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Comment by will4274 | Hacker News Reader

And the result is that Mozilla is a zombie company, filled with LGBT employees who would rather work for a company that is useless than one that has a leader who opposes gay marriage. That's fine for the U25s, but as people get older, they usually want to work for a company that is accomplishing something.

I understand the folks who wanted that and why they wanted that. But it still turned Mozilla and Firefox into walking corpses.

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Eich wasn't a good leader even if you ignore his political views. Brave isn't exactly successful, it's a sham to inject their own ads into pages and to sell a worthless scamcoin.

You're making a stupendously massive, unjustified assumption that Brendan Eich would somehow have prevented Mozilla from being in this position.

They're competing against Apple, Google, and Microsoft simultaneously. It is entirely possible that could have been the best CEO in the world and Firefox could still be in the same exact position right now, or one that is only marginally better.

You've misread me. Eich wouldn't have saved Mozilla. Having many fewer ideological employees who insisted on conformity would have saved Mozilla.

Conformity is not just a problem for politics. Read TFA - these are all conformity problems - Mozilla gets angry at people who disagree with their point of view - whether it is that tabs belong on top or that Eich is an evil abusive person or that Proton is surely better than XUL. A company that better tolerated diversity in their employees would be better set up to tolerate diversity in their users.

> Proton is surely better than XUL

Proton has literally nothing to do with XUL, so if this is something you believe they think, then they'd be right to be annoyed about people with no clue what they're talking about spreading FUD.

That is like complaining that KDE is better than QML files or that GNOME is better than .glade files. Or that Chrome is better than HTML and JavaScript. Utterly nonsensical.

I probably couldn't have saved Mozilla given all their constraints and baggage. But on market share, I am confident I did something right since Mozilla. Brave is heading toward 38M MAU this month while Firefox has lost 50M users since 2018. Brave was small in 2018, and we've shown consistent monthly, steady low-exponential growth since, so much of our growth may have come from Firefox (but we aim to pull from Chrome).

I hope you can get over your anger at me and comment on market share. Excusing Mozilla's woes with "no CEO could have done better" hypotheticals is weak. Such CEO performance should in any event not be rewarded with >$3M/year.

You're making a lot of assumptions about Mozilla's employee base here...

As TFA says, it's about Mozilla's employees. "Thinking you know best" is an attitude that leads you to fire people for out-of-work disagreements, and also remove features that "no one uses", and also divert money from useful products (Firefox) to products that they are "just sure" will be a huge hit (Firefox OS) but then turn out to be total flops.

Mozilla's problem is that its organization (the collective outcome of its employees) is extremely arrogant. Arrogant about technical choices, arrogant about product design choices, arrogant about the way they do PR (including shaming a developer after he died), and arrogant about political/ethical choices as well. That's not to say they aren't ever right, but an organization that approached political topics where Americans are evenly divided with a bit of humility might have an easier time hiring just as an organization that approached product design topic where it's users are evenly divided with a bit of humility might have an easier time finding a good design. Humility helps, and Mozilla has none of it.

Not sure that's especially true. Eich has admitted he had trouble hiring for Brave when he started the company, in large part because of the culture war nonsense.

There's actively woke techies (of which there are quite a few), but then there are also techies who just have a huge distaste for cultural conservatism, and of those there are many.

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