> In 2018 she received a total of $2,458,350 in compensation from Mozilla, which represents a 400% payrise since 2008. 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." [0]
I'm a firefox user for over 10 years. I think I'm now convinced there is no future, I'll have to start to adapt to another browser now. I'll give Vivaldi a try.
Its going to sound harsh, but they are loosing market share to browsers that didn't have to invent a new language to write a browser in.
So, getting rid of those people was probably a positive impact for firefox since they were mostly just yak shaving instead of actually improving the end product. The users don't care if you wrote it in C++ or fortran as long as it performs well, doesn't eat all their ram, or create giant backdoors.
Letting "the lets rewrite our core product in $COOL_TECH_OF_MONTH" people run a product is a sure sign of something that will fail if its not already. Lets invent our own computer language to do it is even worse.
I agree they probably didn't need to invent rust: that was an happy accident, the kind of things that happen when you have really smart people around. If they had a money making accident we would be talking about something else, but I guess they would need a different type of culture for that to happen.
This is not how you run a company and it shows. It's impressive Mozilla is still around if you ask me - but I suspect it has to do with Google, M$ needing someone easily controllable to keep the anti monopoly government people away from browsers.
Firefox is owned by the Mozilla foundation, the corp is only there to help develop it since having developers work directly for the foundation is apparently complicated. Non-profit foundations don't need to find ways to make money with their core product and they should not try to - instead they can seek funding elsewhere, for example from donations and government grants.
But it did push them over the edge IMO. They're behaving like a corporation now, with a CEO pulling as much money as they can, too much PR etc. Through the Google deal they have become what they were fighting. But they're not very good at it, hence the low marketshare.
In the short term, yes. In the long term however, this strategy could have been crucial. And the long term is precisely where open source software usually has the upper hand.
Firefox keeps losing on technical merit because it is fundamentally impossible to keep up with Webkit and Blink, which are all backed by massive corporations and are throwing money at the engineering and project resources to actually move things forward.
Although they are experimenting with Rust, it doesn't seem they will ever adopt it.
Using memory safe languages is a big step towards this goal.
Seat of the pants, I would say getting something like rust on par with g++/clang code generation, and 3rd party tools is probably in the same ballpark engineering wise as actually maintaining the browser.
And if you spend a little time looking at firefox, there is/was a lot of low hanging fruit. I've mentioned elsewhere the difficultly building it, but even more than that, is that pretty much every single version of gcc that came out for a while would break firefox in some fundamental ways. And overwhelmingly these breaks were caused by crappy C++ programming where people were doing things that were known not to be syntactically correct but no one bothered to fix them. Then frequently instead of actually fixing them they did things like switch from building with an old GCC to a newer clang because it threw fewer errors. Then they claimed that the result was "faster" than gcc, despite the fact they were comparing an old version of GCC with a newer version clang. When the work was done to actually get it to build with gcc, it turned out to be even faster. (not that gcc is better than clang, only that ideally a project like firefox would compile cleanly with a wide range of compilers). Said compiler warnings are frequently valid, and analyzing them at least to know if its true is a worthwhile code quality exercise.
Or XUL wasn’t packaged as cross platform GUI framework.
And then of course the Firefox mobile fiasco.
My guess is that the engineering and management don’t interact. Two different companies within the same company, no coherent vision.
Switch apps? Tabs get reloaded when you're back.
Lock & unlock phone with Firefox in focus? Tabs get reloaded
Switch tabs in Firefox? Tabs get reloaded...
I wish I was just ranting, but all of the above happens with a single active tab loaded...
Here's the issue itself on GitHub: https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues/12731
The one thing I really miss in FF mobile is the opposite.. Pull to refresh or another gesture that accomplishes that. The current two tap option is too slow.
Web site users don't care if a site's written with NodeJS or assembly; but that would make a huge difference to bugginess, development speed, feature set, etc.
Firefox is getting bogged-down in some areas due to its C++ codebase; especially trying to introduce concurrency (in a way which doesn't break everything, or cause unforeseen security implications, which is often the case in C/C++)
In place of "We're listening", users that complained got a "Works fine on my machine" bundled with a few rude words in places like Reddit. Not the core teams fault, of course.
Someone with more time can probably set up a scientific test of the performance claim even today - set up a bunch of Selenium tests to open JS-heavy sites in multiple tabs on older versions of FF upto current version using BrowserStack or SauceLabs.
I mean to this day (and i just tossed off a firefox build yesterday to see if most of what I was saying is still true), the firefox maintainers can't even be bothered to fix the tens of thousands of warnings that appear when built certain ways. That is a really low bar to cross with a C++ project, and they haven't even bothered. I've worked on projects where we had a recommended compiler, but we always spent some time assuring that the project appeared to work with the latest gcc/icc/whatever, because at some point those newer compilers would become the defaults, and also because they frequently pointed out issues in the code. Its just a cheap way to fix undefined behavior bugs.
So, I think the only answer to that is yes, that long stretch before they dropped the rust code was wasted time/effort.
Focusing on the mainstream user at this point will not help as they're already so far gone they don't even remember the name Firefox anymore.
They should focus first on making it and excellent browser for the users that still care. Then word of mouth will bring it back to the mainstream as it did the first time.
It's more that they're removing not-Chromey bits, not adding the Chromey bits, and removing Firefoxy bits like search keywords via bookmarks and the like.
Seems silly, I see no valid reason to switch browsers. What technical or functional limitations are you running into that didnt exist earlier?
If Firefox goes the rest of the way down the tubes, I'll try Edge before I go Vivaldi again.
Any replacement CEO is going to be thinking, I'm trying to beat Google, Apple and Microsoft on a tiny budget and if I dont succeed people will blame me personally for it all, complain about me online and claim that no one else should employ me. That's a gamble for anyone coming in who has better options and so attacks on the CEO for being a failure only help to create a moat and increase her bargaining power.
Maybe Brendan Eich can come back? Do a Steve Jobs, take back the project and make it into what it was meant to be, primus inter pares among browsers.
And if we want to get conspiratorial, If she thinks her main job is getting the most money out of the Google deal, then Google would be more than happy to pretend shes doing great in the negotiations and pay 5m extra.
The sooner Mozilla loses its dev culture and talent the more power Google has.
> By 2020, her salary had risen to over $3 million. In the same year the Mozilla Corporation laid off approximately 250 employees due to shrinking revenues. Baker blamed this on the Coronavirus pandemic.
Yikes, makes me also consider just switching off it again
Brave is the most non-google chromium variant, kind of like a Firefox based on chromium, and safari is still a good browser on Mac
I don't trust Vivaldi either to be honest
I can't do much worse than losing 85% market share.
If you pay peanuts, you get monkeys.
Paying more doesn't get rid of the risk, so yes do the version that has risk but without the bonfire of cash.
Japanese CEO salaries in general seem to be below USD1m on average.
I'm genuinely curious: Do you not see how insane it is that you believe this is low? Earning even a tenth of that would be stratospherically high.
The passion they need is a lot harder.
This is not arrogance. This is simply the pay of a CEO, regardless of their performance.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/31/ibm-was-worst-performing-lar...
[2] https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2020-01-31/ginni-rome...
[3] https://www.silicon.co.uk/workspace/ibm-ginni-rometty-20m-33...
There are hundreds of thousands of individuals capable of doing these jobs making nowhere near as much - plenty of them would do it better.
The difference between 0.2 million and 2 million for a board of directors is literally a rounding error.
CEOs of smaller companies typically don't command that level of compensation, and when they do, it's generally because the company performed well and their pay was heavily perforamnce-based.
You have a social responsibility to take care of the people working below you, which as a CEO is everyone. If you fire them and give yourself a raise, perhaps it is not arrogance but it definitely is gross negligence. No amount of "this is simply the market value" corporate doublespeak is going to change the fact that doing so takes you further and further from being an actual human being. Perhaps this is okay with you, but I think it should be questioned and mocked.
What market value? Firefox's market share is down 85%. It's hard to believe there's not someone cheaper and more capable available. This sort of extravagant CEO pay might be excusable if the company is actually booming, but in this case, it really looks like it's just plain greed: loot the company while running it into the ground.
Then go work somewhere else!
If you can make 5 times as much somewhere else, and that's all you care about, quit Mozilla and go work somewhere else. Her attitude and greed are unbelievably infuriating.
> Baker was trained as a lawyer. She coordinates business and policy issues.
I don't know of any lawyers running a successful tech company.
PS: By success I don't just mean economic...
It used to be a 50% haircut every ~10 years, now its closer to a 50% haircut every ~5 years.
Also: as part of my job I can check prices in a major sector of the retail industry as far back as 2015, and I absolutely do not see such major inflation as you're arguing. Inflation is bad right now, but hasn't been that way for several decades.
Completely disagree.
>Also: as part of my job I can check prices in a major sector of the retail industry
That is probably the problem.
>clothes and software
Clothes = imported from countries we export inflation to. Software = ~0 cost to duplicate.
Inflation doesnt hit the whole population equally or at the same time, and it doesnt hit all products uniformly.
The items/services we all want/need, that are scarce, and can't be imported from our foreign "slaves", are where you will find it concentrated. Healthcare, housing, university, etc...
My earlier observation 50%/10y, 50%/5y is closer to reality for the vast majority of the population.
How much did housing go up in price in the last 10-12 years (300%? 400%?)?
Remember when house prices went up 20-30% in a 6 month period of 2021? Not inflation?
How is that a problem? Let's say I work in the grocery industry. Everyone has to buy groceries at some point, whether wealthy or impoverished, and for those on lower incomes groceries are a fairly major share of total consumption. I can check those prices and they haven't gone up nearly as much as you're saying. Ipso facto you're just wrong.
> Remember when house prices went up 20-30% in a 6 month period of 2021? Not inflation?
Inflation is more than just home prices, and just because something is more expensive than it used to be doesn't mean that inflation is the culprit. Supply and demand are still factors. Regardless, rent is accounted for in the CPI (though not assets like home purchases).
Got anything besides home prices? Car prices haven't gone up that much, at least. I can hardly think of anything besides houses and GPUs that (a) impact me and (b) have gone up fairly drastically in price. (Though around here, the suburbs of greater Cincinnati, home prices haven't generally doubled in ten years; my home's valuation is maybe 15% higher than it was when I bought it five years ago.)
>Inflation is more than just home prices
>The items/services we all want/need, that are scarce, and can't be imported from our foreign "slaves", are where you will find it concentrated. Healthcare, housing, university, etc...
It seems you didnt read anything I wrote since you avoided my earlier point and are still ignorantly talking about retail goods that are, for the most part, subsidized, imported from countries we export inflation to, or experience heavy shrinkflation.
I also mentioned inflation is not evenly distributed. Different areas/segments of the population experience different rates. The Ohio housing market may not have been hit as hard, probably parts of Michigan fall in that same boat (these are not desirable markets), but most houses did 3-4x in the past 12 years.
I will move on... Everyone will understand the hurdle rate is higher than 7.5% after enough time has elapsed (just like they did with the BS 2.5% CPI number we used to use) and the standard of living decline is significant enough that it cant be ignored anymore. The investor class generally understands the new yearly hurdle rate is 20%-30% (must earn atleast ~120% of last year's return just to break even). Saylor and a few others makes this point often...
I'll leave those that disagree or aren't interested in learning to figure this out the harder way.
That's not how this country will ever work but it's a nice fantasy.