Firefox usage is down despite Mozilla's top exec pay going up
calpaterson.com
calpaterson.com
This is true, and indeed very strange. I use FF on mobile and it works perfectly. So Mozilla's problems aren't only technical, there's also a question of market awareness.
That said, there are also technical problems. Some bugs on the desktop linger on for years and are never fixed.
As described in the article, Mozilla spent a lot of energy into side projects that never went anywhere and were only loosely related to the browser.
This is all, obviously, a management problem.
Not anymore!
To be consistent with their business screw ups, they addressed this with the latest updates. Now the mobile app a mess like the rest of Mozilla.
I want to use Firefox (or any decent browser not based on chrome), for several reasons, but this way it gets harder and harder to justify to myself.
What alternatives do we have for non-chromium browsers that have a healthy plugin ecosystem?
Even Edge is now chromium based, I think it's a lost battle.
Note also that many of the redesigned plugins will be slower than their older, mature counterparts. Give the plugin authors some time to optimize their plugins, and try to cull the amount of plugins you currently use. I've using only Adblock Plus, Tree Style Tab, and Tridactyl.
It's a Nokia 6.1. I've got a lot of apps running, so my guess is that memory exhaustion is causing the app to completely close when switching away. The whole app and previous page then needs to be reloaded when I reopen the app. I think it's the previous page reloading is causing the biggest part of the delay.
What's annoying is that even if I try to switch to another site, it still waits for the previous page to load. I'd like to easily cancel the reload so that I can go to a separate page quickly.
The obvious answer is: none. It always was Chrome or Firefox, everything else was so niche that 'healthy plugin ecosystem' is out of reach. And this very likely won't change for the better, pretty much everyone I know ditched Firefox in favor of chrome by now. We all want to love firefox, but at this point, staying invested seems like a waste of energy.
A long time ago firefox(program) started asking for donations. I've donated 5$(I was a poor student in Poland[1]). After the donation, I found out that money will not be used for FF development (why firefox page did not mention that?). Long story short it was my last donation to them.
[1] Now I'm not a student ;)
"Nobody pays for a browser", they say. Well, they might pay to see some features in!
I know it's probably not practical to monetize an open source programming language, and they don't centrally manage it, but that seems to be their big differentiator and contribution to the software world as of 2020, as far as I can tell. They were pioneering back when they were driving a lot of the evolution of browsers and web APIs, and providing a way less awful alternative to IE, but by 2020 Google's basically upstaged them in all those areas, and I don't see that trend ever reversing at this point. But Rust might live on in a big or huge way, possibly even long past their solvency as an organization.
So I don't know exactly what I'm trying to say with this post, and I don't know how it could help them financially, but maybe leaning into Rust or other similar very ambitious attempts at fundamentally shifting the software ecosystem could let them remain if not successful, at least relevant and acclaimed. Maybe Servo could've been one of those, but it seems like vaporware at this point (besides the parts Firefox cannibalized, like Stylo).
[1] https://www.f-droid.org/en/packages/org.midorinext.android/
On the parent issue, Firefox on mobile is great because of the same reason Firefox on Desktop is great. Power over your browser. Which is important since browser exploits are using Javascript to compromise phones.
Of course regular people don't know this and will probably never care. But it's the reason Firefox probably won't die. Because the people who know tech know its strength and will want to use it.
It's shameful for a CEO to get a 400% pay increase, regardless of any other circumstances. But it matters less to me because I'm sure Firefox will always attract enthusiasts who care about their online security.
except if firefox wills it, they could have an advertising campaign to show regular people that firefox can block ads (the irony!), and is a much better browser experience when paired with all the plugins!
But of course, this threatens the tenuous relationship with google, their major source of revenue. Google keeps firefox alive on a shoestring budget to stop the anti-trust happenings that microsoft went through with Internet Explorer.
So the status quo fits just fine for these parties, and the web browser competition gets worse over time.
I also really like the new swipe-url-to-switch-tabs feature =D
It used to be "click on the url bar -> click big site preview", now it's "click on the tab counter -> click the plus icon -> click to dismiss some overlay -> click small site icon".
Thanks Mozilla, I hate it.
Thanks !
Oh wait, no, just NoScript, because about:config doesn't work in Firefox for Android anymore.
about:config prefs are not "broken," but many of them work much differently in GeckoView than they work in desktop.
Setting some prefs to the wrong value could completely disconnect Gecko from the embedding app.
Javascript bookmarklets no longer work.
* Firefox Browser
* Firefox Focus
* Firefox for Android Beta
* Firefox Nightly
Can anybody tell me what I'm supposed to install?
Second is Firefox where all the privacy settings are on and the browser keeps no history.
Other two are for people looking to test new features.
Literally the only reason I use Chrome instead is because of the flow ui tab switching. I just can't stand the Firefox mobile UI for tab switching. I with there was an extension or something to change it. It's a huge shame.
I have been dying to switch but tab management and switching is so jarring in FF vs Chrome (on Android).
Not only that, but scrolling is also buggy because it keeps accelerating. Insufferable while online shopping, because I like to scroll-stop-scroll-stop-scroll and FF just speeds up the scrolling if the stops are too short.
Adblock with safari on iOS works great
Even Firefox Focus' content blocker works on Safari and not the main Firefox app
My typical workflow is: (1) search for something in FFF, (2) if it's something I want to stay alive so I can read later, I share it to FF, (3) if it's something that I need to be logged in for, I share it to Safari, where I'm logged into various sites.
It is annoying that I have to manually open FFF each time, instead of being able to use Siri to trigger a search or the systemwide search. Hopefully both of these search options will use my default browser in iOS 14.
To expand on the quality point: I used Firefox a long time past most of my laymen friends had switched to Chrome, despite it being painfully slower, and I spent years giving it trial periods on a regular basis. But the quality gap was just too reliable and persistent, with it always being slower, jankier, and less featureful (from a product perspective, I still can't believe how many years it took for them to get per-tab processes). When I've tried it recently on mobile, it's seemed quite a bit slower, and
Combined with a decline in confidence in their ability to be an effective organization that started with Eich's ouster and has only gotten worse over time, it's difficult for me to see why most users would choose mobile FF over Brave. The only advantage i can see is extensions, but it's my impression that most users don't much care to use them.
I don't know what it is for sure but seems like its malice. No one knows what deals they are making with the devil under table.
"Mitchell Baker, Mozilla's top executive, was paid $2.4m in 2018, [..]. Payments to Baker have more than doubled in the last five years."
and this at the same time:
"Mozilla recently announced that they would be dismissing 250 people."
It's shameful. Specially for a "non profit".
We have an organization where, at the same time they don't have revenue enough for keeping its workers, the decision makers increase their salary. Never mind the legal structure of the organization, that doesn't look to me very ethical.
At the same time, non-profits are suppose to have the mission of improving the world. I understand that the janitor doesn't care about the mission and just want to be payed, but the management should care, at least, about the optics. I, for sure, would not donate (1) to a non-profit if I think that my money is going to be used for buying Ferrari or houses in the Hamptons.
A business that is set up as a "non-profit" means that it can't pay dividends. If the business earns one million dollars, I can't profit from it. This does not mean there aren't people in the organization with salaries. Sometimes big salaries.
You can have a "for-profit" company owned by a "non-profit" one. The dividends paid by the "for-profit" go to the "non-profit" but those can only be reinvested. In a way, yes, "non-profitness" is inherited.
I guess that the "for-profit" organization provides legal benefits. If one of your child companies goes bankrupt, it shouldn't affect the other ones nor the parent company. I have a few more guesses but I am not confident enough to write about them, especially when I am not from the US.
So many non-profits split out the profit-making activities into a separate (for-profit) company so that they can keep non-profit financial streams separate from the for-profit ones.
A for-profit entity owning/operating a non-profit entity would be more difficult to justify without calling on other goals.
The point is not so much that the CEO's pay directly matches the salaries of the sacked employees, more that the CEO is clearly focused on their personal goals, rather than the organisational goals.
CEO's who reduce their salary in order to keep more staff on in lean times are servants of their organisation. CEO's who sack staff to save money so they can increase their own salary see the organisation as their servant.
It's not a crime to be greedy, but being greedy is a clear signal of your values and goals.
Our entire system has been setup like this for decades. 99% of earnings have been going to the top 1% for decades now.
I understand people who don't want to get behind BLM - I might not agree with them, but I "get" them.
But the fact that the country looked at Occupy Wallstreet and collectively shrugged its shoulders and said "I don't see a problem here" - well, here we are - slowly building back a feudal society while blaming the poorest amongst us for our troubles.
And they can't reduce their salary now because it'd be unfair on their families.
Firefox has a problem. It gets most of its revenue from Google. They need a different revenue stream but their ideas haven't worked.
Their executives are clearly failures. But with such high pay, they're cashing out. Buying themselves mansions etc.
Isn't that pretty much admitting that they're on a sinking ship?
This kind of bullshit infuriates me to no end.
I believe they should justify the value they create in this high paid positions compared to all other people making and disseminating the product. There is no justification for this level.
There are lots and lots of families there living on a less fair level of salary but produce much more value (and no damages).
I don't get it.
(I don't even make that much in a month (after taxes)).
That excludes purely burning cash ie on drugs/alcohol, hookers or living in super-high rental place.
If you make that much money, you're not paying more than 25% taxes. Or you are not using the right lawyers.
Most countries also seem to have savings plans where you put money away until retirement and pay taxes only when you're allowed to take it out, after retirement age (after retirement, you have a lower income, so pay a lower tax rate). Of course, you still pay those taxes (wouldn't be a certainty of life, now, would it?), but they're lower.
I also think I still have some legal headroom for optimizing my tax return forms. Maybe I'll have to try an accountant next year.
I don't think this is controversial. Warren Buffett talked about how he pays a lower tax rate than his secretary. There is also the famous curve of tax vs income group: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/10/06/opinion/incom...
Then, you have trust funds for your children so that none of them ever have to work. And when you die, your children will inherit the fortune, so they can do the same for their children, ad infinitum. And if they want a "job" you can start a nonprofit that they can run, so they can be known as successful administrators while you are recognized as a selfless philanthropist who gave away so much money.
I guess it would be hard on their families because they would move off the fast track of multi-generational absolute financial security.
You go from a $1 million dollar home, to a $10 million dollar home.
Instead of one $50k car, you now own 2-3 $150k cars.
Tens of thousands of dollars will go towards your kids education, every single year.
You hire people to do work for you (tutors, nannies, maids, whatever), these cost tens of thousands of dollars.
Maybe you buy some vacation property - that's more money to spend.
And, in the end, you're not some kind of high-rolling baller that jet sets around the world in a private jet or yacht, spending fortunes on vanity.
You're really "just" living the very upper-middle class life.
A clear problem, should address it, but probably won't. And will make up some phoney reason to justify it.
Doesn’t seem to be much of a misquote. Poor Mitchell Baker. She’ll just have to suffer with her non-discounted salary.
Again, I don't agree with that since clearly the higher salaries are not attracting any talented executives either.
I would much rather a lower-salary, less-experienced CEO who actually cares about the mission enough to accept that salary, than someone who has presided over an erosion of Firefox's market share and significant layoffs, while still increasing her own salary. Clearly the system is not working by paying their CEO a market rate.
IMHO, 5% is actually fine. That's a robust user base of a few tens to hundreds of million users. Nothing to sneeze at and a good basis for long term existence of the project.
Where Mozilla went the wrong direction is with their commercial activities. Their core problem is that their product is a commodity. It's just not going to bring in a lot of revenue. Apple and Google use their respective browser as a control point for the app store and ads. It's an expense worth making because they both exploit the large number of users using their browsers via other channels. Most of what Google does is motivated by this. Likewise, Apple is selling hardware, apps, and subscriptions.
Mozilla does not have a similarly viable way of generating revenue from their user base. It's an OSS product that users install and use for free. Their core value is actually protecting users against that kind of thing which is a noble thing to do but not a business plan.
That's why Mozilla was initially styled as a foundation. The commercial branch came later and its the commercial branch that is failing; not the foundation. They have no money maker of note other than their search traffic deals. Everything else, including (I'll just call this right now), their recent VPN offering is never going to come close to bankrolling their operation. This follows a long line of failed investments in a mobile strategy that never panned out, various "experiments' that never got off the ground, misc services that they launched and that people promptly forgot about, etc. None of it engaged more than a fraction of their user base. None of it wowed anyone. None of it was more than a me too effort of replicating things that already existed and already were commodities. Mozilla as an investment vehicle for new products only loosely connected to Firefox has failed.
The way out is back to basics. Pull the plug on the Mozilla corporation as soon as convenient for investors and setup the foundation for success and untangle it from the VCs. It will need donations, the search engine revenue looks good as well and ought to be allocated 100% to keeping the browser going. There should be enough to keep an engineering team going. It doesn't need a marketing department, offices in London, Paris, San Francisco, Mountain View, etc. Hell, the rent for that alone could keep a development team going for a very long time. Much bigger things have been built with far less. That shit only ever made sense when Mozilla was styling itself as an incubation vehicle for turning VC money into products. Now that that has definitely failed, time to walk away from that.
And then there's the Rust part of the company. IMHO that's a valid asset where Mozilla has a lot of influence in a rapidly growing community. There's an opportunity there to grow some healthy business around that supporting the many companies looking to leverage that. So far, they run it like a charity. That's a mistake. Aside from Firefox, that's actually the single most valuable IP they ever created. And like Firefox, it lacks a plan for revenue. Rust almost happened by accident. But MS and Apple are now looking to use it and it seems people are doing Rust things in the Linux kernel as well.
This. So much this. Besides, if they moved their HQ outside the Valley, they could probably also hire new people for much less…
Even worse, the cheapest comparable alternatives are free. At least commodities can be sold at the market price if you can't differentiate yours enough.
My phone browser is like a snack, my desktop browser is what I care about.
It's bad for the organization, but the leadership doesn't really care about that.
The CEO's yacht won't pay itself.
The same is true for most of the engineers at Mozilla. They could go to FAANGs and increase their compensation quite a bit.
So while I agree that the leadership has been bad, executive pay was not the problem. Executive decision-making was the problem. Hiring leaders who could make better decisions certainly won't be any cheaper.
I mean, really? After their record of poor performance at Mozilla?
> Hiring leaders who could make better decisions certainly won't be any cheaper.
It's been blindly obvious for years what they should do, but let's state it again: (1) Build up a fund instead of throwing away the money, so they can be financially independent. (2) Concentrate on the browser and users.
#2 is a matter of opinion in a couple ways. Work on the browser for the betterment of users has never stopped. Intent has always been there, but we can debate quality of plan and execution.
Worth mentioning is how hard it is to rate performance given lack of counterfactuals. Is there even any golden path of success in all of the solution space? All we know is that what was tried hasn't worked.
Its an open source project people believe in. Reduce the pay and you are probably actually more likely to cut out the worst execs and focus only on smart people who want to contribute.
Yes, indeed a good CEO has offers from elsewhere. But...why isn't the business and governance open-sourced like the codebase?
Now, is every well paid CEO a truly good leader? No. But I’d argue it’s a lot more difficult to assess a good leader than a good developer. There’s a lot more people management, marketing and other soft skills involved. Not to mention the time scales for success are much larger.
At a decent-sized org it is nearly impossible to measure an individual developer's impact with any granularity.
I think this should also illustrate that evaluating a leader and evaluating a developer are two entirely different things that can't be directly compared anyway.
But over what timescale? For startups especially it is not easy to evaluate a job that involves long term planning in the short term.
Eventually you get CEOs making statements that amount to 'I deliver 10x or 20x more value to this company than you, all my CEO peers say so.'
If this counts as "saving Firefox" I'm not sure I want to know the alternative.
That's just baseless assumptions. And considering that this "saving" did not work out so far, it seems they are not even worth the money at all.
On another side, for the money of one of this managers, you could probably get a dozen or more semi-competent people who are more eager to make money and save the project.
What % of engineers at Mozilla are in SV and other places where Mozilla competes with FAANG? I thought quite a lot of the employees were remote all over the world.
So let them.
> The same is true for most of the engineers at Mozilla. They could go to FAANGs and increase their compensation quite a bit.
So let them.
To both your assertions, I highly doubt it. Maybe 1 or 2, but for the vast majority, no.
And Mozilla's poor track record suggests that if Mozilla insists on paying the same CEO salary, they might do well to find a different CEO to give it to.
I think the point is less that this CEO should take a pay cut — although she probably should — but more that the mediocrity + layoffs + exorbitant-CEO-salary situation here reeks of self-dealing.
Find a CEO whose motivation is more "make the world a better place" than "make millions of dollars a year". $500k is a large enough salary to live well just about anywhere. After that it's just "victory points" in the game of careerism.
These theories are untested, except that we now know for certain that paying $2.5M doesn't guarantee that the CEO is any good.
I would bet you can hire an excellent, technically competent CEO for Mozilla for $250k a year.
But how long would they stay after other companies learn this new person is actually competent and start throwing money at them.
Yes.
They are admitting they are solely reliant on Google's money. Given that Google Chrome is a direct competitor to Firefox and has gained more market share, Google can justify to either reduce spend or stop paying for being the default search engine in Firefox due to its shrinking market share and instead pay more for Apple Safari as the default in iOS, macOS, etc instead.
Mozilla and Firefox will be another geek's relic in this decade if it doesn't find another revenue source apart from relying on Google - A direct competitor in all areas.
When you see Mozilla as a Big Tech trust-fund baby struggling with cognitive dissonance, then their behavior makes sense.
'Failures' on the other hand - that is a loaded word. They are failures, they have failed at making Firefox popular. But what needed to happen to build an alternative world where they succeeded? The browsers that succeeded were Chrome and Safari - browsers sponsored by the owners of the two major platforms for accessing the internet, backed by billions of dollars of corporatyness.
What is Firefox meant to do? Charities aren't innovation engines. Back in the day when they were making progress on market share, the options were Firefox or IE6. The strategy of the Chrome web team is slightly different than the IE6 web team. I'm sour about Firefox wiping out their value proposition when they canned the good extensions - but that happened circa 2017 so it isn't the problem for adoption. They need something radical to be relevant and that isn't a fair ask of a nonprofit.
The unique selling point of Firefox (and especially: mobile Firefox) was ability to heavily customize it and use third party extensions.
Those extensions were the ones bringing in the innovation -> most ideas came from third parties (on a side note: usually for free, since extensions are hard to monetize). The system just worked and gave many popular extensions like Tab Mix Plus, Ad-Block, Noscript... through basic customization extensions like Classic Theme Restorer (have you ever setup new browser for a grandmother who does not need 50 options everywhere when you right click? can you even do this now in new Firefox? or the new extension model does not allow it) through countless small extensions that changed users' workflows how they wanted. This ecosystem is all gone.
Developers inside of Firefox completely ignored it - they killed the old extension system because they didn't like it, while they did not provide anything that is even 25% as good. I understand that creating a new, better system is hard, but that is their job and core product. Firefox could have been providing the framework on which extensions would sit. Also, they earned 500 million dollars per year, for years; had over 1000 employees. They couldnt find people who could solve hard problems?
Or maybe it is a failure of project management: developers ignored hard problems, they preferred to work on new, shiny green-field projects. Those new toys are great: they boost the CV, allow to play with new technologies, often are left in half baked state so you dont care about bugs. They also have no users, so nobody will complain, basically no accountability for a project that is never finished and killed after 1-2 years. We saw many of such side projects in Firefox - all shifting away resources from the core product that is neglected.
The big question is whether there’s a model for browser development which isn’t subsidized by huge companies which profit elsewhere. Short of government support (antitrust, direct funding, etc.) I’m not sure there is a viable path forward.
But now they are a fringe browser, that already has problems keeping up with the developments on the web.
Note that for Google they are only a fig-leaf in their upcoming anti-trust case. Note that Google pulled a lot of underhanded tricks to get people to switch to Chrome and paying FF may have been just enough to keep Mozilla quiet about this. If it had been a for-profit situation and with a different source of revenues for Mozilla then there is a fair chance Mozilla would have made a case for anti-competitive behavior by Google.
So that money may have acted to Google's benefit in more than just one way.
Maybe you just can't run a successful business in the browser space in 2020. It was already plenty difficult in the mid-90's, wasn't it?
Let's say I'm hired as a coach of a team that's second best in the world (Being the second used browser in the world is NOT a rough hand, other browsers are clawing for >1% for ever and are not coming close). I'm not saying it's easy at all but after 5 years I manage to do NOTHING to stop the bleeding, lose 250 highly skilled people and RAISE MY OWN SALARY 5x...
Let's assume good faith and that executive pay in general at Mozilla was not competitive.
That would be similar to a company noticing that it has been underpaying software engineers and then choosing to bump up compensation significantly.
A question that raises is: do executives (and software engineers?) bring the value that is associated with those pay grades, given that they seem increasingly detached from other roles?
I don't know - are many people here on HN familiar enough with executive-level strategy, connections and work practices to discuss whether that value is justified?
In honesty I believe that some executives are probably capable of using their personal networks to bring on-board significant expertise, industry influence, negotiating power and other talents (such as, frankly, the ability to dominate conversations and sway opinions, for better or worse - as long as it doesn't hurt the company) that are typically hard to quantify or certificate.
If the tech industry continues consolidating into a smaller number of more important companies then it seems understandable that those influence and network effects become more important in order to stay competitive.
I'm not sure if that's fair - those might not be the kind of skills that can necessarily be learned; I'd argue they're frequently side-effects of people's upbringing, social networks, and psychological profiles (including some dark/problematic personality types). But it explains the realpolitik of the situation without demonizing individual decision-makers for what may be rational choices in the environment.
The problem is that this is a very subjective claim. If you think of mozilla as belonging to the same category as tech giants or successful tech startups, and believe it needs to compete with them to attract talent then it's not unreasonable. If you think of firefox as a charity then it's completely insane.
Compensation for charity CEOs, even tech focussed ones (like the EFF, TOR, wikimedia, khan academy) are lower, usually much lower. A number of charities have managed to attract impressive CEOs despite not paying 'market' rates.
It's pure conjecture but I'd imagine that the compensation culture in this case started near the top of the company (given that it appears executive-centric) - perhaps based on conversations with potential hires, vendors, competitors, and so forth.
Given the nature of Firefox, I'd expect many of those third parties would have been anchored in the 'tech giant' world -- perhaps leading compensation policy astray.
What ideas though?
WTF of an excuse that is?!
afair AMD CEO is paid 4x less than Mozilla CEO.
AMD's Lisa Su was the highest-paid CEO of a company in the S&P 500 last year. Su earned a total of $58.5 million in 2019 [0]
Mitchell Baker, Mozilla's top executive, was paid $2.4m in 2018 [1]
[0] https://edition.cnn.com/2020/06/01/tech/lisa-su-amd-highest-...
So not 4x, but 2x based on base salary.
Su revived a company on the verge of bankruptcy. Since she was appointed CEO, AMD's stock has soared and they've made themselves a viable competitor against Intel. This has been a massive boon to the market.
It's worth noting that Su has a deep understanding of the underlying technology that the company works on (she's an electrical engineer), which was essential to her success at the company.
Su is an example of merit-based compensation. Baker is not.
Imagine saying, "well, I know he gunned 20 kids in a school down, but he had such a bad day, he's just couldn't take it." Sure it's probably true, but it's definitely not right.
Yes. The exec team and CEO.
They should be ousted.
"Unfair to their families"? What BS, what about the families of the laid-off?
Yes I read that too, I couldn't believe it.
She can decide to work for a non-profit, work for the good of the Internet and its users. Accept to earn 500k, which put her well in the top 5% earners and let her and her family live a comfortable life even in Silicon Valley.
Or she can go work as an exec for Google/Apple/Facebook, accept that she's just working for a group of people against others, and be aware she'll be actively doing harm to people's privacy and freedom, but rake in a multi-million dollar salary every year.
I'm sure there are plenty of skilled and talented people who would be happy to work as an exec for Mozilla for the meager salary of 500k.
The quote is not really crazy:
"Executive compensation is a general topic -- are execs, esp CEOs paid too much? I'm of the camp that thinks the different between exec comp and other comp is high. So then i think, OK what should mozilla do about it? My answer is that we try to mitigate this, but we won't solve this general social problem on our own. Here's what I mean by mitigate: we ask our executives to accept a discount from the market-based pay they could get elsewhere. But we don't ask for an 75-80% discount. I use that number because a few years ago when the then-ceo had our compensation structure examined, 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."
https://answers.thenextweb.com/s/mitchell-baker-aGY62z?comme...
First, an 80% discount would still leave the CEO on a very comfortable salary. They're not going to have to dumpster-dive for dinner.
Second, what about doing the job on principle? Plenty of people volunteer their time to good causes for no money whatsoever.
And then to wipe out a massive portion of your employee base? I find it abhorrent, personally.
This would be impossible for Mozilla's structure
Well...bye.
Baker has clearly not been worth her increased salary; I don't even think she's worth the original 20%-of-market salary, given how Firefox's market share has dropped precipitously, and Mozilla has been forced to lay off staff.
Sure, you're probably not going to get a 100%-of-market-rate CEO for a 20%-of-market-rate salary, for CEOs who only care about compensation. But I think that's ok, especially given that some CEOs aren't even worth 20%. And you're much more likely to get someone who actually cares about the mission.
Couldn't she just have gone and become CEO at a different company if she wanted to make more, like the rest of us do?
In a commercial company, there would be activist investors pushing to cut manager's pay and change management. But I'm not familiar with this type of NGOs so well; who is supposed play the role of principal here? And are they not playing it properly?
...I guess if you get your money from a disinterested Google rather than fundraising there really isn't anyone to push back against inefficiency/poor performance.
Really the board should have been pushing back/course correcting, but sadly even in private companies boards are usually weak af (simply doing the ceos bidding).
FYI -- The foundation owns the IP, while the corporation manages software engineering and the Google search deal.
But for execs it's about their need.
Once again, it's down to rich vs poor. Rules for thee but not for me.
That's downright appalling.
That said: to me it comes off as a bit done deaf to raise salaries for top execs in a non profit while firing the people who does the work and also I cannot see how anything should be prioritized if the situation is critical except:
- the main revenue driver and simultaneously their biggest contribution to fulfilling their mission, Firefox.
- initiatives to add more reliable sources of income for the long run.
Deprioritizing Firefox seems crazy in such a situation.
(I know nothing about their actual plans but I could come up with is if they are cutting spending to save up money for an endowment fund, but I guess that is just wishful thinking.)
It's not just that they get most of their revenue from Google -- it's that they're getting most of their revenue from a company that also runs their biggest competitor and has every incentive to push their own product over someone else's.
Apple and Mozilla both have uncomfortable dependencies on Google nowadays, so I wonder if one of them (if not both) are looking to buy DuckDuckGo.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980s_austerity_policy_in_Roma... [2] https://medium.com/incerto/corporate-socialism-the-governmen...
I also suspect Firefox engineers are underpaid relative to Google SWEs working on Chrome.
"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."
But it’s moral to let people starve, die of preventable disease due to sitting on your ha day
Welcome to America’s emotional prison
Old people have convinced young people to pander to them until they’re the grave, they’re locking up the judiciary to force themselves on the future
And Americans sit here like coddled children
Isn’t that pretty much living in a sinking ship of a country?
No one here going to admit the top down political failures of the past aren’t able to handle modern reality?
There is no artificial shortage of code anymore. GitHub and GitLab are gutting that labor market. Who cares if they can’t make new code shapes? Business only cares that the machines keep sorting. Self aggrandizing nerds care about code shapes.
BUT... key point here, I totally agree with them regarding their compensation.
Even non-profits have to be competitive.
Imagine it's YOU... everyone you know is making 350-400k at Google and you're stuck making 180 or whatever at FF. Would you stay?
And sure, say YOU would, what % of your colleagues do you think would stay?
But if the company/organization is doing poorly, the CEO doesn't deserve the high pay. And having the pay reduced, or even not being paid at all for a time if it can help the company is one of the risks CEO should be able to take. It is not unfair for their families if they planned for it in advance instead of taking their high pay for granted. You can save a lot when you are being paid millions.
Today: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/leadership/
One year ago: https://web.archive.org/web/20190923050403/https://www.mozil...
Two years ago: https://web.archive.org/web/20180923185143/https://www.mozil...
Specifically for criticism of the CEO, I wish people would keep in mind that Chris Beard was CEO from 2014 through 2019.
https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2019/08/29/thank-you-chris/
https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2020/04/08/mitchell-baker-name...
(Disclaimer: I work for Mozilla)
> And they can't reduce their salary now because it'd be unfair on their families.
To give context, Baker's annual salary is $2.5 million.
That's fucking bullshit. They make millions.
Firefox OS has been pretty much unsuccessful, but it sort of made sense? It started to be made when Firefox was still on top on desktop, but mobile started eating its lunch; and it was clear that Firefox need to do something about it, or the future will be all Chrome and Safari, on the two locked-down platforms.
Which eventually happened, of course, and Firefox share is neglible nowadays on mobile.
The identity management with Persona or what was the name also made sense. People at that time started using Google and Facebook for unified identity, and it made sense to make a decentralized identity.
None of these project ultimately worked, but they made sense?
What never made sense to me was Pocket or Send, or even the teleconferencing they had, but it seems that Firefox doubles down on Pocket now.
Look at the Chinese Manufacturers having trouble to deploy Android due to tech embargos.
If those could just install a free os made by an indendent Organisation...
It would not help to overcome embargoes if said independent organization is established in California.
The only issue with Android is that it isn't really opensource - users expect the Google apps, and those are closed source.
I think the main bottleneck is not the installation by the vendors, but the apps available.
I believe, what is missing is an abstraction layer between the apps and the OS. If it was possible to create apps for Android and Apple in a generic way and, it was easy to add a third OS, so all the apps could be made available to the new system, a new OS would be not so limited. I know, I know, that is itself a very difficult endeavor.
The thing holding them back is apples deliberate crippling of them to make them hard to install, slow, buggy, and not having basic platform features.
I believe Apple is deliberately doing that because if they supported PWA's properly, they'd loose all vendor lock in.
imo pwa's on webkit are only crippled in regards to the google extensions that make no sense for most usecases but ad-tracking.
Classic example: Oil companies "investing" in clean tech in the 90's, sucking up government grants and public attention and never really getting anywhere probably slowed down the switch to renewables by 10+ years.
This is exactly my take on it.
I think timing was a big part of it, too. They were too late to get a foothold on the current market, but too early to take advantage of the more open platforms coming out nowadays like the PinePhone.
But the small brainless degradations of the UI in Firefox make me worry about its future. For example it’s not possible to permanently add exclusions to the privacy shield. Because of it the sites are often broken. And this is a feature that is directly user facing on the main screen!
I loved RIL but Pocket is but a shadow of what it once was.
Similar to Evernote web clips, or Instapaper. I now use OneNote instead with the webclipper plugin, mostly because it puts the clips in a place where I can also add my own notes.
Best of all, it's all in Markdown. There's a beta rich text editor, but the Markdown editor has a preview and a little button bar for common stuff like lists and formatting.
I think it would be a valid strategy if you do go after developers and sysadmins. So pour resources in getting parity where devs think they would switch.
In general whenever I help installing software for someone, I install FF, and I think I have installed in at least a couple dozen computers now.
Aka do a Blender. Blender has gained momentum by getting things right, not adding features nobody wants, or Blender sidegigs.
There is also the problem of addon monetization, Chrome has a whole ecosystem of people earning revenue from add ons. That’s a invested network you have to deal with at some point.
There is a parsimoniousness about Blender that is really quite incredible. I have rarely used an app that has so successfully resisted feature-creep and bloat. E.g. unlike almost all other 3D apps, it has no radial array tool or feature. Why not? Because you can cook your own using a simple linear array.
I not knocking blender. I love its austere design philosophy. The add-ons are a case in point. Some very important functionality is not loaded by default (e.g. loop tools and copy attributes). But the devs seem to be saying, 'if we can live without something in the default load, then we should'. Huge difference to bloatware like 3DS Max.
The only place left for them is webapps like some of the electron based apps.
That's a side effect of not listening to developers.
---
Dramatization:
Web Developer: I need non-standard feature that works in IE and Chrome
Firefox: But that's non-standard, you'll be able to use standard alternative in the future
Web Developer: When?
Firefox: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ it's still in draft
Web Developer: But I need to finish my project this quarter
Firefox: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Web Developer: -webkit-something: 1
Firefox: The web is full of -webkit-something and everyone thinks Firefox is broken because we support the standard something but not -webkit-something
Firefox: Please remove the -webkit- prefix
Web Developer: I don't support that project anymore
Firefox: But you only need to remove the -webkit- prefix
Web Developer: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Firefox: We will support -wekit-something because nobody fixes their websites for Firefox even when they only need to remove the -webkit- prefix
Web Developer: So you're telling me that we can get away with not supporting Firefox and you'll eventually follow suit?
Firefox: That's not what I meant
Web Developer: -webkit-something-something: 1
To be honest I think that Firefox has already crossed the point of no return, in the past Firefox used to have a share of about 30% of the market and supporting Firefox was justified even if that meant writing twice the lines of code, but nowadays the share is less than 3%. Firefox doesn't have enough resources to compete against Chrome with features, and people doesn't care enough about security to justify a broken web for the sake of security.
I don't know whether it's a good idea or not, but rather than pitching Firefox for the mainstream web, I would push Firefox to become the de-facto browser for security sensitive scenarios (ex. online shopping, online banking, taxes, etc.). Supporting a subset of the web makes more sense in a resource-constrained scenario especially because the Servo experiment and the Rust project exist to tackle the security issue.
Regarding Send/Teleconferencing, I think that made sense to. In theory you don't need anything as complicated as Skype or Teams or Zoom and lots of people, me including, use VOIP a lot. It would have been nice to have a simple click to call on the browser itself. Same goes for sending files with a click. Utilities that lots of people use and would give the browser a boost. Unfortunately I think these products failed because the sort of person who needs them is the sort of person who does not like learning new things so even if their current method is 8 steps and takes addition software and is not free, they will keep with what is currently working for them. Again this might also be Mozilla's marketing falling short.
Native is by nature faster, which makes sense on the resource sensitive devices.
webOS (the Palm thing) did the same mistake, I think.
It makes sense on desktop, and even there people keep complaining about Electron performance.
Ultimately webOS didn't lose because it was web tech. It lost because Android and iOS already captured the market. Windows Phone was a .NET runtime with similar performance to Java, but it failed to capture the market even with billions in Microsoft subsidies.
People don't complain about VSCode because microsoft tried hard with optimizing performance. But see any discussion about Atom, its "predecessor", or Slack (at least the older version, that was really memory hungry).
To counter that anecdote, I have an LG WebOS television and it is constantly freezing, I frequently have to power cycle it just to launch Netflix, it automatically updates itself without my consent, and each update seems to make it slower, or break something. Simply navigating the menu is a pain because of how unresponsive and slow it is, and setting it up required me to agree to a bunch of privacy policies.
To be fair, I blame LG for that more than WebOS. I don't really know anything about WebOS and how it relates to web tech, but I do remember using it many years ago on an HP TouchPad tablet. That was a great tablet experience at the time; way better than anything Android had to offer (except for the larger catalog of apps)
Electron is bad because it uses a separate browser engine per app. Webviews don't have that problem.
It was clear from the start that Mozilla did not have enough to move the needle in the mobile market all by itself. FFOS was a massive waste of time, effort, and money, that even resulted in a loss of prestige for the brand. It sucked the air out of more relevant priorities, diverted (and eventually often lost) their best talent, and wasted time and focus at a critical juncture.
* There are Firefox browser users shocked by spyware addons, it is a norm on mobile. There are no paid Firefox addons. This does not work in "pay or product" reality. Open source and freeware is a small (and awesome) niche.
* There is a Mozilla stance against DRM. There is a lot of paid books, movies, music on Google Play.
* DOM is slow. Javascript has good parts. Google decided in favor of Android apps, not Chrome apps. Also Google Fuchsia.
* Bluetooth, Contacts, NFC, SMS, Wifi [1] access can be asked from OS.
[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Archive/B2G_OS/API
----
Firefox was not default Windows browser, yet it succeeded. The reason I've never tried Firefox on Android is the loss of Firefox reputation on desktop. Memory bloat, falling behind Developer Tools, constant UI changes, not so snappy UI. Firefox was slow on desktop how could one expect it to perform well on mobile?
Why is there no system for calling them out on this, swiftly kicking them out and staunching the bleeding?
The only silver lining here compared to any other type of software, is that legally, this software can never be anything but open source -- so we are all free to fork and attempt to do a better job, and make a valiant try in not repeating history.
Honestly as a dev that sounds to me like a culture where engineers are too able to run free. If anything.
But of course swiftly kicking people out to staunch the bleeding - as happened recently - can cause a lot of pain and backlash too. New executives usually cause strategy/org thrash which sucks for everyone at the bottom.
Just saying these things are hard. Executives have to make decisions that suck, doesn't mean they're vampires. May be very painful for them too.
All of the moonshot projects are done at the direction of executive leadership in the hopes to open new profit streams.
In fact some of the more technically promising projects (like Servo) had their whole entire team laid off recently to "refocus" on more of these executive-sourced profit grab moonshots
IMO We desperately need socialism and an end to rent-collection in totality.
As a private company it is their right to fail.
It's like Nokia all over again; the plurality of people who are watching this failure predict every step of it, but are denigrated as antisocial, selfish, mentally-ill trolls. As they leave, the ones who remain are attacked more, because now they're outnumbered in every conversation. Then the company fails.
Of course, in this case firefox will never disappear, but stumble along like a zombie, forever, because google needs it for antitrust purposes. Mozilla will do anything but work on its browser, at high salaries, rife with self-dealing and cush jobs handed out to the most connected, while claiming the languishing firefox as its emotional core and charitable mission. The work done on firefox will consist of tests for things that chrome is thinking of doing, or the non-disableable incorporation of acquired companies or partners into its functionality.
There's no system for calling them out on this other than just calling them out on this. They don't have any duty to us.
That must be a real comfort to all the people they laid off.
This CEO needs to go, needs to be replaced by someone who is well versed in technology instead of in law.
Cancelling has a heavy element of being ostracised from a community and having your reputation destroyed.
- employees publicly speak out, telling him to resign - widespread media reporting - an online campaign to have him removed starts - “online dating site OkCupid automatically displaying a message to Firefox users with information about Eich's donation, and suggesting that users switch to a different browser” - “CREDO Mobile collected more than 50,000 signatures demanding that Eich resign” - Eich resigns
I'm not sure how that could be anything other than part of cancel culture, other than it being ahead of the current trend by a few years.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brendan_Eich#Appointment_to_CE...
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/03/mozil...
AFAIK no Mozilla Corporation employees spoke out publicly in this manner, and internally I did not hear any such sentiments from Corporation employees. On the contrary, a lot of Corp employees expressed anger at that Foundation group ... not because they supported Brendan's Prop 8 position, but because that Foundation group poured fuel onto a fire that was doing great harm to Mozilla.
I do know of Corporation employees who said they left or were prepared to leave because Eich was promoted. They didn't want publicity though.
There was even a blog post from a homosexual woman who worked for Eich, where she said what a great boss and friend he had always been to her, how well he treated everyone including gay employees, and how much the hatred directed at him was misguided.
The logical conclusion we have to make is that a political donation or opinion does not necessarily indicate bigotry.
I think the real problem was that Mozilla had built a strong community support on representing certain values and freedoms in contrast to Microsoft (which was the dominant competitor at the time) as being perceived as more trustworthy. Firefox only became successful because lots of supporters advocated it and web sites made an effort to support it.
But this support only exist as long as you are perceived as honest. During his week (?) as CEO Eich (and other Mozilla spokesmen) emphasized that Mozilla as an employer recognized same-sex marriages and provided equal benefits to same-sex spouses. The CEO clearly disagreed strongly with this policy, but at the same same swore to uphold it. Who cares if he believes in it then, right? But it clearly shows that the leadership does not actually care about the values they espouse, which is a broader problem that this particular issue.
I don't really think a browser or other software should have a stance on marriage equality. But the fact remains that Mozilla as organization and employer did have a stance, and the CEO disagreed with this stance - but claimed it wouldn't matter at all.
If the mission of Mozilla has just been to make money, nobody would have considered it problematic. But then again it would never have become successful in the first place without the community support, based on trust.
The damage control strategy was to insist that his values would not affect Mozilla, which is kind of a weird stance to have as CEO.
> would that mean I don’t think other people shouldn’t be able to make up their own minds, and decide for themselves how to live their own lives?
In this context it is worth noting prop 8 was exactly about preventing other people from living their lives a certain way. There is a big difference between disagreeing with somebody life choices and then to actively try to destroy their marriage!
First they came for ... and I didn't say anything.
Then they came for ... and I didn't say anything.
...
Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak for me.
Most people would probably think it is worse to get their marriage annulled than to lose a job, but YMMV.
When COVID-19 hit the first thing I did was reduce, then totally stop my pay. This has caused me to take a significant personal hit but it means that the company now has a year and a half of runway left at the current rate of expense.
Nobody got laid off even though we are down to some fraction of our pre-COVID income. Morale is not super high because of course people are still suffering personally because of the whole affair, several people working with/for us including me have been infected, and all of our lives are significantly impacted. But we are still afloat and will get through this crisis with all hands on board and when we do I will make sure to send extra compensation to those people that took a pay cut to make this happen.
So, as one CEO commenting on the actions of another: this excuse is bordering on the ridiculous and I'm surprised that she even mentioned it.
None of them would run their companies into the ground to maintain their executive pay because they felt that would be 'unfair to their families', this is a CEO that is so self centered that nothing good can come of it.
But besides that, Mozilla - or rather, FireFox - is an important (though now much less important) technology component and a lawyer is not going to run a company making such a component effectively because this is not a regulated industry or a financial vehicle where having a legal background might give you an edge.
When three years from now Baker will have her nest egg completed the husk of Mozilla will quietly die and Firefox right along with it whereas right now there might (and that's a very small might) still be a chance to turn this around.
Regardless of whether you think lawyers make good CEOs, this lawyer is not a good CEO for this company, witness the performance of the flagship product, recent layoffs, the company financials and their recent statements.
I would say without a personal understanding of the challenges of the core business, their judgement would lack that influence. This lacking will absolutely effect the direction of the org. The numbers don’t lie as to the effect.
The board typically does not get compensated the way the CEO does so they are usually not in a position to 'suck it dry', on top of that they have some responsibilities and if they don't act in the best interest of the company they might be found to be personally liable depending on the jurisdiction and the details regarding their responsibilities.
I should study that to see if there is any way to solve it but frankly, even though FireFox has been my daily driver since about forever I don't see a happy ending here.
Is this really a problem? The CEO is often a director, and even as chairwoman I doubt anything in the bylaws prevents the board at large from removing her if they wanted to.
Instead, it seems like the board itself is the issue, since they allowed Mozilla to stray so far from its core mission.
In fact, I have seen this very debate play out in real life. We appointed a new President of the ASF during my term. That person had been a Director, but when they became President they stepped down from the Board.
For a non-profit charity that relies on volunteers, perfect separation is not always feasible, and especially in the early years when the ASF was smaller the President was often a Board member. But although I can't speak for anybody but myself, I believe that the ASF is likely to continue with an informal tradition of separating Board from Officers for the indefinite future.
A similar cultural change ought to be possible at Mozilla — and perhaps elsewhere.
The legal world has "managing partner" as the equivalent for LLPs.
It can vary, though; e.g. Kevin Sneader is the de facto CEO of McKinsey, but his official title is Global Managing Partner and his predecessor used Managing Director.
If they are not, the roles should be separate.
Their patron should rectify this, but it's possible they don't care.
The 'plan' may be to kill Firefox.
Given that, as you seem to agree, Mozilla is probably doomed now no matter what, why would they deprive themselves of these benefits (and possible future similar gigs!) sooner rather than later? It seems extremely unlikely to me the mismanagement is rising to the level of personal liability.
Agreed. But the CEOs statement here is very peculiar and might actually rise to that level, the board not taking action in turn might just make them culpable.
It is a very dumb statement, especially for a lawyer, to make.
The Martha Stewart case revolved around a similar minor (for her) issue, $45K loss avoided but it landed her in jail. Rich people make stupid mistakes too, whether this is one of those remains to be seen (I think it will pass) even so, it isn't smart when your company is on a multi-year downslide.
It's not good optics.
Does this make you more or less willing to take risks? More or less focused? Does this decrease or increase the amount of attention you give to "optics" and politics?
As an FF user I hope Mozilla does a turn around, gets back its engineering culture and focuses on delivering the best - and most secure and private - browser in the market.
I am not convinced that even if Mozilla/FF got a competent CEO tomorrow and started executing 'just so' that they would be able to recover from their slide, a newcomer would have it harder.
Shuttleworth did that with Ubuntu and it's barely surviving.
What trend should Firefox ride ? And how will it keep that project a secret for long enough, Given that it's all open-sourced ?
Firefox was originally competing against the pile of steaming garbage that was IE6.
Now they are competing against Chrome which is actually a good browser, and Chrome also has the advantage of having google behind it which can leverage their search/ad monopoly to push Chrome.
And which they have shamelessly done.
The way I’ve heard the story is that by the time of firefox, IE6 was still a really good browser, it had just stayed stagnant for a little too long, and bundled got with Microsoft’s monopolistic behavior.
I think there are more parallels between late IE6 and present day Chrome then you give credit for.
To do this today, with a much more complex product would be no mean feat, back then a browser was a much simpler piece of software than it is today.
Netscape was not “still hugely popular” when Firefox was created. IE market share was upwards of 90%.
ChromeOS of course puts them in the OS market, and it's doing very well for a niche operating system - my entire company runs on ChromeOS in fact.
And there are interesting parallels, Apple too was kept alive by their competitor as a fig leaf in light of anti-trust troubles.
Edit: Cal Peterson's article clearly shows how we got here. Such a shame.
So far what I am seeing and hearing does not make me very hopeful.
FF will be my daily driver until they stop updating it, where FF does not work I very reluctantly use Chrome. I suspect that if and when FF dies Chrome will no longer be available for Linux because the main reason for offering it (as an alternative to FF) will be gone.
Could you expand on this?
I think the goal should be to make Firefox the sane default firstly for business and secondly for consumers. Business users care about privacy and security, yet Chrome and IE are the standard platforms for business webapps.
If you want an example of how misaligned those values are from reality, I need to use Chrome to talk to my doctor. Safari and Firefox aren't supported. That's entirely because Firefox doesn't do enough to make it the default platform for developers and by focusing on the wrong users.
There is a bigger reason. Literally every software engineer at Google/Alphabet uses Linux, other than a very few exceptions (likely only a fraction of a percent).
Even if your laptop is a Mac or Windows machine, your source code access is exclusively on your Linux box in the office.
Google is a Linux shop. Regardless of their reputation for dropping products, Chrome on Linux isn't going away any time soon, for the simple reason that they need it internally.
I also use FF as my daily driver. However, should FF become unsupported, I'll go with Palemoon[0] rather than Chrome.
In fact, there really isn't anything that could get me to use Chrome. I find its interfaces to be insulting to my intelligence and not at all friendly enough to the idea that I should never see ads or be tracked through my browser.
Edit: Added link to Palemoon.
Yes and in Apple's case, no one could have pulled it off other than Steve Jobs.
So basically the answer to the original question is none, zero.
She is incompetent, but I dont think she has the intention to drive Mozilla to the ground. After all she co-founded the Mozilla Project, and was the Chairwoman for a long time, long before she was named the CEO.
Why did they not find someone else to be CEO is beyond me though.
Or remember Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer? She also did a great job at making the company ready to be sold out to Verizon at low price.
These CEOs know what they're doing. They take care of their personal interests and steal companies for the tech giants.
While I am absolutely pissed ( to say the least ) that Nokia was sold to Microsoft and Yahoo couldn't turn its ship around. I dont think both CEO were doing in their own interest or another companies interest.
Nokia refused to use Android. ( Which was what really killed Nokia ) That was only two possible outcome, either go full force with Symbian or partner with Microsoft. I mean there are so many wrong with Nokia even before Elop joined nothing much could have been done. It turns out the penalty for completely dismissing iPhone and Smartphone was death for their phone division. ( Currently the Nokia Smartphone are manufactured by a JV formed by former Nokia employees and Foxconn, with the name licensed from Nokia )
Elop did however completely neglect the importance of Carrier / Network Infrastructure segment, although arguably Ericsson wasn't competing much and Huawei didn't show up on their radar. ( Yet )
Marissa was trying very hard to recreate Google within Yahoo. She was absolutely executing it. But it is one of those example where I put the argument against execution eats strategy for breakfast.
It is not one OR the other. You need both. The equation times both together. When you have a strategy which trends towards zero or even negative, it doesn't matter how well you execute it.
In the end she failed. The strategy was wrong from the start. I actually thought the other CEO candidate's vision of turning Yahoo in to an Online Media Companies suits Yahoo better. But Marissa got the job, and the rest is history.
Circa 2010, Symbian was clearly uncompetitive and MeeGo was far behind schedule. There was a fairly ambitious plan to build a new UI framework in Qt that ran on both Symbian and MeeGo -- the Nokia N9 used this with Harmattan, which internally I don't think we ever referred to as MeeGo, IIRC! -- but I'm pretty sure when Elop arrived he took stock of things and thought, "My God, this MeeGo thing is Nokia's version of Apple's Copland project," and it's really hard to say he was wrong.
Looking back, it's really easy to say that he was wrong not to choose Android, but it was seriously considered. The problem was that Nokia insisted on two mutually exclusive conditions: they wanted to use a lot of Nokia-based services so the new devices still "felt Nokia," and they wanted to fully partner with Google and market the devices as Android. And Google wouldn't do it. If you want to call your device "Android (R)" then you use Google services; if you want to use your own, you have to do what Amazon did with the Fire devices. Google wouldn't make an exception for Nokia, but Microsoft -- who by that point had, at least internally, realized Windows Phone was seriously floundering -- would. And so they went with Microsoft.
They dawdled and ignored the problem for too long, and were left with selling to Microsoft and adopting their mobile OS as the only semi-plausible way to maintain a strong market position. Both Nokia and Microsoft's efforts ended up being too little, too late.
From the outset it looked (from the outside) exactly like his goal was as described - torpedo the company and get it bought by Microsoft, returning to the mothership in the process.
Yahoo was similar in a way -- they built a whole array of services around identity way before Google did. Ultimately it didn't work out well for the company.
She's a lawyer. She got the Mozilla deal out of Netscape and AOL. That's the highlight of her career and what she's good at too - that and public speaking. For what it's worth she even recognized this in the past and stepped down as CEO before - but stayed as Chairwoman of course and kept getting the salary.
Well, this person already existed. It was Brendan Eich.
"Get woke go broke" Mozilla.
Sorry if I sound bitter, but I love Firefox and hate to see it loosing users.
Interesting that any comment stating this is getting downvoted. Tells it all really.
This is extremely non-controversial in any other social setting, why would running a company be different? Why is being forced out for being a bad person seen as this new phenomenon when people stop interacting with people they dislike _all the time_?
I can't believe what I'm reading here. We all have different principles. Lying whilst "apologizing" isn't really apologizing is it?
He actively chose between "have a good relationship with employees at Mozilla" and "stick to his guns on the issue at hand". He made that decision, and had a hell of a lot of agency in how things turned out.
Granted this was a while ago, but imagine being so committed to anti-marriage equality that you do what he did? Why do you feel the need to carry water for somebody doing that?
Do you, at all, consider, at least sometimes, that people that disagree with you might have to say something intelligent about their position? I am not trying to defend homophobism, irrespective of the question of Brendan Eichs action or believes are homophobe, or not. But, I do believe that somebody disagreeing with me, might have something to tell me. I believe even that it is boring to talk to people with whom I agree on everything, although it is comforting and easy. There is value in communicating with people of different believes, standpoints, intellectual fields, religions, or sexual orientation or ... . Therefore, I cannot fathom how people can prefer being lied to.
In your worldview at what point can I start rejecting people's positions? Why do I have to give ground here?
"you can just lie" is a cynical position, of course, but people are faced with much larger dilemnas. I would like for people to have basic empathy and _not_ finance anti-civil rights movements. But hey, at least a public apology/fix does a bit of damage to the reactionary movement.
And maybe they are actually a different person or have reflected on their actions, and it's not a lie. Nobody's a mind reader.
And when you are directly affected/targeted by the movement that Eich is donating too, it's not just a conversation. The guy was funding an effort to take away your rights.
Maybe consider that "you have to be nice to people trying to take away your rights" is something that relatively few people would actually subscribe to.
His stance was known, maybe, but it wasn't until after he was appointed that the backlash ramped up to its peak.
Of course there are arguments. The arguments would be if there wasn't a huge controversy about it. But there was.
Thats the evidence that he was forced out.
If, instead, there was no controversy of note, and nobody had called for his resignation, internally or externally, then in that situation I would believe that they were not forced out.
But thats not what we saw. What we saw was a huge controversy, and we saw people, and even other companies, calling for him to be pushed out of the company.
If this evidence had not existed, then I would believe that they were not forced out.
I reckon if everybody who felt like chipping in with their lazy armchair analysis of "SJW mobs ruining Firefox" instead spent their time fixing a bug or two, then maybe they'd be happier with the state of the browser they claim to love so much.
I'm very happy with the state of the Firefox software, and have in the past contributed finanically to Mozilla (not anymore :().
The portrayal of this situation as a "witch-hunt" or being "dealt with by the mob" is a good demonstration of how you personally are contributing to this problem.
I'll say it again – it's easy to portray something as a "witch-hunt" when you personally have nothing at stake. I'm sure it seems pretty abstract, to be honest – a nice and easy thought-experiment about how we should all have respect for everybody else's views and all that.
On the flip-side, we're talking about a situation in which somebody was happy to campaign to prevent a number of their own employees and other people in the wider community from gaining a set of rights. Eich was an active participant in trying to disadvantage me, personally. This is something that I would consider unacceptable for an organisation I would support, and others feel the same way. They are entitled, and should be encouraged, to express that view.
We will each draw our own lines in terms of what we consider to be acceptable behaviour from public figures. Most people would probably object if Mozilla were to appoint a CEO that promoted some other controversial cause – say, mandatory deportation of all non-white Americans. I doubt you'd cast objecting to that appointment as a "witch-hunt".
Personally, I consider funding a campaign against same-sex marriage to be behaviour I'm not willing to accept. And you consider this to be behaviour that you are willing to accept – that is, in this case the benefits of appointing a particular CEO outweigh any concern about the views they hold. It would be way easier for you to be honest about that than to pretend this is anything other that a group of people who don't agree with you.
I mean, sure, Baker's done plenty for Mozilla, but Mozilla has been absolutely lost as to what they're trying to be this past year. It's not a clear cut software company anymore and that's a problem.
I don't think you'll be able to attribute that quote to me. Eich fucked up, and should have realized that you can't be leading a flagship of diversity on the one hand and be a bigot on the other. But he resigned (he wasn't forced out, though it might have come to that, contrary to various strong assertions in this comment thread, both Eich and the board are on the record about that). I can't imagine there isn't anybody to be found who is more qualified than Baker but the window of opportunity for turning this around is closing rapidly. FF usage is the only thing that keeps the whole circus alive, when that goes Mozilla will have officially failed in their mission, no matter what the balance on Baker's personal savings account.
And there was me thinking he was just leading browser development.
Not only has Mozilla an overpaid management that doesn't do what it is supposed to do but the it seems that the staff fits into that same category.
I have a problem with characterizing Brendan Eich as a bigot for donating to a non-fringe political group. IIRC, the proposition campaign he donated to had close to a 50/50 split in support for/against. Eich's ouster crystalized in my mind that Mozilla wa no longer focused on its core mission (the signs were already there - dropped Thunderbird, had an oversized IoT dept). I am speaking as a person who was a vocal Firefox evangelist since the 2.x days
Eich should have realized that his actions as CEO of a highly visible entity would be viewed in a different light than if he were merely just another nobody. Missing that was his crucial mistake, he could have made the donation anonymously, but decided to do it in his own name making it a given that this would be associated with Mozilla. That was stupid.
But as it was he could have simply apologized and hunkered down, I suspect (based on board members' and Eichs' own statements) that it was the pressure from the employees that made him decide to resign.
Whether a proposition has a 50/50 split or not does not matter, if half your country is made up of bigots that doesn't mean that it isn't bigotry, it just means that you have a very large problem.
So I guess this means no Mozilla leader should be making any private political donations at all, because if they do, Mozilla is at risk of losing half of its (US) leaders in red or blue states.
I sure hope the employees still have jobs, and if not, they have vetted their new board & CEOs past donations.
> Whether a proposition has a 50/50 split or not does not matter, if half your country is made up of bigots that doesn't mean that it isn't bigotry, it just means that you have a very large problem.
Do those employees/volunteers feel equally strongly about their "bigoted" user base? Or are they more morally flexible since that directly impacts their incomes?
They can, but they had better think this through. Note that money in politics is a problem to begin with, and that your regular votes are anonymous. If you decide to do so in a public way on a controversial subject then you take a risk.
> I sure hope the employees still have jobs, and if not, they have vetted their new board & CEOs past donations.
Writing this from liberal Europe, the American stance against gay marriage is very puzzling, though even here in the EU there are countries where this sentiment is still alive.
> Do those employees/volunteers feel equally strongly about their "bigoted" user base?
They typically don't know. By advertising it the rules were changed, and that was optional.
> Or are they more morally flexible since that directly impacts their incomes?
How many of the HN folk are in the MIC? How many of them are against anything other than heterosexual relationships? How many of them are racists?
We do not know. We do occasionally get a glimpse when someone deliberately or accidentally outs themselves as such and when they do so in the name of a company that tends to reflect badly on that company. Eich made his own bed and chose to walk rather than to lie in it.
Personally I think the bigger problem with Mozilla/FireFox is the lack of focus and as long as that isn't addressed it does not matter who is in the wheelhouse the only thing that it will affect is the rate at which the ship is going down. The way things are going there won't be another Google payday for Mozilla because there won't be a FireFox userbase left.
You do realize that you're contradicting yourself, right?
Promoting cancel culture (ousting Eich) isn't exactly focusing on tech. Generally you can only pick one or the other
The actions of the CEO and the actions of the employees are two entirely different things.
The CEO could have been just focused on tech and could have left his political flags in the proverbial closet. Instead he chose to bring them out.
Mozilla was already an entity that had made some pretty strong statements about diversity, inclusivity and their view of the open web.
If you then stir up a shitstorm you will find you can no longer effectively focus on the tech either.
So you can very well pick both: make all those statements, live by them, attract employees who see things likewise and then focus on the tech.
But that's a glass house of your own making and if you then start hurling bricks it will have a terrible effect.
Dutch proverb: High trees catch a lot of wind.
If you become a high tree, in politics or as a CEO then your past will come under scrutiny, and what is found there may very well have a direct effect on your present day life.
I highly doubt that.
It's "close enough" only because you're trying to save face from your incorrect implication/claim you've repeated several times across different comments in this thread that he was the CEO when he did the donation.
It's close enough because right up until his apology Eich did not indicate in any way shape or form that he had changed his views on this. Only after it all blew up did he come with his apology. Sure, he wasn't CEO at the time he made his donation but when he stepped forward to become CEO he was well aware of his own position regarding this and knew that to effectively lead Mozilla would be impossible given his - apparently strongly held - views. At least, I'm assuming people do not donate to political causes they do not feel strongly about.
That's part and parcel the strategy of the left, shifting the Overton Window of what you're allowed to support publicly until anything representing traditional conservative values is safely out of range.
Repeatedly framing opposing views as "racist", "misogynist", "homophobic" is a perfect example of this. Let's not speak up lest we get labeled with one of those.
I'm not aware of anything in this thread that has anything to do with race and yet that's the first word in the triumphant trio of your counters.
They tend to go together. I'll be happy to bet that a large fraction of the Eich defenders in this thread are just using him as a proxy because they sympathize with his viewpoints, and that you will find a disproportionally large overlap with the other viewpoints mentioned above.
That's as may be. However, as someone who is significantly to the left of the Democratic Party on many issues, not least being that no one has the right to tell other consenting adults who and how they should love, I was left feeling somewhat uncomfortable with the firestorm over Eich's financial donations to a particular cause.
I'll expand on this as I don't wish to be misunderstood. I vehemently disagree with the idea that the government should restrict how, and with whom, we create and maintain relationships. That applies to all relationships, whether they be romantic, platonic, familial or business.
Given that Eich's donation to an anti-Prop 8 group goes against that belief, you'd think that I would applaud Eich's humiliation and ouster.
But I don't. While I certainly wouldn't invite Eich into my life or home because he is clearly not on the side of liberty and individual rights, I do not believe he should be judged on those stances in his professional life.
There is a difference between the personal and the professional, although they have been blurred (both incidentally via social media, and deliberately by those who seek to dehumanize those who disagree with them -- and that's not a right/left thing) in recent years.
Eich's performance as CEO of Mozilla should have been viewed by his statements/actions as Mozilla CEO. And unless he took steps to incorporate his personal biases into the management of Mozilla, they were of no relevance to his job as CEO.
And so, no. I completely disagree with Eich's personal homophobia. At the same time, our professional lives should be judged by our professional actions and statements, not our personal and political actions, unless there's overlap between the two.
I have no doubt that there are those who will disagree with the above. And I'm glad you do. In fact, I'd really like to hear your arguments as to why I'm wrong.
Because I believe that we, as humans, need to have our ideas, viewpoints and opinions challenged on occasion. Even more, just because someone disagrees with me, doesn't make them my enemy or a bad person.
IMHO, demonizing/dehumanizing those who disagree with you is not a reasonable response. Engaging in discourse so that the best ideas can rise to the top, ala Mill's Marketplace of Ideas[0] is a much better response.
In that light, please feel free to disagree with me. When you do, I'd only ask that you keep in mind that I'm human. With my own thoughts, ideas, biases and experience. I don't need to have everyone agree with me. Rather, I want others to consider what I have to say, just as I consider their thoughts and ideas.
A fair point. Although I'd say that if Mozilla was actually being progressive, they would focus on Eich's professional decisions, not his personal ones.
Perhaps I misunderstand the term "progressive," but I see it as moving us forward in the context of our current culture/society and not as punishing anyone who refuses to conform. The former attempts to bring positive change, while the latter seems to be focused on stifling personal expression.
>But this would be a bit like the CEO of Greenpeace going on a whale hunt for sport.
I think that's a poor analogy for several reasons:
1. Mozilla is a software/technology organization, not an LGBTQ+ advocacy organization. Eich's personal political views are irrelevant to running a tech organization, while Greenpeace is specifically focused on the species diversity and the environment. Apples and oranges, IMHO;
2. Not only was Eich not CEO when he made such donations, I am unaware of any anti-LGBTQ+ actions by him in any of his working capacities at Mozilla (please correct me if I'm wrong). Or that Eich ever brought his thoughts about same-sex marriage into the office;
I may be way off base here, and have no experience working at Mozilla and don't know Eich at all (although the ideas behind the Brave browser disgust me, and as such, perhaps I should just pile on and demonize him just for that).
Edit: Fixed spacing.
Agreed Brave is a terrible concept.
I strongly disagree: political polarization is not limited to the left. The right has used similar polarizarion and smear campaigns for decades in order to turn out single-issue voters: any politicians who is remotely pro-choice becomes anathema, regardless of the rest of their platform. Hillary Clinton was so effectively smeared, in 2016 a lot of voters disliked her, but couldn't articulate why. Since Reagan, the political Overton window in the US is has been sliding rightwards - not left.
Also, I am on the left.
Morality (or what is "bigoted") is not a law of nature or an absolute, it's a societal convention (even murder is not an absolute "bad" - the US or Chinese or Saudi society deems capital punishment as immoral for example, whereas mine does not. Same for drug use or sale, and tons of other things, heck, even incest - not a big deal moraly in ancient Egypt, Westeros, and/or some parts of the rural South).
So it very much matters what the split was.
The US has no problem with capital punishment last I checked (nor do they have a problem with life imprisonment without a trial), maybe not the best example?
No, it is fine if you have wrong opinions. But be prepared to get the flak associated with those.
Nobody forced Eich to make a donation, but doing so publicly set him up for a confrontation with a substantial chunk of Mozilla's employees further down the line.
Just like a 'mild case of rape' could trip up a supreme court justice nominee. (Or at least, it should have.)
That's not different than Stalinist Russia, the Inquisition, Nazi Germany, McCarthyism, some conservative backwater, etc.
If having "flak associated" with having wrong opinions is acceptable by your book, then those examples were all about free speech too. Their victims just got some heavy flak for their opinions.
Or is it bad only when it involves an execution? Rest assured than in most cases in those regimes an execution wasn't needed either. Most were just fired, or beaten up, or ostacized, or disallowed to advance etc., so that's ok I guess.
Doesn't even have to be the state to give "the flak". In the case of the Inquisition it was the church. And in other cases it has been an angry mob.
What does that even mean? If Prop8 had won, would it have been on the right side of history?
Prop 8 did win. I don't know if it is still on the books; it was rendered inoperative due to a later Supreme Court decision based, so far as one can tell, on neither the text nor the intent of the Constitution. In other words, whether one agrees with the decision or not, it was unconstitutional.
Sorry, that sounds like something Nazis or the Maoists in the "Cultural Revolution" would say. "Wrong side of history" is historical determinism and teleologism.
Who is on "the wrong side of history" determined by consensus itself. And it can be as fickle and temporary as anything.
moral, not immoral
Actually, the only places in the US where incest (between adults) is legal are New Jersey and Rhode Island.[0] Which isn't exactly the "rural south," no matter what the bad jokes say.
[0] https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/incest-laws...
Yeah, but I was going for where it's moral/casual, not for where it is legal :-)
Do you have data to support that? It may well exist, but I haven't seen anything that makes such a claim.
https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/atyhay/us_states_m...
He must feel pretty strongly about this subject given the fact that he could have recanted but he chose to walk instead.
He would have needed a time machine or a crystal ball, since the donation was made in 2008 and he became CEO in 2014.
Clearly it didn't work out well for him, but I'm not sure it rises to the level of stupidity so much as naïvety.
After all, he'd probably seen plenty of his peers publicly supporting other political causes without problems.
He just didn't realise the situation was "Leader of open source nonprofit, right-wing, publicly political, pick any 2"
If the political cause is to take away freedom from others, you can expect resistance.
What if he was donating to support miscegenation? Would that be over the line?
In a free society, we do not rely on force to produce morally correct behavior, except by force of state. We rely on law instead, which conversely requires complete freedom to participate in the democratic apparatus. Anything that messes with that messes with the very heart of a liberal democracy.
Okay, let me explain that one. I know he says that, and I know Mozilla says that, but "I've decided to leave of my own accord" has simply become such a cliche that it can no longer be distinguished from firing.
In any case, this mostly just supports my view that people don't understand liberalism and why we need it. When an atheist and a christian can sit down together and have a peaceful family dinner without talking about politics, despite the fact that at least one of them thinks that it's a matter of utmost moral importance that the other change his mind, this is a miracle of social cohesion that is crucial to keeping society together. And we're losing it.
That's revisionist history. Free software, and the greater "hacker" community, has historically been libertarian. It's only recently that authoritarian leftism took over.
Here are a bunch of variations of the definition, for your perusal.
Oxford: "a person who is intolerant towards those holding different opinions."
Merriam Webster: "a person who is obstinately or intolerantly devoted to his or her own opinions and prejudices. Especially : one who regards or treats the members of a group (such as a racial or ethnic group) with hatred and intolerance"
Cambridge: "a person who has strong, unreasonable beliefs and who does not like other people who have different beliefs or a different way of life: "
Dictionary.com: "a person who is utterly intolerant of any differing creed, belief, or opinion."
Collins: "Someone who is bigoted has strong, unreasonable prejudices or opinions and will not change them, even when they are proved to be wrong. "
Oxford Learners: "a person who has very strong, unreasonable beliefs or opinions about race, religion or politics and who will not listen to or accept the opinions of anyone who disagrees"
You do realize that the donation occurred years before he was appointed CEO, right?
Also, and this is just a general observation, whether Eich would have been a good CEO or not is a complete unknown.
You're basically faulting him for taking a position which was reasonable and well within the center of public opinion at the time, which had subsequently become unpopular. And completely discounting the statement he made in the meantime showing that his opinions had, in fact, evolved over time, just as it had for a large fraction of the population.
(Another thing to point out is that the board was aware of the political contribution when he was appointed CEO, and did not feel it was any obstacle.)
And one board member did resign over this prior to his appointment.
For us here in NL (where 90%+ of the population supports gay marriage) the whole idea that this is even worth arguing over seems strange, about as strange as coming out pro-slavery would be.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10654651 has more on the story you are misrepresenting even on its own terms.
I could have worded that comment a lot better but the intention seems pretty clear to me: Your actions as a CEO (even past actions) are going to be viewed in a different light than your actions as just another employee, even a co-founder, and what wasn't a problem before the CEO nomination quickly became a real problem, both for Mozilla the progressive entity as well as for Eich himself. Whether the donations were made several years, months or weeks before his tenure as CEO are not important.
The one thing I did get completely wrong - and which I will also acknowledge - is that I thought Eich could have legally made those donations anonymously (it was argued quite strongly during that time that this should be a possibility). I did not realize that this was illegal.
Sometimes the best response to a rebuttal is just "TIL".
Good faith doesn't mean "be very afraid to criticize others when they lie".
You do realize that all political donations in the US are not allowed to be anonymous right? This was years before citizens united, the only way to donate was through your own name.
Nothing you’ve said in this entire thread has made any sense, please reconsider demonizing someone you don’t know about issues you don’t understand with arguments that are false.
> I suspect (based on board members' and Eichs' own statements) that it was the pressure from the employees that made him decide to resign.
I worked on Firefox from 2000 and full time from 2005 to 2016. Your suspicion is completely wrong. All employees I knew, mostly on the engineering side, were happy with his appointment or at least didn't express any wish for him to step down. That includes the gay employees I knew.
The only Mozilla group that I know of who expressed a desire for him to step down were a handful of people in the Mozilla Foundation (who would not have been part of Brendan's org since he was CEO of the Corporation). They went public with it and got a big PR splash, which I think spawned this meme that there was a clamour of Mozilla Corp employees demanding Brendan's resignation. There was not.
You have posted many comments in this thread but apparently you weren't there and you aren't aware of basic relevant facts. Please show some humility.
If those are not to be taken as authoritative then I think we may as well shut down HN because there is nothing that can be debated past that point.
I'm sure there are interesting and probably quite relevant details to be had but your word - an anonymous HN contributor to me - does not weigh as heavy as Eich's own statements on the matter.
Maybe it is you that should show some humility? Or maybe you should attach your name to your profile to show that you actually were in the board room at the time that this was decided. If Eich wanted to record a different history then he was entirely free to do so.
I clearly remember his statement of regret at the time, it seemed sincere as far as I could see and I think that he should have been given a fair chance, but I also understand how he may have decided to step down.
There are lots of stories about what happened in that boardroom meeting, all of them more or less plausible, until the participants speak up to contradict it I will stick to basing my views on the official version.
[1] https://www.cnet.com/news/mozilla-ceo-gay-marriage-firestorm...
[2] https://brendaneich.com/2014/03/inclusiveness-at-mozilla/
There are some articles which I've linked elsewhere which quoted some Mozilla employees at the time, which seemed pretty strong evidence to me (names, dates). Of course that is a fraction of the workforce there and it could have easily been blown out of proportion but there were at least some employees who thought like that.
It's unfortunate that Brendan didn't get as robust a defense from his board as Ms. Rice got from Dropbox's at roughly the same time (and I'm no fan of Condoleeza Rice, the Bush IIs administration in general, or the "War on Terror". I believed then as I do now, that it was a wrong precedent to set)
Apologize for what? Exercising his right to political speech? His views represented the views of 52% of the Californian voters, i.e. the majority of voters. He's supposed to apologize for, literally, "agreeing with most people?"
If employees were revolting, perhaps him stepping down was the right choice. But suggesting that he should "apologize" for having political views some employees disagree with is completely unreasonable and indicative of a bullying power play.
52% of Californian voters didn't ask Mozilla employees to trust them with their livelihoods and the culture of the company. A lot of them changed their minds by 2014 too.
[1] https://brendaneich.com/2014/03/inclusiveness-at-mozilla/
I don't understand your point about 2014. Did Eich make more "controversial donations" that year?
If 100% of Americans voted that way that would just make all of them bigoted.
The reason why it does not is that people don't typically wear their politics on their sleeves though the divisive nature of present day politics is not helping with that. So in fact, you may be prophetic, time will tell on that one.
Saying it's not bad because it only happens to people to assert their Constitutional right to free speech is, besides not true... Orwellian.
You are aware that they only reached that number after placing armed guards at the polling places, with large parts of the opposition in prison, missing or exile? Hitler wanted to win that "election" with a majority by any means possible, getting 43% despite all the steps he took were a slap in the face.
And by the November elections that same year they had already lost several percent.
> Despite Nationalsocialists and Communists battling it out in the streets
Paradoxically Hitlers campaign at that time ran less on antisemitism and more on restoring law and order as well as fixing the economy. Communism and the near endless pool of unemployed it could recruit from was the great enemy of the moment.
Bigotry is not how, and never has been, a fringe position in the US. If you have a problem acknowledging that...well, it doesn't make it any less true.
I don't care if it had 50/50 support. It's dead wrong. 50 years ago there were places in the US where interracial marriage had 50/50 support or less. Still dead wrong.
Says who? 50% of voters?
The employees of any large organisation are bound to have differing views, particularly on divisive political issues.
Why should somebody be forced out of a role because their views differ with those of some of their employees?
I’m in favor of equality in marriage and broadly the rights of individuals to live true to themselves and free from discrimination, but if a divisive topic is 50/50, it’s hard to see how supporting one side or the other wouldn’t alienate some portion of your employee base.
Obviously, never taking a stance on any issue is the most middle of the road, career-lengthening tactic to take, but that’s not exactly the world I want to live in either. I don’t have to (and do not) agree 100% with my CEO’s political views; that doesn’t impact his ability to lead nor my ability to execute.
I think this is a fallacy: either way you're making someone unhappy. It's fundamentally a flawed argument: giving rights to someone it's not taking them away from someone else.
You're not making the "50%" of the people that are conservative unhappy. You are impacting a minority of those, the ones who can't live with the fact that somewhere there is a married same sex couple.
On the other hand you're telling the other 50% that they do not deserve a right. All of them.
So - that "some portion" it's not the same in size.
<rant>And if you ask me, which I admit: you didn't, the portion that believes that they should be able to deny other people a right they benefit from, can pack up an go. The inability of emphasizing with others would make them horrible software designers and developers.</rant>This sounds compelling, but what happens when you apply it to other issues? What will you say to the "taxation is theft" camp when they demand the right to the fruits of their labor and don't want them to be used to wage unnecessary wars?
Or are you fine with capitalists firing anyone who advocates for taxes to continue to exist?
If it was only views, I might agree with you. However, it wasn't just views. It was action. And it's easy to see how action can impact a CEOs ability to lead a team of people. Furthermore, we know for a fact in this case, it did literally affect his ability to lead and execute. This isn't a debate. It happened.
Simply put, he could not do his job effectively. So he stepped down. Others will say he was fired, but you can only think that if you think Eich lied.
In the workplace, employees have (broadly speaking) a _legal_ right to be free from discrimination on the basis of protected grounds. If your boss (or their boss, or their boss, etc.) makes it clear they don't support that: that's not a political statement, it's workplace discrimination / harassment.
That a stance against marriage equality happens to overlap with political fault lines is _entirely beside the point_.
I am going to speak plainly. I don't think people in the Valley really believe this argument. Political opinion is a protected class in California yet people feel free to create a hostile work environment for Trump supporters. It feels like there a set of right answers and you can say the right answers or shut up.
There’s no point in making this argument. Mozilla is company headquartered in San Francisco - and AFAIK, has the most “out” LGBTQ employees I can remember of most tech companies.
Just like I wouldn’t be surprised if Mitt Romney got raked over hot coals for not supporting a RBG replacement, I’m also not surprised Eich got kicked out for not supporting gay marriage. It was incredibly deaf on his part.
Interesting that we've gone from "kicked our for actively opposing" to "kicked out for not supporting" in the span of just a few comments.
What if the boss eats meat or prefer cats over dogs, while you (or other employees) do not?
Please don't reply with "are you comparing [X social cause] with eating meat?", because for some (not me), eating meat might be more important than [X social cause].
* Some people no longer wanted to work at Firefox if he was their lead
* Some people no longer wanted to use Firefox if he was their lead
Now, the organization can easily take any position here. They could say "Yeah, I guess you can't work here, employees who can't work with Brendan Eich. And yes, I guess you have to stop using Firefox, users who can't use product led by Brendan Eich" or they could say "Brendan, looks like you leave or we lose these people" or anywhere in the middle.
This is just people freely expressing their views and advertising how they will act. It is pure liberty and I love it for that.
George Bernard Shore: Forgive him, for he believes that the customs of his tribe are the laws of nature.
Your word choice is your business. But why would a bigot become not-a-bigot because there were more of them?
Morality is not a popularity contest.
What?
What does people's support for a proposition that denies rights to homosexual people do to make it less discriminatory? What if it's worse? "You're not being discriminated against, because 80% of the population are in support of you being discriminated against". This makes no sense.
Is it ridiculous to suggest we should just ignore what people think and do in their private lives?
I both fully support gay marriage and couldn't give a rat's ass about what the maker of my browser thinks about it (Eich donated 1000$ to Prop 8, 12 years ago). The real problem is that you can pay to have laws changed!
These "acts of protest" like OkCupid's banner need to stop. Most likely they care as much as I do (= not), they're just preemptively trying to get on the right side of the argument, trying to win the social justice olympics, to avoid the same fate as Eich.
The problem is that Eich was supposed be leading a team that prides itself for being supportive of the causes that Eich donated against. Bridging that gap became impossible once he was on public record for that.
Having any leadership position requires at least a fundamental trust of the people you’re supposed to be leading.
OkCupid is not a part of FireFox, they were simply trying to virtue signal at Eich/FFs expense, and the empire behind OkCupid (not the original founders) has done a lot worse than anything that Eich ever did.
That would have been easy enough to ignore. But the Mozilla employees were another matter.
Money in politics is a problem in and of itself, that doesn't mean that CEOs living in glass houses should not be aware that if they start throwing stones there will be consequences.
If a dutch CEO would come out to vote for Geert Wilders' PVV (our ultra rightwing populist party) I'm pretty sure that would have an immediate effect on the company and on its remaining employees.
Employees as a rule want to be associated with companies and CEOs that they feel have their interests at heart. Plenty of them can be 'bought', which is why so many terrible companies with terrible leadership flourish. But Mozilla made it quite plain that they weren't going to be 'that sort of company' and if you say that loud enough and often enough then there are certain things you should not do.
So you have to shut up and kowtow to the popular opinion?
Society is going to weird places.
Given that access to health care is a major pain point for queer people in general and health care benefits are employer provided in the US made the matter even more pressing.
So yes, if you choose to apply for a position in an org that has a public stance on an issue, choosing to wear the opposing flag on your sleeve may not be the best move. You’re however, absolutely entitled to your opinion - you just have to deal with the results of your statements.
If you hold strong opinions that are counter to your company’s manifesto, you might not want to be in charge of it.
But we'll never know so this is not a fruitful branch of the discussion.
No other way to describe this contempt for basic human rights than "vice signalling"
I'm a straight, white male with a long-time significant other. We never got married because marriage is a religious ceremony, and we don't share those values (for example, the church's views on gay marriage). At least in my country, being married doesn't give a person any more "rights".
What happens in your country is irrelevant to this discussion
The root of Firefox's problems start with San Francisco. It's inflated salaries and political sideshow have caused an existential threat to Mozilla.
None of the code of the browser changed when Eich resigned. It still had the same pros/cons, didn't it?
Who asked Mozilla to be a "flagship of diversity"? What we wanted off them, and what their mission statement was, is a FOSS browser that supported the open web.
Plus, one can be/believe whatever on their personal life, as long as they don't bring it to the office.
Not to mention that penalizing people because they supported one side in a public vote is anti-democratic.
I'm all for the FOSS browser company, the 'support for the open web' is already a step in the direction of losing focus. Just keeping up and having a viable alternative browser out there keeping Chrome at bay is a major job (and one they are currently miserably failing at).
> Not to mention that penalizing people because they supported one side in a public vote is anti-democratic.
Actually, it isn't. Actions have consequences, if Eich wanted to be a contributor to that cause he could have done so silently. By doing it in a publicly visible way as the CEO of a large company he made it a political statement and action begets reaction. Eich very explicitly brought his views into the office in a way that a substantial fraction of Mozilla's employees did not want to be associated with.
Besides that, money in politics is anti-democratic.
Then those employees are part of the problem!
He didn't bring his views into the office. He had them outside and the alphabet mob lit them as a Molotov cocktail and threw them into the building.
Those employees could have quit and worked somewhere else too. In a lot of ways that would have been great as they could have cut down on a couple of the pointless projects.
By your standard it's impossible for anyone to both have public views that disagree with your own and be the head of any large organization.
> Besides that, money in politics is anti-democratic.
Money in politics is the great equalizer. It's as democratic as it gets.
Otherwise you end up with a handful of media and tech oligarchs controlling all messaging.
He made a public donation in his own name to a very divisive cause. That is a political statement if there ever was one and set the stage for a confrontation with at least a sizeable fraction of the company he as supposed to want to lead.
> Those employees could have quit and worked somewhere else too.
Yes, they could have. And they might have had Eich stayed on.
> In a lot of ways that would have been great as they could have cut down on a couple of the pointless projects.
Contrary to managements' viewpoint programmers are not fungible, and you can't just drop them into each others projects on a whim. What if the bulk of those that left had worked on FireFox?
> By your standard it's impossible for anyone to both have public views that disagree with your own and be the head of any large organization.
Why do you think CEOs are normally speaking quite careful about such public statements? Precisely because there is the possibility of backlash.
Surely this isn't news.
> Money in politics is the great equalizer. It's as democratic as it gets.
Abject nonsense. Money in politics means that wealthy people get to vote many more times than poor people. An equalizer should make everybody more equal, not less equal.
> Otherwise you end up with a handful of media and tech oligarchs controlling all messaging.
Yes, like Rupert Murdoch for instance. Oh, wait.
Salaries are paid in dollars and all dollars are fungible. That money could have been saved for a future date, which is coming sooner than they think, when search referrals will no longer pay the bills.
> Abject nonsense. Money in politics means that wealthy people get to vote many more times than poor people. An equalizer should make everybody more equal, not less equal.
Oh but it does. The issue you seem to be having is that you do not want anyone to hear opposing view points. If your ideas are so great they should be able to stay standing when the masses learn about alternatives.
Or are you scared that it might actually change their minds?
>> Otherwise you end up with a handful of media and tech oligarchs controlling all messaging.
> Yes, like Rupert Murdoch for instance. Oh, wait.
Yes exactly. And also like Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey, Sundar Pichai...
At least with the free flow of money someone working in a non-media industry can channel the fruits of their labors to pay to spread their message.
Without that ability you're limited to whatever your media masters decide to let you hear.
Dollar donations made to political causes are not fungible when done in the name of the donor (as per the law). And that's the root cause. Whether or not employees would have walked or not you can not know, they very well might have because Mozilla made a big point of attracting those very people.
> Oh but it does. The issue you seem to be having is that you do not want anyone to hear opposing view points. If your ideas are so great they should be able to stay standing when the masses learn about alternatives.
I think you have your parties muddled up here and I think that you are not so much arguing for Eich's benefit as you are arguing for your own and your own views which you have made plenty visible on HN in the past. The people that don't agree with you are 'leftists'.
For instance: "That's part and parcel the strategy of the left, shifting the Overton Window of what you're allowed to support publicly until anything representing traditional conservative values is safely out of range. "
Traditional conservative bigoted values are what they are, if you want to publicly associate yourself with those then you are opening yourself up to - at a minimum - ridicule.
> Or are you scared that it might actually change their minds?
No horse in the race, so not scared. Why would I be?
> Yes exactly. And also like Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey, Sundar Pichai...
In other countries it is called bribery, in the USA it is normal. But that is an aberration, one that is hard to fix because both of the powerful parties in the USA are benefiting from this and effectively manage to keep out any outside contender that does not manage to take over one of the parties (like what just happened to the Republicans).
Or do you honestly believe that Trump embodies 'traditional conservative values'?
> At least with the free flow of money someone working in a non-media industry can channel the fruits of their labors to pay to spread their message.
Which effectively limits the speech of those not so privileged that they have money to spare, who - coincidentally - also happen to be the ones disenfranchised by tricks like Gerrymandering, voter identification, roll purges and a host of other strategies.
Fairness doesn't enter into it.
> Without that ability you're limited to whatever your media masters decide to let you hear.
I read manufacturing consent the year it came out.
And they might not have cared and moved on with their lives as well. The point of the exercise was to get a scalp to scare anyone else in an executive position from making a public donation. The end result was losing a competent executive.
>> Oh but it does. The issue you seem to be having is that you do not want anyone to hear opposing view points. If your ideas are so great they should be able to stay standing when the masses learn about alternatives.
> I think you have your parties muddled up here and I think that you are not so much arguing for Eich's benefit as you are arguing for your own and your own views which you have made plenty visible on HN in the past.
I'd argue you're doing the same in reverse.
> The people that don't agree with you are 'leftists'.
> For instance: "That's part and parcel the strategy of the left, shifting the Overton Window of what you're allowed to support publicly until anything representing traditional conservative values is safely out of range. "
And this thread has a perfect example of it in reply to that very comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24565502
You also manage to both quote my reply and misquote me back to back. I did not say, "leftists", I said, "the left", which is a standard term to refer to that side of the political aisle. Just as "the right" is a standard term to refer to the conservative side.
> Traditional conservative bigoted values are what they are, if you want to publicly associate yourself with those then you are opening yourself up to - at a minimum - ridicule.
You're free to have whatever opinions you'd like. I really don't care. If you want to label everyone that disagrees with you with terms like that it's your prerogative.
> No horse in the race, so not scared. Why would I be?
You're arguing that anyone that who disagrees with you and has the means ($$$) to promote those disagreements should not be able to do so.
People who are confident that their beliefs will win out in the market of ideas tend not to act that way.
> In other countries it is called bribery, in the USA it is normal.
So buying advertising is bribery now but operating a newspaper at a loss to continue to publish a liberal agenda is somehow perfectly fine?
> But that is an aberration, one that is hard to fix because both of the powerful parties in the USA are benefiting from this and effectively manage to keep out any outside contender that does not manage to take over one of the parties (like what just happened to the Republicans).
Interestingly Donald Trump spent less on advertising in the 2016 primaries than his opponents. IIRC, Jeb Bush spent something like $120M for 3 primary electoral votes and Hillary Clinton spent $1.2 B (yes billion!) in the general election (double Trump's amount). Now that is trying to buy an election.
> Or do you honestly believe that Trump embodies 'traditional conservative values'?
Ha! Not at all. But I believe he's done more to promote conservative ideas and ideals than any other politician of the past thirty years.
In particular reshaping the federal bench and the SCOTUS will have a lasting impact for the next 30-40 years.
> Which effectively limits the speech of those not so privileged that they have money to spare,
Breaking news, people with money can spend it more freely than people without it!
They also get to eat better food and live in safer neighborhoods. There's a lot of advantages to having money and there's not necessarily something wrong with it.
> ...who - coincidentally - also happen to be the ones disenfranchised by tricks like Gerrymandering, voter identification, roll purges and a host of other strategies.
Okay so now that you've given up on arguing against freedom of expression you're trying shift the topics.
> I read manufacturing consent the year it came out.
It shows.
Except what you term "the left" in the US is actually center-right on the political spectrum.[0]
I'm all about freedom of expression and personal liberty. However, I believe that government (because government is the people) has a valid role to play in creating equality of opportunity and assisting those who are, for whatever reason, having difficulty surviving in our society.
In any reasonably written project they actually are. If your experience is that they are not then you have worked with badly written and badly documented projects.
> and you can't just drop them into each others projects on a whim.
Indeed you don't want to mix and match too much. Programmers need a ramp up time and teams need time to have cohesion.
Essentially programmers are replaceable but there is a non zero cost to replacing them.
I felt that that was just a bit hamfisted. All my adult life I've been a feminist [insomuch as a man can be one] and supported this cause. But I had no idea how to answer that question, or I'm pretty sure my answer wasn't satisfactory to the person asking.
What? Are you serious? After browsing through the comments, this here is what really ticks me off and solidifies that mozilla/firefox is in a rotting place right now. sad.
I suspect the right answer could be: get out of the way. I did, they hired someone else. I dodged a bullet.
I don't think this embrace of social justice stuff has much to do with Mozilla's rot, BTW. Any business without a clear profit/success model and a reasonably sized workforce will just crumble under empire building and competing agendas. The "SJW" stuff is only notorious in our community because of the way the Eich stuff went down.
I would have been willing to work for half of what I am now to help make the open internet succeed (well, also to work from home, and to get to work with some friends, and with Rust, and other perks). But that whole interview really soured me. I dodged a bullet anyways.
He did not deliberately publicise his donation. It was not publicly known until 2012 when someone dug up the records.
> Eich very explicitly brought his views into the office in a way that a substantial fraction of Mozilla's employees did not want to be associated with.
This is a lie.
What side of the fence do you think Eich landed on when it came to health benefits for same sex couples?
Here's pseudocode that can be expressed in tons of languages:
func compare(a, b) {
if typeof(a) == "marriage" and typeof(b) == "marriage": return false;
return true;
}
> typeof 1
'number'
> 1 == 1
true
> typeof NaN
'number'
> NaN == NaN
false
Because religion is also a theory about how society should live, what is sacred/holy/profane/immoral/etc, not just what someone believes for themselves.
Plus, in a sense, he doesn't force his religious views on other people. He asks other people not to step on his religious concept (the marriage as a specific sacred mystery / holy union with specific rules, etc).
Now his objection might be outdated, but it's not some outlandish idea the "beyond the pale" kind, like being in the KKK. Just a few decades ago (not in some ancient ages) most of the US (not to mention the global population) would have agreed with this, including many progressives otherwise. Heck, it wasn't even one of the major demands of gay activists themselves back in the day.
In other words, can you please explain why priests should not be forced to marry gay couples? "Force" is a loaded word, of course - I'm not necessarily talking about armed agents going into a church and demanding that a priest perform a marriage ceremony, but rather referring to the full range of coercive actions available to the federal government. For example, if a church refuses to perform same-sex marriages, why should they get tax-exempt status?
Maybe churches shouldn't have tax exempt status at all. Taxing some religious organizations and not others sounds unconstitutional though.
Because part of the whole point of a religion / creed is that you do some things and not others.
"Forcing priests" means no freedom of religion expression, one of the older democratic rights.
THAT IS "bringing it in the office"
(The point of the phrase "It was 12 years ago" being that:
(a) people change with time
(b) we should not hold things people did long ago against them forever
And thus, that a reaction "but he did X bad thing" to the suggestion of bringing Brendan back is not relevant anymore...
This must be some novel notion of "bringing it in the office"...
Note the weasel phrasing "so that his gay and lesbian employees" -- to imply that he did it specifically to target his employees.
If he gave money in favor of e.g. stricter weed laws, would he have done it to target his "weed using employees" or generally society's use of weed?
Vivaldi seems like the better Chromium wrapper to me. But my daily driver is Firefox.
Instead of Brave where he's having to build a product, brand & userbase from scratch & try to force a niche unproven VC business model with Brave.
I do not need to elaborate on why a diverse browser ecosystem is important, there are enough threads on that already.
Mozilla had this jewel, exactly what it needed to succeed and make the web a better place. He was attacked for his personal beliefs regarding gay marriage, which went against the current popular liberal attitudes, who attack anything they perceive as against them with a fury on the scale of lynch mobs. The web, for better or for worse, gives huge leverage to whoever is willing to make the most noise and be the most unruly.
So Eich was attacked, Firefox market share plummeted, the new CEOs take home four times what Eich was taking home yet add "Pocket" and other misfeatures while funding for Rust and MDN is being cut. Instead of a 95% monoculture of a Microsoft product we now have a 95% monoculture of a Google product. But hey, the guy who doesn't support gay marriage is out of the picture, right? That's a win, right?
And there is no argument from utility to be made here either along the lines of 'oh Eich may be a bigot, but look at that nice browser he gave us'. He has to work with the people around him and that scenario would have likely not panned out.
Instead, a large chunk of Mozilla/FireFox' employees may have walked if he had tried to hang on, or maybe he could have come around on the subject in a halfway believable way.
But he chose to walk instead, his loss, and ultimately, possibly our loss too.
Eich was perfectly capable of working with others. He had a demonstrated track record of doing so since he co-founded Mozilla.
>a large chunk of Mozilla/FireFox' employees may have walked if he had tried to hang on
A group of people intolerant of a political difference would have left rather than continue working with him. That's the definition of bigot.
Bigot: One who is strongly partial to one's own group, religion, race, or politics and is intolerant of those who differ.
I think it's worth pointing out that the ballot prop that Eich supported actually won. It wasn't a niche belief, certainly not at the time. I don't think Eich was the only CEO in America that didn't support gay marriage. What set him apart was that he didn't do a better job hiding his beliefs.
No, I meant as in genuinely doing that. People are typically capable of learning. I'm pretty sure Eich is smart enough to do so.
Or it would, since he worked with the same people before the wokefest with absolutely zero complaints from anybody. If people didn't decide having ideological purity and expelling wrongthink is more important than having a good independent browser. Well, they have their purity now. Hope they are happy. Their usage may be in the drain and their perspectives bleak, but at least nobody dares to form an unapproved opinion!
> Instead, a large chunk of Mozilla/FireFox' employees may have walked if he had tried to hang on
Or, somebody adult would explain to them it's actually ok to disagree on some subject, and that't the thing adults do sometimes. Unfortunately, looks like there's no adults in the industry anymore. Or at least not at those quarters.
If he had shown actual remorse for doing this, he would have been fine. But he didn't.
How many of those that "cancelled" Eich are still going to vote for Biden?
[1] https://www.cnet.com/news/mozilla-ceo-gay-marriage-firestorm...
Imagine if who you supported on Patreon or Ko-fi caused you to be harassed until you quit your job? Imagine if someone says you're a hateful bigot because you openly donated to a podcast. Imagine if a donation to the Trump or Biden campaign caused all your employees to turn against you?
If he was firing homosexuals for being gay, that would be one thing and unacceptable. I grew up around Christians who would say they find x or y morally wrong, but that wouldn't prevent them from working with people who supported x or y, or believing they were human beings who are entitled to their own opinions.
Real tolerance is accepting people who have different beliefs about core issues, and working with them despite those differences.
Look up the Popper's paradox of tolerance.
Romantic pairing is a common enough human thing that it makes sense to have legal constructs to protect both parties. If you are affording these protections to opposite-sex couples, then it is blatant discrimination not to do the same for same-sex couples. There is no rational basis for making such a restriction, after all.
Legal marriage, as in a civil arrangement, isn't really a right. However, being treated equally under the law is a right.
I am an atheist and yet I am married. I know other atheists who are married. Marriage can have religious aspects, but it doesn't have to.
> Romantic pairing is a common enough human thing that it
> makes sense to have legal constructs to protect both parties.
Personally I'm not a huge fan of the intense court of public opinion of cancelling, but it's absurd to paint it both as a leftist-specific act, or that if you're a leftist then you're allowed to get away with it.
I believe in people being able to actually talk and treat each other like human beings instead of monsters. The conversation unfortunately is hyper-polarized and many people aren't willing to even engage with someone who doesn't share the same belief set, and to me that is a shame. I don't think it's fair to paint this as a left/right issue. This total lack of engagement occurs on both sides.
I'm not complaining (it was worth doing Brave on many non-material grounds), but you are disparaging out of malice and ignorance. This will not work well for you in life — my two cents!
That said, I wanted to use and like Brave but no gestures so I moved back to Vivaldi to support another overpaid decadent CEO. You can't seem to escape them.
Oh, and 'disparaging out of malice and ignorance', well some have made a good living out of it as we see in our current climate. Not going to name names here but I'm sure you know who I'm talking about.
You are still maliciously and ignorantly defaming me, with false claims anyone can verify from open source. This reflects badly only on you. Will Rogers' advice, free then and now, applies: when in a hole, stop digging.
And threatening people online to basically shut up, who you view as misunderstanding, you're vastly underestimating the expected demeanor of a CEO. As a user you'd expect me to be frustrated sometimes and complain but as CEO, honestly, you should just answer the questions as it doesn't make you look professional when denigrating those who used to be in your userbase. And if anything, the fact that I among many have these questions and they've ran so rampant and unanswered even on this very tech-related forum reflects at least poorly on your company's PR department.
You are the one doing the denigrating (“to criticize unfairly, to disparage”) here.
It looks like pure politics, keep conservatives out and keep liberals in. His fault wasn't the donation. His fault was being outed as a conservative.
I think someone should try wearing a trump hat to work at a technology company for a week and see how long they last in the organization.
Some people like to wax poetic about getting along with people with whom you disagree. But there's a difference between disagreeing on, say, tabs vs. spaces or fiscal policy or something, and disagreeing about what sort of people do or do not deserve rights. This situation clearly falls in the latter category and attempts to conflate it with the former are very unconvincing.
Mozilla employees did NOT support the firing of Eich. Don't use them as human shields for your assault on civility.
I say this as someone who, while living in Virgina and having never lived in California at the time prop 8 was on the ballot (I moved here a few years later), I donated to opposition to CA prop 8 and decided to not get married to my (opposite sex) partner out of solidarity with gay people who couldn't get married in our state.
I never felt that I should be or would be persecuted at Mozilla (which employed a lot of christians, and particularly Catholics), if it had become public that I funded opposition to prop 8. Nor, by the same token, did I think it was appropriate for Brendan to come under fire for funding support for it. I have sympathy for the theoretical argument that it might be difficult to work for someone with personal views incompatible with yours or your identity, but in practice Mozilla was an an extremely open and inclusive place that employed people of all kinds and treated them with respect. (In other words, a theoretical problem which wasn't in this instance a practical problem by any report I heard.)
Although I don't have any actual knowledge, if I had to speculate I would guess there were other Mozilla employees who supported prop 8 (many?). -- especially considering that prop 8 _passed_ with >52% support.
Even though I strongly disagreed with him on this subject (apparently! not that I'd have any way to know other than the media coverage of this), the incident made me feel slightly less safe and welcome there-- because clearly your lawful and constitutionally protected outside-of-work personal/political/religious views were potentially subject to scrutiny. Although not very much so, because it appeared clear to me that the events were primarily being driven by public noise, and not by some internal wrong-think witchhunt.
The CEO is the face of the company and oversees HR. Most people who objected to Eich being CEO didn't have a problem with him being CTO.
Believing different races shouldn't mix is legal. Just saying it in public will disqualify you from being CEO at most companies. Never mind funding a constitutional amendment.
That said, Mozilla works in a competitive environment. Perhaps it would have made more sense to wait for valuable employees to start leaving before dismissing their CEO. While I find his position on Prop 8 offensive, as others have pointed out, they are entitled to their beliefs.
That isn't as idle a question as you might think on first glance. Denying someone marriage rights is waaay down the list of ways voters can screw each other over through government policy. Most high income earners are in companies with co-workers who literally argue that they should be less well off.
Being anti-gay-marriage is more stupid because the upside is unclear, but we expect people in the same company to put up with bigger differences of opinion on a routine basis. Different religions have gone to war in the past. I don't think many battles have been fought over official marriage rights.
I think in programming we've learned (the hard way) that fuzzy input should be rejected. Stuff should do exactly what it says on the can. No mather how sophisticated, if a date object returns political opinion they are not parsed.
Perhaps one day we can do modular job descriptions or functional employment. Accurate task descriptions with actual specs. Well formed execution and response text. The most professional people I've worked with were already strict about what everyone's job was.
[0] https://www.politico.com/blogs/ben-smith/2008/08/obama-says-...
To be more precise: In a democracy corporations can still be concerned with their public image and distance themselves from (particularly high-ranked) employees, if they consider them detrimental for their business.
It used to be that it was OK to know and be friends with people who had different views than you. It was called "being an adult."
Now we're all in these ever-shrinking thought bubbles where if someone's views don't line up with yours 100%, they're the devil.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Antonin Scalia couldn't be farther apart on most issues. But they were the best of friends.
We're all children by comparison.
That's a generous way to say he opposed equal rights for a minority group, some of whom he employed.
But instead, we can choose between Firefox, and Brave. 2 competitors for Chrome, from which users can choose. So, in the end, maybe it was for the best?
"We study six browsers: Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, Brave Browser, Microsoft Edge and Yandex Browser. For Brave with its default settings we did not find any use of identifiers allowing tracking of IP address over time, and no sharing of the details of web pages visited with backend servers. Chrome, Firefox and Safari all share details of web pages visited with backend servers."
See also https://brave.com/brave-tops-browser-first-run-network-traff... and https://brave.com/ios-browser-first-run/.
I'll also note that Brave went for Chrome's Blink engine, and while that calculus might have been different if he were running Firefox, it doesn't give me confidence that he would have preserved the Gecko engine.
If not for that we could have easily seen a repeat of Netscape vs Microsoft, but it is hard to consciously decide to bite the hand that feeds you, especially when it is connected to the proverbial 800 lbs gorilla.
I suspect FF would have lost marketshare in any "under Eich" scenario too, maybe not as fast and maybe he would have re-focused the company earlier.
But that's all water under the bridge we are where we are today.
He took concrete actions to damage LGBT people. That's not just an opinion.
Baker was officially appointed CEO in April, though has been doing the job since December when Chris Beard resigned.
I'm very confused as to how everybody seems to have missed this. I had the first couple hundred posts opened and can not find a single mention of Beard
I mean, when company fails, isn’t the cause that the corporate failed to lead the company, right? They sucked at their job, not at someone else’s job.
Letting managers pretend their lack of some stinky nerdy ability outside of their job description was the direct cause of their failure don’t sound right to me.
I'm pretty sure they want to milk this to the end though, there's a reason their salary skyrocketed after the co-founder, Eich, left Mozilla...
There are people who are well versed in both. There are several HN posters for instance who are or have been both lawyers and engineers (although I can't recall any specific names at the moment).
They did have a person with that profile but then he was asked to resign.
i wonder how things would have turned out if mozilla was some kind of cooperative instead of top-down traditional structure
ceo chosen from someone who actually worked there, or brought in from outside, would they have chosen someone different... in this case, would they have already voted them out?
"In recent years Mozilla has created:
* a mobile app for making websites
* a federated identity system
* a large file transfer service
* a password manager
* an internet-of-things framework/standard
* an email relay service
* a completely new phone operating system
* an AI division (but of course)
* and spent $25 million buying the reading list management startup, Pocket
Many of the above are now abandoned."
There's no money in making a browser, and even the things that look promising enough for a company that can't just throw 100 million at it because that's not even a dent in their budget almost always turn out to not be promising after even a year or two. When keeping those things running costs you more than you'll ever make back on them, you shut them down. That's what a company has to do.
That list is not "What did Mozilla kill", it's "What did Mozilla unsuccessfully try in order to not go under". It reads as a testament to the reality of how hard it is to make a buck on the web: everyone wants everything for free, and if it's not available for free, hundreds of bunches of folks will make a competing thing that is, and of those hundreds, usually at least one succeeds (and you never hear about the hundreds of failures).
[a] https://web.archive.org/web/20200916125550/https://www.mozil...
No, it isn't: it's what everyone has to do, because you need to make enough money to at the very least cover your expenses.
Mozilla may be a non-profit, but being a non-profit does NOT mean "doesn't need to make money": they still have 750 employees that need to be paid, offices around the world that need rent paid (despite COVID), global infrastructure that needs to be paid for, SaaS for employees and contractors that collectively runs in the tens (if not more) of thousands of dollars a month, etc. etc. and that needs a sustainable revenue stream that isn't "hoping google will foot the bill".
Right now they're losing 7-8 digits a year. Mozilla absolutely puts people before profit, but they sure as hell aren't going to put people before surviving. That would be idiotic: you can't further a mission by going bankrupt.
Trying all these product ideas is exactly what I'd expect them to do if they're struggling with revenue.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/georgeanders/2015/11/30/mozilla...
Also interesting to note that Brendan Eich too plotted a chart showing Baker's pay vs Mozilla stock's performance: https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1217512049716035584
How anyone can claim that sort of pay hike when showing very poor results is beyond me.
This was on HN just a few months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22058629
He was 11 days on the job, so, not so bad.
Did you ever read animal farm?
The pigs serve as placeholders for Stalinists, but the general dynamic exists in any political situation that accepts inequality, like corporate capitalism in the case of Mozilla.
The pigs were swept into power on an anti-inequality/equity platform. Could be a lesson there…
Stock?
https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/difference-between-...
I'd also pay to remove junk like Pocket, or rather I'd consider paying for Pocket as a separate service. It irks me that it's forced into my browser.
I want to be free of Google. This includes Chromium which has too much of Google included. Mozilla is the last hope of a free (as in speech) internet.
On iOS Apple have enforced WebKit so there's little reason to use Firefox. It may have only ~4% market share but it's still my preferred browser. I hope beyond hope that they find a way to recover and rise again.
Donations go to the Mozilla Foundation, not the Mozilla Corporation.
Both the overpaid leadership, and Firefox development, are the domain of the Mozilla Corporation.
Relevant discussion from a month ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24200395 , https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24142097
Precisely. I couldn't have put it better.
I assume it's easy to set up a monthly donation.
Or would you rather they start demanding or pleading for money?
EDIT: To be fair, I don't either, and I do use FF. I donate to wikimedia and the internet archive but not Mozilla.
I wish as a community our reaction to Mozilla's troubles was "let's all start donating!" instead of "screw those evil pigs".
I don't want Pocket. I don't want VPN. I'd pay for Firefox though, and only Firefox.
Buying a product to solve a problem is very different to donating to a foundation.
But what would that change? You're not donating to the makers of Firefox, you're donating to the entity that owns the makers of Firefox. They'll spend the money on whatever they find interesting or lucrative or politically wise. Firefox might or might not be among them.
But if serious money came in through donations, and everyone put "for firefox, keep it simple and good" in their donation box, they'd have to be particularly braindead to put that money elsewhere.
That being said, now that I do some math, it'd take 3.7mm people each donating $10/mo to match their 2018 revenue of $450mm/yr. Which does sound difficult to achieve...
For normal users who can hardly tell Chrome and Firefox apart and say "Chrome? Firefox? Sorry, I'm using the internet"? Yeah.
For power users? I'm not convinced. JetBrains makes about $250mm a year only from developers. But their focus is on delivering value to developers, making their lives easier and their work more fun. I'm sure Firefox could deliver a lot of value too, but they're focused on the lowest common denominator of all users, not on targeting e.g. developers or web power users and offering them something that Google does not.
But if there's a good chance that the money ends up in political activism or some hobby project at Mozilla ("why don't we build a new OS?"), donations aren't going to work.
Make Firefox a great Developer tool so you don't need Fiddler & co as a developer and sell that as a commercial version, keep the open source version. I don't know whether it will bring in $450mm, but I'm sure it will bring in lots of money.
I would argue JetBrains doesn't make most of their money from individual developers (consumers) but rather from businesses (who in some cases may be freelancers or solo founders).
Firefox offering a browser to companies, that's a better product for them from a security perspective or something, sounds possibly interesting.
But that being said, the competition from Chrome (which is free, integrated with GSuite, and already offers corporate security features) would be stiff.
And of course, Firefox's mission has always put humans at the center, not businesses. Moving from "Google Search $$" to "Business $$" might be a frying pan to fire move in terms of distracting from their core mission...
But still, interesting, and I appreciate your thoughts..
Send money to people on the SCM commit history.
Let's say I want to sponsor the Servo project because I believe it's something the world needs. There's no obvious way to financially contribute to the project or to individuals other than randomly sending cash to them via PayPal using their listed email addresses on GitHub.
Ditto Firefox, but the source is in mozilla-central, so I'd have to work out how to deal with Mercurial to get the names/addresses. Another step, another barrier.
I'd also have to figure out who deserves reward, and that's not a minor task either. Then I'd have to repeat this X times for each person that should get paid, then repeat every month. It needs to be centralised to make it easy for the sponsorship.
I'd certainly argue that for a normal company. For mozilla though, there is a question of why do you even need a CEO? Does Linux have a CEO? I suspect at least some of mozilla's problems is trying to run an open source project with an unsustainable (and very non-diversified business model) as a normal company.
However, if it becomes a more volunteer based organization, you tend to pay people in conferences and other infrastructure. Which is a very different type of thing. You still probably need someone to manage that, but its very different from being a CEO
I agree with you, but isn't the problem more that they're sinking the ship? To take it to the extreme, if I joined a fortune 50 company as the CEO, and started losing billions a year with my decisions, should the board pay me more because I've created a risk to my reputation?
Or to put another way, life isn't fair and outcomes dont neccesarily align with what people deserve in a moral sense.
The CEO’s value in general increases but that of the current particular CEO which is running the company into the ground decreases a lot more than that.
Incidentally, this is the basis of unions - the union negotiates your salary with the union's negotiating power of having the company's entire staff walk, which hurts far more than merely losing one employee.
Being a CEO of a stead fast ship show evidence of stability, and people with high stability should get higher compensation than low stability.
This create this perfect situation where regardless how the ship is doing the CEO should get paid more. There is always an argument for more pay.
The author presents firefox market share (a relative term) on one axis and CEO pay (an absolute term) on the other.
The sad reality is that the CEO pay should be a relative metric to tech companies of similar size in the bay area, where Mozilla is based. Or at least US tech companies of similar scale.
As the internet has enveloped the globe in the last 10 years, a huge amount of money has accumulated to this one industry & area. Even if executive salaries were constant, returns from stock at FAANG and startups would, I think, make $2.5mm a pretty small total package for an org like Mozilla.
Eg GitHub founders are now worth billions. A lifetime at 2.5mm wouldn't get you there.
This sucks. It's sad. It's weird. But blaming the good people at Mozilla feels pretty unfair here.
The fact is that 2.5 million probably isn’t enough to get the kind of turnaround leader Mozilla needs. They have no revenue model. You’re basically handing a CEO a bunch of talented devs and free products and saying “make a revenue stream” for products where their competitors make a better product for free use. Lots of tech companies spend billions and never find revenue streams outside of their core business until they make acquisitions.
I always have to think back to Jon Stewart on The Daily Show, who, in reaction to that exact argument for Goldman Sachs & Co paying out huge bonuses from the bailouts they've just received for crashing the economy shouted: You Don't Have The Best People.
What if you don't get the best people by offering huge financial incentives - what if you just get people who focus on financial incentives and career development, and what if those things do not strongly correlate with actually delivering higher value for the company?
> You’re basically handing a CEO a bunch of talented devs and free products and saying “make a revenue stream” for products where their competitors make a better product for free use.
"Here's a product that brings in 450-500 million a year, see what you can do". The users of Firefox aren't Mozilla's customers, it's Google & Co that are the customers. The users are the product.
You aren’t guaranteed the best people if you do; but you are excluded from getting the best people if you don’t.
If a person is the best person, then all other things being equal (they interview well, like all potential job opportunities equally), they will accept the job with the highest pay. Obviously that’s a simplification of any situation.
Focusing on financial incentives and career development is what makes most of us get better. I study my craft and improve not just because of intrinsic value, but because I can make more money. The extrinsic rewards are the only reason people join corporations, otherwise we’d all work for ourselves. You may not like it, but it is true.
Yeah, I believe it's an oversimplification to the point that it ceases to be useful. All other things are not the same when you're running a privacy-focused "for the public good and the internet" charity vs when you're running a profit-focused "the public good is irrelevant" ad-tech company.
I don't know who the best developers are, but I have a feeling that a few of them are working on open source projects and aren't working on new ad products that would make them dozens or hundreds of millions if they worked for Google.
My impression is that you'll get a narrow field of candidates if "we pay you a lot" is your argument for why they should work for you. And on the flip side, if you say "we pay you well, but not FAANG level", then you exclude some people with a certain personality trait. I'm not sure that you're creating an issue if you don't attract those people when your motive is not "profit above all else" but essentially "profit doesn't matter, we're a non-profit".
In the case of for-profit companies like Nintendo, the CEO typically owns a ton of stock. If they turn things around, the financial returns to them will be huge – especially compared to letting the company crater.
Steve Jobs took no salary for years while Apple struggled (great!), and still ended up with several billion dollars, mostly from Apple.
That can't happen with Mozilla. If they cut the CEO pay in half, they'll probably quit and go work somewhere else. Then what?
Do you try to hire some other CEO for a tiny fraction of what they'd earn at an equivalent role at a for-profit company? At a time when Mozilla already looks like a sinking ship? Sorry, most folks who are talented enough to have multiple options would choose something else, even if there are "warm fuzzy feelings" for working at a non-profit.
If a company needs to buy some widget - and this widget is worth $100 to the company - the company would be foolhardy to ignore the market and pay $100. Instead, the company should be looking at different suppliers and choosing one with the best quality, price, etc. If there is a lot of supply, it might be able to get the widget for $10. If the supply is limited, it might be forced to spend $90. In both cases though, the value to the company is $100.
If this CEO is not performing adequately in his role, then he should be fired. Full stop. But bringing his pay into the picture (which isn't all that much higher than high-level employees at FAANG) is just trying to incite anger in the mob.
Tendering encourages reduction of quality in order to minimise cost. It wastes time, and time is money. And quite often it means that opportunities are lost whilst wading through tedious processes.
Or move to Europe or Asia and get 2-5x output per Google Search dollar.
Another problem is that it's all very well to wish for an alternative revenue stream, but the reality is maintaining a competitive browser with an independent browser engine and the wraparound service regular users expect (accounts, updates, sync etc) costs hundreds of millions a year. Finding an alternative source for revenue like that is just really incredibly hard. Mozilla's been trying for a long time. Saying "Mozilla needs an alternative revenue stream" is just not helpful at all.
The fuck is the CEO getting paid for, theN?
What alternate revenue sources have they tried? Outside of their recent VPN offering, I haven't seen anything that they've tried to monetize. They didn't even try and monetize Firefox Send, even though the developers had a monetization strategy from the start.
I'm sure that a number of people would have been prepared to pay for Firefox Send. I know a lot of people who have trouble transferring files too large for email so it surprised me that putting a user interface around backblaze's object store api with Mozilla's brand on it could not be a profitable business.
FirefoxOS had some obvious revenue potential.
The pattern here of course is that every attempt to raise extra revenue caused storms of protest amongst Mozilla supporters.
Pocket was quickly rammed through. Mozilla denied getting paid for the integration. That baffled people who would've understood if it was about money. Mozilla eventually admitted getting paid for referrals. That upset people who felt Mozilla had lied to them.
Sponsored tiles kicked off with marketing drivel about transforming the user's content experience.[1] Addressing users first and being more honest might have worked better.
The Mr. Robot promotion silently installed an add-on with a cryptic name. People thought they'd been hacked. Mozilla denied getting money for it too.
Mozilla treated users like resources instead of stakeholders and lost their trust.
[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/advancingcontent/2014/02/11/publish...
I'm sure that marketing is an important point and it's true that Google can promote Chrome in many places. However Firefox gained considerable market share against internet explorer under (IMO) more difficult circumstances: it was pre-installed, Microsoft were considered as or more trustworthy by the public than Google now is and of course some sites could never work well with Firefox as they used proprietary features like ActiveX. Word of mouth is one of the primary reasons that browsers (other those that are pre-installed) are adopted and the word-of-mouth on Firefox has been poor relative to Chrome for some time.
Contribution to Mozilla's defeat of IE is one of the great accomplishments of my life, but having been there for both fights, the fight against Chrome definitely was much tougher. Microsoft took their eye off the ball and basically stopped working on IE for a few years, which gave Mozilla a huge opportunity; no such luck with Chrome. The complexity of Web sites has increased a lot which makes it much harder to keep up and surpass a more well-resourced browser.
"As of June 2013, Nokia's mobile phone market share had fallen from 23% to 15%, their smartphone market share gone from 32.6% to 3.3%, and their stock value dropped by 85% since Elop's takeover."
"Controversy arose around Elop receiving a €18.8 million bonus after Nokia sold its mobile phone business to Microsoft and he stepped down as the CEO. The controversy was further fueled after it was revealed that his contract had been revised on the same day as the deal was announced."
But you can't write an article about the decline of Firefox market share during the rise of Chrome and blame it all on the CEO.
(Mitchell's only been CEO for a year or so, but it is true that she (and Brendan, before he left) were largely the powers behind the throne since the beginning of Mozilla.)
Mozilla's approach is "spend lots of cash and grow fast like a VC backed company".
The guardian is a "let's try and have a stable user base and keep the company alive for another 100 years".
In this case, Mozilla's approach has failed badly. I think it's unlikely they'll turn it around without the help of another big tech company making a strategic purchase.
On one hand, if people are happy to do work for free, a company would be stupid not to make use of it. On the other hand, governments should probably outlaw it since it really is just a loophole to pay less than minimum wage. ("Volunteer for 2 years for free, and then we'll give you a minimum wage paid position" = "On average over your career, you get less than minimum wage")
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2019/aug/07/guardian-broke...
And one of the claims / complaints of TFA is that Mozilla had a massive income for many years, and could have built up an endowment; but instead chose to live "hand-to-mouth", spending their income on useless failed projects that have nothing to do with Firefox. (And CEO pay of course.)
Not arguing against the overall point but Thunderbird has nothing to do with Firefox either and is still a thing Mozilla's reason for existing is not just their browser.
From the post:
> Mozilla should probably just ask their users for money. For many years the Guardian newspaper (a similarly sized organisation to Mozilla in terms of staff) was a financial basket case. The Guardian started asking their readers for money a few years ago and seems to be on firmer financial footing since.
This comparison doesn't make sense. First of all, nearly all these publishers are moving towards subscriptions. This clearly works for them to give readers other incentives like say remove ads and paywalled content, weekly hard copies, etc. Asking users to donate to a free browser when the alternatives are also completely free to use isn't sustainable for Mozilla.
Given that the closest equivalent replacement is Chromium or ungoogled-chromium which is completely free to use and the latter addresses privacy by removing Google on everything, how can 'donations' work for Mozilla if there are other browsers that exist that users can be used for free?
The Guardian knows that they will eventually add paywalls and require subscriptions just like every other publisher as everyone knows 'donations' are not sustainable to fund their 'journalism'. It's all about subscriptions, paywalls, etc.
EDIT: To downvoters: Oh so donations 'are sustainable' for the likes of the Guardian, such that they are still asking their users for years to donate whilst ramping up the registrations and adding a soft pseudo-wall on their content, and the suggestion is to get Mozilla to also ask its users for donations?
What happens if Google decides NOT to renew that contract in the future due to Mozilla's declining market share?
Explain how surviving off of user's 'donations' is sustainable for Mozilla to survive, given that Google is its direct competitor and offers a browser for free (and a similar one without the Google stuff is also free).
Now you're just generally (and angrily) defending mozilla against a donation model, and ignoring the passage you quoted entirely. A passage which iirc was the entirety of references to a donation model in the entire article.
I do share your wish in retrospect that they'd saved more cash...
Why does it need a company with highly-paid executives and HR departments and all that to exist?
If Firefox/Mozilla the company goes out of business then .... nothing changes? Apart from of course a bunch of people sadly lose their full-time jobs and development speed slows dramatically as people are no longer working on it full-time and only volunteers contribute. Maybe some slick marketing goes out of the window and there are no more budgets for server farms to run Pocket (Oh no...</sarcasm>) and other centralised servers for distractions from the main Firefox product etc, but I am sure donations will cover the cost of a few .com domain names to keep those going (I'll stump up the $20 for the first year registrar costs if they need it)
Can everything go back to normal OSS development and distribution with almost-zero overhead (host on github, distribute over torrent/dat etc) if the business fails?
Don't get me wrong: I like Firefox and use it as my main desktop & mobile browser.
While the money is available (google) having a team this big requires enterprise level management, which leads to enterprise level shenanigans...
Still. There are some obvious counter-examples of development of extremely complex projects being community-driven under the aegis of much lighter-weight organisations than Mozilla. LibreOffice is an obvious one; The Document Foundation had (at the last report) total expenses of $679,000, with nearly all of that coming from user donations.
Edit to add source for the numbers: https://nextcloud.documentfoundation.org/s/LEat3j6nepdggNk#p...
I understand it's hard to get someone "good" in as CEO of you can't offer competitive pay - they'll just go somewhere else. But I think the last few years of Mozilla and Firefox falling into the realm of niche developer/nerd tools needs to serve as a sharp reminder that even "good" executives can fail.
Time for an ultimatum - offer a reasonable salary with a large bonus based on improving market share. Get someone in there that really wants it.
Q: Can you define "good"?
If everyone could be CEO like anyone could be a laborer, they would not get paid well.
When they fail, were they among the pool of qualified candidates, or is their qualification determined by whether they get hired for the job? In other words: are they highly qualified at working as a CEO, or is their specialization in getting hired as a CEO/looking like they'd be highly qualified in the actual work?
I recall a study a few years back that found that CEOs did not appear to have a large impact with regards to company success. We're looking at successes and attribute it to the CEO, but when a company fails, there are a million things they had no control over so it's not fair to attribute the failure to them.
I find it highly unlikely that people hired for CEOs do not have excellent CVs or success stories to point back to, or a strong network vouching for them. This isn't a level I networking certification. This is a top position with top pay - the idea that there is a subset of people just gaming their way to CEO is hard to believe. That's not to say they don't politik. But I don't think it's like a programmer lying on their first resume about how much of that project they really contributed to on internship.
This isn't consistent with the "rare qualifications create a positive edge, multiplied by lots of leverage" value story, but it is consistent with the "climbers get good at climbing" story. It's also consistent with my anecdotal observations where the biggest executive jumps involved dirty tricks that transferred downwards momentum to the company they springboarded up from.
Are boards stupid? Probably not. My guess is that investors have a cognitive bias towards simple stories and "qualified" CEOs help the board serve up simple stories to their investors while also providing ample opportunity for mutual backscratching. It doesn't matter whether or not they have an actual edge, the story is the product.
It's a good hustle if you can get in on it, but that's the trick, isn't it?
> "climbers get good at climbing" story.
This isn't true. There are plenty of climbers - and if all that mattered was being good at climbing, boards would work to save millions of dollars by hiring cheaper "climbers."
>My guess is that investors have a cognitive bias towards simple stories and "qualified" CEOs help the board serve up simple stories to their investors while also providing ample opportunity for mutual backscratching. It doesn't matter whether or not they have an actual edge, the story is the product.
Or, perhaps, experience matters, and they just don't want to give it to people who don't have experience leading large entities. Just like anything else.
I'm sure you trust a plumber of 15 years over his journeyman of 4. Is it some secret evil cabal working against the plumber? No, it's just common sense.
Are there though? By nature of that kind of climbing, they get thinned out quite quickly, plucked from the wall by those more adept at hyper-competitive climbing without rules and sheer randomness. Here's a short overview with a few links pointing to studies that suggest that CEOs aren't having the impact common perception attributes to them, and whether they succeed or fail often depends on luck: https://www.inc.com/will-yakowicz/study-luck-looking-the-par...
> I'm sure you trust a plumber of 15 years over his journeyman of 4. Is it some secret evil cabal working against the plumber? No, it's just common sense.
Especially in tech, we don't see a lot of old CEOs though, and if we did, that still doesn't explain why any one in particular is chosen: the pool for any age group is large, they'll all have roughly the same number of years in experience. If luck is a large part in whether they succeed or fail in their role, if you continually test, you'll end up with people who rolled the dice and got lucky multiple times in a row, or you'll end up with people who manipulated the dice (or your perception of the dice).
If I remember tonight I'll dig through my archives and pull up the study.
Short term or long term? How do you measure performance in a way that can't be gamed? How do you prevent alignment of the company to achieve the metrics you set at the expense of all of the other things that make a thriving corporation?
Sure setting good metrics is hard, but that doesn't mean you should not set and publish metrics.
What seemed to have happened is that pay was simply increased without strings. There are a bunch of cultural outcomes then across the company when you have this kind of absurdity.
(A previous company I worked for the CEO had a multi-million dollar loan for his family-home/mansion written off by the company/board... the company was losing money.)
Define performance? (not trying to be rude, just using a little Goodhartian pedantry)
So please remember: every time you want to say 'meritocracy', you say 'discrimination' instead. Therefore, any your statement about performance is not valid.
If you are a For Profit company with share-holders, you can define performance as money gain by shareholders, i.e financial performance. This is always short term and it's the #1 cited reason why private long term investment has basically disappeared in the last 40 years. BigCo are managed with a 6m horizon and both eyes lock on the stock prices.
But if you are a non-profit how do you define performance ? How do you define Good ? What horizon do you set ?
And BTW : why do you think higher comp will lead to better work ? Was Einstein the most paid individual ?
While I do partially agree, I don't fully. Those who are good at what they do get paid more. Now, that means they generally start competent and well intentioned. No amount of money fixes an idiot with ill will. I think a lot of firms are ignoring that concept in the past 10-20 years.
The short term outlook is also a huge problem. You see it often in action on Bloomberg with the markets. It's Christmas or Crisis every other day, absolutely ignoring long term positions. To me, that's the difference between capitalism and profiteering. Capitalism is a long term infrastructure play to make money (like Disney buying Marvel and setting up the MCU in a way that can create many, many products that build off each other) while profiteering is just turn and burn, short-term plays ignoring more than 12 calendar months.
Perhaps your non-profit question is the real kicker. How does Mozilla measure success? Market penetration? The end of IE? But then by taking in Google money, does that make Chrome a competitor or ally? From a user standpoint, Chrome isn't exactly the "good guys" either due to epic tracking. So that in turn makes a bit of a conflict of interest when you toot your "privacy and user first" horn while you're paid by one of, if not the biggest privacy invader... ever. Financial independence would be a good current metric... but with the ceo pay hike... I doubt that'll happen.
The article makes me sad, but I am also sad to see time/work being wasted for needless UI updates.
There's an option to restore its rightful position at the top.
After the address bar on top, it is possible to disable the suggested search terms, which solves the race condition. It now looks more familiar but it remains:
- opening a blank tap requires a top-left corner tap and a bottom-left corner tap: quite a bit of thumb exercise
- the colors: I cant help thinking of a well-known french porn producer color-style. So I do not mind they are used in incognito mode, but I do for normal mode, which I always use.
https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity
As a firefox user, thats not great news, but it's different from current users leaving en masse.
But if Firefox stays its course and doesn't gain new users, it'll be done for when the next hot browser comes along or current users have enough of what's happening behind the scenes.
Let's say that the cost of a single full time contributor is $200k/y on average. Every 10 people working on the project cost $2mil/year - that's roughly the funds FreeBSD raises each year (and 3-4x more OpenBSD does). And I don't think you can continue independent fork with 10 people; you'd need 30-50 for the fork to make sense. I suspect it would be possible to get corporate sponsorship for the infrastructure needed so I'm not counting those costs but at this scale there's some legal and administrative overhead that has to be taken into account as well.
So the bottom line seems to be that you need around $10mil per year to let Fx survive as a community project. And I'm pretty sure you can't crowdfund that much. :S
That pay is abhorrent for a company that failed to communicate the mission, even though the browser is better than ever.
Same with Windows. : D
Mozilla need to stop sucking at google's teet. I know this is much easier said than done. At some point, the value proposition to google is not going to be that great since they already own the browser market. Not sure about you all, but I use Firefox. I use computers daily and immediately change my search engine to DDG once I have a fresh install.
They need to go after corporate IT departments and say something like the following: buy into our product. Our code is open, we are a charity, and we are here to make the web a secure place and free to everyone. We are here to make sure you are not bullied. They need something like the Linux foundation's model. They need the Exxons, they need the Fords. They need to show how scary it will be if Google wins the browser war again and what it will do to them, just like it would be scary if one single entity started owning the Linux kernel.
I think consumer markets are fickle. I bet if someone uses FF at work they are much more likely to use it at home.
Moreover, many companies make use of GSuite to handle email or collaboration tasks. If you already pay for such features, then it makes sense to follow through the platform and stick with Chrome.
To end, I will say that I use Firefox daily at home and work.
Chrome already does this and markets itself as just doing it better while firefox kinda just passively takes it. Normal users don't read nerdy tech blogs explaining why the latest under-the-hood improvement is cool and improves performance by 0.3% on average.
Just look at vivaldi for a good example of how to do things right: Don't bother convincing people that you're "faster" than chrome and instead spend that time on building actual features.
What does firefox do that chrome doesn't? Vivaldi has tab groups, tiling, full-page screenshots, an option to hibernate background tabs, etc. etc. etc. and even then it struggles to compete with chrome. How the hell would firefox manage without any of those distinguishing features?
If Microsoft couldn't win and had to accept Blink, Mozilla can't compete. In its current form, Firefox can’t win. And this critique comes from someone who’s main browser is Firefox. Mozilla can’t compete with Google and Microsoft contributing to Blink (or Apple to WebKit).
From a performance standpoint, Firefox is not better. From a differentiating standpoint, Firefox doesn’t have the extension capabilities it used to. From a user’s perspective, there is very little incentive to recommend Firefox. From a website maintainer’s perspective, every year there is less incentive to support Firefox. This is the same downwards spiral that Microsoft saw.
Gecko will die and Mozilla will have to accept Blink. It’s the hard-cold truth. And all of this is ignoring the fact that Mozilla depends economically on Google.
Neither is it worse. Firefox is faster at some problems, Chromium is faster at some others. I don't agree that Gecko/SpiderMonkey are doomed, and they certainly aren't doomed on the grounds of performance.
You are correct. But to be fair, that wasn't my point. My point is that Firefox doesn't work properly on as many web pages as Chrome does. This trend will get worse overtime. Why would an end user choose an alternative that breaks their experience with no perceivable benefit?
And yes, there are privacy benefits, but if the end user doesn’t know/doesn’t care then it isn’t a perceivable benefit.
There is also the problem that google services are a huge part of the web and they obviously make sure they run better on chromium than on firefox.
This... sounds good to me?
-No backdoors for advertisers -DNS over HTTPS -Do what you do online.Firefox Browser isn’t watching -Protect your privacy
So for all intense purposes, people get the impression that this product protects one's privacy, but, this is not the case.
For their android app, there are 4 embedded trackers that violate your privacy:
-google admob -adjust -google firebase analytics -leanplum
https://reports.exodus-privacy.eu.org/en/reports/org.mozilla...
Also included inside Firefox is their telemetry data.
In their desktop app, the telemetry data is enabled by default as is their studies option and their default search engine is Google.
So, what they project in terms of being a privacy focused browser is a lie.
Perhaps people are catching onto their bllsht and switching to real privacy focused browsers.
(Remember this is the organization being well run previously, until someone dug through private political data and found the previous CEO had made donations that were deemed double plus ungood by a minority of stakeholders.)
The "web" (and mobile) just got big and expensive and Mozilla couldn't keep up. Just look at Apple and Google revenue and it's obvious that Mozilla couldn't sustain.
Compounding the problem is that the more money they made, the easier they could buy out all the Mozilla employees who aren't politically committed against Google and Apple.
Firefox needs to change it's strategy, it needs to pull an Amazon.
Amazon is the type of business that cannot be built. It costs too much, it was not profitable, but it was a stepping stone. Amazon sold books to get people in, built AWS (a separate business) to fund the business, created a fast delivery network (also funded by AWS), and then became profitable.
Firefox needs to find it's AWS if it wants to survive.
It has always seemed like it should be.
That focus could be a welcome simplicity to this.
Long term you don't want a single donor, but this very simple mission then makes it easier to broaden that base of donations.
I agree that Mozilla needs to get a similar lucky break somehow, but it’s not easy to get lucky on that scale.
Safari has dropped support for any privacy oriented extensions, and while Chrome might support them, everything you do with it goes through Google anyway.
That while Firefox can run uBlock Origin, has the Facebook container built in and you can even install a 3rd party Google container.
No company likes to say publicly it fired someone (it's bad for hiring new people).
I am not defending this CEO's pay but I am just curious: how much do people on HN think the CEO of Mozilla should be paid? It's got to be enough to attract someone with extensive management experience at a high-functioning tech company so to me the absolute floor would be like $500k unless the person is retired and doing it for fun/charity.
Or do people not think they need a particularly qualified CEO and would be fine with a more democratic governance model?
> Or do people not think they need a particularly qualified CEO and would be fine with a more democratic governance model?
This line of logic is so prevalent in the world, and isn't evidence-based. The idea that a desire to be compensated a specific amount always correlates with competence & that advertising a position with a higher salary will tend to attract people with a higher competency.
This thinking is likely to have some truth below a certain threshold, at which point people don't have sufficient income to live comfortably and as such have a need-based approach to raising their own salary. This rarely applies at CEO-level.
How?
Who?
Would you find someone who hasn't previously run a large, innovative tech org? How would you determine that they'd be good at this job? (Remember, switching costs for CEOs is high).
The current CEO is well remunerated and seems by many popular accounts to lack competence, so this seems like a relatively low bar as bars go.
> How?
Hiring competent staff at any level is a challenge and depends on many things; there's no magic bullet. I at no point argued that hiring a competent CEO was easy, just that linking salary to competence as part of that hiring process is a faulty metric.
I'd say refining any hiring process by removing faulty metrics would be a good thing. Wouldn't you agree?
Average tech CEO pay in 2018 was $6.6mm, probably not including stock appreciation: https://www.vox.com/recode/2019/5/2/18522927/ceo-pay-ratio-t....
I've seen companies overpay for mediocre talent and assume that'll get them good work. Obviously doesn't work – you're right that high salary does not _cause_ high competence.
But if someone truly competent has an offer from the Google Chrome team and an offer from Mozilla, and Chrome can offer 10x more, well, you want to do the best you can.
> Average tech CEO pay in 2018 was ...
"well" is not relative to average, it's relative to requirement.
> But if someone truly competent has an offer from the Google Chrome team and an offer from Mozilla, and Chrome can offer 10x more, well, you want to do the best you can.
"Competency" is a complex (& somewhat subjective) thing when it comes to leadership, but if that's your candidate's sole criteria for seeking the role, I wonder if that's who you want running Mozilla. You forget that this swings both directions: motivators are extremely important in leadership of any company, not least one with Mozilla's rights-based values.
The perfect person could exist here but it's starting to look like very steep odds.
If someone has a deep passion for building an amazing browser but lacks any appreciation for why building Firefox might be more worthwhile than building Chrome, then I'd hope they would go work for the Chrome team, as I would not expect them to prioritise aspects of Mozilla's business strategy that differentiate their products.
Or in other words: is there any point in Mozilla existing if they ape Chrome/Google/Alphabet in their approach?
Mozilla IS a not-for-profit foundation it's primary goal should not be profit.
What revolts people is how much she is paid and how much she increased executive pay _WHILE_ firing 250 people of one of their most successful teams.
Also lets be honest their 'strategy' has shifted from making software people want to use to let's do a UX extreme makeover because that's how Chrome does UX.
I know I should aim for constructive criticism but the UX on the Phoenix release for Android is so annoyingly counter-intuitive it made my blood boil.
Also dropping support for pretty much all addons on Phoenix is yet a major ball drop. The whole point of Firefox is customization and add-ons, if execs fail to see that then they don't understand the product that pays their 400% salary increase.
> how much do people on HN think the CEO of Mozilla should be paid? It's got to be enough to attract someone with extensive management experience at a high-functioning tech company
$20k. And give him a bonus depending on the companies performance. Works in other countries and companies, no reason why it should not work there.
In the first place, that so called "extensive management experience at a high-functioning tech company" should be highly paid is a myth and BS. After a certain point the scale of organisation does not change enough to be more worth. And most work is not done by the CEO anyway.
How do you define company performance?
For a non-public corporation like Mozilla, you'd have to use a metric like market share. Okay well in the first year, how can you earn enough to pay for your kids college or whatever? You'll have to really get those numbers up _fast_.
Things like this is where we get shitty growth tactics like spamming everyone in your contacts or auto installing and preventing uninstall.
Instead I'd much rather have bold investment in long term growth. Innovative initiatives that may take years to pan out.
Very hard stuff.
Whether they need someone that expensive is up to the organization to decide.
What about having a decent base salary, and a bonus of extra millions if your results align with the organization goals?
SV companies relocate development but never the top brass to Europe as they would lose their pay, status and network.
Believe it or not, just like with dating and real estate, your monetary value is more dependent on where you are rather than how good you are. Shocking, I know.
If he would do that, maybe better leadership would improve Mozillas situation.
When Mitchell was given a raise for no reason, it is a sign of corruption in Mozilla board.
https://usanewssite.com/news/the-unconventional-ceo-of-33-3-...
[0] https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/200...
For that kind of negative growth? No, of course not.
> In its fiscal year ending January 31, 2019, for example, Snowflake had revenue of $96.7 million. A year later that number was $264.7 million, or growth of around 150% at scale.
Admittedly, Baker specifically got her role by being "promoted" from a Netscape lawyer and then playing a role in the creation of Mozilla, so my complaint doesn't quite apply. I'd still see letting her go and promoting someone to fill her place as a better alternative to the pay raise.
(If you look at a company's share price, you will see a drop roughly equivalent to the dividend per share each time dividends are paid.)
But after reading this, I think I will switch to Safari. It'll be a tough change after all these years but I believe Apple is more capable of enabling me to keep my privacy more than Mozilla Foundation. I don't regret the donations I made there but it's really sad to see that I paid that money to that CEO guy.
I'm not someone who generally thinks high exec salaries should be regulated or anything - but in the case of Mozilla it's just dishonest: The slogan on their home page is literally "Internet for people, not profit".
> Mitchell Baker, Mozilla's top executive, was paid $2.4m in 2018
but doesn't offer any consideration or speculation as to why this is exaggerated. It's entirely possible that without that particular exec, Firefox would have been even worse off, or would have taken another direction with regards to privacy, etc.
My subjective feeling is that $2.4m does indeed seem too high for such a position. But I have no objective data to support or refute this. It's quite possible that the same person managing a comparable employee base at a FAANG would earn even more.
Maybe a good CEO isn't defined just by the salary he or she receives?
It’s not possible to get from 0 users to 20% market share overnight. Brave is doing great.
What about US based NGO's? I don't know where to find this data.
Lastly, a FAANG may or may not pay more, but they're certainly in a much better financial position than Mozilla to pay a high salary.
> James Skogsbergh, Advocate Aurora Health Title:Chief Executive Officer , Director Amount:$8,511,609 % Revenue:14.9% Revenue:$56,950,972
~1/7 of the revenue of charity goes to CEO's pay? Is that even legal?
Granted, you have to deal with pressure, but today CEO can just switch companies like underwear. They press KPI on every employee but are themselves nearly exempt from any quantifiable metric aside from turnover.
But in general CEO pay is rising with falling results and falling pay for everyone else.
I have not seen this. Where have you seen this? Firefox has no marketshare and is still losing marketshare.
No, it is completely discretionary. I don't consider this controversial because I know it is completely discretionary. Why would it be tied to anything aside from the ability to continue paying that compensation or desire to be compensated that way?
The only consideration of a foundation is the nearly tax-free capital growth rate, 5% net assets grant rate, and whether the TAXED salaries are tolerable. And for them, yes, paying super high income taxes and giving the government over a million on a $2.4m salary per year is tolerable.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.mozilla.fi...
I saw this once when Firefox deprecated something that the old Jira instance used. The next day Chrome was the default browser and has ever been since.
I'm not sure about the extent to which this is true? I dont think Firefox has extensions on iOS (probably not up to Mozilla). Meanwhile, the extension experience on Android is "bumpy" to put it lightly. Just a few weeks ago, FF mobile broke nearly every single extension (apparently this was intentional, but it makes for a bad user experience)
Web-browser is not very profitable bussines, and by bloating web with more and more complexity, we made sure maintaining alternative implementations is getting harder and more costly.
The Web degenerated into it's natural conclusion - a centralized platform controlled by a handful of corporations extracting value from its users.
Seriously, better start exploring alternatives already if you care about your privacy and freedom, because this route is gone.
Also, I don't totally understand why you can expect to get and retain talent while paying way below market rate.
And... suppose the CEO were paid 1M instead of 2M. That's, what, 5 engineers? You could pay the CEO $0 and it would make only a small dent in the recent layoffs.
And, anyway, I'm going to use Firefox no matter what.
This doesn't seem to be the case with Mozilla, though. They somehow have the worst of both worlds: inflated executive salaries and a loss in revenue.
Anyways, I'm a happy firefox user, their PiP feature is great and the fix they finally did for rendering on macs made it possible for me to use it without it eating my battery. I'm happy there is an alternative to chrome, it hopefully keeps the ecosystem a bit healthier
I suspect that Mozilla could just consider that near guaranteed income while they worked on other things as long as the browser stayed alive.
Poor leadership abounds.
I'm guessing there are a lot of initiatives with a heavy "SJW" direction that was spared. Most of those are probably not very technical.
I think Mozilla should focus on getting Firefox written in Rust. This will likely make Firefox a safer browser and make it easier to work on. A safer browser is good for privacy which is partly a non-tech thing they should focus on too. Personal privacy and safety.
Donating to Mozilla feels completely pointless when there are people at the top leeching off money without having none of the qualities of a charismatic leader.
I had downloaded a podcast in advance for a road trip. I went to open it via the Firefox notification and it said "you have no app that can open mp3s" which is wrong. After that I went to Files to launch it manually, but it wasn't there (it must have saved it in a non-standard location). Finally I went into Firefox and couldn't find the downloads page, only to find out they removed that feature.
I was frustrated and shocked by Mozilla's incompetence. I had 3 different methods of accessing that file and they screwed up all of them. Even if these issues are fixed I probably won't return, I need to be convinced Mozilla has fixed its management issues.
Imagine a world where a non-commercial open source browser has billions of dollars in the bank, and through the interest alone, achieves total financial independence to pursue development purely on behalf of its users.
I personally don’t think that world exists because any such situation would get pilfered away exactly like this one.
I've been using firefox since the really early days and I eventually gave up on mac and started using Brave. Still use it on windows work machines or occasionally on ubuntu where it doesn't have these problems.
i changed back to chrome because of this and it's so much smoother.
I've seen numerous people craving for better container support, which is definitely a killer feature for people going forward towards a more private web. Why isn't Mozilla more actively developing this? Developers were the primary driver behind adopting Firefox during it's hayday - no reason why it can't be again if we have the resources to make a compelling case for it.
What's wrong with the support it has? [1]
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account...
TBH, those days I tend to use separate browsers, because profile management is significantly less convenient than just running a different program.
So I've had to install an auto-reload extension[1] which simply reloads the Slack tab once an hour, and that contains Slacks stupidity.
Now Firefox is nice and fast, even with hundreds of tabs across many windows.
[1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/reloadmatic/
And now they switched back to shared memory again, and the moment they did, the browser started hanging again, like it used to do pre-Quantum days.
Chromium's "per process memory isolation" is the right approach, despite all the cries about memory use. I'd rather have that than have the browser hang on me, or have more security issues.
If anything, I think even the future of operating systems is complete process isolation and separation by virtualization tech and encrypting each process in RAM with a different key. The hardware is coming, but it may take another 10-15 years for this to be fully realized.
I could not get Chrome to stay stable enough with that much resource utilization, and the most important part I've learned is that Firefox's profiles storage formats are open enough that I've been able to recover from some pretty bad kernel panics (due to the graphics card switching on my laptop; disabling that fixed the panics).
Probably next Macbook Pro refresh cycle from Apple I'll upgrade to the latest they introduce, but Firefox-as-daily-driver has been able to take a lot of abuse from me.
[+] as in 500 or more. I use my browser windows to keep my 'state' of what I need to read and where I've left off, by the time they are all closed again I'm done preparing for an interview.
Regarding performance on macOS, Firefox runs fine for me and I very very rarely have below 50 tabs open. Have you tried it recently? I had read there were some bugs with macOS but most of those were resolved a couple of years ago.
Firefox Mobile is generally fine, though I occasionally end up in a state where tabs refuse to load and I need to kill the whole app. Minor annoyance.
Desktop though, when I've got a bunch of tabs open and I close a bunch down by clicking the 'x's, I definitely notice how much Firefox speeds up as I close each tab. What drove the knife in was on the odd occasion that I needed Chrome, opening it up was like a breath of fresh air that was hard to ignore. Pages just seem to load faster and the Chrome seems more responsive under lots-of-tab situations.
Another part is peer pressure - the frontend guys all just use chrome, so pairing is a little bit more frictious. Though there is benefit to having someone in the team who uses something different to Chrome. I just don't want to be that guy.
Year Total 2010 $123 million 2011 $164 million 2012 $311 million 2013 $314 million 2014 $420 million 2015 $420 million 2016 $520 million 2017 $562 million 2018 $436 million https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation
As an open source contributor I have to say that Firefox is very hard to contribute to, compared to something hosted on github or similar.
I looked once on the effort required to fork Firefox and run it. It's a big project, but it's not impossible. It would still requires about 10 engineers full time to keep it alive.
I don't have the resources to make it happens, but if a serious fork is ever created, I'll do my best to contribute.
I think you can't because you can't predict the future which means, the high payment of executives is simply based on trust (by the company owners) that they will do the right things for the company.
"It was intended to harness the creative power of thousands of programmers on the Internet and fuel unprecedented levels of innovation in the browser market. "
All of the innovation on web standards, web frameworks, etc. has been coming from FAANG and Mozilla is funded by them. They defocused and have been messing around with all kinds of other stuff.
Someone who believes the ship is not sinking, who has a vision how to save the ship, and who agrees to be paid only if ship continues floating.
Hiring a CEO who believes the ship is going to sink is a straight way to sink that ship.
If I want to minimize friction, I use Chrome.
If I want to use ancient web apps, I use an ancient version of IE.
If I want privacy, I use Brave.
Where is Firefox supposed to fit in for me?
If they use Chrome that could be a risk for them since it does/could collect browsing data.
Do you think selling extra privacy features to governments could be a viable business model ?
Buy Mozilla, fire all the CEO/Staff, bring all the lost Devs back and let them work on the Browser and Rust (and just that), if anything happens with the Chromium development you have your own second browser at hand...and by that way rust itself.
They don't have a browser yet (extremely interesting data), directly compete with google on ads (and search when we consider shopping) and are increasingly using Rust. Getting great engineering talent on top is nice, too.
Hmm nice idea with Amazon...or Linaro OR IBM/Redhat OR SUSE..
Pocket is fine. Pocket randomly appearing on the gunwale of the sinking ship to tell you how great it is while the crew takes the life rafts, not so much.
Actually I was a long time user of Firefox and I finally switched to Chrome because Firefox was painfully slow at basic things like scrolling.
Just to pick out one example: The Fluent localization framework is the best in its class. Localization is a huge and valuable market. Simply building that out and charging customers could potentially save the organization all on its own.
There is plenty of capital and experience around, so why isn't this already happening? Or maybe it is?
If I was on the board of directors of Mozilla, my main ask from the CEO would be to ensure that the money flow from google does not stop.
If that means that google decides what features make it into Firefox so be it.
Some people say that Google will keep sending them money no matter what as a defense against monopoly accusations but it is doubtful this would stop the billion fines from EU and others, it hasn't in the past.
I wonder what the boards of these non-profits are doing and who has the power to change the boards? Typically for-profits have shareholders and non-profits have members that can hold accountability - but im guessing both Wikimedia and Mozilla don't have this stakeholder accountability :(
User.script didn't get the love it needed to build a single community. I never upload anything anymore.
The way a website should look is entirely different from the way it should look for those regularly using the website. It says Hacker news at the top of this page. It consumes space on my screen. (This isn't a thing worthy of discussion. I just remove it, others can use the script. In top down design hierarchies this kind of stuff takes endless arguing with people who never tried to use it like that but, from a position of ignorance, seem to want to dictate how you use your computer then enforce it. There is nothing FOSS about this aditude)
There continue to be lots of FOSS projects that would benefit greatly from browser integration.
I was skeptical about Opera's build in bittorrent client at the time. I couldn't imagine such a thing running un-managed. I couldn't have been more wrong. I looked what it was doing after a while and (while not downloading) it was seeding a hundred files in small groups (4-6) at a time, 1-3 kb upload speed. Perfect for rare blocks. It was a tribute to the swarm rather than the parasite I expected it to be.
In stead of webtorrents something like:
<video src="magnet:?xt=urn:btih:000000007005000000005000003d00000240a607&ws=https://example.com/video.mkv" onerror="src=https://example.com/video.mkv">
I could think of a dozen such examples...
Take how hiding complexity is the norm nowadays. Firefox could in stead be an entry point to learn managing a database.
Distributed search is also doable if you have this many clients. If webmasters can expose their site search they would do it. Ranking is the only puzzle.
huh. The Guardian did a massive cut out of the bunch recently [1]. They'll soon start pay walling articles
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/media/2020/jul/15/guardian-annou...
Firefox inevitably will have to go the way of a chromium reskin if they can't compete. There's no reason to be doubling your development load when you cant even impliment the features users want.
I know many of us will pay for privacy, and even help subsidize those who can't, but they have to be alive first.
At work, I replaced Chrome with Brave, but I still trust FF as the browser for my personal life (in addition to, of course, Pi-Hole, Algo VPN, and a number of plugins; or QubesOS + Whonix when things are really serious).
This makes it annoying to go from work mode to personal browsing mode, and so every time I try to make the switch to Firefox, I eventually revert back.
Then I discovered Brave, and was immediately familiar. Haven't used Chrome since.
Anyone else have this experience with Firefox?
Get rid of the Google support, let people donate directly to Firefox, provide corporate support contracts, integrate with everything you can like CI, phone, IOT, ...
At this point we as devs (with time) should hard fork the project.
I live outside of US and I’m annoyed that Firefox does not fill addresses in forms, for example. Because Mozilla does not bother finishing this feature for the rest of the world.
Similarly they have released credit card auto fill recently, and again, US only.
That’s just one of many example.
I still use Firefox, but mostly because it’s hard to switch (reconfigure all extensions, get used to new UI etc).
I made the switch from Chrome to Firefox a year ago when for whatever reason Chrome started stalling. A year in, Containers all the rage, I still hate Firefox because its autocomplete sucks and if I type a/b in the search bar it tries to load http://a/b, what kind of logic is that? This isn't 1995. They literally fixed only this 2 versions ago.
How many employees would it really take just to evolve Firefox and MDN?
The executive compensation seems really out of line. Could a lower paid staff and executive team do the job? Possibly by relocating the company?
Sounds like Mozilla thinks they can still 'win' whilst backing a browser with a declining market share against Chrome which is clearly eclipsing it.
on edit: removed extra what
Mozilla doesn't support embedding Gecko these days: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Gecko/Embed...
>Embedding of Gecko is no longer supported. If you currently embed Gecko, you should use an alternate solution, because you will not be able to pick up new security improvements.
They are supporting GeckoView[1], but that's android only.
Mozilla has no shareholders so the pay of its CEO cannot be justified by the usual arguments - that shareholders decided it presumably in their best interest. Comparing Mozilla with NGOs seems appropriate.
I'm not an advocate of socialism, but I think there should be more thought about egregious CEO salaries. Like another poster said, why are not CEO salaries tied to performance? Almost every other role in a company's salary is tied to their individual performance.
1. When I learnt about the corporate structure at Mozilla. I simply don't drust any large corporation with matters related to privacy.
2. What happened with Brendan Eich. That just wasn't cool. What someone does in his personal time is non of my business. Virtue signalling of any sort, to me, is a hallmark of the wrong crowd in power. As far as I could see, Eich refused to bend the knee which is an admirable quality considering the fact that internet privacy is an uphill battle against giants.
3. Lack of innovation and getting in bed with Google. If Firefox needed money, all they had to do was just ask. How can they, when they have to pay a CEO millions of dollars.
Now I'm primarily using Vivaldi. Sometimes Brave. I'd support a small, talented and a focused team anyday.
"Don't be an asshole" is a pretty good philosophy if you're going to be a ceo of an org like mozilla, and donating to an organisation which seeks to deprive a subset of your employees of their rights then refusing to compromise on it sounds pretty assholic to me. I know in the US it's all unlimited free speech, "but I have conservative views" etc etc, but that has real consequences in the same way that going up to a homosexual person in the street and telling them that you don't think they should be allowed to get married would have consequences - maybe they punch you, maybe they shrink off and feel terrible.
The point is not that he mistreated them, or that making a political donation was wrong, the point is he made a personal decision which is unstandably engraging to his employees affected by that decision. They called him out and he failed to come up with any reasonable remedy.
Foss folks and hackers would probably choose the latter, where as we've seen with all the FANNGS the world would choose the first.
Kinda surprised that its usage go down when it is better than most of browser products.
Minus the fun of getting to mock them from the peanut gallery, I don't really see why this is news.
Sometimes an organization needs the detail oriented folk to spend a month crafting bylaws. This can help prevent organizational disaster when a new ‘leader’ arrives and spins the steering wheel wildly.
> Mitchell Baker, Mozilla's top executive, was paid $2.4m in 2018, a sum I personally think of as instant inter-generational wealth
It’s certainly not if you are in SV. And that number doesn’t even seem high to me, given her impressive background and the opportunity cost. That’s Facebook E7 money. Or Google L8 money. She would easily be hired above those levels at those companies.
On the other hand:
> But then, things are different at the Guardian. Their chief exec makes a mere £360,000 a year.
That’s quite high, for UK standards and for journalism standards.
Her experience was in legal and operations, not product vision and development. She's a Tim Cook or a Sundar Pichai when what's needed is a Steve Jobs or Sergey Brin.
The CEO's salary is too high, but also pretty much irrelevant.
It wasn't always this way. For example, FF beat Chrome in battery life until a few years ago, and FF extensions used to be superior in functionality Chrome extensions. Chrome eventually caught up in the few areas they were seriously lagging in, or Firefox shot itself in the foot trying to morph itself into a copy of Chrome (eg. multiprocess architecture, WebExtensions).
Today there is little reason to use any browser other than Chrome / Chromium or Safari (which is still superior on Mac / iOS in a few aspects).
Most of the hate seems political: people keep bringing up supporting a ban on homosexual marriage and how Mozilla shouldn’t have liberal cultural values.
Most of these comments treat her as if she’s a virus, eating away a mozilla. They give an uneasy feeling.
In the end, I chose Chrome as a protest against this hypocrisy.
- Using defaults means arguing for the status quot.
- Kubernetes sucks.
- Ads suck.
etc. :)
Even if you really really believe in capitalism, I don't know how that is capitalist. It just seems like a "tails I win heads you lose" arrangement.
Alternatives? Brave?
- make firefox UI snappier than chrome
I'll take a symbolic dollar per year, thank you
They should have focused on this feature instead of all the useless junk they built into the browser.
Brendan Eich.
He not only was heavily involved with destroying IE's monopoly, he was able to start Brave in a punishing market (competing against Google, Apple, and his own FF) and made it a contender.
But, he wasn't woke enough. And for that, everyone will now pay dearly.
I daresay, learning that someone else is entitled to a competing view is difficult. Allowing others to have a view other than yours means that you and those you agree with may pay a cost. But the cost of not allowing any other opinion whatsoever to exist other than the one you believe in will eventually have a much much greater cost, in many more places than you would think. Mr. Eich once gave $1K to a cause that was anti-gay. He backtracked and apologized but was cancelled anyways. The cost of losing the only open contender to the spyware that passes as a browser is but a byproduct of the immature view that destroyed FF. It will eventually come back to kill those that think you are not allowed to marry your mother, and probably, eventually, to those that think you are allowed to be religious.
> Brendan Eich is [the] creator of the JavaScript programming language. He co-founded the Mozilla project, the Mozilla Foundation and the Mozilla Corporation, and served as the Mozilla Corporation's chief technical officer and briefly, as its chief executive officer. [1]
Yes he was only CEO for 11 days, but he literally co-founded Mozilla so it's not like he was only around for a couple weeks.
A great CEO would have been able to handle the issues he was confronted with.
Just because somebody was ousted in a way you feel was unfair, doesn't make them a great leader.
And $2.1K to a prop 8 supporter [0]
> He backtracked and apologized but was cancelled anyways.
This is lie and you are re-writing history. I can find no such statement from him. In fact all he said was he wanted to "express my sorrow at having caused pain" [1], the classic "I'm sorry your were offended by that" non-apology. He has never stated that his support of Prop 8 was wrong, he side-stepped the whole thing expecting us not to notice.
> It will eventually come back to kill those that think you are not allowed to marry your mother, and probably, eventually, to those that think you are allowed to be religious
What the... no seriously, what the heck? You can believe whatever you want to believe but you don't get to push your religious values onto others which is exactly what Prop 8 did. Please cut out the BS that this is somehow going to lead to outlawing religion.
[0] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/03/new-m...
[1] https://brendaneich.com/2014/03/inclusiveness-at-mozilla/
As outsider it looks like in recent years the most vocal shaming is not of gay or fat but shaming of whoever does not participate in shaming. I really hope that these are not true representatives of LGBT community.
Words are cheap, I don't think it's at all unreasonable to think that some employees might not feel that way or trust him to back up those words with real actions.
> And I'm sure he can believe in whatever he wants - in Christ, Flat Earth and Aliens if he wants.
They sure can and I can choose who I work for. If someone thinks I don't deserve the right to get married (again, people want to gloss over this but he didn't /think/ that, he /thinks/ that) then it's not crazy that I might not want them as my boss and especially at a place like Mozilla that prides themselves on openness and inclusivity. Unlike most companies the employees at Mozilla did feel compelled and safe enough to speak out against their CEO, that doesn't fly at many companies. At a smaller company I worked at I had no protection to call out the president who would always lead the company in prayer before we had a meal even though I'm not religious. I personally think it's encouraging that many gay (and straight) employees did take a stand on this issue.
> As outsider it looks like in recent years the most vocal shaming is not of gay or fat but shaming of whoever does not participate in shaming. I really hope that these are not true representatives of LGBT community.
Then you haven't been looking and your outsiderness shows. Not all of us live in CA and not all of us are protected by labor laws where we do live. I've seen first hand fat shaming and heard plenty of language/jokes/etc that warned me that coming out would be extremely detrimental to my ability to progress and even do my job at some companies. If you truly believe that the backlash to people who are homophobes is worse than the effects of their homophobia then I encourage you reevaluate that stance. Also I'm not sure what you mean by "shaming of whoever does not participate in shaming", the "shaming" was aimed at the person who supported not allowing gay people to marry and the people who defended someone who supported not allowing gay people. You are describing it as if people were mad at other people for not calling Eich out, no, they were mad at the people defending him.
Why don't they speak last years? Do they support how CEO manages company? If not should we believe employees had any say than?
> even though I'm not religious
That's the problem, I'd expect if you was the president these prayers would not have a word. Minority who does not understand other minorities.
> You are describing it as if people were mad at other people for not calling Eich out
No, I am describing people who said not a world of love. Who see only their stance and force it on other people. I by comparison do not care - that's neutral. I am against propaganda and hate speech.
Because of law.
Uber CEO stepped down after a number of scandals.
I do not work at Mozilla. What I see is several people ask to leave another because who he is. And I do not see mirror action "please leave because who you are". This is discrimination. Law has not helped that person. He was honest not to lie about his believes. He left the company.
I do not know how honest current CEO is. I've heard at least some people left the company because of management actions. I know a lot were fired. I think people hacking source code, helping with bug tracking feel uneasy, I do.
[1] Mozilla employees tell Brendan Eich he needs to “step down” [2014] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7482017
I've heard of him peacefully supporting his believes. Is this outlaw? Don't LGBT community do the same? Should LGBT CEOs be fired? Should LGBT employees be fired for what they do?
Even Eich acknowledges he hurt people.[1] He just thought they should trust him anyway.
[1] https://brendaneich.com/2014/03/inclusiveness-at-mozilla/
The way you do not see how behavior was not balanced you hurt me. I expect my words could hurt you. I try my best to avoid it.
Equality is a line on the sand. For some reason you've decided only your line is true. Tradition says another line is true. From that point of view your line is subverting the language. And language got hurt a lot, like some words are bastards and there is no equality for them.
The loss of clarity. I am not native language speaker yet I feel language becoming slippery, that hurts. Entire generations could loss sharp of mind just because some people want to change meaning instead of inventing new words. What's in "marriage" for you? How about "unity"? Why do you want all the baggage of forced marriage, child marriage? What would you do with "father" and "mother", "uncle" and "aunt"? What about that stream of he/she? Get noun genders like many other languages if you care that much.
Language is alive. Current state can be just a swing waiting to turn back into nonsense babbling criticized by Orwell [1]. Invent your own metaphors. We have had grammar nazi, now we've got LGBT nazi. Fear us, lie to us, conform us or mob will lynch. Can you imagine what would happen if Brendan asked LGBT employees to step down? If no, please, do not respond.
[1] http://web.archive.org/web/20200808042031/https://www.orwell...
And that was why it was an issue that he made the donation. Not because he opposed gay marriage (many people did and still do), but because he supported the wholesale slander of thousands of people.
If the Prop 8 campaign had been run differently, his support would not have been an issue.
Nice hyperbole there. What next, "LGBT is just a gateway for the pedophiles/people who want to have sex with/marry their dog"?
I think the writing is on the wall.
Supporting such a change for unrelated political reasons was a mistake, as it always is, because you help serve the hidden interests of others. And the issue that seems important to people (gay marriage in this case) is not even affected in any way by Brendan being sidelined. But you can clearly see the effects that the new leadership - lot more interested in money, power, politics and subterfuge than tech - has had on the product.