Mitchell Baker needs to go. I hold her responsible for much of Firefox's slide in use over the years. She keeps pulling in a larger and larger salary for doing less and less.
why was it a goal, I have bo idea
Given that Firefox has kinda lost the browser war it seems obvious that they should be focusing efforts on other things that further that mission besides dumping money into a browser a tiny slice of people want to use.
Aaaand that's why I don't use Firefox.
Chrome blatant spyware that scans your whole pc ever since google had the bright idea of sneaking an "antivirus" into chrome and enabling it by default. Firefox is better that chrome, but there's lots better than firefox.
This is why it is critical to have a meaningful alternative. Developers and end-users are pragmatic - all things being equal they will choose privacy and openness, but not at the expense of performance and capabilities.
This is why it is so perplexing seeing Mozilla just focus on everything except for the one thing that gives them relevance and is actually important.
For non chromium based, librewolf is a clear winner for me. Waterfox is also good. Hardened firefox is also okayish but not ideal.
I use Firefox. I want to use Firefox. That Mozilla insists on pretending it's not the one single worthwhile thing they do doesn't make it easy.
What could possibly be more important at "ensur[ing] the internet is a global public resource, open and accessible to all" than keeping competition and choice in browsers, which forces web technology openness and standards?
We've already seen Google's web integrity moves coming, and we can no doubt expect more of that as they continue to dominate. A world with only Chromium-based browsers is one where Google can implement anything they fancy. To me the importance of that overshadows anything else Mozilla can do (that I can think of at least).
Yes .. and that is the core problem. Their relevance (and income) only comes from Firefox and its market share. But for some reason, they cannot bring themselves to acknowledge this. The income they generated from Firefox, should have been re-invested in Firefox. They should have been organized as an engineering company at the forefront of web technologies.
>Given that Firefox has kinda lost the browser war it seems obvious that they should be focusing efforts on other things that further that mission besides dumping money into a browser a tiny slice of people want to use.
That is their strategy. Right now, Firefox is still the only thing that gives them any sort of relevance.
Like what? Selling you "premium" subscription to glorified bookmarks service? Or reselling Mullvad with Mozilla logo slapped on top of it?
The problem is that Mozilla hasn’t been able to find any product that generates any meaningful revenue.
It makes perfect sense for them to try to be an entity that can exist without their biggest competitor tossing them scraps.
How they should achieve that is certainly up for debate but it’s also clear that their attempts to add monetizable aspects to Firefox isn’t moving the needle much either.
If Google didn't pay for being the default search engine, or tried lowballing, someone else would make a deal instead.
The idea that it's some kind of a proactive antitrust defense is one of the more bizarre ideas that gets repeated on HN.
If you look at the situation in the reverse, what sense does it make? Why would you pay a direct competitor to exist when the amount of money you put in to them is an incredibly large majority of their revenue? Firefox continues to become more irrelevant, and the amount of their revenue they get from Google doesn't really reflect that trend.
I'm not saying the only reason Firefox exists is for Google to point at it. That doesn't mean it isn't a major one. It also is pretty clear to Mozilla because they sure keep trying (and failing) to find other revenue sources
One plausible reason is that Google is not a monolith: the entity paying the money is the Search division, which does not compete with Firefox. Chrome does, but Chrome is not a party to the deal. Search is interested in maximizing their own profit, not in maximizing Chrome's usage share.
> Firefox continues to become more irrelevant, and the amount of their revenue they get from Google doesn't really reflect that trend.
It is a revenue share deal. Firefox gets some specific (agreed) percentage of the search revenue from searches done via the Firefox search bar. If the revenue Firefox gets is stable despite reduced relevance, it is because the revenue is stable.
Relevance doesn't translate to revenue. What matters is the number of users and revenue per user.
This already happened with Yahoo. Mozilla got a ton more money, too.
It was utterly disastrous for them. It turned out that Firefox needs Google as the default more than Google needs them - well, for the stated purposes of the deal, of course.
They should ask (not require) payment for that service. Yes, what they should do is basically to run a Patreon subscription, clearly marked "For the continued development of Firefox".
At a very accessible level of $3 / mo on average, and merely 5M subscribers over the world, they'd have $15M monthly, or $180M a year.
See how Wikimedia Foundation is basically flush with cash, without getting handouts from its competition (haha), zero ads, and asking users to spare $2.75 here and there.
Sure - let them squeeze out the last drop of their one and only cash cow before it becomes utterly irrelevant - instead of investing in it and making it a core pillar of their strategy.
>See how Wikimedia Foundation is basically flush with cash,
Mozilla was (is?) flush with cash. Browser market share and corresponding user eyeballs are immensely valuable. That money isn't going back into Firefox development. This is why it is borderline criminal that they choose to focus on everything except Firefox.
Alternatively, what are they without Firefox?
Now Firefox can't be used to make webapps effectively, the only alternative is to use Electron and fortify Chromium's monopoly.
Electron won not because chromium was more embeddable, it won because it made it easy to pull hundred of MB of nodejs dependencies. Everything else you could do already before with XulRunner...
That's exactly what "more embeddable" is. It made itself easier to turn into Node.js, Electron, etc. I don't think it was a pure coincidence.
Will you name them? Mozilla cut embedding when Gary Kovacs was CEO. XULRunner, Graphene, and Positron were cut when Chris Beard was CEO. GeckoView was not cut.
What are they investing in now?
> Mozilla was (is?) flush with cash.
It's not neutral cash, it's Google's cash. The point is to get off the needle of Google's handouts and become independent. Maybe then there'd be less incentive to slowly drive Firefox towards irrelevance.
> what are they without Firefox?
With a small bit of conspiracy theory, that would be "mission accomplished" :-|
I deeply resent being pushed into subscriptions and you should too.
But it's a recurring revenue what allows you e.g. to hire developers. Sad but true.
Which is to say, at some point they might become annoying enough for Google to not want to pay them anymore, and then Mozilla would cease to exist shortly thereafter.
So with that in mind, Firefox as a dedicated separate browser with its own engine is an albatross around their neck. A source of significant ongoing investment and cost for comparatively little return. For the Mozilla "mission" and the CEO's personal goals and purpose, a simple rebadged chromium fork skinned up with open-web platitudes is a far better idea in the long term.
That would be the worst thing for the web. Blink is objectively bad in the first place, and we need more than just chromiumum skins in the market.
I wish they would finish and move to Servo.
I wish Brave or some of the other Chromium Skins would become Firefox based.
Everyone consolidating down to Blink and Chromium is about the worst thing that could happen to anyone that desires an open Web
This hurts because Firefox should have been that embedded framework powering browsers like Brave and electron apps. But that would have required them to invest in R&D to match performance but also to make their rendering engine easily embeddable (with a corresponding investment in documentation and outreach).
Eh, a CEO is a quasi-public figure. Those weren't his personal business entirely. (Consider a gay employee at Mozilla or partner.) That said, the solution was chastisement and a public apology. Not termination.
Not all gays are in favor of gay marriage. The solution was to let him have his political opinions, and simply agree to disagree, like adults.
Given that he refused to apologize, and that the pesky freedom of association exists, which can lead to problems for Mozilla like the Montgomery Bus Boycott did for the public transit system in Montgomery, it was overall positive for Mozilla that Eich resigned. That doesn't mean that Mitchell is a good CEO. It just means that things would have been worse.
Years ago, Gecko had at least some support for being embedded within native applications.
This was apparently discontinued around 2011, though:
https://web.archive.org/web/20110403052816/http://www.h-onli...
https://web.archive.org/web/20210723183100/https://groups.go...
At that time, there were a number of browsers with native UIs that used Gecko, and software to help embed Gecko in other apps, such as:
Camino: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camino_(web_browser)
K-Meleon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K-Meleon
Galeon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galeon
gtkmozembed: https://web.archive.org/web/20110505053545/http://www.mozill...
JavaXPCOM: https://web.archive.org/web/20100626110814/https://developer...
There was also XULRunner, too:
https://web.archive.org/web/20161201115812/https://developer...
Mozilla and Gecko had a staggering amount of potential back then, but it was squandered away, unfortunately.
Do you mind explaining this statement?
My dream is for them to add a privacy-centric email product, a robust enough office suit (e.g., Google Docs) and then a bundle with those and Relay and their VPN.
We do?
Actually, this is a great analogy. We have grades of gasoline because there is a trade-off between anti-knocking and cost. Monoculturing the grade approximates the diversity of requirements worse than honing in on a few points on the curve. As with browser engines, there is a limit to this diversity since each additional grade imposes novel fixed costs in production, distribution and combustion. But I’d be surprised if something as varied as browser engines optimally solves for a single solution.
Similarly Chromium can be configured in many different way, see chrome://flags. It's open source and has a modular design so even further customization is possible.
Different configurations can make different trade offs to appeal more to certain user's needs.
We have diesel and gasoline at least.
However the key difference ethere is somewhat different: We have independent supply lines, starting at different oil fields, going through different refineries, into different distribution networks, which ensures that there is some competition (even oligopolic is better than plain monopoly) and supply chain attacks on one vendor don't havoc the complete supply chain.
For a practical example: Countries were able to massively reduce the dependance on Russian gas and oil recently.
If Google however decides to havoc chromium development all dependants have trouble.
Because an ongoing antitrust suit against Google search could mean the revenue they get from Firefox is no longer an option.
Having said that, Mitchell was instrumental to several very important things, not all of them in the distant past. She also went years taking annual salary lower than she probably should have been taking. It frankly wouldn't be unreasonable to grant her lifetime emeritus status that comes with a no-strings-attached $1–2 million annual salary to sit on her hands and do nothing. (I do think that $7 million per year is pretty gross, though, especially given the current "state of Mozilla".)
Having said that, $7 million for a CEO who isn't earning it really isn't Mozilla's biggest problem, and it's not even its biggest financial problem. If you really want to be critical of its spending, consider this:
The annual budget for marketing and branding every year falls between $30 and $60 million. Per year. This is Mozilla. Empirically, it may as well not even have a marketing department.
When Chrome really started eating into Firefox marketshare 10+ years ago, one of the things that Mozilla folks used to complain about (a lot) is that Chrome's effective* marketing budget was higher* than Mozilla's total budget—browser development and other software eng. included. The perverse thing is that the same is true of Mozilla: you could take its annual marketing budget, pour it into a different org that works on a different browser, and what you could get out of it is an independent browser development company. What's more is that you could without too much difficulty get that company not only to profitable status in pretty short order (given that kind of budget), but get it to usage share that matches Firefox's own (given how low that is). This would take something like 3, 4, 5 years max, provided you have competent leadership.
That's the sort of profligate spending and a lot of other poor decisionmaking at Mozilla that really needs to be addressed if Mozilla is going to turn around. (I have given up hope that this is ever going to happen. I expect it not to.) People hardly talk about this aspect of the business, however—instead focusing on how much Mitchell is getting paid, which, to reiterate, is not in any sense the biggest problem that Mozilla is facing.
-- former Mozillian
Sorry, what? She was underpaid for a few years, so should get a couple mil forever now? Can you at least list out the "several important things?"
Before someone here says that they would be the CEO for less money than Mitchell. Can you get an appointment with the vice president of search at Google and Microsoft? Could you call their bosses and get though?
I'm sorry? My entire life I've been told that CEOs make 1000x as much money as me for golfing and writing a couple emails a week because they're genius Ubermenschen whose illuminating strategic insights add orders of magnitude more value than my measly toil, but you're telling me it's actually because other executives are willing to take cold calls from them? That's why?
Is your claim that this other browser company would ship an open source browser that is a) gpu-accelerated, b) cross-platform, and c) render Youtube, Tiktok, Reddit, bank websites et al. correctly, and be used by millions of people?