Beside the moral issues, this undermines all the reason I would update altogether. Now every time there is a update I have to wonder if I will have Disney shit shoved down my throat?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30608022 ("Why am I seeing this adorable [sic] red panda?", 44 comments)
The direct, targeted fix is to disable the "what's new" page after updates:
(in about:config)
browser.startup.homepage_override.mstone = "ignore"
https://kb.mozillazine.org/Startup.homepage_override_url
The substantive parts of update release notes are still accessible here -- no ads here, so far:
Unlike other ads, it's not invading my privacy and it's not really in my way.
They're not tracking me or selling my data or doing anything creepy.
Firefox continues to be the ONLY major browser run by a non-profit, and the ONLY major browser not a shim over chromium. It's still a great product.
If this is what they have to do to keep the lights on, then cool, whatever. How many of y'all who use Firefox donate or buy their VPN anyways.
They don't want to be purely funded by Google's whims. Them being independent would, if anything, be better for their real mission of being privacy focused.
Because they "gave in to cancel culture" WRT Brendan Eich and his political views. That's at least 90% of it.
Sucks that (if these comments are real and representative) people really care more about that than their fundamental right to privacy.
Probably because there is a simple answer which will help, if not eliminate a large chunk of their financial issues which is accept donations for Firefox.
It's better than Chrome, by a lot, but I'd trust Mozilla over Apple any day.
I saw it on Linux; we weren't spared. However, I think the ad was region-locked to North America.
(Also I can confirm Widevine DRM was disabled, so that's not a targeting variable).
> How many of y'all who use Firefox donate or buy their VPN anyways.
A couple of caveats to note. Donating on the Mozilla site funds Mozilla Foundation, which is the non-profit, and is not the same as Mozilla Corporation (which is the maker of Firefox). AFAIK, the donations to Mozilla Foundation cannot be used to fund Firefox developers/development (at least not directly). As for Mozilla VPN, it’s available only in a few countries.
If MoCo (Mozilla Corporation) would just sell Firefox themes or digital stickers, I’d gladly buy those to support it (anything that’s legal and allows it to take money from people). Being on the outside, I haven’t understand why Mozilla isn’t looking at and exploiting as many revenue streams as possible to reduce the dependence on the massive search engine relationship with Google.
https://web.archive.org/web/20220308222503/https://www.mozil...
Regardless, there's precedent for "we'll have to imagine that Mozilla engineers have spent their time on working to promote a Disney movie just because it's cool and it is available on Disney+."
> Mozilla wasn't paid for the "Mr. Robot" tie-in, [Mozilla's chief marketing officer] Kaykas-Wolff said. "We've enjoyed a growing partnership with the show and the show's audience," he said.
https://www.cnet.com/news/privacy/mozilla-backpedals-after-m...
Mozilla employs, what, over 700 people to constantly maintain a Browser that is not financed through ad-tech and tracking (Google) or skimming developer revenue (Apple). Having a tab open with a Disney collaboration, that includes some colorful themes, every couple months seems fair to me.
I mean this does not interfere with your day to day browsing, there is no ad-tracking and the partnering with Disney does not create a conflict of interest in terms of Firefox's privacy features.
To be clear, this is not my favorite thing in the world and I agree, these campaigns should not happen monthly, but I'm okay with it for the reasons above :)
wut?
https://frankhecker.com/2020/08/13/mozillas-uncertain-future | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24166385
> The Mozilla Corporation’s customers are large corporations like Google that pay for things that will help them make money
Maybe if they had managed to sneak some product placement for Firefox into the movie it would balance things out and make it seem better.
In all seriousness, I don't like it either, but I wish the question wasn't so unnecessarily hostile ("Disney shit") toward a Pixar movie that I and my young daughter found quite delightful. That kinda makes me want to defend Mozilla.
Mozilla isn't completely perfect, but they are very good, and getting more independent funding seems like a positive thing to me.
Don't we have posts on here every other day about getting over perfectionism and how its bad?
As a FF desktop user, I honestly have not seen any full page ads for Turning Red. Haven't noticed full page ads for anything (yet) to be honest.
How many ads do they have to sell to earn only her salary. It’s mindboggling [1]. And she thinks she is „underpaid“.
Browser share down to 3.45% and they only live off their Google Money for the default search engine. If that drys up ...
Is the CEO of Mozilla "worth" $3M/year? I don't know. But it's not clear why Mozilla's apparent executive valuation of her is held to a separate standard from every other shmuck in this industry.
Because they’re not a real company. The same rules don’t apply to Mozilla.
Google's paying them, but it's not for Firefox to be successful—Google is paying for antitrust cover. To them, Firefox should ideally lumber along with enough market share for them to be considered a "competitor" but not enough to take too much away from Chrome.
Considering Baker's reducing expenses while keeping the status quo: I'd say she deserves that raise from Google's perspective.
Neither of these is the definition of a company in any country on our planet.
You can dislike her executive compensation (I don't think anybody should be paid that much), but there's nothing illegitimate or particularly unusual about it.
Isn't it? Mozilla is pretty widely regarded as the last defense against complete browser monopoly.
The Mozilla Foundation is a California non-profit corporation exempt from Federal income taxation under IRC 501(c)(3).
Whether or not Mozilla is the "last defense" is immaterial to how much she's paid, as is our Peeping Tom evaluations. If the Mozilla board thinks she's worth that much, then she's worth that much. If you have reasons to doubt their stewardship in ways that would run afoul of the IRS, you should report them.
[1]: https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/charitable-organiz...
I linked her personal justification below, but to summarize: relative to her professional cohort, Baker is substantially underpaid. Not doing layoffs would have meant offering pay cuts to a significant number of highly qualified engineers, causing attrition. Instead of doing things the slow and painful way, she did them the fast and painful way. If I was in her position and had the knowledge I currently do (i.e., that just about anyone working at Mozilla can find employment elsewhere easily), I would probably have done the same thing.
None of this, however, means that I think CEOs should be paid as much as they are.
[1]: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/documents/bylaws/
Might you try sharing that again? :)
If any other schmuck in the industry does as much as a poor job as Baker has done, we'll be in the right by kvetching about them.
And they even want me to donate money to them.
1. Your average software developer employee just simply doesn’t have that much control over their own salary. I believe I may have greater than average control over my own salary, and that doesn’t even compare to the kind of control that high level executives of a company have over their own salaries. Because of this, developers lack the conflict of interest that a CEO has.
2. Though developers may be “overpaid,” especially in the more extreme ends, and other employees may be underpaid, the difference between developers and CEOs is not even in the same wheelhouse. It’s not just a mere discrepancy that can be explained with market rates alone. Data I’ve heard repeated paints a picture that shows CEOs pulling far away of basically everybody, even considering other executive wages being quite high too:
> In 2020, the ratio of CEO-to-typical-worker compensation was 351-to-1 under the realized measure of CEO pay; that is up from 307-to-1 in 2019 and a big increase from 21-to-1 in 1965 and 61-to-1 in 1989.
(Source: https://www.epi.org/publication/ceo-pay-in-2020/)
I don’t think the question is whether the CEO is 351 times more important than the average employee below them. I think the question is, how is it even possible that it’s worth it, in terms of outcomes, to have a CEO make this much more than the average employee? Do you actually think that, if accountability were at least as tied to salary as it was for other employees, it would have been possible for things to get this disparate?
Even if it was actually leading to better outcomes for companies, this kind of income inequality is definitely leading to worse outcomes for society.
No disagreement here. I think CEOs should be paid no more than 10 times their lowest paid employee, and that should be made enforceable by law.
Using 150k as a random number[1], Baker is overpaid by roughly a factor of two based on my "ideal" scheme. But I have the sneaking suspicion that HN would gripe even if she took a 50% pay cut.
[1]: https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Mozilla-Salaries-E19129.htm
And from there it's very easy to ask why Mozilla's CEO keeps getting raises (hell, and hasn't been fired yet) while their main product keeps doing worse and worse by really the only metric that matters for this type of product.
Certainly that is the metric you seem to be focusing on, but maybe the board rewarded her for something else, like reducing debt or improving cash flow or some other metric that might be also very important to Mozilla's long term survival.
Specifically which project are you referring to and why do you think their success would transfer to Mozilla?
Does this mean that she's actually undercompensated? No. $3M/year is an obscene amount of money to pay anyone. But her public position is factually correct[1]: she could go somewhere else and make significantly more money, and it's up to the Mozilla board to determine whether that's a bluff or not.
With all due respect, that statement elicits a massive DOUBT reaction. It's the sort of thing that the C class spouts to justify their backscratching, but it's hardly a fact for most of them - and for Baker in particular, at this point.
I wonder how much they'll need to pay her replacement.
The whole system of boards and execs is broken, generally speaking, but at MozCorp it looks more broken than average.
Not because she is a woman, because she is doing a terrible job.
Mozilla will stay afloat so Google can tell their “we have no browser monopoly” story.
Mozilla gets 1.2 BILLION$ for 3 years. Mind blowing ... and they handle a product as a side project. Unbelievable.
Are you aware that she became CEO in December 2019? The previous walked away presumably as he knew that layoffs were coming and people would be after his job, making it one of Baker's first acts as CEO.
I get why people are unhappy with her, but most of the problems predate her becoming CEO and the executive budget overall has shrunk as nobody has replaced her ole position to my knowledge.
I don’t know the answer to this question, but i know that Mozilla is a bleeding company, that does not need 10 different nice to have projects, but a strong core product.
I have the feeling that these men and women just milking Mozilla dry. Firefox lost nearly ALL of their market share and I think the salary should be tied to goals. Real goals.
For others wondering, that figure is across all platforms. For Desktop, they're around 7.5% and for mobile it's 0.5%.
Mac: Safari
Windows: Tough choice. Firefox still probably the best, despite everything.
Like DRM’d media.
It's not possible to express how unusual and miserable a modern ad looks, from the point of view of someone not acclimatized to them.
Firefox is basically adware at this point.
It pops up once and never again.
"Brave is one of the safest browsers on the market today."
I use Brave as my daily driver, and to hear that it's "cryptoscam" just doesn't align with my experience. You can totally turn off or ignore the crypto stuff if you want. Unlike the majority of the web today which is full of so much tracking, intrusions and scams it seems strange to pass off Brave for offering something different to that.
I don't think the BAT tipping ecosystem fits that pattern: Brave is a normal ad agency that sells adspace for normal money. Second, the BAT they give to users isn't new mints by Brave, it's bought from the open market with a cut from Brave's normal money ad revenue. This means there's always a buyer for the coin, and the sums offered are linked to the normal economy. Means the creators who get tipped BAT can reliably cash it out.
They are controlled opposition at best, and are completely ideologically possessed and controlled by politics at this point.
I think it behooves people to be precise and explicit when they accuse a large non-profit (with a wholly owned corporate subsidiary) of being "controlled opposition."
This might just be me showing my ignorance, but for the common person to be able to stand a chance of writing a full browser that people want to use, we will have to create something new that overlays or subverts the WWW portion of the internet. The current system of RFC's and even knowing which ones we acknowledge and which ones we silently dont, is so byzantine that someone born today could spend the next 30 years of their life trying and they won't be able to make a browser and keep up with web standards and expectations. This here is a big reason why only big and wasteful tech juggernauts can do this.
Im old enough to remember the birth of the WWW, and I never thought things would or even could get this good and bad at the same time. This web needs to be taken out behind the barn so we can think about something new, and maybe this time protect it at all costs.
Lynx does not have any of that
If you encounter a website that does not work in Lynx, complain to the website admin
Cool, let me go submit 5,000,000 complaints to a few megacorporations real quick
When you consider browser engines, you can use Blink (Chrome, Edge, Brave, Opera), WebKit (right now, Safari and Blink only?), or Gecko (Firefox, LibreWolf, others?). I would suggest just supporting anything other than Blink if you want competition. Firefox isn't the only alternative. At least with WebKit there's someone who isn't Google who wants to make changes that won't fill their engine with ads.
It also applies to Chromium forks like ungoogled-chromium.
What now? I'm already using Safari but it's not cross-platform.
Only half-serious. If web developers hadn't totally drunk the Goog-Aid and went with 100% JS SPAs when forms and static content would do, we would certainly have more usable browsers and sites.
This is existentially disappointing.
I’m not sure what ethical profit looks like for FireFox, but as a 15-20-year user I’m finally out.
Those values are insane. “Chinese culture love”!??? What the actual fuck.
This is infuriating.
Billionaires of SV please fund a Philanthropic project for a web browser. Like Jeff Bezos funding Washington Post, we desperately need a window into the internet. The days are numbered.
Turning Red is the first Pixar film solo-directed by a Chinese-Canadian woman Domee Shi (who also made the Academy Award winning Bao short). The film was inspired by her childhood in Toronto, hence the many Canadian references, and is told from a culturally and gender specific lens. It's a 2nd generation immigrant story.
Remember, there are tons of Chinese people out there who have little or nothing to do with the authoritarian Chinese state. I should know. I'm one of them.
This knee-jerk bias against anything Chinese is xenophobic and racist.
I am gonna push back on you for this absolutely baseless accusation of racism. This seems to be a pattern to gain moral superiority over others. Find ways to accuse others of racism/bigotry, what have you.
Little do you know, I've lived in Chengdu for 6 months and still have many friends. So kindly go f yourself.
This is not some attempt on my part to gain any kind of moral superiority but to speak out against what is clearly a baseless insinuation, associating a Pixar film made by a Chinese Canadian director with the CCP when there is no clear link.
Asian Americans are currently targeted with verbal and physical violence because of pervasive undifferentiated narratives the likes of which you espouse.
Before you insinuate anything in the future, step back and think -- is this true? Did I bother to investigate further? You made insinuations based on vague associations and no evidence at all. Insinuations are deadly because you don't even have to worry about something being true or not because once you've planted an idea, it's there.
Comments like yours create seeds for narratives that get planted and reinforced. You might not care, but many of us have to live with those narratives thrust upon us.
My guess is that this is due to Disney’s questionable relationship with Chinese Communist Party.
It's not even opt-in, it's opt-out. We're not Mozilla's customer any more at this point, the customer is the one buying the ad space. Gives a new meaning to "Just Browsing" the web when your browser itself is becoming more and more like a mall.