Firefox usage is down 85% despite Mozilla's top exec pay going up (2020) 400% | Hacker News Reader

Firefox usage is down 85% despite Mozilla's top exec pay going up (2020) 400%

calpaterson.com

All thanks to Google keeping Mozilla on eternal life support and accounting for more than 80% of their revenue. The CEO is also suggested they wouldn't solely rely on Google's money 14 years ago. [0] Here we are today still bending over to Google's spyware demands for having them as the default search engine on Firefox.

Mozilla are essentially irrelevant and are a complete embarrassment to their mission statement on privacy that even Brave seems to be a better alternative to Firefox for this.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20120105090543/https://www.compu...

Baker and friends pulling out the money and Mozilla employees turning the NGO into just another bargaining chip in the US culture war seems more like a symptom of the rot that set in years earlier. Since the late 2010s there seems to be a distinctive lack of vision at Mozilla.

Building a browser engine from scratch is akin to building an operating system. Maybe the new Firefox will be 95% effective vs. an only 92% effective Chrome but I don't see how this effort advances the state of the web in terms of freedom and user choice meaningfully. Like others here I switched to Brave a few years ago. I think their strategy of building interesting things on top of Chrome is smarter. Imagine if Brave where the prevalent browser and I could send anybody an .onion or ipfs:// link at it would Just Work (TM). Same with their BAT token. Instead of restlessly shitting on the idea, let's imagine it does work and we have an alternative to ads for monetising content. I find this way more exciting than parallel rendering and Rust.

For a Phoenix and later Firebird user like me it's sad to see what happened to Mozilla, but the only constant is change.

Edit: grammar

I would think that FF lost a lot of users to brave and similar alternatives because they have the same target demographic.

Execs probably earn so much because of their connections, but I fail to see how this would improve adaptation. Mozilla is in a difficult position although I never believed in star management. A manager that isn't an idiot is important, but... Overall management pay is vastly exaggerated to a degree of severe perversion of course. But here Mozilla is sadly not a special case.

I believe FF would be a good solution even for corporate environments, but it would be very hard to advertise it to IT in a Windows landscape that can just use the new Edge.

> I would think that FF lost a lot of users to brave and similar alternatives because they have the same target demographic.

Yeah. I really want to promote Firefox more because I think it would be a good thing for the Internet to have multiple capable browser engines that all have some traction in the marketplace, but IMO Mozilla has become too concerned about culture war bullshit to be a super-effective player among the smaller group of people that really care about that stuff.

And it's a shame because I dislike that so many browsers out there are essentially held captive by decisions that are ultimately made by Google. For example, Manifest Version 3 is likely going to have some real problems for ad-blocking extensions on any Chromium based browser in the long-term.

https://www.ghostery.com/blog/manifest-v3-the-ghostery-persp...

Sure, some browsers like Brave will be able to keep their core in-built blocking features, but anything extension related that potentially goes against Google's interests is always going to be a concern for any smaller browser.

Yeah, especially since the arguments for improved security are extremely questionable.

Compared to websites, malicious browser extensions are a small problem and I do believe making it harder for adblockers is part of Googles motivation.

I've been a firefox supporter for so long, but it feels like mozilla isn't interested in it anymore. I hear a lot about brave but the crypto/ad stuff really turns me off

I still use Firefox privately, and it's still an excellent browser as far as I can tell, but it's disappointing to see that Mozilla seems to be more about making their CEO a quick buck than about growing Firefox.

> One of the most popular and most intuitive ways to evaluate an NGO is to judge how much of their spending is on their programme of works (or "mission") and how much is on other things, like administration and fundraising. If you give money to a charity for feeding people in the third world you hope that most of the money you give them goes on food - and not, for example, on company cars for head office staff.

This is popular because it seems simple. Take one number and judge an entire organization by it. Don’t even look at growth or impact.

> Mozilla looks bad when considered in this light. Fully 30% of all expenditure goes on administration.

This whole reference is very simplistic, especially since it’s closer to the beginning of the article. It would’ve made sense after explaining more about what’s happened with Firefox on features, what it has offered to standards, etc.

I’m not happy with Firefox losing market share or with the layoffs that happened. Monetization by Mozilla Corporation is nowhere close to what Google pays it to be a preferred default search engine, and not addressing that is a huge issue.

What I don’t agree with is starting the article with a few basic points and going on a tangent on sites like Charity Navigator, which focus on providing easy lists based on one simple number like administrative expenses. I stopped reading the article after these paragraphs.

> This is popular because it seems simple. Take one number and judge an entire organization by it.

For NGOs receiving donations, it's an incredibly useful number because it shows how much of your donation actually ends up at the purpose you're donating for. Maybe it's less relevant for Mozilla because their income comes mostly from Google.

> Don’t even look at growth or impact.

Growth doesn't make Mozilla look very good either.

This post is in 145th position despite have 36 points in 4 hours, any reasons why it should be shadow downdovted like this ?

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