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Mozilla is a case study in how damaging a CEO can be. She is truly a disaster and I have literally zero confidence in the company's success (or its ability to effect its mission) under her leadership.

That comes off as too targeted.

This instance shows a few _general_ problems:

1. Compensation is a function of power, not merit.

Merit is a secondary, indirect factor that _can_ have an effect on power, but it's not a necessary condition.

Power often comes from social currency, negotiation, manipulation, wealth and ownership.

2. Power and responsibility are at best loosely correlated.

Often those in power try excuse their obscene privileges by pointing to responsibility. According to this idea, their decisions are force multipliers and they carry a huge risk.

But reality shows time and time again, that this isn't true outside of the most extreme cases. They accumulate power and wealth to an irresponsible degree and make irresponsible decisions all the time without being held accountable. In fact, many get _rewarded_ instead.

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I want a Mozilla that is the steward of the fastest, most advanced, secure and user respecting browser. I want the best in class dev tools.

I would gladly pay good money for that and I 100% bet that there would be enough people who would too.

What I don't understand is why someone doesn't just, essentially, fork the browser and take over for them. You'd either need someone with enough name recognition that the people tired of Mozilla's incompetence would switch to their fork (and thereby give them the search revenue), or a donation from someone to get them off the ground, but nobody even wants to make the attempt?

There are several Firefox forks of some note: LibreWolf, Palemoon, etc. I think you'll find that maintaining a huge, legacy codebase that supports a rapidly expanding API is significantly more costly than a single engineer's salary.

The point is to ultimately take over the entire thing.

Find some existing pain point that people don't like about Firefox, fix it, make sure people know the better version is available. People switch to it, you get more search revenue and donations, you hire more developers. It's the same way Mozilla operates, but this time you hire competent management so your market share goes up instead of down.

Browsers are a pretty crowded market and they seem to have reached a certain equilibrium of normie-facing features. Unlikely you'll gain traction among regular users who are bagged to use their OS or search vendor's own. Perhaps one could gain Mozilla users, though hard to compete against millions of dollars of development (regardless of whether CEO is taking a chunk or not).

> Browsers are a pretty crowded market and they seem to have reached a certain equilibrium of normie-facing features.

I feel like you could have said the same thing about IE 4.0. It's more like, the incumbents don't care outside of what they need for their own purposes and Mozilla is the one supposed to be doing it but they're not.

Except for the crowded market, but that's not even true now. We've got Firefox and the KHTML lineage and that's about it.

> Unlikely you'll gain traction among regular users who are bagged to use their OS or search vendor's own.

Chrome has 64% market share on desktop despite the proprietors of Edge and Safari having a combined ~90% desktop market share. Firefox itself had 32% market share in 2010. You can get people to switch from the default if they have a reason.

> Perhaps one could gain Mozilla users, though hard to compete against millions of dollars of development (regardless of whether CEO is taking a chunk or not).

The problem is more than the CEO taking too much. They're not actually spending most of the money on making Firefox better.

They should also be spending more of it on marketing, because their funding is directly tied to how many users they have, which keeps going down.

> What I don't understand is why someone doesn't just, essentially, fork the browser and take over for them

1) it costs money, so those doing ot for philosophical reasons may find it daunting

2) Those who'd do it to make money (less ideologically aligned with Mozilla) would rather fork Chromium instead as it has momentum

I have been liking Mozilla for a very long time, and even has thoughts of applying to work there. Now I read about that woman and I’m not so sure any longer. Now I see it all as some kind of politics, when you say so beautiful and shiny words, but in truth your actions are the opposite to all that.

Man, I want to be able to work for the Mozilla of yore too. But it simply just isn't what it was, and over the years its true purpose has become more and more clear.

After their alarming treatment of security researchers documented here [0], I've been doubting whether to continue using Firefox at all. For what it's worth I still do, because I think not using Chrome is a fight worth fighting and that alarming behaviour was just from the VPN team, but if any similar behaviour happens with the Firefox team I'm just going to drop it altogether.

I want Mozilla and Firefox to succeed. I want diversity in browser engines. I want to see the culture change happen. It still can! But the debt created with each passing year and each percentage point of market share lost makes it harder and harder.

[0]: https://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2023/08/03/1

I went all-in a couple of years ago, switching almost all of my computers from macOS to Linux (Fedora Workstation and Arch), and where I still have macOS, I use Firefox, not even having Chrome installed. Now I doubt it's worth it. But what else do we have these days? Safari? (Limited to just one OS.)

I remember these old-days of Linux with other browsers pre-installed. Like Konqueror (I see it's still in development), or others even more niche ones. Cannot even remember their names.

Why wouldn't it be worth it?

- The only non-Chrome browser available across 3 operating systems I use.

- The only mobile browser that supports extensions.

These two alone make it an objectively a better solution for me than Chrome or Safari, regardless of how I feel about any of them. If I was on iOS and didn't run Linux on my personal computer, then Safari might've been a worthy alternative. Since I'm not, Firefox is really the only one that satisfies both of those criteria, no "ideological" reasons necessary.

If those arguments are supposed to be slam dunks, then it's probably worth being pedantic about the second - standard Firefox, as downloaded from app stores, allows fewer than 2 dozen officially vetted Add-ons to be installed. [1]

It's not a great state of affairs. This is speaking as someone who's used Firefox as primary browser for many, many years.

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/search/?promoted=re...

Is there any other way of running full uBO on a phone?

Open a website in Firefox, click on three dots, click on "install", and you have an ad-free version of the app you'd otherwise find in the Play Store.

Just that one extension alone makes Firefox objectively better than Chrome or any of its Android forks. It is a slam dunk. Having all extensions available is a nice cherry on top, but no other desktop extension is as important as uBO.

I switched from iOS to Android so I could use Firefox, but looked for alternatives when their extension support got so bad. Kiwi Browser has been a huge improvement over Firefox for me: supports extensions, fast, frequent updates. I wouldn't recommend Firefox to anyone, but I would recommend Kiwi Browser to everyone. I really wish I could find another open source Chromium-based Android browser that supported extensions though.

It's still worth it because you really don't even have to think about it.

I don't use any Google products/services except when I need to at work. Firefox is perfectly fine for now; I agree that Mozilla's future is concerning but there is absolutely no downside to sticking with Firefox for now.

It's too bad that Mozilla doesn't push for more adoption; the vast majority of users would never know the difference between Firefox and Chrome once they're browsing. It's not like it's an inferior product.

Except for all of those sites that use chrome specific features so the site puts up an alert saying best viewed in chrome

I have never seen a "best viewed in Chrome" alert. Maybe in a tech demo or something like that. Even Google products work fine in Firefox.

A bank I use rewrote all their sites, bigger fonts, much slower and blocks firefox, and it's not just user-agent.

There are a few government website where I live that block Firefox, although those are just checking the user-agent so easy to work around.

And yes I complain all the time about it.

I’ve never seen an alert either, but I’ve seen plenty of sites and pages that only work in Chrome. Just yesterday I was trying to pay a credit card bill and the page kept breaking in Firefox. Out of desperation I tried it in Chrome and it worked.

Do Slack huddles still require Chrome? That was the most recent one I recall bumping into

I've almost exclusively seen them on "luxury" apartment websites, where they're completely ignorable . oh, and tidepool, a diabetes data visualization website, where it is actually required.

It's exceedingly rare and you can almost always discard the warning with no adverse outcome.

Chrome was originally based on Apple WebKit (before they forked it), which was originally based on KHTML, Konqueror's engine.

> Safari? (Limited to just one OS.)

The underlying WebKit engine is the interesting part and is portable, with multiple other browsers using it.

IMHO, Safari has been consistently good for 20 years, and the need for defacto iOS support, and defacto chrome desktop support means the desktop version is generally supported most places.

I tend to use Firefox elsewhere too, primarily because of my disdain/distrust for/of Google and Microsoft. I know the WebKit/Konqueror relationship soured after a few years of Apple giving them massive, untenable patch sets, but haven’t kept up with their development. In the early 2000s it was really impressive what they were doing compared to the Mozilla bohemoth of the day.

I also find it sad that Opera and other implementations are out of the running. I’m sure one day some Blink challenger will arrive, just like some Gecko challenger arrived, just like some IE challenger arrived, but table stakes are so much higher than they were 15 years ago.

> But what else do we have these days? Safari?

Safari in WSL

Edge Linux :P

I just run Degoogled Chromium forks (Cromite/Thorium) these days. Maybe its still Chrome underneath, but if I'm blocking Google Ads and their native browser tracking, at least its still a middle finger to Google's business model.

> Safari in WSL

How? There is no Safari for Linux and never has been, AFAIK.

There was Safari for Windows until 5.x and it was good -- I liked it and used a Windows XP VM just to run it on Linux. Dead and gone now.

You can run Epiphany on WSL and get a Webkit browser that way, but that is not at all what you said.

Sorry I meant in Wine.

If you mean running the 2012 release of Safari 5 under WINE today, I think that using such an old browser is probably a bad plan.

For the entire life of Mozilla, the tech has been fantastic and the leadership... suboptimal. It's always been my greatest frustration with them, they're permanently unable to accept and change from criticism. They simply ignore it or brush it off.

Alarming treatment of security researchers made me think threats. Not communicating is bad. But is it more alarming than how Google handled the libwebp vulnerability for instance?

Do you approve, or even know about your current company’s CEO?

"Other person is bad" is not an excuse, especially when your entire company's position is "we're not those guys".

My point was - the vast majority of people don’t care or even know about their CEO. Why is it suddenly a problem with Mozilla?

OR bad leadership is a problem with a lot of companies, but this thread just happens to be about Mozilla?

That's a bad point for a lot of reasons.

1. It's irrelevant, as I pointed out.

2. It's a false premise. We talk about bad CEOs all the time, especially egregiously bad ones. I saw only just the other day comments on the Yahoo CEO.

That doesn’t track with my experience at all, so it seems like the kind of place where hard numbers would help you make your point.

What a strange reply. Most people on this site do know their CEO and are able and willing to leave jobs when they disagree with their direction. I have done it myself.

I think a better question would be whether I approve or even know about Mozilla's CEO.

I don't know a thing about Mozilla's current CEO, and I don't give a shit about them either.

I still use Firefox and haven't used Chrome in many years.

Firefox users are known for defending it as a moral alternative to Chrome even though currently it is so behind in feature and performance. It makes no sense to defend Firefox if it is just a cash cow for some disconnected-from-reality leeches.

> it is so behind in feature and performance

I would like to see a source on that.

Even if it were actually worse of from a technical standpoint, do you not see the huge value of an independent implementation of the most crucial platform of humanity? Should it really be controlled by a single giga-corp?

I saw the huge value of it when it started and for a long time, now this is just an excuse for the privileged ones milking Mozilla to continue doing so. The market being controlled by a single giga-corp or shared with a paid fake competitor I would prefer the giga-corp so it becomes more obvious that we need to fund a real alternative, not waste money on what Mozilla became.

I use Firefox everywhere, MacOS, windows, iPad iOS. Not sure what features I am missing out on. I don’t use any plugins, mostly happy with performance, no complaints about current feature set regarding tabs. I really don’t have a wishlist of things I’d like to see improved. Faster and less resource consumption would be nice, but not super urgent. What am I missing?

You actually use safari on iPad and iOS, as it only has browser skins with a safari widget. (JIT compilation is a more restricted permission not given to AppStore apps)

I find that Firefox consistently uses less memory. It might be a bit slower on some things, but the slimmer better memory usage is nice.

The performance is fine on desktop, maybe even on par with Chrome. It used to be worse but nowadays I can't see any performance difference between Firefox and Chrome on desktop.

The performance on Android is garbage though :(.

The feature set is worse in some parts, better in others. Better UI customization, container tabs is cool, and some extended APIs for extensions. Meanwhile, Chrome has support for more exotic web APIs (e.g. WebUSB, filesystem access). So it's your choice.

Mozilla has occasionally seemed to have inconsistent values/behavior, for a long time, which has made me nervous. But some of their stuff is still the best starting point for some public interest technology goals. So I keep working with it, and promoting it (though not as strongly as I have in the past).

I've suspected that their mix of people includes (but not limited to):

* many very capable true-believers in their ostensible mission, like we'd expect of Mozilla (though they can't all have perfect morale right now);

* some people who've gone through, or are going through, a rough time, and are trying to use Mozilla to solve problems that they see elsewhere in the world (even if off-mission, but other people are sympathetic and want to help, so it's complicated);

* maybe some true-believers who have to make hard compromises to keep Mozilla alive, somewhat quietly (and maybe it's hard to know which compromises to make, and to not lose the way at some point); and

* people who'd actually much rather have their counterpart roles at a FAANG or other prestitious tech company (and so aren't true-believers in the mission, and will tend to think and act with their true thinking, with impact to vision and decisions, and to leadership of the true-believers).

Maybe some key people span multiple categories.

This isn't a satisfying grand unified theory of all of Mozilla's behavior, and I'm sure there's insiders with better insights.

Thats not all!!!

I was really amazed with this post I found here the other day:

https://lunduke.locals.com/post/4387539/firefox-money-invest...

maybe they should think better where they put their money!!!

If servo ever gets into a decent independent browser I will let go of Firefox the second its released!!!

I do not support a donation-based tech company spending money in other places not related to tech!

Bryan Lunduke is a terrible source for anything. You'd do better ignoring what he has to say and interpreting the source documents yourself.

Lunduke has his issues but I don't actually think there's are massive issues with this post. He clearly has idealistic issues with the political spending but it's hard to disagree that $500k on McKenzie Mack Group is probably not the best way to spend money...

FWIW I think a few of these likely have perfectly reasonable innocent explanations like consultants having a company they don't bother branding rather taking payments personally (hence hard to find specifics on them - they brand themselves rather than their company) and I find it hard to believe that Lunduke didn't consider this possibility, but he asks nothing that doesn't deserve an answer.

What's specifically wrong with this post besides the author?

One example is that he first explains that there are two different Mozillas, the corporation and the foundation, and then proceeds to ignore that for the rest of the peice when it's rhetorically convenient to do so.

He bags on "Mozilla" for claiming that they relied on donations to function on a Foundation donation page, using the total revenue from both orgs as proof that wasn't true, but didn't bother to drill down into the Foundation's income specifically to see if the statement was true in the actual context that it was being made.

Which is a common theme in a lot of his work. If he has an axe to grind (and he clearly does if you're familiar with his comments about Mozilla going back like 5+ years), his journalistic integrity takes a nosedive. Remember when he claimed that Mozilla funded terrorists because they donated to a privacy focused email service, and some antifa group he disliked used that email service? I do.

Mostly, knowing how completely insane he has been on this and similar topics in the past makes me assume that he's probably as least being misleading now.

> One example is that he first explains that there are two different Mozillas, the corporation and the foundation, and then proceeds to ignore that for the rest of the peice when it's rhetorically convenient to do so.

Charitably I'd assume the quoted reason in the article is the reason:

> In fact, the “not-for-profit” and “for-profit” aspects of Mozilla are so tightly intertwined that the auditors report makes a point of calling the collective group of three organizations simply “Mozilla”… and reports on their finances as a single entity.

Wow. If that’s all true then that’s really disconcerting but hardly surprising in this corrupt-to-bone world. Every single choice we have to make boils down to taking the lesser evil.

Interesting, I didn’t know that Baker was paid by the corporation. American 501c3 non-profit law is deeply flawed and, though orgs aren’t allowed to generate profit per se, they can pay their staff salaries as high as they want. If the board consists of the staff’s friends, eventually the staff view their positions as a sinecure and put in the minimum effort necessary to keep their jobs. So, I assumed that what happened with Firefox's director was the same corrupt non-profit thing.

It doesn't seem to be the case that you can pay 501c3 execs exuberant salaries. This site looks to have a more realistic view of those tax rules. [1]

If she's getting that salary she must be able to defend it as reasonable based on comparable salaries in the industry, the income she's able to secure for the company, etc. So if her pay seems like a lot, it's probably because the tech sector overall is paid too much in your opinion.

[1] https://www.501c3.org/nonprofit-executive-compensation/

> So if her pay seems like a lot, it's probably because the tech sector overall is paid too much in your opinion.

tech CEOs ≠ the tech sector...

I’m not sure there is a comparable software industry were you are effectively paid to run your product into the ground.

It’s niche.

Google's business model seems to be the gold standard when it comes to killing products.

Is there any evidence that's a problem that actually happens often, as opposed to just being something you can easily imagine happening?

I've known quite a lot of CEOs, of small and big for-profits and charities too, and anecdotally they've all been some of the hardest working people I know. There's many complaints to make against many CEOs (including some of the ones I've known), often including taking obscene salaries while under-paying workers, or other problematic management decisions, but in my experience laziness just doesn't seem common - in exec levels generally as well as chief ones.

If you want to be lazy and paid well, there are easier jobs with less constant security than being a CEO!

It happens often enough. I don’t want to give exact names, as that would possibly dox me, but 1) as an idealistic young person I worked for a time in the central office of an org where both ordinary staff and management admitted that they had long since lost interest in the mission, but the position was comfortable and required little actual work, and since the board consisted of some pretty acquiescing and clueless people, they were able to ensure regular pay increases. 2) One 501c3 I have been active in, dedicated to a certain hobby, is currently riven by scandal because the board hired a new director who, according to tax filings, gets a big salary for only a few hours of work a week, and this is only one of several business ventures she has going on, and the others look like outright grifts.

I think the biggest mistake they made was not succeeding in convincing edge to use Firefox's backend. It was such an obvious move but Microsoft instead have opted for the embrace technique.

Microsoft wouldn't have anything to gain by forking Firefox, as Chrome was already dominant and Chromium is open source, with more resources going into its development.

Microsoft dropped IExplorer because they were far behind in their implementation and by embracing Chromium they short-circuited the development needed to produce a credible alternative. They had nothing to gain from Firefox and everything to lose, actually.

Never said Microsoft would benefit. I said it was Firefox's failing to convince them of that direction.

Clearly time to switch back to Chrome, where Sundar Pichai made $226 million last year, and fired 12,000 people back in Jan.

Straight up wicked!

I'm absolutely disgusted every time i'm reminded of just how obscene the yearly pay for that class of people, and how often they are just straight up psychopaths.

They rely on nepotistic networks of power, scamming, and straight up financial crime.

Unless you yourself built the company, or pulled some rare actually great scheme to elevate it, everything above 1MM a year is stealing from other peoples wages, especially in orgs like this.

I wonder why people haven't pulled a french revolution when there's countless examples of this type of siphoning everywhere these days.

These people don't give a fuck, they are twofaced, they lie all day long while they take your money and use it to buy wine cellars, yachts and propaganda to keep everyone down - all disguised by buzzwords like "open", "green", "patriotic" or whatever while they tank the great work done non psychopaths.

Maybe getting rid of Brendan Eich wasn’t the best idea.

But isn't 3M the normal SV FAANG salary?

Excluding Netflix as it's irrelevant technology-wise and including Microsoft, the difference is that those companies are offering a wide array of core products (operating systems, developer tools, server hosting, smartphones, etc) which most people on earth consume. They make a lot of money and continue to do so.

On the other hand what is Mozilla offering? A (now) obscure web browser that has run an Google charity for decades. It's painfully obvious that Mozilla isn't playing in the same category.

>On the other hand what is Mozilla offering?

Mozilla makes and manages many other software titles besides Firefox. Rust, NSS, etc. Just think about all the current software built on Rust. That alone is a huge contribution to the tech industry and to society, more indirectly.

Rust hasn’t been managed by Mozilla for a long time. It got spun out years ago and Mozilla laid off all the people working on Servo

Unfortunately Mozilla has little input on Rust these days. They fired nearly everyone working on it.

Rust got kicked out of Mozilla long time ago. The developers were let go.

Mozilla is providing a defense card for Google's lawyers when the anti-thrust sharks circle around..

If you're like, at a very senior level it's not unusual. But that also comes with a level of accountability to stakeholders that Baker demonstrably does not have.

How long do you imagine someone in such a position at a FAANG company would last if they were getting Baker's market share numbers?

How does Sundar or Eich compare?

GOOG stock is up 300% under Sundar.

Yet how much of Sundar's time is spent on Chrome? Then what's that percentage of his compensation? My guess is it's likely millions more than any Mozilla CEO. Google is also under investigation for buying browser defaults and probably should be under investigation for bundling.