources and dedicated themselves 100% to building a mobile OS, I’d personally be surprised if they were able to secure any meaningful market share. Talk about playing against a stacked deck.
I don't have any insider knowledge but:
It's entirely possible that Mitchell Baker was responsible for getting hundreds of millions of dollars extra for Firefox when they switched search provider and then back, invoking a clause in their agreement with Yahoo.
Which seems like some pretty skilful playing of a bad hand.
The fact that they switched from Yahoo after the Yahoo sale to Verizon was announced, and got Yahoo to keep paying them was a great move.
I talked to one of the corporate lawyers that worked that deal, and told him it was a genius move.
Those constraints can be turned into positives depending on your point of view. Imagine what you could do?
And the whole point is that paying someone 6M means you should be able to figure out how to solve for these problems
The idea that nobody possibly could reconcile these issues and yet should still be paid egregiously is absurd
Because it basically requires to beat a monopoly power that has repeatedly used its unrelated lines of business to crush competition in the past?
Growing Mozilla is probably as hard as growing diapers.com as an independent company.
I forgot diapers.com had closed. :/
The most important skill is being in the right social class. The rest is just justification.
For a company that has a declining marketshare like Mozilla it's really way too high IMO.
Her salary kept going up as the marketshare was going down...
You'd really need to decide if you thought their marketshare would go down faster or not with someone else.
If Firefox is destined for a market share of 2%, may as well get there quickly. A few years of decline vs a few months makes little difference in the long term.
To be honest, market share shouldn't ever have been Baker's goal and losing it isn't necessarily a black mark against her. Firefox should have a vision of what it wants a browser and the internet to look like and be working to make software that supports that. Firefox seems to just be following along as Chrome with some minor tweaks [0] and that is the real problem. Google's vision of the internet is not what Firefox should be working to implement. There are deep strategic issues here that go far beyond market share. I'm personally happy to use niche software, I don't care what other people are using (Linux reached my desktop a long time ago). But it is hard to see what even Mozilla thinks the point of Firefox is.
One of the things that makes Brave interesting to me is that it sees a web where middle men get cut out through the use of cryptocurrency. Is that going to work? Probably not. But it is a different take on what the internet could be. We need competitors like that. Even for privacy; it is hard to tell who Mozilla thinks the internet should look like. I'd hazard little change from now except without 3rd party cookies. That isn't a very impressive vision.
[0] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/browsers/compare/chrom...
How does that play into your decision to use Firefox or any other browser? I'm a Firefox user and I care nothing about market share. I get annoyed if I stumble upon a page managed by incompetent devteams and thus only runs on Chrome, but that's a quick in-and-out.
Why do you care about share? Why do you feel it's relevant, specially if people are pushed to use Chrome or Edge through unethical means?
I read this kind of comment all the time, and it's something I almost never experience.
The only feature that I want in Firefox that I need to use Chromium for is Web Bluetooth, and that's because I use a Bangle.js smartwatch, which is even more niche than using Firefox is.
It's very hard for me to understand why so many people think they routinely encounter websites that don't work in Firefox.
In the early days of bloated SPAs, they used to run like absolute shit on Firefox (if they even worked at all).
Now everything runs like shit on every browser so things appear to be more equal.
I agree, fortunately that's somewhat rare. It still stings if you come across a broken site that you need to use frequently. I'm concerned that Google's "extend" phase is just ramping up, with incompetent devteams confusing "Chrome has a large market share" with "it's ok to publish a broken site if it works with Chrome".
As a developer the lower the market share the less incentive there is to supporting it. I have stopped testing to see if my sites work on firefox and just focus on chromium and safari.
A few years ago Firefox was my main browser and I got sick of the constant changes and just use chrome, brave and safari now. I never missed FF for one moment.
I remember when Firefox was the faster leaner version of the mozilla browser and now they have bloated it up and forgotten its foundational principles.
It's one thing to claim to not include Firefox in your list of supported browsers.
It's an entirely different thing to claim you only support Chrome and Safari.
If you are a developer and only target browsers from Apple and Google, this is a personal decision you're making to purposely ignore around 25% of your whole market share. This is not Firefox's or Microsoft's Opera's problem. This is your problem.
Firefox is a pretty good browser, I wonder what caused people to switch.
I remember when Firefox did themselves a bud light when they ousted Eich. People hold grudges.
Google ad campaigns, some years where Chrome genuinely felt snappier, Google pushing Chrome everywhere, Google sabotaging Firefox on their own websites.
Generally speaking, we have seen that people are okay with handing over the web and all their data to Google, if a button press registers 20ms faster.
Firefox isn't the default browser on any of the popular consumer operating systems, so people don't need a reason to switch from it, they need a reason to switch to it.
Which Mozilla could provide if they'd spend more resources on Firefox and less on random tangents.
But now Google is doing their work for them by making Chrome worse:
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/11/google-chrome-will-l...
Market share was/is a means to an end.
Mozilla positioned Firefox in part as a reference for how web standards should behave (*), particularly for ones where Chrome/IE/Safari diverged with competing non-standard implementations.
But for that to work in the real world, not just at W3C debates, you need major websites to care if they function correctly on your browser. And for them to care, enough people have to be using your browser that these companies see a business case for spending money to add your browser to project plans and QA test matrixes as a compatibility target.
That decision is heavily informed by market share, whether global or as a percentage of the site’s own access records. In particular, double digits is a rough threshold for that, and that was pretty much Mozilla’s target. 50% would be wonderful but 10%+ let them assert standards in the ecosystem via the implicit threat of users leaving a site if Firefox didn’t work.
As a test professional at the time, one of the most discouraging things I saw after leaving Mozilla was Firefox dropping off all the test plans I knew about when they hit single digits. I’d poke at that decision where I had influence, and would basically get back a response that “Firefox is dead, just look at the numbers.”
(*) I’m pointedly ignoring some of the more aggressive introductions of things like device-interface APIs crucial to making a browser engine act like a phone OS, etc. Ultimately, someone has to build a working implementation before it’ll become a standard, anyway. There’s a race aspect for new ground and Mozilla was part of that.
But generally speaking, where there was an actual recognized standard, Firefox used it and not some homegrown alternative. So websites also had to develop to that standard to function correctly for a significant percentage of users.
Great, informative comment. Thank you.
I think this whole discussion of market share smacks a little too much of evaluating a president by the country’s GDP. Useful for a pithy remark, but doing any sort of detailed analysis seems doomed. I think the factors you listed are far more relevant
That’s irrelevant. People were starting to see alarm bells ringing when her salary had quadrupled to $2.5m (this is in 2018 or 2019 I think?) while market share was dropping, it should have stayed basically around there until she turned things around with an increase as an incentive.
Instead it doubled and then increased again (wasn’t it more like $7m by the end?)
And someone said yes to that. Think about that for a second.
The product's global importance is now a tiny fraction of what it was 15 years ago, and the person during whose tenure this happened was recently making 10x as much as back then. TEN TIMES.
And whoever approved that obscene compensation thought this was a good idea.
It’s almost parasitic, suck the host of it’s resources and dump it when it’s near death for the next host...
I used to be a big Firefox fan, but the last 10 years made me abandon it, I don’t even check if my sites work on it anymore because the market share it has is so tiny. My time is better spent making sure it works with Safari...
Mozilla is also making 10x as much revenue as 15 years ago, has massively increased cash reserves, and is finally starting to diversify its income streams.
And it's absurd to put the fault for the declining market share purely at the feet of Mozillas leadership. Not to say they were blameless, but when Google threw its weight behind Chrome, including massive ad campaigns on billboards, pushing it on its web properties, and regularly breaking Firefox on their own websites for no technical reasons, you can't reasonably expect Firefox to just magically maintain their market share. That said, at the upper end you could look at Germany, where Firefox is still between 10-20% (depending on the estimate you look at), as what could have been achievable more broadly.
Even still. These two trends can't be reconciled. With the marketshare the importance of the role also drops.
In 10 years she'd be making 100M per year and have 100 customers :P
I know nothing of this person or Mozilla internals, but I could imagine a company heading towards bankruptcy, that was avoided while still losing market-share. In this situation the role of CEO could become more important as market-share decreases and the situation becomes more precarious.
Now if that person caused the downward slide to begin with, that's a different conversation. Again, I don't know the internals of Mozilla well enough to make an educated argument one way or the other.
Welcome to Elon Musk at Tesla.
I'm no great fan of his (anymore), but Tesla's market share or at least market size did do very well during that period, not to mention the stock price going nuts. And this was all before he took a sharp turn at the corner of alt and right.
The controversy is not over whether or not he performed his duties effectively as CEO, it's over the disguised self-dealing that produced the comp package in the first place.
The milestones were reasonable, the rewards were not.
Please correct me if my understanding is wrong here, but isn't the current situation after the judge nullified his comp package now that he has done a phenomenal job growing the company, has taken $0 in salary for the last 5 years, and is now receiving no stock compensation either?
Sure $50bn+ is unreasonably large, but isn't $0 unreasonably small?
He can negotiate a new package. Besides he has plenty of money. If he spends a million a day he won't be broke for several lifetimes.
Can he? How can he know whether the new one will or will not be retroactively invalidated 5 years from now? Do all executives need to get permission from a sitting judge before signing a contract now to be sure it's not going to be retroactively invalidated in the future?
All public company executives need to get their pay package approved by a real board that can actually tell them no (or at least sound like it in the minutes), not a handful of fawning sycophants. Or, if their board is actually a handful of fawning sycophants, they need to not lie about that when describing the pay deal to shareholders. Or they can take their chances on what a judge may think in the future. Doesn't seem unreasonable.
Don't the shareholders elect the board members?
Up to a point. Tesla has a staggered board, which is well-known as a technique for making it hard for shareholders to control the board, and in general it's very rare for shareholders to vote board members out even in companies with more shareholder-friendly charters. Support for Tesla's directors in their most recent election was well below the median, partly because ISS had recommended voting against them (which is again unusual), but didn't reach the level of removing them.
I didn't realize it wasn't as cut and dry as a simple majority vote among shareholders, thanks for teaching me something new :)
Get a real board to negotiate and approve the package. Boards and CEOs are already buddy buddy, but this is so far beyond even that. Heck, one of the members is Musk's brother - not even trying to appear objective. Musk's hubris bites him again.
https://theconversation.com/why-elon-musks-self-driving-of-t...
USD 0 is perfectly fine given he owns a lot of TSLA stock already.
See also: Zuck, Jobs, Larry Ellison. Not an entirely atypical arrangement.
He negotiated the $0, that sounds like his problem.
If any regular person negotiated an underpaid salary at their job the past 5 years, and then demanded to be paid extra, that would get laughed out of the room.
Yes, but he didn't negotiate $0 in a vacuum, I assume he was factoring in the performance-based stock compensation too, in agreeing to take $0, no?
He agreed to forgo one type of compensation in favor of another type, that was later yanked away from him under the reasoning that his compensation package was deemed retroactively excessive.
I imagine a scenario where I take a slightly lower base pay for a higher number of RSUs, that are only unlocked if I meet my performance goals. I then proceed to meet or exceed these performance goals, as the contractual agreement specified. And then the government, acting on behalf of a shareholder who used to hold 8 shares total, complains that my compensation package was retroactively excessive, even though he hadn't raised this concern earlier.
I'd feel unfairly cheated in that scenario, and I can't help but figure Elon probably feels the same way. I know he isn't going to starve to death or anything, but it seems bizarre and worrying to me that it's just perfectly fine to invalidate what was a perfectly fine and legal contract 5 years after it was signed because a minor stakeholder of one party to the contract didn't like the terms.
Does this undermine the trustworthiness and stability of executive compensation contracts, or really any compensation contract, broadly in the US? Do I ever need to be worried about getting rug-pulled the way Elon was?
I fear this precedent may be abused against "the little guy" / the working class in the future.
The rewards were reasonable when they were agreed to. I think the shares were only worth $50 million total. The fact it increased in value so much is the result of him meeting those milestones.
Why is that not reasonable.
I mean, being a succesful ceo at a declining company is much harder than being one at a growing company. At a growing company you just have to not screw up, and a declining company you have to actually turn things around. It doesn't seem totally unreasonable to get higher pay doing a harder job (presuming she is actually good at her job)
Given that nothing has turned around, it's hard to point to any evidence that she's doing a good job. The best she can claim is that had anyone else been CEO things would have declined even faster, and that's not something anyone can prove.
What more do people want at this time? She’s quitting. Now we can see how the next CEO somehow manages to defeat the multiple massive anti-competitive behemoths Mozilla is up against.
I'd like to see her donate half the salary she took back to Mozilla, since she obviously didn't earn it. She doubled her pay several times. Did the engineers doing the work get their pay doubled? No. The only person who did that was the one who was failing in her role. It's actually quite disgusting, just a blatant money grab because no one would stop her.
I wonder if they'll work on the little things. Like text reflow for their mobile browser.
We have a massive aging population, and text reflow helps immensely, and only Opera does jt well.
We just want to not be gaslit into believing that she did a great job, which she clearly didn’t
I’m not sure why all the excuses made for her
This line is trotted out all the time... but her salary also was going up as revenues and earnings kept going up. From 2005 to 2022 revenues grew more than 10 fold, from 52M$ to 593M$.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation https://frankhecker.com/2020/08/13/mozillas-uncertain-future...
In recent years, the proportion coming from Google has also been coming down (even if slowly, from 90+% to just above 80%), and considerable cash reserves have been built up.
Her compensation is ahead of the median for companies in the 0.1-1 billion revenue range, but in line with the median CEO compensation for a company with 1-5 billion in revenues:
https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2021/10/07/ceo-and-executive...
https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/F...
So if you accept that this is an unusually complex CEO role, then it does not seems disproportionate (when judged relative to the absurd disproportionate growth of CEO compensation overall).
Her salary began increasing in the late 2010s, when the annual revenue was already around 500 million. Her salary did not grow in step with revenue, her salary grew after revenue stopped increasing & market share had long been declining. I'm not sure if you're being disingenuous by citing growth since 2005.
Instead of building cash reserves and laying off engineers, Mozilla could have invested that money in Firefox. Could it have successfully turned around? Maybe not, but we'll never know.
It's basically a question of whether you believe Mozilla's mission is best served by building Firefox or by continuing to exist once Firefox no longer exists, and whether its appropriate then for the foundation chair & CEO to be pulling a 7 figure compensation out of a declining non profit. It's obvious the leadership believes the Mozilla Foundation needs to outlive Firefox, but from my perspective the Mozilla Foundation's influence and significance will be nil without browser marketshare.
2005 is when the Wikipedia table starts. The premise of your "they should have invested in Firefox" is just flawed. They are spending by far the most money on Firefox, always have. And Firefox has always been a perfectly fine browser. They were behind Chrome on some metrics for some years, but have long since caught up. Quantum launched towards the end of 2017, more than 6 years ago.
The idea that the lack of quality of Firefox is the dominant reason behind the declining marketshare just is not plausible to me, and I have seen no evidence posted for it. It's wishful thinking. Firefox and Internet Explorer both started declining when Chrome started eating the world. The speed of the decline does not in any way seem to relate to the gap in tech between the browsers.
Everyone talks a lot about market share but I never saw the breakdown of the market in terms of what is actually reporting the user agent. For example, both Chrome and Edge provide embeddable webviews used by applications to put together their GUIs, while Firefox doesn't. Other competitors such as Microsoft also pushes Edge very aggressively in a way that to me seems ethically questionable. Chrome leverages Google's control over some apps and features to be pretty much the only browser that is able to render some pages.
To me, Firefox is undoubtedly the best browser out there, and the only reason I see people use any other browser is inertia and not having control over their OS to change defaults. So what's the argument on market share?
I suspect a ceo could have asked for a pay package of massive bonuses correlated with marketshare. My understanding is the board has pretty wide discretion to set pay, and following years of steep marketshare losses, who would question such an arrangement?
Based on this thread, I think... everyone would question such an arrangement.
I think people are mostly questioning her quite large pay packages when measured against the abject failure on every metric except for the cash-paid-by-google-to-disguise-their-monopoly metric.
At the last company I started, a b2b saas, as of 5 years in, there were under 10 logged-in pageviews from Firefox. Ever. It's dead; the coyote is 50 feet past the cliff; and we're just waiting for gravity to appear.
Mozilla has also clearly given up on Firefox, though people get mad on here when you point that out. I just don't know why they're operating under the delusion that anyone will listen to Mozilla about privacy when everyone realizes they no longer build a browser that matters.
They've been dropping long enough that a pay package almost entirely based on increasing market share would have gotten a lot less objection from me at least.
I honestly can't fathom caring about the difference between 6.2m a year and anything higher than that. Once my salary gets that high all I'm caring about is whether or not I'm doing interesting things.
What if someone is mean to you on an internet site and you want to buy the whole site to silence them?
Not really. A Non profit ceo will always take a pay cut. You can't expect big tech salaries in a non profit, and if they can truly get a better salary elsewhere that's probably what they should do if they want that type of revenue. The thing is, they usually can't. A non profit ceo is not typically very well suited to be a big corp executive, and vice versa.
Mozilla corp is not a nonprofit. Mozilla org is, but we'retalking about the ceo of the corp here.
I’ll do it! At this point I’d like to see some actual data to back up this so-often-repeated claim of “being a CEO is super hard, there’s only a few people in the country smart enough to do it well, so they need to be paid millions of dollars a year”
That sounds… plausible, at this point. I wouldn’t say probable. Especially with tech making everything so interconnected. I loved the kind note at the root of this thread, but the idea that the CEO is some market visionary who is carefully keeping the whole company afloat seems rotten.
It is about as plausible as only the pharaoh can rule us since he is a god.
yeah but she ran it into the ground
On the other hand, if you work elsewhere, your not turning around Mozilla.
I worked in academia, now government, in HPC/data-sciency positions, so the overlap/competition with finance and big tech is large (and a lot of people move there and back again). Let's just say, we have far more interesting problems ;)
Leaving aside small business, are there (m)any larger organizations where the CEO makes >1% of revenue? Mitchell making $6.9M in cash compensation of a $600M revenue company is the equivalent of:
- Chuck Robbins of Cisco making $655M/year
- Mark Benioff of Salesforce making $360M/year
Maybe let's look smaller:
- Fidji Simo of Instacart making $29M/year
- Patrick Collison of Stripe making $166M/year
When you look at it like that, Baker's compensation is quite absurd.
(And for more comedic value than anything serious, similar to Tim Apple making $4.4B/year...)
Arguably those compensations are what's absurd.
They don't make those amounts. I'm saying if they were paid similarly to Mitchell, at 1.2% of revenue.
Instead, Chuck Robbins makes $31.8M.
Benioff makes $28M.
Simo, $2M. Collision, $6.3M. Cook, $15M.
nearly everyone that is not in the insanity that is the US Exec market.
Hey, at least Firefox stayed in the game, Nadella takes 10x as much and IE didn’t even stick around.
Satya Nadella became CEO of Microsoft in 2014, since then MSFT share price has 10x'ed, from $300Bn to $3.3Tn, making it the most valuable company in the world. He turned it around from a 30% drop in value under Steve Ballmer. Global cloud marketshare has Amazon AWS at 31% and dropping down from 34%, Microsoft Azure at 24% and climbing and Google GCP at 11%. Microsoft has transformed their business offering from "Office in your datacenter" to cloud-backed Office apps accessible from any device, Office apps in a browser, in Teams. Microsoft took Teams from 20M users in November 2019 to 1.4Bn users in October 2022, used by 91 of the Fortune 100. Microsoft got the jump on Google with OpenAI and integrated it promptly into Bing, Edge and M365 offerings.
If that isn't company leadership worth paying for, nothing is.
Not according to other people in this thread:
- "As a test professional at the time, one of the most discouraging things I saw after leaving Mozilla was Firefox dropping off all the test plans I knew about when [FireFox market share] hit single digits. I’d poke at that decision where I had influence, and would basically get back a response that “Firefox is dead, just look at the numbers.”" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39309843
- "At the last company I started, a b2b saas, as of 5 years in, there were under 10 logged-in pageviews from Firefox. Ever. It's dead; the coyote is 50 feet past the cliff; and we're just waiting for gravity to appear." - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39309564
(and I'm typing this from FireFox, although on my work machine I'm moving to Edge because it's good. Click a link in Outlook, the link opens with Edge and the sidebar opens with web Outlook open showing the email I clicked on to reference, for one example. Vertical tabs for another, I stopped running TreeStyle Tabs in FireFox years ago, though I no longer remember why).
The real question is: will the new CEO start promoting Firefox as it should have been since the beginning, or Google money is too important to piss off them with actual competition?
It’s a lot of money, but it’s not a lot of money for a highly visible tech CEO. It’s a similar problem many non-profits have when hiring tech in general.
Maybe relatively low salary for a typical CEO (no comment)...
But doesn't seem like Mozilla is a typical company; not built around selling a product... so maybe that merits a different type of CEO with different skills not normally desired by the companies paying 10s of millions to their CEOs.
I'm no business person, so I could be completely wrong about what's needed at the C-level to keep Mozilla afloat. My view my be warped by assuming the vast majority of companies do not make money the way Mozilla does; but maybe there are more Mozillas than I know about.
low salary lol
No exit but racked up 10s of millions of dollars in increasing salary since 2017 while laying off 250 employees
I also worked for Mozilla in that time period (I left just before they canceled FxOS) and found Mitchell to be an inspiring leader. OTOH, the track record over the last few years suggests she's not as great an executor.
It was an impossible situation. Chrome can be funded and promoted by some of the most dominant web properties in the world. Even Microsoft is struggling to get a foothold with Edge, and that's after turning it into a Chrome reskin.
Not saying the comp package was justified. But it was a job doomed to fail.
I personally tend to think if Moz had focused on desktop browser development rather than thrashing around on mobile versions on restricted platforms where they’d always be second-class citizens, smartphone OS moonshots well after that was very likely to succeed, Pocket at a time OSes were introducing their own reading lists, etc. that they could have at least sustained the open web standards goal Firefox used to achieve.
Instead they freaked out about overall browser usage going to mobile, and threw shit against the wall trying to make some kind of mobile strategy stick no matter how late they were to the table. But I personally still use desktop universally at work, and sometimes browse that way at home too. Maybe Moz could have maintained significant market share in just that space and still be more relevant today.
To be fair, that was more Gary Kovacs and immediate successors as CEOs than Mitchell. But Mitchell had a lot of influence on direction even then, and could have decided to pivot back to core competencies once she did take the reins directly. Servo looked pretty promising to me. At least we got Rust’s success out of it. Maybe she could have leveraged that more.
Fabrice seems pretty convinced that embracing feature phones would have made the difference, and KaiOS shows that the FxOS platform certainly is more well-suited for that than for smartphones. She was involved in the decision-making around killing FxOS right as Mozilla started exploring pivoting to feature. Whether that would’ve helped drive Mozilla’s higher-level goals of browser synergy and making sure the web stayed open, I don’t know, but you’d at least still know their name as a thriving organization.
Or if data privacy is the way to go, maybe pivoting to that focus years ago would have been successful. I guess we’ll see how much potential it has, but I bet it would be even more if Mozilla and Firefox still commanded the respect they used to.
I just think Mozilla had way more routes to success than the routes they picked. Almost everything they tried either struck me as too late, too unlikely, or something nobody really wanted. That’s what I meant by questionable execution.
By the time FirefoxOS first demise was announced in the Florida all hands Telefonica, ZTE, Sony and every other partner said they were pulling funding. I don't see what else the board could do.
The OS folks tried to spin it into a few different things. Shipped a Firefox TV OS but that only lasted for a year or so. In parallel there was the IoT plans that never really took off.
Oh, hi! Long time.
Don’t take my words as being too critical of the Android version FWIW, at least the Gecko one. I think that’s been one of the few mobile successes. But what I personally perceived as discounting desktop as a viable strategy was a gross mistake IMO.
Yeah, I agree FxOS was largely a dead end for Moz by the time it was killed and there wasn’t much choice there. My take was partners pretty much lost faith when it became obvious we’d never have performance parity with Android even if feature parity were reached.
But I’m not sure what they—or Moz—expected. FxOS was running core apps on multiple layers of browser stack. Even a Dalvik-based app was going to be faster than that for having a JIT optimized to that purpose, much less native core system utilities. WebAssembly could possibly have mitigated some of that, but partners were universally putting FxOS on the lowest of low end smartphones since cheap was the selling point for them.
I also think the split personality it put on development of Gecko was a huge detriment to Mozilla’s momentum. The browser-focused devs plainly didn’t appreciate the pressures FxOS put on the stack. Then there was the bit where a zero-day in the browser would have been unfixable without potentially compromising all the phones that wouldn’t be able to update for weeks or months later across a disjointed ecosystem.
I left largely over my dissatisfaction with how Mozilla handled that whole period of time and particularly the FxOS effort. It really damaged my impression of Moz as an effective org, primarily due to the leadership and execution issues and what struck me as extreme tunnel vision.
I hear you that after being on that path, Moz was pretty much forced to fold when partners walked away, but maybe some unrealistic expectations were set in the first place. And maybe there wasn’t enough consideration for how that half-pivot would divide the org and drag on Gecko.
I do think the opportunity for feature phones could have panned out technically, though the way reorgs played out may still have gutted it. But when I said I don’t know if it would have advanced browser synergy or the open web (i.e. pushed market share back to full-featured Firefox) I’m saying I’m deeply skeptical it would have been anything other than a purely business success.
KaiOS isn’t a mission-based product and just needs to succeed in being adopted. Moz would have needed to make it mean something. Plus I’m just not sure the audience for feature phones and the audience for web-standards-requiring websites are the same. That’s why I think brand recognition and cash influx were the only real potential gains there.
I think IOT played out well after I was gone, but another comment on here suggests it was never a serious effort so much as a tactical positioning.
Re: TV OS, if you mean Panasonic I’m not sure exactly how much of Mozilla’s code actually survived into that product. I’m pretty sure I’d heard that there was a lot of work done on under the hood on Panasonic’s part to make it viable, while keeping the look and feel plus the FxOS brand on the label.
Maybe that was exaggerated or Moz took a more active role in it after I left, but I didn’t get the impression we had many people in the org dedicated to it when the first implementation happened.
Yeah, to the extent that I’d criticize her it’s for not calling more for antitrust enforcement and since that’s basically asking Google to cut the lifeline, I don’t see how that could have worked in the current climate.
Mozilla sold defaults to a variety of vendors, most notably Yahoo, and others outside the US. Arguably they should have refused Google money from the jump.
The thing is, they’re in a really expensive place and almost everyone on the web has been trained to think of browsers as free. I don’t know what alternatives they could have picked at the time.
New Edge was released in January 2020 with Chrome around 70% of the browser market. By May 2022 new Edge was the second most popular at like 10%. Safari gained and took second in 2023, Edge reached record high browser share 11% last month, with Safari also growing leading second place. Chrome is down to 65%. Yes Edge hasn't crushed Chrome, but it's going toe-to-toe with Apple, and is far ahead of any other contender (FireFox, Opera, Brave, and the rest).
Microsoft has started aggressive tactics like opening links in Edge even when it's not the default browser [I'm observing, not defending that] and it results in things like this on Reddit[1]: "When did everyone switch to Microsoft Edge, and why? I work in cybersecurity for a software vendor and over the last 3-6 months have noticed Edge has completely dominated my customers' web browsing choices. [...] the last six or so months it's been nearly 100% Edge."
Chrome grew by being better, faster, and signing in with your Google account to sync state between devices, and with ChromeBooks. Today, Apple is knocking it out of the park and Microsoft can underhandedly force many businesses over to Edge and is jumping on the hype with "your AI powered browser enhanced with GPT-4" and "prioritises your privacy with adblock and tracking prevention". What's Google doing which could push Chrome back up or stop it sliding down by tempting people away from Apple/Microsoft?
[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1ah5yv6/when_did_...
Or that making money and increasing market share while building an open-source browser for people who don’t like ads, don’t spend money on software, and think they always know better than you… is damn near impossible.
I think people remember a Mozilla that never was. Mozilla was saved by Firebox which Mozilla the organization would have successfully blocked if their institutional processes were not the reason their community was frustrated.
I don't think their processes have ever been better, they got initial and later injections of code from outside. Rust/servo was the moment when I thought they might turn it around, but their bus has always gone in the direction of the same cliff.
Because greenfield parallel rewrites of giant production codebases have such a fantastic track record, that we might as well add "in a novel programming language we're inventing while we're at it" just to make it interesting?
But Rust is actually a successful language, and the idea of writing a web browser in it is actually a good one.
Security is a huge concern for something like a web browser, which is a thing that keeps on increasing more and more in complexity. So far it seems Java is dead in the desktop space, and .NET has a very minimal impact, so it seems a compiled language is the way to go.
And Rust's excellent support for multithreading is also a big boon since now multicore CPUs are a standard and keep on getting more and more cores.
Overall the idea of building a very safe and performant browser seems like a great one.
Is Java truly dead for desktop? I like Rust, don't get me wrong, but is there anything written in Rust for desktop on the scale of Jetbrains IDEs?
They had decades to ship next and they didn't want to be bug for bug backwards compatible. Local optimums in hell don't have a path to heaven.
I think demise by drastic jump stories work because the examples are few and notable. Most projects accumulate experts in moving around the wrong optimum who then block plans of getting free that aren't too conservative to possibly work.
I was there through all of it and you couldn't be more wrong. If you're not just making things up, you're clearly too out of the loop to have anything to offer.
I think the "squirrel!" behavior has to do with getting revenue in the door.
I'm not following extremely close, but it seems like Mozilla is chasing what can be turned into a product. Things that involve setting up a monthly subscription, whether it's VPNs, keeping your name out of certain tracking databases, etc.
I wonder how Mozilla used to be funded vs how it's now funded?
The web is a better place with a non-profit-driven group like Mozilla in it... but is Mozilla Corporation becoming more money-driven than it used to be, even if it can't turn a profit? Or can it turn a profit, because it's not the Mozilla Foundation [1]?
1. https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/moco/
Or is that backwards? Revenue comes in the door, and we must spend it, because empires must be built. No longer 100 developers working on a browser, but thousands working on all sorts of unrelated things and all the support staff. Whereas the alternative would be staying small and focused, sticking that money in the bank, and become financially independent. A new CEO could even do that. Conservatively invest one year's 600M revenue, rake off 20M per year, and the nestegg would still grow with inflation. And that is enough to develop a web browser provided you don't do it in silicon valley. Two or three years revenue and you can even market it.
I think we see this a lot, with companies pulling in too much money from IPOs or venture capital, pissing it away on unfocused growth, and if they are lucky back where they started. Or unlucky and bankrupt.
Mozilla Corp is allowed to turn a profit. Distributions of that profit are the primary source of funding for the Mozilla Foudnation.
It's pretty straight forward to me. "$CORPO_STOOGE does all the things that make you a great leader and talks in platitudes that seem genuine! That makes them a decent person!"
Nah. I have a quote that I think about often on this topic, from none other than Bojack Horseman[1]:
Bojack, "Well, do you think I'm a good person... deep down?"
Diane, "That's the thing, I don't think I believe in deep down. I kind of think that all you are is the things that you do"
$CORPO_STOOGE is just a sociopath who follow the suggestions of "Lean In" as a behavioral guide of motions to follow. That doesn't make them a good person, just maybe a more pleasant manipulator.
[1] S1E12 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkG7x-hwqN8
The most psychotic person ive ever known started his leadership by saving someones job after they made a mistake. Everyone assumed he would be a great leader, my skepticism proved right.
>was good to Mozilla employees, but it's hard to square the picture you paint with the complete lack of direction
Isn't there a fundamental tension between "be good to employees" and "strong sense of direction"? If you are focused as CEO, then you must neglect a fraction of your employees at any point in time. This is a side-effect of focusing on one direction, while maintaining capability to go in other directions in the future. If you don't neglect some of your employees and project, then you come off as being distracted and without a strong sense of direction. Is there some way to square this circle?
I would think you could have a company focused on one thing; e.g., "making the people's browser" (with more explanation so the goal is clear). Hire people who believe in that goal. Make it relatively easy for people to leave so they're not tied to their job; e.g., generous severance, active help networking with other prestigious tech companies. Maybe even force people to take a break and work elsewhere for a couple years every N years before coming back, to keep people from getting stuck in a rut. Keep the company relatively small so that it _has_ a primary direction.
They did lead on with some very cool ideas like panorama (now tab groups, still a Firefox exclusive feature!), Ubiquity, ... The problem is that they killed them with the rest (and got the good people behind to leave).
With regards to be a good "community leader", it sounds like it might be true for the devs, but it is completely false with regards to its user base. Pocket and other commercial moves were made in a very underhanded way that angered many, for good reasons, and they repeated these types of mistakes many times over.
Since a very long time the worst enemy of Firefox has been Mozilla, let's hope it changes.
I think this statement from the parent addresses your point. Perhaps them stepping down as CEO will result in more focus? Time will tell.
IMHO, this is far too stretched. Give me a single project or initiative she pushed successfully that became a part of "the web we have today".
Mozilla was originally the Netscape browser, which was a paid browser. All browsers were paid at the time, until IE came along and was bundled for free with Windows. Firefox broke that chokehold, and make an open web possible.
Mitchell was a lawyer at Netscape, and used those two things to (with others) spin Firefox off into a non-profit (controlling a for-profit). No, she didn't write any code, but she is directly responsible for forming a company that enabled Firefox to be free and open source.
"Firefox to be free and open source. "
And die.
And spending >$6.000.000.000 to do it.
As a 30 years user, it's just so sad to see Firefox going down down down. No innovation, no progress since the introduction of tabs. At least the sell-customer-data-for-marketing-experiments phase is done. And at least it's not unusable slow like it was for some years, so the bare minimum works. And it somehow survived the XUL/extension debacle. But it's 2024 and I'm through my 10th vertical tab extension (Tab Center Reborn for now) since using FF. How is FF supposed to work with >20 tabs open? The only reason to use it for me is it's open source and not owned by M$ or Google. Would there be another open source browser with traction, I'd be gone in a second.
Firefox keeps getting better?
Are there any major features or reason that chrome is better these days?
Firefox has yet to top Firefox 57.
Bring back multi-row tabs.
Actually, while we're at it, bring back XUL. And apologize to all the addon developers and users they straight up lied to.
I can't live without multi-row tabs but it's totally doable in current Firefox. It's now possible with just CSS. It still breaks every so often when they make big UI changes but it's manageable.
It's the reason that Firefox is my main browser.
If that's your main reason have you tried vivaldi?
Vivaldi is great on paper (if you don't care about it being F/OSS), but it's wildly unstable compared to all other major browsers including Firefox. Every time I try to use it as a primary, I end up running into something blocking within a week, reporting it, and switching back to whatever.
Which is a shame, because, stability aside, it really is the best option among Blink-based browsers, at least for the power user. No containers, sadly, but the problem there is Blink itself.
I played that game for a while, it gets old. Also the UX is not nearly as good as TMP when it comes to moving tabs around.
dropping anything goes xul was a large improvement in security. Extensions still have a lot of power.
Why not drop the browser entirely and get maximum security? Firefox without TMP is not worth using for me.
I've been led to believe that xul played a large part in the memory leaks, security issues, and poor performance Firefox was known for.
Yes.
For a long time, chrome has had significantly better memory use. I really tried firefox again 2 or 3 years ago. If you have to keep jira open all day for work, it was unusable.
Regardless, your comment illustrates why Baker should have been fired for cause. Browsers are not really evaluated on technical merits past a minimal quality threshold. Rather, browser marketshare is built on distribution -- like any business.
And firefox was incompetent at that. Google has effectively used search; Microsoft effectively uses their OS; Apple effectively uses their OS, etc. And all products work this way: this is the reason Slack sold to Salesforce, ie Microsoft was using Office's distribution to effectively clobber Slack with Teams. The same reason that Google pays billions of dollars to Mozilla and Apple to be the default search engine.
What could have been done here? I dunno, but focusing on technical measures is not the right lens. BD is and was the necessary component, and that could have started with companies that don't want to see Chrome be the sole browser in the world. What could you have done to get eg Facebook or other companies with large web properties to ask their users to use Firefox? What partnership could have been forged with Microsoft when they were broadly uninterested in browsers? What could you have done to make Firefox a better browser for technical users specifically? etc.
Firefox could have build a niche, e.g. be clearly the best browser for developers - like native autoreload API support. Or the most secure one. Or be the best browser for power users. Or or or. But you need a vision for that.
Apple started their comeback with developers who liked the combination of a slick UI, commercial software and a unix shell (Got a G4 Cube around 2002 or so, then a Macbook). Dominating that niche made them hip and then everyone wanted one. The rest is history.
Everyone uses Linux, even if MS did everything to push MS on servers. And don't forget Apple spend millions (billions?) on pushing OSX to the server two (I had some XServe and XSans). But Linux dominated, and not because of Red Hat.
Many people and perhaps in the future everyone uses Postgres, even if MS and Oracle spend millions (billions?) to prevent this.
Are there other browsers that have successfully built a niche? And how does one use that to bring in enough money to sustain a reasonable sized organization? To me it neither seems easy, nor any guarantee of success.
Well Mozilla got >$6.000.000.000 - so I do thing this is enough money. Do you think they would have needed more money?
Brave currently tries to grow from the secure niche. I think Chrome started from the developer niche, with developer tools, being embeddable, open sourcing a rendering engine etc.
I am not sure clawing back a significant amount of marketshare can be done with any amount of money. As long as there is no access to a distribution channel that is similar in size and low friction to what the other browsers have, it will at least be extremely tough. Far from "easy".
Vivaldi has been around for 9 years now, and they manage to get by without regular donations from Google.
It becomes better after it became worse. It's not that hard to make it better after you burned all the bridges who lifted your product into the sky. Though, at this point, there isn't much left anymore outside the core-abilities.
Firefox has been always the best browser as it is the only open and free (as free from adversarial incentives).
Unfortunately many people (especially here) have advertised Chrome instead, naively believing Chrome to have these important properties.
Chrome has always been the controlled frontend for Google business and Google is readily willing to hurt the browser to aid its business and keep its dominance.
Blink is also open and free enough. The wide usage of it, and the manifold companies pushing successfully against Google, is proof enough. Firefox on the other side is not free from hostile behavior itself. The manifold bullshit that Mozilla did over the years telling.
And in general, your requirement is not matching the demand of the majority of users. I don't give a f** if something is open or liberated, I'm a user, I care firstly whether it's doing what I need, and being open&free are just tools to balance the powerplay of the creators.
But if not enough people are using the browser, they have no power anyway. And if there is only one developer, then we as the users have not way to balance our power against them. Mozilla has shown over the last decade that the user has no power in their game, which shows that free and open software in itself has little meaning.
The multiple blink-browsers are showing better how this is supposed to work, then the one project who always claims this as one of their main goals.
A personal gripe is FF's refusal to implement WebSerial or any form of screencast functionality.
Just use a screencast tool. It's a browser, not an OS.
I'd rather not use something that's less convenient, less consistent, and generally worse.
"Firefox keeps getting better?"
In which way?
Its “appeal has become more selective”
7 years later Firefox still hasn't caught up to 2017 Firefox in functionality. Using ancient versions of Firefox isn't an option, so I switched to Vivaldi.
Firefox definitely gets better, as much as it frustrates me sometimes. It's not hard to come up with examples, I've yet to see any other browser use persistent or temporary containers per tab and per site - just to name the most obvious.
I can only think of @scope in css
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/:scope
I have no problem with Firefox staying as it is. But do not push new products via it. Focusing on the things other companies cannot copy (privacy, extensibility for the user) is definitely the angle for Firefox IMHO.
Chrome is better for websites that are specifically tweak to run well only on Chrome. Surprisingly, such websites are not trivial in amount and traffic.
Are we only allowed to compare to chrome?
I miss session manager, tab mix plus, a few others.
I really miss having a gesture extension that runs at the GUI level, so it doesn't stop working while pages are loading and lag all the time and not work in certain places. And that one isn't even about XUL, they simply refuse to implement the mouse callback in the new system.
Every thread about Firefox there's a comment like this and I truly don't know if we're using the same browsers. Firefox keeps getting better and faster, while chrome is getting more bloated and aggravating.
"better"
What does better mean? What is better in the last 10 years? And I'm not trolling, I'm interested in what 10 things FF got better for you in the last 10 years.
Say, I have been buying on Amazon 10 years ago using FF.
In which ways has FF made that better or easier for me as a user? Can't think of anything with Amazon.
The only things I can think of: More secure when misclicking somewhere and better video on Youtube.
Firefox's built in password manager is pretty good, ten years ago you had to install a separate extension for that.
The synchronization of browser tabs and history across devices is also very good nowadays, so if you look at some product on Amazon with your phone on the way home, you can continue the same browsing session on your regular PC right away.
There are also multiple profiles. That helps in case you have multiple Amazon accounts like one for shopping, one to mooch off your cousin's prime video subscription, and one to work with the AWS console for your workplace. I think you couldn't do that out of the box 10 years ago.
Good points, I concede for some users and perhaps the majority there is progress.
(For me - and probably many others - though I use 1password since the beginning, have 50 tabs open so sync is a challenge and never understood to use the profiles, perhaps I'm too stupid or the UI is bad)
When it came out I thought profiles was a good idea, eager to use it, but it's often difficult to say what is in what profile. AWS is clear, and banking, but reading some articles? For me to work the UI would need to be smooth so I don't need to switch profiles just because something is in the other. Perhaps I'm not focused enough ;-) It then was too complicated for me to use and switch and I dropped it.
Writing this in FF, where would I need to click to switch profiles? I have a drop down on the right (it's not in there), I have a drop down on the left (also no profiles), I have a menu at the top(can't find it there) and a drop down in my sidebar (no profiles in there).
I have, at this moment, 5501 tabs open. Sync does just fine.
How do you work with 5501 synced tabs on your phone? I didn't mean technically but UI? I have a 38" on my desktop which is 30x (?) larger than my phone?
In Brave one can press command-shift-a to get a search bar for your open tabs. Otherwise I periodically consolidate similar tabs into same windows. It would be nice to have an ontological browser for tabs but search is normally sufficient.
On a phone iOS Safari has “tab groups” that effectively act as windows in a desktop browser. It also has a tab search feature.
Go to about:profiles. From there, you can create and switch between profiles. This is not as convenient as it perhaps should be, but I did find one add-on that claims to simplify the process [1].
[1] https://github.com/null-dev/firefox-profile-switcher
Will take a look
"Create, edit, delete and switch between browser profiles seamlessly in Firefox. Inspired by Chrome's profile switcher."
;-)
It is an extension for Firefox, but one created by Mozilla. It's official in that sense, but it does seem a little strange it's not included by default.
https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/multi-account-conta...
Sync has no problem with lots of tabs - I routinely have multiple hundred open on multiple devices and firefox sync just does it's thing without complaining.
Multi-account containers are a feature I use tirelessly. Standardized add-ons are great too, so people can release one add-on and hit multiple browsers. I also really like Firefox sync for sending bookmarks/tabs between devices. Firefox is also extremely fast nwadays, and comparatively easy on system memory.
These are things that have improved in the last decade. I also like the fact that FF isn't owned by an Ad company that pushes binaries supposedly built from an open-source project controlled by an Ad company.
Containers and first-party isolation in FF are my killer features. Echoing your comments to the GP post, that didn't exist a decade ago and is genuinely one of the best improvements they've made in that time.
I just wish they made vertical tabs built-in. Or at least made enough UI hooks that extensions could do it properly (instead of duplicating the tab bar via side panels).
Yes, that's a major irritation. Or at least allow me to switch off the built in tabs when I have an extension that provides that functionality. It would be absolutely trivial to do so.
Better video on youtube? Youtube works like shit on firefox.
Open 20 tabs and you get delays. (probably intentional gutting by google)
On my one PC I have a Firefox instance with over 2500 tabs open. I'd guess about 5% of those are youtube.
I often open a string of 30+ tabs of youtube to watch in one go, and it works fine for me.
* sync of tabs and passwords across devices __that always works__
* multi account containers
* better implementation of standards than chrome (i swear to god chrome date pickers...)
* cool privacy features like blocking facebook properties, email relays, etc
* smaller memory footprint than competitors
to your point about things being worse than they were 10 years ago, in part i agree. the web as a whole has gotten much more bloated and frustrating than it was a decade ago. pages take gobs of bandwidth and memory, everything is in a walled garden or infected with facebook's tentacles. in terms of experience, imo it's really hard to separate the browser from the browsed because the end result is that the experience of using the web in 2024 is downright unpleasant, where it wasn't really before, but i just don't see that as mozilla's fault. i think without mozilla it would be even worse, and it can always get worse...
The FF I used a decade ago was far more embedded and matched to my workflow than the present day one, including more efficient use of screen real estate and far more powerful plug ins. As far as I'm concerned it's been a slow and steady slide backwards. Yes, it's more secure (probably) and it is faster (but I don't notice that all that much because I very aggressively block bloat on the sites I visit).
Except for Rust.
I thought we were talking about the browser, but yes I like Rust a lot, although I switched to Go because the benefits of the borrow checker were just not worth the effort in my use cases. I would wish more main stream languages would experiment with owner transfer though
Hot take: it's usually not, and people are using Rust in a lot of places where it's the wrong choice. It looks a lot more appealing when you're writing an OS or a browser.
I never paid for Netscape and I used every single version of it.
From the Wikipedia page [1]
Maybe the misunderstanding is because (from the same page) the original plan was to have a free version only for academic and non-profit organizations and make everybody else pay. That wouldn't have had a chance even ~30 years ago especially because building a browser was much easier than now. The features were so much more limited in 1995. No JavaScript, no CSS, the only one that mattered was loading and displaying text and images on the page without blocking until everything was downloaded. The Mosaic browser was blocking. Minutes staring at a white page waiting for something to appear...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape_Navigator
Businesses paid for it. It was free for non-commercial purposes.
My internet connected computers were owned by a business. They were desktops inside my company's building.
However I dug more and I found this at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape
so either I don't remember well (maybe my company had actually bought some licenses) or nobody was paying no matter what. I remember everybody else and I downloaded Navigator from Netscape's site without having to go through any authorization process.
I always used Navigator/Communicator for free personally but a lot of companies (especially big companies) bought licences. I'm sure many companies did not pay for a license but there was more than enough that did to make Netscape a viable and growing business.
There was a brief time where Netscape Communicator filled the role that Outlook fills now.
That's right, I won't link here but one of jwz's earliest blog posts describes putting Mozilla 0.9 on an FTP server in '94 and hundreds of thousands of people were downloading it. I assume this violated some commercial license and I know my employer (UC) did buy their server product but I don't recall anybody even remotely considering licensing Netscape Navigator itself.
Netscape was never open source during that phase though, I think that's the point. Moving to firefox was a huge improvement for the internet community.
I paid for Netscape. I bought it as a boxed product at Fry's in Palo Alto, CA.
AFAIK The Mozilla project (initially started by JWZ) started when Netscape made its browser open source. The reason for this was the loss of market share due to free IE. Firefox came a few years later as a spin-off from the Mozilla Application Suite. Mozilla/Firefox's popularity correlated with Linux's because we needed a good open-source web browser on Linux (and BSD), not because she saw some opportunity to make an open web possible.
Unlike Brendan's role (excluding javascript), she had a small part, but I would not call it significant.
IE didn't gain share because it was free (Netscape was, as well). It gained share because, with Windows 95 OSR 2.5, it because integrated into the operating system and no longer had to be downloaded separately.
While being bundled made it easier to start using IE, that didn't guarantee that people would try it, and it didn't guarantee that they'd continue to use it on an ongoing basis after that.
It may not be as obvious now, but at the time, IE often offered a better experience for both users and web developers.
IE tended to be faster and stabler than its competitors, and releases like IE3 and IE5 offered a number of innovative features and technologies.
IE coming with Windows clearly didn't prevent a large number of users from switching to Firefox once Firefox started offering a better experience, and then to Chrome once it started generally offering a better experience than both Firefox and IE did.
IE had better CSS support, as well, and JS scripting was more powerful (ironic, given that JS was originally a Netscape thing).
I would say that the turning point was when HTML 4 adopted a lot of things based on the way IE did them rather than Netscape (e.g. <div> + CSS rather than <layer> etc). By IE5, if you were on Windows, you pretty much had to be a die-hard Netscape fan to keep using it.
this kinda stuff is often way more important than any code of course!
Honestly, it sort of is.
Someone who'd got it wrong would have opened the door for the kind of IP clawback we're seeing with the cloud tech startups wanting to pull people into their companion SaaS products.
and openai is definitely becoming less open every week
Netscape always had free editions. It was simply closed-source until 1998.
Baker may be a savvy lawyer, but that doesn't make her a good technologist.
You’re omitting something crucial though. Between the commercial Netscape and the open-source Firefox, there was the open-source Mozilla browser. Firefox wasn’t the Mozilla organisation’s first free and open-source browser. Firefox was the cut-back reboot of the open-source Mozilla browser. So clearly Mitchell’s work to create a spin-off for Firefox wasn’t necessary for them to have an open-source browser.
Besides which – forming a spin-off company seems like super basic stuff for a lawyer? Why are you describing it as if it’s some crucial innovation?
Mitchell gave us Firefox, literally. When AOL canned Mitchell as the tip of the layoffs that would be the end of Netscape, she, almost singlehandedly, made the Mozilla Foundation happen which gave my project, then m/b but soon renamed Phoenix and then renamed Firefox, a chance at life. Take her away, and when Ben, Blake, myself, dbaron and a couple others were laid off from AOL-Netscape, that would have been game fucking over for Gecko and what became Firefox. It's really that simple.
Counter-anecdote.
She also wrote this incredibly rude and grotesque obituary for Gervase Markham after he died of cancer (working for Mozilla until the end). You are welcome to disagree, but Gerv contributed just as much to Mozilla as Mitchell did.
https://blog.lizardwrangler.com/2018/08/07/in-memoriam-gerva...
And a well written reaction here
https://lwn.net/Articles/762345/
I didn't get that vibe from reading the post at all. On the contrary, I perceive it as a celebration of the person who had invested so much of their (unfortunately ultimately limited) time to their common cause.
"the damage and trauma he caused"?
Really? That's a celebration?
I think it's just honesty. You don't have to pretend that the bad a person did ("bad" being defined by your own perspective, of course) didn't exist in order to celebrate the good.
I think the article author managed to balance the feeling of gratefulness towards the person for their contributions, while obviously perceiving that person's worldview as unfathomable in comparison to their own.
In that situation, what other choice did the author have? Lie (by omission)? I respect the fact that the author chose to be honest instead.
And I think people should appreciate that choice or at least understand it without dismissing it as some kind of character assassination or rudeness.
An ever increasing number of people nowadays seem to be very much guilty of the same things the author mentioned in their post (the black and white worldview), it's not exclusive to deeply religious or conservative people. It very much exists on the "other side" as well. They will usually cite their own favorite pieces of dogmatic gospel (e.g. the "paradox of tolerance") to justify dismissing a person outright, based on some "incompatible" worldview or statement.
The author, however, didn't resort to this. As someone who obviously has no insight into what the article describes, to me it still absolutely comes across as balanced.
Sorry, but that has absolutely no place in an obituary.
I think it indicates a care and deeper appreciation for the person in a way that anything else wouldn't.
"$NAME was $COMPANY's first intern, and went on to stay with $COMPANY for eighteen years. We thank $NAME for $GENDEREDPOSSESSIVE years of service." would feel soulless, as if she didn't know the person at all. It's the sort of obituary a VP at Apple might get; named, but essentially anonymous. A form letter, without any actual sense of appreciation or understanding.
I don't particularly like Mitchell's handling of Mozilla, but this obituary is one I'd like to have for myself. It's written in a manner that politely disagrees with the subject while acknowledging perceived harms, in a way that's not dissimilar to his own views on how ideas should be addressed while not falling into the trap of modern pluralism (the acceptance of all beliefs as equally valid) which he personally thought to be harmful.[1]
It's a remarkable obituary for what seems like an intensely bright human who was openly disagreeable.
[1] https://gerv.net/writings/three-forms-of-diversity/
I think it's because you agree with Baker's positions that you're more willing to not see her statements as in poor taste.
On the other side where I am, it is a bitch slap and a half.
It is very clear to me that Baker actively detests Markham even past his death. That's fine. I also detest people that are long dead. But this blog post is not really something that I would call "good", it truly reads to me as a very bitter person goading about, not a final ribbing between friends.
Don't treat something like this as 'remarkable', that's dulling the word.
I think that you're actually the one who disagrees with Gerv; as he notes in his writings, a society where all views are seen as equally correct is bad. It's not wrong to draw a line and say, "This person is wrong about this," and it's not a sign of detesting someone; to quote him, distinctions have to be made. You are, ironically, the one completely disagreeing with him, pushing ideological diversity.
I don't see the post as a "bitch slap" to him, despite more or less disagreeing with Mitchell's views, but it's probably a "bitch slap" to you.
I make no judgement on Markham's thoughts on the matter. If I am or not is probably the position you should take, but its not one I'm pushing here.
Words presented by Baker are not words I would like from someone I respect, 8 days after my death, just enough tact to know not do it within the first week before the man is decaying in the ground, not enough to think about what people will think of the person that's still alive afterwards.
Yes, I state it as much, there is no statistical uncertainty here on my end. There is no allegations or false journalistic integrity to take credence to.
The man is dead, there is no rebuttal. Baker took her final words and danced on his grave with it, figuratively, I can't be certain if she was in attendance or will be sometime in the future.
If I am, then I suppose it. I'll leave this here as an address to your view here:
Would you honestly say that someone being described in the following way is not a clear line:
"Eventually Gerv felt called to live his faith by publicly judging others in politely stated but damning terms. His contributions to expanding the Mozilla community would eventually become shadowed by behaviors that made it more difficult for people to participate. But in 2001 all of this was far in the future."
All he's done, shadowed?
To me it reads like a final backstabbing against someone who held diametrically opposing views and who no longer has the ability to talk back. If you can't say something nice, say nothing at all. Fully half of the sentences in that obituary list his shortcomings, if that's your attitude then you should refrain from writing an obituary. You don't have to lionize the person or turn it into a hagiography but at the same time you don't have to use it as an opportunity to have the final word and to highlight once more to a much larger audience why you really didn't like someone and why someone didn't fit your view of Mozilla.
It's an obituary of a co-worker/employee, right after his painful drawn out death. It's not a professional biography or a profile. It's ostensibly intended to comfort the bereaved. I truly don't understand a worldview where instead of a) not writing anything at all or b) saying something like "While I strongly disagreed with his religious beliefs, but as a co-worker and employee of many years, he was....", something like this was written.
In case it's not clear, the vitriol was solely based on his being an unapologetic Christian. Not at any overt acts as an employee.
Have you considered those left-behind to be those who have been hurt, too? Addressing the bad may allow them to process mixed, or even "shameful" feelings about someone's passing. Feelings they can't voice, because of your "you can't speak ill about the dead".
I have my suspicions what's implied by this... and how that may be perceived as indeed very hurtful and destructive to some.
https://lwn.net/Articles/762345/
Does a better job than I ever could to explain what's wrong with that piece.
Speaking of spreading personal dogmatic gospels, I'd like to call out that the
Is better understood as the "peace treaty of tolerance". There's no obligation or expectation to be tolerant of someone who is intolerant to your existence. You can choose to remain tolerant of those who break the treaty, but I personally don't extend that courtesy to those whom I perceive to be consistent belligerents.
I initially didn't get that vibe but then I re-read it. Yikes.
This is manager-speak describing someone who is incompetent. Someone who, only thanks to management, become less incompetent. Should that be in an obituary?
On the whole, Mitchell paints Gerv as a great programmer and an unruly religious nutjob. A good worker and, as she conveys, a bad person. Frankly, I'm unsure why she didn't just say a few parting words and leave it at that. I don't think she was his friend, and he probably didn't think of her as his mentor.
I suspect her stock in Mozilla depended being seen as a "great community leader", and that this was an opportunity to signal her goodness over a report she couldn't manage and whose views her people hated. It's self-serving, to say the least.
I feel like I've gone a full 180 from my feelings on the company after reading this.
Having their personal beliefs belittled by a CEO after their death is frankly disgusting. I will be switching off of Firefox, I wish I had seen this earlier.
To be fair, that's the last thing Gerv would have wanted, particularly now that she is no longer CEO.
That's a fair point, but at this point, there are a lot of browsers with open source browsing engines and they don't have the baggage that we see here.
Bit ironic coming from someone who is happy to say they worked for coca-cola. You know the company who hired mercenaries to murder union workers...
I learned about that from Immortal Technique's "The 3rd World". Great song, but thankfully they didn't do that in Japan.
Their real crimes are the proliferation of plastic water bottles / other microplastic garbage and the amount of sugar in their drinks (although the most popular drinks in Japan are not available abroad because they are expensive and not sweet — green tea etc..). Not to mention the amount of overtime the average worker had; something I tried to change but one that managers were allergic too (adding new meaningless procedures once old ones were simplified and automated).
None of that changes the facts about failed aforementioned Mozilla CEO, cowardly attacking a dead man because he didn't match her personal and socially fashionable beliefs. Why would you even make a new account to defend that?
She also wrote that awful "we need to go even further than deplatforming" blog post a few years back. I have no real opinions about her skill as CEO, but when she is out there actively encouraging the division in our society I could not in good conscience support Mozilla any more. I hope that the next CEO will be more focused on building up, rather than tearing down.
This is the post in question:
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/we-need-more-than-deplat...
What is questionable about the things that she suggests? The only thing that I see there that is debatable is "amplify factual voices", and then only because it's unclear who decides what those are. But all other suggestions seem common sense to me.
If you mean the fact that she is condemning the US Capitol riot in no uncertain terms, I fail to see how that is "encouraging the division in our society". The riot itself did that, not commentary on it.
The ideas in the blog post are good, but the title is terrible; deplatforming is a synonym for censorship, which is a weird thing for the CEO of Mozilla to advocate for. The ideas would be better received if they were presented as an alternative to deplatforming.
She gave herself 20-30 million dollars while the company tanked in every measurable way and devs got fired.
She's the reason we have Firefox and the modern web? What in the actual flippin bizarro dimension?
Besides being a member of the parasitic upper classes the leeches on all of our work while robbing to live on yachts and in mansions i don't see what she excelled at.
It's depressing how much this class of people is filled with nepotism, favours, family and an almost aristocratic talentlessness besides the random figureheads appointed PR.
Oh my god, Google her.
I also disagree with her salary while layoffs were happening, however recent raises don't negate the fact that she also built Mozilla from the start.
She's not a member of the parasitic upper class. She was laid off from Netscape 20+ years ago, and just never stopped. She kept volunteering for free, and eventually lead the charge to spin it off into its own entity.
You can dislike where Firefox is headed, or be upset about Firefox layoffs (I was: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24135032).
But to act like Mitchell lives in a mansion while leaching off people?? She started from nothing and worked hard on the same mission for 20+ years.
Balmer worked at Microsoft for 20 years before becoming CEO. And even then I'd say he cared about MS more than she cares about Firefox.
Ballmer was also an okay CEO, he missed mobile but he didn’t miss cloud and made MSFT a crapton of money.
Definitely no star, heck back in the day he tried to convince Bill Gates to stop investing in this dead end “Windows” project because OS/2 was obviously the future. But certainly not a train wreck like Baker.
IIRC he did mosrly miss cloud. Microsoft stagnated under Balmer[0] and only picked up after Nadella started really pushing cloud.
Edit: actually revenue did increase a lot under Balmer just not stock price.
[0] https://www.statista.com/chart/1399/microsoft-stock-under-st...
Azure started under Ballmer’s tenure as CEO, years before Nadella became CEO, and now is the second biggest cloud company in the world. I wish I could mostly miss something like that.
Not to say Nadella doesn’t deserve most of the credit but it speaks well of Ballmer that an internally promoted employee like Nadella who replaced him did so well.
Again I can nitpick but he grew revenue and did not fatally injure MSFT. He was mediocre but not terrible is all I’m saying.
He also killed the Microsoft courier duel screen tablet as he didn't see it as integrating well with office. Killing possible the best designed consumer tablet at the time allowing Apple and Google to own mobile.
Mitchell worked on Mozilla 20 years before becoming its CEO. MS is a company, Firefox is a product. Doesn't seem like you're making a lot of sense.
Mozilla is a company
She laid off 250 people in 2020 and proceeded to raise her own salary by $2,000,000 per year over the following two years. Whatever her prior record is that behaviour is despicable.
Leeching is precisely how I would describe someone who demands more and more money each year from a company that's declining due to their own mismanagement and at the same time takes money from those who earn less.
Hey, I agree. I was very against the layoffs (I built this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24135032), and at my own company I have a very strict layoffs-are-the-absolute-worst-case-scenario rule (which I got from working at Mozilla back in 2010; we were proud to have been one of the few companies who had never done layoffs back then!)
I think Mitchell has made many bad decisions the past few years. When I saw the news, my gut reaction was to post something negative. However, having known her and known all the work she put in early, I wanted to post a counterbalance. She wasn't a great CEO (and the $$ is a very bad look), but she's done a lot of good for the community over the past 20 years.
So you agree to a bunch of examples of terrible things she's done, and then counterbalance it with a vague "she's done a lot of good for the community over the past 20 years"?
Oh, and she was considerate towards your feelings in an email, and a followup email?
I too have seen many corporate higher-ups be highly pleasant when you talk/correspond with them. But they do jack shit about the actual issue, but assure you that they care about your feelings.
I'd rather she was an absolute bitch to everyone, but actually steered the organization in the right direction. That would have had a better positive impact on the world than a few placating emails.
I... think I made it very very clear I'm not a fan of her as CEO, nor am I a fan of Mozilla's decisions the past 11 years.
But that doesn't change the fact that early on she was instrumental in getting Mozilla off the ground and it wouldn't exist without her.
Both can be true at the same time, and I simply shared my experience of her.
I'm not entirely sure what parasitic upper class is, but getting paid over 2 million while the company you are in charge of dives, and then in response saying you should be earning 5x more.. truly nobody needs that kind of money.. maybe this isn't 'parasitic upper class' but it's certainly what's wrong with the world
"According to the company's filings, Mitchell Baker's compensation went from $5,591,406 in 2021 to $6,903,089 in 2022."
Straight from wikipedia:
Negative salary-achievements correlation controversy
In 2018 she received a total of $2,458,350 in compensation from Mozilla, which represents a 400% payrise since 2008.[15] On the same period, Firefox marketshare was down 85%. When asked about her salary she stated "I learned that my pay was about an 80% discount to market. Meaning that competitive roles elsewhere were paying about 5 times as much. That's too big a discount to ask people and their families to commit to."
In 2020, after returning to the position of CEO, her salary had risen to over $3 million (in 2021, her salary rose again to over $5 million,[16] and again to nearly $7 million in 2022[17]). In August of the same year the Mozilla Corporation laid off approximately 250 employees due to shrinking revenues, after previously laying off roughly 70 in January (prior to the pandemic). Baker blamed this on the COVID-19 pandemic, despite revenue rising to record highs in 2019, and market share shrinking.[18]
In other words, no she definitely is. She fired 250 devs while doubling her pay multiple times to live a luxurious life while lying about the cause. People have to feed their families, she doesn't need that much and this is not good community spirit.
It gets even more interesting googling bit further and becomes a brilliant example of either "money corrupts people" or "i'm romanticising my upperclass upbringing", because she apparently went from patos filled stories about her dad paying just above minimum wage (lol) to firing 250 devs while she ran with the money:
"[about her parents] So I would call them progressive. I would call them really focused on -- well, so for example, he would never pay minimum wage. They ran a small business. It was pretty-- Weber: Doing what? Baker: -- hand to mouth. A pewter factory, making wine goblets and gift items out of pewter. Not so easy to do in the Bay Area, which is expensive. And so he would hire someone at minimum wage. But he had a period of time -- it was six weeks, or two months, or three months, or whatever it was-- after a probationary period, and then he refused. He felt he needed to pay a living wage."
https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/20...
You either die the hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain.
She wasn’t up to the job but decided to stay there because it afforded her a higher salary than ANY OTHER company would ever hire her for because very few people are worth salaries in the millions and Baker was not one of them.
My problem with Baker wasn’t her compensation it’s that her desire for that compensation caused her to occupy the CEO seat and tank Firefox. I’d rather Mozilla had paid her 50 million to retire and find a new CEO, it probably would have turned out better than to let somebody incompetent do a job because she was selfless in the past.
$6mil/year can net a pretty nice mansion...
I wonder if being a corporate lawyer at a corporate company is what hobbles Mozilla/Firefox. Could they have found better success, albeit chaotically, being organized/governed like Linux/Debian/Python orgs? And specifically not being for profit? And if so, would someone w/ her background be blinkered enough to not be able to see it?
I've followed your advice, 'Google it.'
"According to the company's filings, Mitchell Baker's compensation went from $5,591,406 in 2021 [PDF] to $6,903,089 in 2022." Did not continue to dig further.
Mozilla tanked a lot, even Thunderbird is doing better recently. So definitely part of the 'parasitic upper class.
I would also reply to emails when earning 30 million dollars. It's not THAT hard.
I'll even stay up late to write them!
It is very nice to see your inside view. For me as an outsider: Mozilla is FireFox and that that doesn't seem to have registered with Mozilla management is irritating me beyond measure because it means that (1) I don't have a way to sponsor just FF and not the rest of Mozilla and (2) that quite frequently FireFox suffers because of resource depletion or crazy experiments that benefit Mozilla but harm FF.
To me that speaks volumes about the quality of management, and much as I'm sympathetic to your feelings I wonder what FF would have been like today if Mozilla had not been eternally distracted. I suspect that without FF Mozilla funding would dry up overnight and that alone is something they should respect.
Back when I worked there (2010-2012), a lot of people thought Google wouldn't renew the deal. So there was a scramble to figure out how to make enough money to avoid layoffs.
Basically, how do you make another ~$100M/yr in case Google money goes away?
It's 2024, and Google still pays (more like ~$500M/yr from Google now) and Mozilla still exists. But it was hovering over people's heads back then, and still is.
And I suspect Google pays that $500M in order to have something to point to and say, "See! We're not a monopoly!"
Yes, quite literally. And the answer is, Chrome is the better product, the users continue to choose the better option, if the government wants to consider that Chrome acts monopolistic, then the government is acting in extreme bad faith.
The statement or existence of "monopoly" is not one way direction to being "bad for the economy", the government knows this and speaks out the side of their mouth declaring it always is the case, and does not care, so Google is funding the opposition, as they must.
The only place I see Chrome is the objectively better product is when using google services, so your monopoly argument somewhat falls apart.
So why doesn't the government get in and break apart that monopoly that is Chrome, today?
Chrome has the highest market share of internet browsers ~this side of the great firewall~ worldwide (just checked, still is the case in China today, assumed it changed)! Far worse has been done to companies with less control over their respective markets.
I am being a bit facetious when it comes to features though, fully admit, FF is better in getting a few of those, and don't deny history especially with Firebug.
> So why doesn't the government get in and break apart that monopoly that is Chrome, today?
Wake me up when the government finds the gumption to break up any of the monopolies that are begging for it. Google is but one of dozens that should have been broken up before now.
Two words: regulatory capture.
Regulators are usually underpowered, overworked and short of funds. Any attempt to regulate the likes of Google effectively would be faced with such opposition that it would swamp the officials. Check out what happened when DOJ had an ironclad anti-trust case against Microsoft and how it all ended up in the longer term.
For the same reason the government hasn't broken up anything since Bell System in 1983: those 500 million that Google pays Mozilla is higher than FTC's entire yearly budget (430 million in 2023). It takes years to build a strong case, and companies can easily throw more resources at a problem than that. Monopolies don't even need to win the case, just drag the whole process on until the next election cycle, when all of a sudden the next administration is far less interested in following through. Rinse and repeat indefinitely.
Technically even Bell didn't lose a case, it broke up "voluntarily" before that happened.
Is Chrome the better product? IMHO Firefox provides much better tools for ad blocking and privacy. Those are both very important to me and areas I think Chrome is weak.
FWIW, my take back in 2010-2015 when I was at Moz wasn’t quite that cynical. I’m sure that was at least some of it, at least after Chrome started really gaining users, but Mozilla and Google had a good relationship for a long time before Chrome was popular.
Mozilla used to actually have their offices on Google campus (even though I started after the HQ had moved out, I was still given a Google badge for their cafeteria) and I believe the early Chrome team already had ex-Moz people on it. Goals around standards, etc, were relatively aligned, at least early on.
When Mozilla decided to go rapid release, Google was the one who walked them through how to do it (then Mozilla bungled it by diving into a very accelerated schedule and not considering how it affected add-ons, but that’s another story). It was all pretty friendly.
I’m also pretty sure Bing offered similar incentives for referrals, just without the flat-fee contract Moz had with Google, and they didn’t have the same antitrust issue in that particular space. Referrals and default search provider status have always been part of the financial model between browsers and search engines. Dealing that value back to themselves is one of the reasons search providers publish browsers.
I was pretty surprised when there was such a huge backlash against Apple for that recently since it had been SOP in the business for a long time.
To your point though, given the current market share of Firefox, $500M has to be about more than that if that’s an accurate number.
okay, but did they figure it out? it seems they are stuck between two worlds.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation#Finances
they are spending serious startup money every year on nothing. it's as if they got the google disease with the google funds. :/
Yeah you'd think if FireFox is their golden advertising goose they'd, you know, make it embeddable and add the ability to fully style scrollbars so it'd be suitable across the board for modern development. And you'd think 500m a year would be enough to do this.
But here we are. And with FireFox fading I'm wondering how they plan on having a real impact with their mission.
Google will keep propping up Firefox to keep placate anti-comp. I recon Mozilla have more leverage than they think.
I guess that makes sense but for me the equation would be a different one: since Mozilla is for me synonymous with Firefox I'd allocate all of the resources to FireFox and that would result in (1) a much more secure future for FireFox, (2) reduced loss of marketshare (so a better negotiation position vis-a-vis Google) and (3) a much lower per annum expense to keep that mission alive. By burning a ton of money on unrelated things FireFox is now actively at risk of disappearing. Google can point at Edge now and say they're not a monopoly, they may not need FireFox for much longer.
Pretty sure it popped up to closer to $300M/yr around the time you left, at least based on the internal rumor mill around the value of the three-year Google contract immediately prior to the Y! debacle.
That said, since it was MoCo and not MoFo, I think the specific numbers were never divulged. Take the rumor mill and my recollection with a grain of salt.
Wouldn't someone else step in? It was Yahoo for a while. Firefox market share is pretty pitiful these days but the default search engine is still worth something.
You can honestly just tell every single person at the top there would love to still be making the money they are without having to support a browser. Their actual product passions lie in VPN subscriptions and other low effort shams, very little passion from the top towards building and maintaining actual technology.
I’m going to throw my hat in the ring to say FirefoxOS and the phone (of which I bought the first beta version) were IMO great ideas and they should have stuck with it. The iOS/Android duopoly really needed a web-SPA option. Maybe they were too early (rust & wasm would have helped a lot with the speed), maybe it was too difficult a task…but I really wish they had succeeded.
They did in a way, just after they had given up.
There's a whole series of popular phones in India that ship FirefoxOS. I think they're sold by Jio, a carrier there.
Not just India, there are several Nokia/HMD models that run the same fork [1] of FirefoxOS, I am thinking of buying one in Europe.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KaiOS
Unfortunately KaiOS is not in great shape currently.
I was looking at the phone mainly to use it as a 4G WiFi hotspot.
What is wrong with KaiOS itself?
KaiOS is struggling because business on the low-end segment is very hard. Which means that the technical side is cutting corners and you end up with a lacking product in important areas like security. (disclaimer: I worked there and left recently)
It's not great at all. Convicted persons on parole are often disallowed from Internet use or smartphone ownership, so I see a lot of parolees with KaiOS flip-phones.
The text entry is really, really horrible. That's probably the worst bit. The OS is pretty unintuitive and inconsistent in the UX. No-one is really developing apps for it as far as I know.
It's definitely way worse than c. 2007 Nokia Symbian devices.
It basically got pushed out by android as even very low end devices can now mostly run android sort of ok, right?
Firefox was actually successful, in the form of its fork KaiOS. It's a shame that Mozilla wasn't the organisation that managed to bring the OS to the people, but KaiOS is still running on millions of phones today. Mozilla partnered with them to upgrade the Gecko engine from some ancient version to a much more recent version, as well.
With KaiOS 3 not receiving many app updates necessary to continue functioning (WhatsApp, most importantly) I'm not sure how long it'll stick around, but it certainly left its mark on the mobile phone industry.
I think it’s an unpopular opinion but I think it’s actually not an impossible goal today. One well run org making an OS for phones that put the user not profits first is possible. Just like Linux was in the 90s.
It would have gone the way of the Palm Pre guaranteed. They just don't have the cash compared to Apple/Google
Do you still have that? What was your reasoning?
I don't, because it was on my corp email.
I remember the gist being that we were trying to compete against the two biggest companies on the planet, and (outside of some concerns about security) nobody seemed to really be complaining about the two options. If our goal was to bet the company (financially) on it, it made no sense to try to undercut Android... at the time Android was open source and ran on dirt cheap phones.
I remember a big part of it being "nobody wants a phone that doesn't have Angry Birds on it". I wasn't specifically worried about that one game (although it was insanely popular at the time), but rather all the apps – Uber, Facebook, etc. We had no ability to make parternships of that level happen. Especially since some of those companies (like Facebook) were trying to build their OWN phones at the time.
I just didn't think there was a market for a phone with no apps, that was positioning itself as the "cheaper" version of an already cheap (and ubiquitous) competitor. And I wouldn't have cared, if it wasn't for the fact that we had to move the entire company towards building this – which we did for a few years.
Interestingly, though, FireFox OS was forked to become KaiOS which can now be found on just about every feature phone on the market that I've seen.
Damn, I wasn't aware of this. I had a big interest in FirefoxOS when it was developed, so much that I named one of ours dogs after one component of it (Gaia). I was always sad that FirefoxOS (tried) to pivot to IoT instead of continuing to iterate on the idea, seems KaiOS is worth looking into.
There was no IoT pivot. This was just a corporate play to get rid of the FxOS team. Ari got a nice exit package from doing that.
A couple of years ago my elderly parents got feature phones with KaiOS. It was slow (at least on those devices), cumbersome, and some basic things such as SMS felt quite unintuitive and complex to operate. Think old feature phone OSes where you have to navigate from one menu to another with arrow keys, a few buttons and limited screen space, but without the relative polish of those actual old phone OSes from the days when they were standard. And with tangible sluggishness added.
n = 1 and I don't know how much phone vendors customize KaiOS. Maybe it was only cumbersome due to customizations or limitations from that vendor. Maybe it works better on touch devices. Maybe the hardware just wasn't up to the task. But it didn't leave a good mark.
It's also terrible. Source: I used it extensively last year as my primary phone OS.
Which has a 0.16% global marketshare. I guess feature phones have to use something though.
I think there was kind of a need for such a software, not just phones. But not sure why Mozilla was the company to deliver that. And not sure it would be a money maker.
Nokia also had an internal 'next gen small OS' that they also killed during that time.
I feel like developing consumer software products that focus on privacy is like pouring a glass of water on a forest fire. If the goal is a free, fair, and private web then those need to be the most economical and profitable values for all software developed on the web. If Mozilla offered developer focused product suites that made it so it was super cheap and easy to develop a website that was private by default then markets would do the rest.
If Mozilla is truly going to be taking privacy seriously, they should start by reading the Firefox Privacy Notice:
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/firefox/
Firefox could then be modified to remove the need to mention "Google", "Microsoft", "DuckDuckGo", "eBay", "our partners", "our third-party ad platform", "a third-party referral platform", "our campaign marketing vendors", "sends Mozilla", and any other companies/organizations/third-parties we find referenced in that document.
A privacy-respecting browser would never collect nor send any data beyond that necessary to provide its core web browsing functionality.
Any functionality that might compromise a user's privacy should not be bundled by default, and would instead have to be explicitly opted into by manually installing an extension that provides such functionality. This would include Firefox's/Mozilla's own "telemetry".
Somehow, "privacy" has come to mean protecting the spy data collected instead of not spying. It's quite literally newspeak.
I think this paper, more or less on this issue, is pretty worthwhile.
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2321480
and maybe especially if you dont use firefox :)
I worked at Mozilla because I saw John Lilly (CEO at the time) speak in 2009.
Someone snarkily asked him about Chrome, and he responded that Chrome was a victory for Mozilla – the mission was an open web, and choice was what Mozilla was fighting for. I thought it was a very healthy view.
Source: https://wordpress.tv/2009/07/08/john-lilly-mozilla/
without having read that, I would agree, more competitors is better. It just seems like mozilla decided to not really fight to develop product, thus reducing the competitors in the arena
I know you didn't mean it that way but this sounds like you are blaming Baker for the current awful state of the Web.
People in charge are not supposed to reply to emails of low level drones, but they are supposed to make good decisions.
Could you explain this assertion?
I really want to thank you for this post. An upvote isn’t always enough.
I also agree with a focus on privacy and trust.
It seems like the perfect time for it, with the other platforms enshitening.
It would have been nice if they would have been successful with their OS
I'm also an ex Mozilla employee and I 100% agree. Mitchell is a great human being and I respect her immensely!