I'm still holding out with Firefox despite Mozilla trying very hard to get rid of us (to the point where the thought has struck me more than once if the current CEO of Mozilla is in the pocket of Google).
If at some point the last competing mainstream browser engine is gone I'll probably go for Brave and I might start testing it this week.
"On the same period, Firefox marketshare was down 85%. When asked about her salary she stated "I learned that my pay was about an 80% discount to market. Meaning that competitive roles elsewhere were paying about 5 times as much. That's too big a discount to ask people and their families to commit to."
"By 2020 her salary had risen to over $3 million, while in the same year the Mozilla Corporation had to lay off approximately 250 employees due to shrinking revenues. Baker blamed this on the Coronavirus pandemic."
This lady then goes on and on talking about "social justice".
Also Google deal produces 90% of Mozilla's revenue. I would say Mozilla is really controlled opposition.
Does anyone know who actually controls the direction of the organization? How are the board members chosen/elected? Is there a way for the general public to pick other board members?
Mitchell Baker's blog:
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/author/mitchellmozillacom/
Not a single word about Firefox, just some far-left propaganda about racial justice, empowered women in tech, Trump bad, and so.
At least partly because people like me pay them to. I like the work the Moz foundation does and I'm happy to contribute to it with donations.
Can anyone explain what this actually means? It sounds like she's saying that taking a lower pay by 5x is too much to ask of her, but then "people and their families" doesn't make any sense, because its 1 person and 1 family.
Thats not even getting into how true is may or may not be, or how its still a lot of money overall, even if its not compared to the market overall.
In other words: good luck finding a qualified person to run Mozilla.
Then he got cancelled, and with it was cancelled the dream of having a real platform that can compete with Google. (Brave, with all of its advantages, is still a fork of Chrome and in that way promotes the Chrome monopoly.)
Since then, the new CEO of Mozilla has made herself a lot of money, and she seems perfectly happy to destroy the long term viability of the company for some quick injections of cash that can justify her bonuses.
And Eich single-handedly created the only other viable browser in the market starting from scratch [market wise, not technology wise]. Yet, somehow, people still think this was better than leaving Eich as head of Mozilla.
Per StatCounter, Mozilla's market share decline started in early 2010 (including mobile, late 2010 for desktop only) and Eich was fired (resigned, but that's BS) in early 2014.
Eich was still at Mozilla (not CEO) when Mozilla under-invested in desktop performance, failed to get Firefox OS off the ground, and most likely laid the groundwork to switching to Yahoo.
Mozilla bungled Firefox OS after I left, lost Andreas Gal and most of the top talent, lost Li Gong, while KaiOS based on same code and business plan, with some of the talent, took over and grew to over 200M phones. Blame Mozilla there.
I had nothing to do with the switch to Yahoo. That deal was a gleam in someone else’s eye and I left before it was done.
Last thing: how did not-me leadership do after I left, and I started Brave and grew it to 40M users while Firefox lost over 50M? You may dislike me, but your fantasy blame game cannot excuse Mozilla outcomes lately.
flying high for all eleven of those days or just some of them? :P
> And Eich single-handedly created the only other viable browser in the market starting from scratch [market wise, not technology wise].
This is a bizarre re-writing of the history of Mozilla. Brendan Eich was obviously very important but he definitely wasn't alone, their corporate owner at the start was AOL, then a gigantic company, and he wasn't originally involved in Firefox when it started, it was a rebellious offshoot from the rest of Mozilla's large number of existing products, some dating back to the Netscape days.
Who are you and where were you inside Netscape then? Or are you just lying about me?
Leaving aside the whole "please don't fulminate" thing, you're going to have to be specific about which part is incorrect. Is it just the "he wasn't originally involved in Firefox when it started" word choice and you'd like that amended to "he didn't start Firefox (though was aware of it and soon incorporated it into Mozilla's strategic plans)"?
The righteous demand for truth would be a bit more inspiring if you'd similarly correct the GP for "lying" about you being the one true Mozillian, though.
edit: also, rereading my original post, I'm sorry if the first line reads as mean spirited. The ":P" was meant for the poster's inconsistent recollection of events.
Ask Dave Hyatt, Blake Ross, Ian Hickson, or others if you dare. Unlike you (I have to presume), I have friends who support me and will testify if you bug them and they are willing to answer HN anon hostiles like you.
I never said I was "the one true Mozillian", that's another false dichotomy from you, and a jerk move. You didn't answer my question about the basis for your hot take here. I doubt you were there at Netscape. Did you just make it up, or get it third hand?
But it's not like Brave is ethically or technically better. They use Blink (the same engine as Chrome) and therefore contribute to the mono-culture of the web.[1]
They collect donations on behalf of content creators[2], they created this "Attention Token" based on etherium to replace ads with all the controversies surrounding cryptocurrencies (from the pyramid-scheme to the global-warming topic, I know the latter is not valid with Etherium anymore), …
I think that these days, it's more about choosing the lesser evil as a browser.
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Brave_(web_browse...
Your claim that Brave collected donations on behalf of others is quite misleading. There was a bit of confusing UI in our early tips interface (called 'Payments' at the time). We clearly marked verified creators as such, but gave no special marking for unverified creators (our approach resembled that of Twitter's blue checkmarks).
Regarding the "donations" themselves, we allowed Brave users to direct BAT from our user-growth pool (that is, Brave's own tokens) to creators. If those tokens were not claimed by the intended recipient after 1 year, they (Brave's tokens) would be recycled back into the system. As Wikipedia records, there were major UI/UX changes made about 48 hours later which dramatically improved the feature, IMHO.
The coin itself is one of the few that has a value based on some actual use, at that:
Brave sells adspace, gets paid in Money™. They keep a cut, take the rest and buy BAT with it, give it to users. Users can then tip content creators with the BAT and get some compensation for Brave's part in killing tracking ads.
Many people are idiots who do think that BAT is for them to get rich but like hell it is. Single ad viewers aren't very valuable, they only matter in aggregate, so you'll only ever get pocket money as BAT.
It has Web Torrents, IPFS, Tor, built-in ad blocking, etc.
I just don't understand how someone can be "mad" at a feature that is turned off by default, especially when most browsers ship with literal spyware turned on.
I really think most people don't understand how destructive cryptocurrency is, in multiple ways.
If you don't care about the energy use causing greenhouse gas emissions, how about electronic waste? https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-electronic-waste-monitor/
How about the impact on any service that offers free CPU cycles, such as continuous integration systems used by open source projects? https://drewdevault.com/2021/04/26/Cryptocurrency-is-a-disas...
How about the impact on critical infrastructure such as hospitals due to ransomware? https://www.stephendiehl.com/blog/ransomware.html
Cryptocurrency isn't just a disaster, it's several disasters bundled together. Anyone working with it in any way, anyone who has a stake in cryptocurrency, has been compromised, and can no longer be trusted, just as your neighbor who is trying to sell you on their multilevel marketing scheme can no longer be trusted. (Did they invite you to dinner? Oh, surprise, it's just to sell you on their MLM again.) They are ignoring multiple dire ethical problems as they sell their relationship with you for funny money.
We should all just return to sticks and stones I guess.
No need to wonder. Mozilla gets $450M per year from Google [0], and the Mozilla Chair gets a large chunk [1]:
[0]: https://www.androidheadlines.com/2020/08/mozilla-firefox-goo...
Pushing Pocket (which is nice and could have become a nice source of income from users like me who wants to support the browser) in a dishonest way and as a built in part of Firefox instead of an extension that people could remove, saying there were no ties when there definitely was.
Almost scaring the crap out of a number of the more careful ones of us when they installed a "I, Robot extension" or something without any warning.
Milking the browser part of the system dry to fund its "mission", then laying off browser engineers and the Rust team to save money.
Pretending to be a community when fundraising, but a dictator when making decisions.
Misleading people to think they suppprt Firefox when they donate to the foundation, then sending nothing to the browser and burning it all on "its mission".
This is where they lost me as a donor. Mozilla can't go a month without launching a new idiot project.
Do we know what fraction of their revenue gets spent on Firefox and Rust versus everything else?
The Mozilla Foundation (where your donations go) is not the one launching these new ideas that you hate so much. If you are going to hate something, at least hate the right thing.
The strange thing is that it shouldn't even be a timing thing all that much, a bunch of SaaS apps were already running by 2015 and subscriptions were becoming a more normal thing. Even Office 365 had been a thing for five years at that point, Dropbox and Evernote for eight.
But I definitely remember the hatred, and I was one of the haters back then.
Maybe the difference is that the initial Firefox userbase came more from FOSS people where there's more of a purely altruistic expectation, while I at least approached new browsers more from an IT startup culture angle, wanting to support organizations that do good things more than hanging onto moralisms.
Firefox's market share is 3.6% and on mobile only 0.5%. On many websites, mobile traffic is now at about 70%. Firefox doesn't even show up in dashboards, and is smaller than various Chromium clones and/or regional browsers.
The loss of market share has nothing to do with the browser in itself. Mozilla simply has no reach. Chrome is shipped via Android and on the desktop via services having a billion+ users, like Youtube and Gmail.
Mozilla has no reach or push. It's not an engineering problem.
You can install FF on Android in a second on the Play Store, it's easier than it's ever been on the desktop; but you have to want to install it in the first place. Some of this want can be generated by feature excellence, some by peer pressure; but for a long time now, FF has lagged in producing the former and its leadership has actively sabotaged the community that can provide the latter.
Obviously FF was helped by MS dropping the ball in a way Google has not (yet), but in my opinion what happened then could be done again. Antitrust action is coming for both Apple and Google, Mozilla should be ready to pounce right there and then - but it cannot happen if the leadership does not understand that there is a problem.
This vacuum no longer exists. The competition isn't stagnant, they're speeding away.
Now people don't care, because Mozilla is seen as Just Another Silicon Valley Corp, with overpaid execs doing shady deals to push shit down our throat. At that point, "they are all the same" so might as well use the browser that works more often (Chrome). This can change, but it needs a positive shock.
Casual users don't care about technical differences, but they will care about "install this browser and see no ads nor cookie banners ever". The Enterprise will be happy to pay for this because of the security benefits.
Hell, I'm talking about casual users but the truth is that Mozilla has even managed to alienate power users with stupid & useless UI changes and "features".
This happened at the time when no other browser vendor drove any kind of serious marketing campaign. Even so, Firefox only reached 30% market share at its peak.
Then Chrome shot out, backed by Google's marketing budget, bundled with popular software installers and featured at the "Internet home page": "Still running Firefox? Upgrade to Chrome now!" (quote is approximate, but very close)
At one time Lenovo was bundling Firefox on their computers.
Google and Apple aren't making that same mistake, at least not to that same level. The developers are happy with the tooling, and the fact that ECMAScript and HTML API's keep evolving faster than much of the ecosystem can keep up with. The casual public is happy about a fresh coat of paint, or putting tabs in a different place every few years.
There just isn't the same opportunity due to incumbent vulnerability today.
I have been using Firefox since the Pheonix/Firebird days where you download it and unzipped it to a folder.
I left a few months ago because I just couldn't get the performance where I needed it. I unfortunately had to go to yet-another-Chromium browser and just chose Brave because it seems like it has the right priorities. After installing the same extensions I was using on Firefox it's pretty much the same, it's just faster.
I hate saying that, after two decades of using Firefox. I want another browser engine. We need that competition.
We lost Microsoft. We still have Apple with Safari and I hope Mozilla can hold on with Firefox.
But if Google ever cuts that search funding I don't see a great future.