I think the general critique is: the performance of a CEO should be tied somehow to the performance of the company, yet year after year, the company performs worse while CEO compensation goes up.
Then put the money saved towards allocating tens more top, full-time, aligned engineers to projects.
When I see leaders of a non-profit personally drawing more than is necessary to lead a comfortable life, I see a conflict between the mission and personal enrichment.
(There's the argument that non-profits need money, and supposedly you can't get good people to generate money except by hiring people who are personally money-motivated. But the evidence I see is that it looks like money and power potential attracts self-interested careerists, and you get people building fiefdoms, and incestuous relationships among them. Get an honest, smart, true-believer board, and anyone who tried to draw millions of dollars in compensation, or assemble an org chart of careerist execs, would get a regretful, "Sorry, this isn't that kind of 'non-profit' vehicle for wealthy executive lifestyles and careerists, and we don't seem to have alignment", as they gently dropkick the misaligned people out the door.)
That doesn't translate. A believer in freedom and openness should be compensated more than a counterpart in the private sector so they can work even harder for the causes. They may not be in it for the money, but they shouldn't be punished financially because of their belief, as surely there are no lack of lucrative opportunities in for-profit organizations for them.
Not paying them millions is only "punished financially" if being rich well beyond comfortable is more important to them than the mission of the non-profit.
This "doesn't translate" only to people who have zero business leading non-profits. (Incidentally, capping compensation is an awesome cut filter, to eliminate people who are poorly aligned with the mission.)
Sure, there are classes of people who see something like non-profit CEO as their angle for wealth and status to which they feel entitled, when they can't get the for-profit CEO job they'd prefer. Not only are they innately misaligned with the mission, but they are also completely out of touch with the vast bulk of the people who non-profits typically are supposed serve. Keep them away from non-profits.
The list of major charities with much larger and more complex interests that Mozilla, yet lower executive pay, is quite long. Here is a sample: https://www.charitywatch.org/nonprofit-compensation-packages...
She's massively overpaid, not only when you consider her performance but particularly so.
Browsers just duking it out on features and ease of use is not how the browser market works—Google can and does leverage their dominance in non-browser markets to boost their browser, and Mozilla is not going to raise their browser share against tactics like that if they simply focus really hard on making a better browser.
Tying it to a more functional goal like successful diversification of revenue makes much more sense (even if you disagree with how they did it in this particular case).
Firefox is by many metrics a better browser than Chrome. I don't like everything about it, I think some parts of it are mismanaged, there are some parts that are underdeveloped and some parts that are straight-up frustrating. And do I get upset when teams get cut or features slashed? Yeah, of course.
But it's not lack of engineering that is making Firefox lose. It's antitrust. It genuinely is that simple.
You could replace the CEO with pretty much anyone on the planet and the situation would remain the same. The reason why Firefox is losing has nothing to do with features or engineering at this point, Firefox is already arguably better engineered than Chrome is.
Meanwhile, diversifying revenue is addressing one of the biggest criticisms people have of Firefox, that it is getting too much of its funding from Google. But does that help? No, because people have an axe to grind.
I genuinely think that Mozilla will have to go out of business before she will step down.