7 ms·

Thank goodness. Mitchell Baker was running Mozilla into the ground while stuffing her pockets. >Doubling down on our core products, like Firefox... The fact t

by Gerlo 3y ago

Thank goodness. Mitchell Baker was running Mozilla into the ground while stuffing her pockets. >Doubling down on our core products, like Firefox... The fact that they acknowledged Firefox at all gives me some hope.

Spivak 3y ago
I mean I kinda doubt any new CEO is going to take an appreciable cut to salary. Baker got a bad rap among tech nerds for whom Mozilla === Firefox for trying to find literally any new market outside Firefox. It's not the golden calf it once was and only survives because of Google's hedge against antitrust. If they can't find a way to bring in outside money that isn't from Google they're gonna have a bad time if Google ever stops feeling threatened by US regulators, and making bets on new products is the only real thing you can do. Edge has proven in an embarrassingly public way that being a better browser under the hood doesn't get you more users.
- pgeorgi 3y ago
  It's less a "Firefox above all" sentiment, it's that Mozilla had 1. Firefox as baseline product declining 2. Lots of failed experiments to find new revenue streams while staying true to its mission 3. Baker's CEO salary rising several-fold 4. Engineers laid off for cost reduction Any three of them might well be okay, all four together look terribly self-centered on Baker's part.
- mekoka 3y ago
  > It's not the golden calf it once was Can you blame people for not understanding how a company who once had one of the most dominant and influential applications on the Internet, managed to fumble, by basically acting like a wallflower and letting the ecosystem figure the future out? > Any new market outside Firefox Why was this even necessary? Firefox has always been an undervalued asset at Mozilla. They sat on it and seem to have barely invested enough effort to make it decent enough to compete with Chrome. Back in 2009, if you'd asked me where I saw Firefox 10 years from then, I'd have said that in 2019 it's more than simply a browser. It's a platform competing with Apple and Google for apps, but on the web. It would have a core web browser with various derivatives. For example, one aimed at general purpose browsing (the FF we know currently), one for business apps (e.g. specialized browser augmented to understand better languages than plain old HTML/CSS/JS and built-in libraries for business apps; think Visual Basic, Notion), one for game apps, one for education apps, and more. Mozilla would provide tools and toolkits to make it easy for devs to just build apps for the web, so that they don't have to fight with the front-end. Apple is doing it for iOS, Google is doing it for Android. I still don't understand why Mozilla couldn't see itself sharing this cake with Firefox when it had 30%+ market share.
  - wolverine876 3y ago
    Can you back up these accusations?
    - mekoka 3y ago
      I think that I'm rather observing than accusing. Which of my statements do you need evidence for? That Mozilla fumbled despite Firefox having 30% of the browser market share? See its market share today. That they played wallflower while others were figuring out the front-end ecosystem? See the ensuing decade of front-end tooling extravaganza, through which Firefox's role was reduced to the app that eventually runs your web app (i.e. you the community figure it all out). That Firefox was an undervalued asset? See their foray into other venues, despite Firefox's untapped potential in being a real platform for the web (unlike Android and iOS). That Mozilla didn't see Firefox as their Trojan horse to share the apps market pie? See their equivalent of the App Store and Google Play. That they sat on it to barely make it compete with Chrome? Firefox has been my primary browser since it was still named Firebird, there was an extended stretch during which my faithfulness had nothing to do with it offering a better experience than Chrome. Indeed, even today, I still have to start Chrome from time to time for a few things that FF doesn't handle well.
      - wolverine876 3y ago
        All that reasoning is claims without facts (and they don't match my unsubstantiated beliefs).
  - Hasu 3y ago
    > Why was this even necessary? Firefox has always been an undervalued asset at Mozilla. They sat on it and seem to have barely invested enough effort to make it decent enough to compete with Chrome. It's necessary because Firefox doesn't make money. >Apple is doing it for iOS, Google is doing it for Android. I still don't understand why Mozilla couldn't see itself sharing this cake with Firefox when it had 30%+ market share. Mozilla's browser development is funded almost entirely by Google. If Mozilla had stepped up to become a real competitor, Google would have shut off the money, and Firefox would have just died. Google sells ads. Apple sells hardware. Mozilla doesn't sell anything. If they want to be independent and compete, they need independent income.
- csdvrx 3y ago
  I think you perfectly summed it up. Mozilla depends on google largesse, which limits its perimeter of freedom. Imagine if Firefox included perfect ad blocking + antitracking (ex: reporting a standard canvas size, having multi account container on) out of the box. Add an AI API so that users who have very basic questions wouldn't need to interact with a search engine. I don't think it would fare well with google. Google money has unfortunately created the perfect innovation trap: it removed the incentives that Firefox could have had, to create a product that users would want that could have a positive feedback loop on what users want. Instead, Firefox is what google want: an hedge against antitrust. I don't think the previous CEO could do anything to find out a new market when isolated like this from market signals (like donations which are the equivalent of sales: a signal that what you are providing is what users want) I think Google is also stuck in a local optimum trap: it can't innovate out of ads and tracking. Its own technology had to be taken by OpenAI as an outsider, with Microsoft money, to deliver a product. > Edge has proven is an embarrassingly public way that being a better browser under the hood doesn't get you more users. Edge is yet another proof that Google technology was sound, but is better managed by outside companies. The network effect from google created the eye of Sauron, with little else to show on. It acts as an incentives to anyone who cares about privacy or products not being killed. I think it's a tragedy because Google has been strongly incentivized to cut off the seeds it saw, to put more money and labor on its core offering, if only avoid the risk of cannibalizing its core business. ABC/alphabet was about edging that risk, trying to diversify by recognizing business is inherently risky, but you have to make wild bets to get alpha. Unfortunately, it may have been too little too late: 10 years later, I don't think Google has the money or the manpower to try to do that at a scale that matters. Even if it did, its bad reputation for culling out products doesn't inspire trust: personally, I'd rather run llama.cpp than make any bet that Gemini will still be operating in a few years, and for free software I'd trust Microsoft over Google. It's a tragedy, because it has had ripple effects on Firefox, taking similar wrong decisions to cut really innovative technologies (Rust) before they could grow.
  - rvba 3y ago
    > Imagine if Firefox included perfect ad blocking + antitracking (ex: reporting a standard canvas size, having multi account container on) out of the box. Add an AI API so that users who have very basic questions wouldn't need to interact with a search engine. I don't think it would fare well with google. When she writes that she will focus on privacy - isnt that exactly what it would be? We all know that this "privacy focus" is just bullshit and will end up with nothing anyway.
- GuB-42 3y ago
  > Baker got a bad rap among tech nerds for whom Mozilla === Firefox for trying to find literally any new market outside Firefox. Maybe I am a tech nerd, but for me Mozilla is Firefox. We have thousands of privacy-oriented companies and organizations, but there is only one independent browser. I am fine with Mozilla finding some other ways to make cash, but it they have a mission, that's the browser. So if I see money being spent (vs money being earned) on something that is not Firefox, I am sad. Now, they are free to do as they want, if they want to drop Firefox, that's their right, but that would make one less good thing in this world.
creativeSlumber 3y ago
> Thank goodness. Mitchell Baker was running Mozilla into the ground while stuffing her pockets. Can you please elaborate more on this and ideally provide some examples ?
- xnx 3y ago
  2008 to 2022: Firefox market share down 90%. Mozilla CEO pay up 700%.
  - _kwef 3y ago
    Just a quick note; the market share decrease is relative to FF's original market share, in 2008. This may seem obvious to some but its really easy to get confused about absolute/relative changes when talking about percentages of percentages.
    - csdvrx 3y ago
      Relative is all that matters. A rising tide lifts all boats. Microsoft has grown faster and larger than Google from 2013 to 2013: 1000% compared to Google 400% Firefox relative market share down by 90% is a ripple effect of Google generous donations, creating a disincentive for innovation.
- tux3 3y ago
  The title chart from this article caught on like wildfire a few years ago: https://calpaterson.com/mozilla.html https://calpaterson.com/mozilla.html "Firefox usage is down 85% despite Mozilla's top exec pay going up 400%".
  - Night_Thastus 3y ago
    I'm not sure that FF going down in usage can be put on the CEO at this point. There's way too many forces against them, it is not a "fair" fight against the only other option. Google is way larger and has deals set in place to ensure that basically everyone ends up with it as the default. Let that go on for a generation or two and people forget all about FF. They cannot compete against that. As for CEO pay, that's typical. Asking or expecting for it to not go up exponentially is pointless, that's just how it works now.
mavamaarten 3y ago
There's a Pocket pun in there somewhere
wolverine876 3y ago
[flagged]
- tlivolsi 3y ago
  What are you talking about? Criticism comes with the territory of being the CEO of a company. A CEO is going to receive the blame or accolades for a company depending on whether it fails or succeeds. People largely perceive Mozilla to be a declining company. So, yes, she is naturally going to receive the blame for that. What also comes with the territory is massive compensation.
  - wolverine876 3y ago
    Whatever the justification for commenter behavior (which doesn't justify it all in my mind; it just says lots of people do it), how does that address my GP comment?
- mariusor 3y ago
  I think most people are upset that Mozilla went from a CEO with a compensation[1] of ~800K and decent market share to one earning around 7mln but with the scraps of market share that we have now. Nobody can say if Eich would have done things differently, but I guess we'll never know. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22060527 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22060527
  - starkparker 3y ago
    Serious question because a few more minutes of Googling than I should've taken couldn't answer it: did Baker set her own salary, or did the Mozilla board collectively set it? Is any of that released by Mozilla? Laura Chambers, the interim CEO, is listed on Mozilla's website as "member of the compensation committee". Karim Lakhani's chair of the compensation committee and has been on the board since 2016. So I'm assuming the same people who decided to pay Baker $7M/year are still there?
    - wmf 3y ago
neilv 3y ago
A CEO willing to take a modest compensation package (only enough to be middle-class comfortable, like Mozilla's engineers should be) might be signal that they're really aligned with the non-profit mission. People often say you need to pay the big bucks to get a good funding-raiser, but bringing in money isn't the only job of the CEO there.
- mhh__ 3y ago
  I don't think paying a lot for good talent is a problem even at a nonprofit (and it's not just about fundraising) i.e. the issue at Mozilla is competence and alignment not money
- wraptile 3y ago
  I really don't sympathize with the argument that CEO's have be paid big bucks to perform. People would kill for a position like this as long as they could make a living. Free software is a medium that literally has dudes work night and day on some random meme project, create communities, partners and policies just because of their ideological beliefs. No other medium has this incredible level of activity. If Mozilla can't find a leader, they can surely make one.

by Gerlo 3y ago

Spivak 3y ago

I mean I kinda doubt any new CEO is going to take an appreciable cut to salary. Baker got a bad rap among tech nerds for whom Mozilla === Firefox for trying to find literally any new market outside Firefox. It's not the golden calf it once was and only survives because of Google's hedge against antitrust. If they can't find a way to bring in outside money that isn't from Google they're gonna have a bad time if Google ever stops feeling threatened by US regulators, and making bets on new products is the only real thing you can do. Edge has proven in an embarrassingly public way that being a better browser under the hood doesn't get you more users.

pgeorgi 3y ago
It's less a "Firefox above all" sentiment, it's that Mozilla had 1. Firefox as baseline product declining 2. Lots of failed experiments to find new revenue streams while staying true to its mission 3. Baker's CEO salary rising several-fold 4. Engineers laid off for cost reduction Any three of them might well be okay, all four together look terribly self-centered on Baker's part.
mekoka 3y ago
> It's not the golden calf it once was Can you blame people for not understanding how a company who once had one of the most dominant and influential applications on the Internet, managed to fumble, by basically acting like a wallflower and letting the ecosystem figure the future out? > Any new market outside Firefox Why was this even necessary? Firefox has always been an undervalued asset at Mozilla. They sat on it and seem to have barely invested enough effort to make it decent enough to compete with Chrome. Back in 2009, if you'd asked me where I saw Firefox 10 years from then, I'd have said that in 2019 it's more than simply a browser. It's a platform competing with Apple and Google for apps, but on the web. It would have a core web browser with various derivatives. For example, one aimed at general purpose browsing (the FF we know currently), one for business apps (e.g. specialized browser augmented to understand better languages than plain old HTML/CSS/JS and built-in libraries for business apps; think Visual Basic, Notion), one for game apps, one for education apps, and more. Mozilla would provide tools and toolkits to make it easy for devs to just build apps for the web, so that they don't have to fight with the front-end. Apple is doing it for iOS, Google is doing it for Android. I still don't understand why Mozilla couldn't see itself sharing this cake with Firefox when it had 30%+ market share.
- wolverine876 3y ago
  Can you back up these accusations?
  - mekoka 3y ago
    I think that I'm rather observing than accusing. Which of my statements do you need evidence for? That Mozilla fumbled despite Firefox having 30% of the browser market share? See its market share today. That they played wallflower while others were figuring out the front-end ecosystem? See the ensuing decade of front-end tooling extravaganza, through which Firefox's role was reduced to the app that eventually runs your web app (i.e. you the community figure it all out). That Firefox was an undervalued asset? See their foray into other venues, despite Firefox's untapped potential in being a real platform for the web (unlike Android and iOS). That Mozilla didn't see Firefox as their Trojan horse to share the apps market pie? See their equivalent of the App Store and Google Play. That they sat on it to barely make it compete with Chrome? Firefox has been my primary browser since it was still named Firebird, there was an extended stretch during which my faithfulness had nothing to do with it offering a better experience than Chrome. Indeed, even today, I still have to start Chrome from time to time for a few things that FF doesn't handle well.
    - wolverine876 3y ago
      All that reasoning is claims without facts (and they don't match my unsubstantiated beliefs).
- Hasu 3y ago
  > Why was this even necessary? Firefox has always been an undervalued asset at Mozilla. They sat on it and seem to have barely invested enough effort to make it decent enough to compete with Chrome. It's necessary because Firefox doesn't make money. >Apple is doing it for iOS, Google is doing it for Android. I still don't understand why Mozilla couldn't see itself sharing this cake with Firefox when it had 30%+ market share. Mozilla's browser development is funded almost entirely by Google. If Mozilla had stepped up to become a real competitor, Google would have shut off the money, and Firefox would have just died. Google sells ads. Apple sells hardware. Mozilla doesn't sell anything. If they want to be independent and compete, they need independent income.
csdvrx 3y ago
I think you perfectly summed it up. Mozilla depends on google largesse, which limits its perimeter of freedom. Imagine if Firefox included perfect ad blocking + antitracking (ex: reporting a standard canvas size, having multi account container on) out of the box. Add an AI API so that users who have very basic questions wouldn't need to interact with a search engine. I don't think it would fare well with google. Google money has unfortunately created the perfect innovation trap: it removed the incentives that Firefox could have had, to create a product that users would want that could have a positive feedback loop on what users want. Instead, Firefox is what google want: an hedge against antitrust. I don't think the previous CEO could do anything to find out a new market when isolated like this from market signals (like donations which are the equivalent of sales: a signal that what you are providing is what users want) I think Google is also stuck in a local optimum trap: it can't innovate out of ads and tracking. Its own technology had to be taken by OpenAI as an outsider, with Microsoft money, to deliver a product. > Edge has proven is an embarrassingly public way that being a better browser under the hood doesn't get you more users. Edge is yet another proof that Google technology was sound, but is better managed by outside companies. The network effect from google created the eye of Sauron, with little else to show on. It acts as an incentives to anyone who cares about privacy or products not being killed. I think it's a tragedy because Google has been strongly incentivized to cut off the seeds it saw, to put more money and labor on its core offering, if only avoid the risk of cannibalizing its core business. ABC/alphabet was about edging that risk, trying to diversify by recognizing business is inherently risky, but you have to make wild bets to get alpha. Unfortunately, it may have been too little too late: 10 years later, I don't think Google has the money or the manpower to try to do that at a scale that matters. Even if it did, its bad reputation for culling out products doesn't inspire trust: personally, I'd rather run llama.cpp than make any bet that Gemini will still be operating in a few years, and for free software I'd trust Microsoft over Google. It's a tragedy, because it has had ripple effects on Firefox, taking similar wrong decisions to cut really innovative technologies (Rust) before they could grow.
- rvba 3y ago
  > Imagine if Firefox included perfect ad blocking + antitracking (ex: reporting a standard canvas size, having multi account container on) out of the box. Add an AI API so that users who have very basic questions wouldn't need to interact with a search engine. I don't think it would fare well with google. When she writes that she will focus on privacy - isnt that exactly what it would be? We all know that this "privacy focus" is just bullshit and will end up with nothing anyway.
GuB-42 3y ago
> Baker got a bad rap among tech nerds for whom Mozilla === Firefox for trying to find literally any new market outside Firefox. Maybe I am a tech nerd, but for me Mozilla is Firefox. We have thousands of privacy-oriented companies and organizations, but there is only one independent browser. I am fine with Mozilla finding some other ways to make cash, but it they have a mission, that's the browser. So if I see money being spent (vs money being earned) on something that is not Firefox, I am sad. Now, they are free to do as they want, if they want to drop Firefox, that's their right, but that would make one less good thing in this world.

creativeSlumber 3y ago

> Thank goodness. Mitchell Baker was running Mozilla into the ground while stuffing her pockets. Can you please elaborate more on this and ideally provide some examples ?

xnx 3y ago
2008 to 2022: Firefox market share down 90%. Mozilla CEO pay up 700%.
- _kwef 3y ago
  Just a quick note; the market share decrease is relative to FF's original market share, in 2008. This may seem obvious to some but its really easy to get confused about absolute/relative changes when talking about percentages of percentages.
  - csdvrx 3y ago
    Relative is all that matters. A rising tide lifts all boats. Microsoft has grown faster and larger than Google from 2013 to 2013: 1000% compared to Google 400% Firefox relative market share down by 90% is a ripple effect of Google generous donations, creating a disincentive for innovation.
tux3 3y ago
The title chart from this article caught on like wildfire a few years ago: https://calpaterson.com/mozilla.html https://calpaterson.com/mozilla.html "Firefox usage is down 85% despite Mozilla's top exec pay going up 400%".
- Night_Thastus 3y ago
  I'm not sure that FF going down in usage can be put on the CEO at this point. There's way too many forces against them, it is not a "fair" fight against the only other option. Google is way larger and has deals set in place to ensure that basically everyone ends up with it as the default. Let that go on for a generation or two and people forget all about FF. They cannot compete against that. As for CEO pay, that's typical. Asking or expecting for it to not go up exponentially is pointless, that's just how it works now.

mavamaarten 3y ago

There's a Pocket pun in there somewhere

wolverine876 3y ago

[flagged]

tlivolsi 3y ago
What are you talking about? Criticism comes with the territory of being the CEO of a company. A CEO is going to receive the blame or accolades for a company depending on whether it fails or succeeds. People largely perceive Mozilla to be a declining company. So, yes, she is naturally going to receive the blame for that. What also comes with the territory is massive compensation.
- wolverine876 3y ago
  Whatever the justification for commenter behavior (which doesn't justify it all in my mind; it just says lots of people do it), how does that address my GP comment?
mariusor 3y ago
I think most people are upset that Mozilla went from a CEO with a compensation[1] of ~800K and decent market share to one earning around 7mln but with the scraps of market share that we have now. Nobody can say if Eich would have done things differently, but I guess we'll never know. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22060527 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22060527
- starkparker 3y ago
  Serious question because a few more minutes of Googling than I should've taken couldn't answer it: did Baker set her own salary, or did the Mozilla board collectively set it? Is any of that released by Mozilla? Laura Chambers, the interim CEO, is listed on Mozilla's website as "member of the compensation committee". Karim Lakhani's chair of the compensation committee and has been on the board since 2016. So I'm assuming the same people who decided to pay Baker $7M/year are still there?
  - wmf 3y ago

neilv 3y ago

A CEO willing to take a modest compensation package (only enough to be middle-class comfortable, like Mozilla's engineers should be) might be signal that they're really aligned with the non-profit mission. People often say you need to pay the big bucks to get a good funding-raiser, but bringing in money isn't the only job of the CEO there.

mhh__ 3y ago
I don't think paying a lot for good talent is a problem even at a nonprofit (and it's not just about fundraising) i.e. the issue at Mozilla is competence and alignment not money
wraptile 3y ago
I really don't sympathize with the argument that CEO's have be paid big bucks to perform. People would kill for a position like this as long as they could make a living. Free software is a medium that literally has dudes work night and day on some random meme project, create communities, partners and policies just because of their ideological beliefs. No other medium has this incredible level of activity. If Mozilla can't find a leader, they can surely make one.