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Comment by sascha_sl | Hacker News Reader

I'm baffled Thunderbird has to essentially be crowdfunded while Mozilla pays their execs millions and experiments with mostly useless things in Firefox. The only thing I remember worth anything was Container Tabs, and that's mostly abandoned with little tooling and no sync support.

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They've rebuilt several core parts of their browser in recent years, as far as I know, now being in a place again where I'm glad again I'm using fx instead of chrome. I for one am glad they focus on their core product :)

Absolutely, the release of Quantum too changed my view on FX completely.

On the other hand they alienated their core user base with the extensions mess which is still lacking to this day.

While Mozilla wastes a lot of money (for example on their high exec salaries), they also have done a lot to improve Firefox the last few years. It is much faster and more stable now.

Well, my point was that they spend a lot on things that aren't their core product (Pocket, Lockwise, Monitor, Send, Firefox OS) while being unwilling to fund their long time project with an actual audience.

Pocket was already an external product (readitlater?). Send solves a real problem people have, and it was probably easy to develop it separately. Similarly to Monitor, you don't have to touch the core product to make it. Lockwise was probably easy to make, if you already have Firefox Sync, it's just a viewer app.

> Pocket was already an external product

OP's point still stands though. Mozilla spent millions acquiring Pocket. They also made it so users can't disable it as a plugin like they used to be able to.

And this a semi-annual reminder that it has been X years since Mozilla Corp spent $29m to acquire Pocket and said it will "become part of the Mozilla open source project", and Pocket is as open source today as it was on the day before the acquisition, which is to say, it's not.

X here is 3.

Pocket played into an overarching internal strategy that I believe Mozilla has shifted away from since (but it's still useful for populating the default New Tab page).

If you want to make an ex-Mozillian shudder, sneak up behind them and whisper "Context Graph" in their ear.

You just made a current Mozillian shudder!

Mozilla abandoned Firefox OS several years ago. Lockwise replaced the old password manager. Monitor and Send complement and advertise the core product. Pocket has revenue.

Container tabs is the feature that brought me back to Firefox after a decade of Chrome.

Same here. Being able to use the AWS console in multiple accounts is a lifesaver, as is the privacy of my Google cookie not being sent to every site.

Can you cite these millions paid to execs at Mozilla?

Mitchell Baker was paid $2,294,667 in 2017.

https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2017/mozilla-2017-fo.... See page 7.

Mitchell Baker was paid $2,458,350 in 2018.

https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2018/mozilla-2018-fo.... See page 7.

Mozilla has not released their annual report for 2019, yet.

To be fair it's not that much for a CEO of a SV corporation, however the fact that she went from $700,000 to more than $2,000,000 in the space of 5 years and her financial accomplishments don't reflet any of it is quite surprising.

Almost like vultures who are skinning a company while they still can, emptying the bank account knowing that eventually they'll get fired for poor performance.

Yes, I thought the whole point of Mozilla, being a non-profit and all, is to be different from "SV corporations".

But apparently it's run like all the VC-backed companies.

> emptying the bank account knowing that eventually they'll get fired for poor performance.

CEOs don’t set their own comp.

Baker is Executive Chairwoman and heads the Board of Directors. But she's also been around since Netscape, and was instrumental in starting Mozilla post-AOL. Not exactly a corporate raider.

In theory. In practice, they often negotiate it with their board.

Yes, but in practice then all employees set their own comp by negotiating with their manager.

It's (semi-)public info; same as it ever was: Moz is laying off employees and paying managers waaaay too much.

https://twitter.com/christi3k/status/1217542576141524992

Reading through that thread, the main thing that came to mind was the adage "Never meet your heroes."

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