Is a browser so expensive to maintain? $400m/year?
Mozilla is competing for the same talent as Google, Microsoft, and Apple. Browsers are the most important software at those companies because most other software runs on them.
The Hacker News community doesn’t seem to appreciate the work Mozilla has done to establish web standards. I’ve experienced what it’s like to be stuck with IE6 and IE11 for a decade, holding back web projects at work. Firefox broke through that inertia and made Google, Amazon, Netflix and other companies possible. Essentially, Firefox made the whole “startup” wave Hacker News rides on possible (though much of that momentum transferred to the App Stores).
Not exactly the same. Many are willing to accept less pay, to work on meaningful open source and not for advertisement.
"In 2018 she received a total of $2,458,350 in compensation from Mozilla, which represents a 400% payrise since 2008.[14] 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." "
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitchell_Baker#Mozilla_Foundat...
And she said that while laying off 250 people, imposing a 100% discount on them and their families.
Edit: I think we may be starting to figure this out. Google is slowly starting to charge for more services. Even Facebook is looking to introduce paid products (Quest). People are also learning from Elon Musk how much wealth can be generated by working on major human problems like transport, energy, and space access.
But here's another perspective: FF led an audience towards Google's web of shit. It would've been entirely possible for Moz to have said no to the latest fad; then, by the power of having a dominating browser in the field, the web could've been preserved as a medium for relatively simple text-mostly information. I, for one, am interested in individual info and personal sites rather than thousands of nice-looking content farms with tracking.
I'm particularly puzzled by those CSS apologists always painting a naive creationist story about how much we progressed etc etc. Yet, realistically, CSS is so bad, like consider-your-career-choices bad, that I have a hard time accepting this as a result of so much energy of so many intelligent people. CSS will go down as this generation of web "developers" retire, since it's an irrational, overcomplicated piece of shit only understandable in discourse as it has happened. Why did I put "developers" in quotes? Because the web was a vision for easy good-enough self-publishing for layman, not an "industry".
Saying this as someone who's a sucker for design, and sucks at it, too.
We should also keep in mind that the use cases have completely and wildly changed.
That being said, it does seem like we are overdue for a clean slate.
They can't compare.
This person alone receives around 1% of the budget.
> For 2019, the Mozilla Foundation received $15,858,258 per a trademark license agreement with Mozilla Corporation, allowing us to reinvest earnings from our products into advocacy and grant making that grow the internet health movement.