With revenue declining, Mozilla CEO gets a 20% raise
theregister.com
theregister.com
Mozilla is two different entities - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38819284 - Dec 2023 (25 comments)
Mozilla 2023 annual report: CEO pay skyrockets, Firefox market share nosedives - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38795308 - Dec 2023 (331 comments)
Mozilla is entirely unimaginative, but is self sustaining as long as it keeps its advertisers. Mozilla is a shambling corpse that will continue to shuffle forward until it is no longer favorable for Google to buy search placement.
That’s the reason firefox will never improve.
They have ignored user requests every iteration.
Check the play store you can see their score is gamed. Most reviews are 1-3 stars and all have the same complaints for years.
It's been a steady downward trend since google started financing them to have someone to point at and say 'see we have competition, no monopoly here!'.
They removed almost all addons and are barley (like 10+ years later!) bringing some of them back.
Pocket spam. Collections. The list is ridiculous and getting to Google levels bad.
I especially love the part where she laid off hella employees and gave herself a 1/5 raise.
I would say proof that Firefox got objectively better is https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/releases/
At this point, even Windows itself includes antimalware software in the form of Windows Defender. Browsers should take note.
Firefox is in fact better in terms of privacy than rivals with higher market share, the home page of firefox addons store has uBlock Origin with "Recommended" label placed by Mozilla team.
It is important to recognize that the web is also used by grandma and grandpa who won't master any tech more recent than fax and installing uBlock origin by default will harm FF market share even more as usability will be impacted.
Safari works around that nicely - if you refresh a page it prompts you whether you want to reduce privacy protections (assuming you are refreshing because of something broken). Either way, the functionality can always be optional so people who are impacted can disable blocking.
> will harm FF market share even more as usability will be impacted.
The only people who currently use FF are those who also use uBlock Origin - if you don't there is really no point using it compared to Chrome.
Firefox marketshare will improve because there will finally be an actual selling point for it.
Mozilla's statistics say under 4%.[1][2]
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-origin...
Either way my point stands - what's the selling point of using Firefox over Chrome for a non-technical user (who doesn't know what add-ons are and this won't install any)? uBlock Origin bundled by default would be an instant selling point.
Say "install this browser for instant ad-free browsing" and you've sold it to all non-technical users. Say "install this browser, dismiss 5 nag screens, navigate to the add-on store, find ublock origin, install it, tick 'enable in private browsing'" and your non-technical users would've ran away before you even finished that sentence.
The Enterprise pays a fortune for often dubious security products - the browser, being at the forefront of many security threats would be a great place to put some security features alongside things like centralized management, DLP, etc. Use that to subsidize the free version of the browser.
> timely repairs and improvements to advertising blocks
Volunteers that maintain uBlock Origin lists do that just fine already, but if they really wanted to fund it, they could just redirect the donations they currently piss away to the maintainers of filter lists and use that money for something useful.
> Solve this and perhaps they’ll make you the next CEO.
The reason this isn't "solved" isn't because it's some hard problem, it's because converting into a company making an actual paid product requires taking on risk, responsibility and actually doing something. Freeloading off the Google money while puffing hot air every so often about how much they care about privacy requires much less risk and effort, so why change anything?
Google and Microsoft, and to some extent Apple, already offer an enterprise-capable browser for $0; so I don’t agree that enterprise support is a viable funding model here. I can’t find any traces remaining of the Enterprise paid support plan that the Firefox team launched in 2019, so I suspect they reached the same conclusion and shut it down.
> use that money for something useful.
Such as?
> converting into a company making an actual paid product
To clarify, do you mean converting the Firefox browser into shareware/IAP, or free-trial/paywalled, or do you mean another product in the style of Pocket or Relay; or..?
The fact that Firefox usability and perfromance is improving, better addons support for android, unique useful features like containers and easy to configure network proxy/DoH/web protection levels, etc.. is already a big improvment.
How do people expect the market share to grow if the user isn't #1 priority.
Perhaps Google will not continue to fund Mozilla and she will have to go looking for another Sugar Daddy.
In 2024, please switch to Firefox https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38806270
Everybody knows that Linux started with low funding a tiny userbase that had to accept the inconvenience over the year to avoid the project death, now Linux is irreplaceable technology that we rely on more than most popular software, it wouldn't reach that point if users quickly got annoyed and gave up on freedom of software.
The fact that the ceo of Mozilla gets paid handsomely doesn’t inconvenience me, but it makes it harder for me to justify donating to or supporting them like I would for haiku.
But the big money maker is Google's revenue share.
In August of the same year the Mozilla Corporation laid off approximately 250 employees due to shrinking revenues, After previously laying off roughly 70 in January (prior to the pandemic). B
Baker blamed this on the COVID-19 pandemic, despite revenue rising to record highs in 2019, and market share shrinking.
So, as you say, if one shifts the perspective, to look at Google, using what's pocket change to them to keep a competitor alive, in order to keep them out of anti-trust and continue to let them dictate how the web is shaped, it suddenly makes sense.
This is the plague that is currently overtaking all large corporations, and I can't help but think the workers are going to revolt, and they're going to do it soon.
The UAW strike seemed very tame compared to what is to come.
Of course the system is rigged but they don't know that.
I'm not 100% convinced UBI is viable or even desirable, but I know that companies really don't want people to be free to quit jobs they hate and companies don't want workers being secure and comfortable while they look for a new job that better meets their needs.
In the case of Mozilla? Everyone can leave for months and nothing would look amiss - the occasional marketing puff piece about privacy can be ChatGPT'd and critical browser issues outsourced to contractors.
Not saying Mozilla is in an easy position, but everyone could do her job without significantly influencing business results.
Because the supply is constrained by these companies the CEO pay increases well beyond market rates, as each CEO will earn X% more than the one before it by faking competitiveness, then the former CEOs will complain (as the Mozilla CEO did here) about relative market rates of other CEOs, even though the market rates are set by the cartel that proposed them in the first place.
The board not wanting to rock the boat for the shareholders will generally agree to this extortion for optics, and round and round the merry go round goes.
There is no constrained supply of people willing to be the Mozilla CEO for, say, $2M/year.
This is so frustrating.
They get paid what they get paid and that is by definition market rates.
The supply constraint is not due to recruitment companies somehow cornering the CEO market - the very idea is absurd.
It’s because large companies need someone with incredibly deep and broad experience to do a job that has a 50/50 chance of going well, a 100% chance of being blamed when things go wrong, a 1% of getting due credit when it’s due, and a 100% chance of copping flak from legions of armchair critics like you.
Why do Realtors earn 2.5% of a house they sell? Because sellers are nervous it'll cost them more not to pay.
That's debatable.
Where I live realtors are seen as slimy as used car salesmen. It's an open secret that realtors will steer their clients away from low commission or independently listed properties.
Also, shareholders should be free to pay whatever they want, the same as homeowners.
If you tried to tell me what rate I should be paying my plumber based on some moral reasoning I’d nod and ignore you, and as a shareholder I likely don’t want your opinion either.
I figure legal responsibility is about $1-2M in pay right there.
The CEO also plays a critical role (with the CFO) in finalizing the earnings reports, with severe penalties for mistakes. They make strategic decisions that many employees aren't even aware of, that can have $billion+ repercussions for the company.
Taken all together, it's not completely surprising that a CEO of a trillion dollar company makes $10M/year (or receives stock of that value).
No, it's not truly meritocratic. I keep coming back to a lesson I was taught as a kid: life's not fair, but you can use your brain to make it a little less unfair.
There's no reason for the compensation between executives and workers to be so great. It's rigged and you can see it right here in this article.
Oh right, only the engineers were charged in that one.
Also luckily for David, it was a 6 month suspended sentence. Meaning that he would have never had to serve any time that was overturned on appeal.
I mean, sure. a trillion dollar company, 10m dollar salary, that's not even 1 hundredth of a percent of the company.
Apparently the Mozilla foundation is around 2 billion in revenue a year. But how is that worth 70% of the above salary (I won't count stocks, it makes sense that if a company makes more money, shareholders make more money)? $we're already well beyond retirement levels of funding in a few years and they double it in 2 years.
The board of directors is willing to pay more for someone who will first, hopefully avoid such screw-ups and second, be able to deal with them if they happen.
On the other hand if the CEO leaves money on the table and doesn't negotiate hard because he's afraid randos on the Internet will call him "greedy" and subsequently profits fall and the company has to lay off thousands of people, nobody is going to pat him on the back and commend him on being "not greedy" and "respectable".
Or to take a more concrete example, if Elon Musk decided to quit Tesla in a huff and focus entirely on X and stop dealing with the annoyance of public markets, the stock's would probably lose $75 bln in value overnight. If your legal goal is to maximize the company's value and it takes $500 mln pay per year to keep that from loss happening, it seems like it's probably a good deal to just pay the $500. As another example, Steve Jobs received hundreds of millions in stock options, and that was probably an excellent deal for Apple, though they probably could've hired someone cheaper.
I agree there are many cases where a more expensive CEO is actually worse. But I think it is very very easy to imagine cases where it makes a ton of sense to pay a large amount for an expensive CEO if they are the right person for the job and will add 10x more value than their pay.
This isn't a fair comparison to most companies as Musk has made Tesla largely about him, can you think of many other companies where if the CEO left a 75 billion dollar stock drop would happen?
CEOs actually are generally responsible for creating a lot of value, but most importantly, enabling a lot of value to be created by many others. When there is a causal link from you to a lot of created value, you tend to be paid proportionally well.
To believe that value is only actually created by average workers, and not the organizers of this work such as leaders or business owners, is quite short sighted. There are strong ideologies pushing this belief which I hope is not influencing your thought process.
Yes, there are bad CEOs out there, but they are not generally all bad.
most of the Fortune 500 don't seem to have much good to talk about. Let alone what justifies 8 figure compensation.
I guess we'll never truly know, but it does make one wonder how much change it'd be for those to be run by CEOs for a tenth of the compensation (which mind you, is still 7 figures).
I have never seen a system that was actually based on skill or effort be described as meritocratic. Likewise I have never seen a system described as meritocratic that was actually based on skill or effort.
The way meritocratic is usually used is to describe systems that could appear to be based on skill or effort at the surface, but is not actually if you look just a little deeper.
If senior engineers in the valley are making $500K TC, directors might clear $1M and VP’s $2M.
Above that it goes bonkers where you’ll see an SVP make $10M and a CEO $20M+.
Why do senior engineers make $500K? Well, they may be 2-5X more efficient than a junior, or you can look at how much value they are bringing in to the company.
With regards to accepting that, culture plays a big role. Governments effectively groom people into accepting the status quo, some stronger than others. They build on features of the human psyche that otherwise support this too, for example, in many cultures it's taboo to question elders, and also, many cultures observe different classes of people, where the different classes wield different levels of power by default. If you're interested in the psychology of this, I would suggest to look into how societies are organized over the recorded history of humankind.
The charisma and image of the well-off leaders also plays a part in making people accept, and support their advantage. This is also something that people are much cleverer about than in the past - the art that is currently called public relations. The idea here is that whatever people perceive, must make sense in their mind, somehow. If it makes sense, then it's accepted much easier, and if it doesn't, it's bothersome and makes people think about a story where it makes sense after all. So, one aspect of public relations is and making certain things observable, others obscured, and crafting a narrative about the observable things. This game is "history written by victors", but a bit backwards - whoever sells the most compelling narrative, comes out as the victor.
At the end of the day, the question is "what are you going to do about it?". Certain things just are because we're not doing anything about it. Doing about it is a ton of effort, might not be possible, might not worth it at all because the effort outweighs the results, might not worth it because the side effects are greater than the potential gains. Or maybe people care about other things. And because all of these concerns exist in all humans, those in power can exploit these too, in order to keep or further their power.
Page 12 of https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/1/14/Wikim...
https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/search?q=endowment&pa...
Unfortunately Mozilla never had benevolent dictator to begin with and now there is not a single person who can call the bullshit loud enough.
"Chief product officer Steve Teixeira notes in the report the rapid growth of AI and social networks, although warns that Mozilla.social is unlikely to move beyond the experimentation phase in 2024. He says that Mozilla would be "exploring ways to better integrate advertising while adhering to our focus on privacy and choice," including web browsing."
(but am I wrong, downvoters? :))) what the hell bone do you have to pick with a fact? "As well as Teixeira's comments regarding advertising, Baker notes: "We need to be faster in prototyping, launching, learning, and iterating ... This requires rich data, and so we will be moving in that direction, but in a very Mozilla way."")
The way I understand it they upset the free speech abolutist, but to be honest I don't really care, I like the roadmap and what the devs have been doing to firefox lately, I also don't mind being in the minority. I like it here, i'm not one of the ones that's going to switch browsers unless some major shoe drops that slows firefox to a crawl.
I firmly believe we need a strong nonprofit guiding standards and leading innovation in cross-platform technology, but is Mozilla still filling those shoes?
What truly innovative things have Mozilla done lately? They have been playing catch-up/follow-the-leader with various consumer-focused things like federated social networks, VPNs, VR, etc. Firefox is treading water but still slowly sinking every year. Firefox is great browser - it's not a technical reason why Mozilla is "losing" - it's cultural/hype/marketing/something else entirely. Bugzilla hasn't had a major release in 5+ years and has lost the battle of bug tracking to things like GitHub Issues. Thunderbird is back in active development and has had good improvements but has a very niche market. There's Rust, but Rust has it's own foundation now and extends far beyond Mozilla.
The MDN web docs are great, but wasn't that one of the teams hit hardest by "COVID Layoffs" in 2020?
I think it is - Firefox no longer has any selling points now that the competition has not only caught up but overtaken it. There are easy features they can add to make the browser appealing out-of-the-box to non-technical users but those would require courage and taking on some actual risk.
Every other product is useless - we don't need yet another VPN, or yet another password manager. Both those markets are already saturated by both shitty and good products, there is nothing Mozilla can bring to the table.
Massive success to the org. Right after the rebranding from Phoenix, things took off. Super BD effort to get standardization going. Huge community management effort to get all sorts of random people installing Firefox everywhere.
This is the biggest success story ever. And this is why everyone has to always be growing. It's not enough to do what you set out to do. You have to always grow. If you're a for-profit corp this is your partners or shareholders who care. If you're a non-profit it's the general public.
But whoever that person is, the moment you stop growing you're in trouble. Oh they'll say "unchecked growth is cancer" and so on but what they want is to say that while nonetheless you grow.
Growth is survival. Even reaching your objective (as a non-profit) is death.
Honestly, it seems like the problem is that the engineers let the business people in.
Konqueror's KHTML engine was actually more feature-complete for much of the time but there was no organization backing it until Safari based early Webkit on it. And Apple didn't back KHTML so much as just base Webkit on it. Epiphany was a Webkit-based fully open browser but didn't actually get as popular as Firefox.
The whole Firefox thing was a huge success. When they turned Mozilla (the browser) into this it was a feat. And then to coordinate the complex efforts to beat IE. It was amazing stuff.
It was a really well-done job by Mozilla.
sure, when there's only 2 standards (down from 3 10 years ago. Probably down from 5 20 years ago), it's very easy to be compliant to the standards of 2.
But yeah, sad reality. What I want isn't necessarily what is most profitable. I'm tired of having to care about how much money my tools make to justify/chastise their ability to function.
This is a debiliating disease of the software industry. People need software mostly as predictable tools, not some mystery magic entity that shapeshifts with each new profit incentive. To make it better, you can just ask them.
Nothing has changed other than declining usage and revenue. But give the CEO another bonus over poor user usage, shrinking market share and destroying the browser, all done by themselves and now are being kept on life support by Google.
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20120105090543/https://www.compu...
Browser engines are not a money making business (if it was Microsoft would still be in the game)
I don't think they actually ever expected any of these ideas to work. In the meantime you can't even donate to firefox if you want to, only to the foundation.
I mean, I give money to KDE every month and they manage to build a whole desktop environment. Why can't I do that with Mozilla? Oh wait, how much money does KDE waste on a CEO?
It might not make millions, but I'd donate in a heartbeat if I knew that my money would actually go to Firefox and not to one of the dozens of random side quests that Mozilla keeps picking up.
I've head that there are tax problems with that. So maybe there needs to be a paid "Firefox Pro" or whatever?
I mean, isn't that the problem? They made 500m this quarter so a <1m donation box won't shift things. Hell, it may not even pay for more than a few devs given the compensation I've seen.
There simply isn't enough goodwill to maintain the living of even a single person operation without some sort of incentive (which ceases to be a "donation", but a subscription with a fancy coat).
If I was aiming to set up a company like Mozilla, I'd want all earnings to go into such a fund, and all costs to come out of buffered investment returns... Yes, significantly slows down the rate you can spend, but it also significantly increases the odds of longevity and independence.
Of course that presumes the goal is to build the organization, not to get personally rich off it.
Is there a board that actually looked at their performance and decided a raise was appropriate? Or is it due to some term in her contract?
Obviously the board sets ceo compensation. That is why boards exist.
Which in this case they're not doing.
I'm pretty sure they are doing, it's just that there is a big disconnect behind Mozilla's actual objectives and their claimed objective.
Mozilla's actual objective is to provide an antitrust shield to Google by pretending to develop a good browser and get paid handsomely for this service.
Mozilla's objective is not to actually develop a good browser - that's not only an unnecessary expense but would also bite the hand that feeds.
I cannot find any benefit of the articles bashing Mozilla with hot claims - that aren't necessarily false but used in misleading contexts - other than Google, Microsoft and Apple.
I have used firefox for years because I believe in FOSS and privacy despite the shrinking market share and the poor addons market.
I am not going to leave Firefox after the recent and significant improvments in the weakness points for some conspiracy theories based on completely normal facts
Of course we still have to use and prefer and advocate FF because there is no other serious option.
And this leadership problem is a real problem.
That said, FF mobile is still far from parity with its old version from 3 years ago when it did its big break, so it becomes hard to sympathize when a CEO salary doubles and I'm arguably getting a worse experience despite that.
When they attempt to diversify their revenue with VPN, email tokenization, etc, (things not tied to Google revenue) … HN crowd ridicules them for not being focused on gaining browser share.
When it comes to Firefox, it seems few have even given it a fair try anytime recently.
(How can they gain share when HN doesn’t give them a try)
Irony is, HN loves Rust. And Rust was created at Mozilla.
Note: I have no ties to Mozilla and am a Safari user.
There are some HNers (myself included) who hate the direction that Mozilla is going under Baker. I want Mozilla to give me an option to put money into a bucket that will directly pay for browser development, the way that restaurants have a tip jar that goes directly to the employees. I want that because I use Firefox as a daily driver and want it to survive, and the way Mozilla spends the donations they get to the org as a whole isn't helpful to that end.
Separately, there are other HNers who still think of Firefox as the slow dinosaur that Chrome unseated. These HNers likely don't have a strong opinion about Mitchell Baker because they have no skin in the game.
And even more separately there are other HNers who love Rust. That Rust originally came from Mozilla may or may not even matter to these HNers. They probably do remember the day that Mitchell Baker laid off the whole Rust team, though.
What the hell does Firefox bring to the table? Sure they’re open source and “competition” to Google but come on… surely we can all see those aren’t features, they aren’t products, they’re bullet points.
It's everything that Firefox should be and misleadingly claims to be. Unlike Firefox, Orion actually has ad blocking by default.
Here's many of them: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7525198
We are where we are today because of people on this very forum. Especially ironic when it's the more lefty types that have helped kill the non-profit open source browser and many are themselves solely using the for-profit Chrome ran by a capitalistic advertising panopticon. Great job, much appreciated /s
Unless Eich was the one and only possible savior of Mozilla (as Steve Jobs arguably was to 1999's Apple - it does happen), these are two very different things.
You don't fold your principles just because you risk rocking the boat. And Mozilla is a pretty progressive organisation. You can't have a figurehead that isn't aligned with that.
If I were working at Mozilla it wouldn't affect how I'd act in the future though. Yes this turned out very poorly. But you can't predict these things. And principles are worthwhile to speak out for. And we don't even know if he'd have done a better job (though this is admittedly not hard)
Eich wouldn't have made a change to prop 8, no. But the culture at and image of Mozilla would have changed.
You projecting your own or others' politics onto it raises an acute historical question: if I'm a co-founder but not "progressive", yet I was not driven out at founding or for 16+ years, then what changed, when?
No "society" cop-out answers. Mozilla was a global project from early days and we made it a point not to litmus-test politics or religion as conditions for taking on any role, while we were growing.
I have my own answers, but I'm interested in yours.
While Firefox market share and revenue is declining, Eich was able to a 200 person browser company from the ground up (based on Chromium). Huge difference between CEO caliber here.
I think we'd all be better off if those efforts would've been combined to making a strong 3rd browser contender, instead of Chrome, Safari, and the peanuts sprinkled across Firefox and Brave separately.
If I'd stayed at Mozilla, turned around Firefox, spawned other revenue lines, then of course the salary would be high -- it would have to be very high, without any equity upside. This remains a problem for comp at Mozilla from when I was there: we can't compete with Big Tech on RSUs, or even on cash, so we overpay a bit and have a "mission-based" ethos that, over time, tolerated politicking and goldbricking.
Don't forget this phenomenal Baker quote from a few years ago:
>In 2018 she received a total of $2,458,350 in compensation from Mozilla, which represents a 400% payrise since 2008. 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." [0]
I wonder whether Eich manages to turn around the Firefox decline if he hadn't been given the boot. It started under him, but his latest venture (Brave) is growing steadily - 65 million monthly active users [1].
Mozilla needs to be at the very heart of the free an open web. They need to have the biggest Mastodon instance that you can actually depend on. They need to have the biggest Matrix server. They need to have the biggest free blogging platform. They need to hire a few full time community managers to spearhead putting together a clear set of community guidelines and organizing volunteer moderators. People all the way up the chain, accountability and responsiveness all the way up the chain. The anti-big tech. They could easily afford this, too. If it's free and open on the internet, Mozilla needs to be there. But instead they take half-hearted stabs, abandon them, let Firefox linger, and pay their CEO millions upon millions of dollars.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitchell_Baker#Negative_salary...
Mitchell Baker is a bloody genius, this is a woman who heads both the foundation and the corporation to make literally several millions while ostensibly claiming to champion the right to freedom of information and communications.
What she is doing is unethical and suspect as hell, but so long as she can keep getting away with it she is absolutely not a moron.
As the old saying goes: If it's stupid but it works, it ain't stupid.
Note that "works" here does not mean furthering Mozilla's mission, it means securing a fat paycheck off her fiefdom.
“Most of the revenue of Mozilla Corporation comes from Google (81% in 2022)” [0]
But with that said, I am also willing to at least respect the fact someone is making an absolute killing of a living for next to nothing. Think about it: $7,000,000.00 for doing next to nothing at bare minimum. Most people would kill for that kind of income to work ratio.
Mitchell Baker is a woman who figured out how to game the system she's in and win big (bigly?), I can and will respect that even if I otherwise vehemently detest her. The first step to addressing a problem is figuring out the problem.
I'm not the absolute moral authority but I believe a great deal of what's keeping us back from being absolutely great as "humanity" has to do with those parasites and their negative influence.
that's called the human condition. You would've done the exact same, when put in the same situation in all likelihood.
People are inherently greedy, and selfish. There's no changing it, as this is an evolutionary advantage. Those altruists would've died out, since they would've given way to those who are greedier (otherwise, how are they altruists?).
they produce benefit to those that paid - namely in this case, google.
I can't speak toward her specifically in all honesty. I would need to research it further. But a policy of reward/praising all the con-men (using that phrase loosely) in America is a bad policy.
It’s horrible destructive behavior if you ask me but why is she allowed to do it in the first place?
Fire this Fox and go back to Mozilla minus One. If nothing else, the movie rights to this would make more sense than their current direction.
People hate BAT for reasons, but the idea of controlling the ad stream at the software level is a winning one to me. I can't think of any other platform where ads were given such free reign. Could you imagine watching TV, then a commercial comes on that either a) crashes the tv, or b) changes the channel multiple times so you can't get back, or c) installs malware onto the tv, or d) clones itself 20 times over the content you were watching, or any other fun stuff web ads have been known to do.
What would Eich have done as CEO to turn around Firefox that he wasn’t able to do as CTO for nine years? That said, Brave has innovated and had some VC-fueled success. I just don’t see him as the Firefox savior some people do.
https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share#yearly-2009-...
As a lieutenant, I don't get to just go do whatever. I advise, I provide options, I make calls that don't to up to the CEO level.
I pick tech stacks, I pick how to do the things we decide to do. But the final call on what we are doing is the captain's. Especially about the fundamental direction like how to acquire users, markets we target, and how to acquire revenue.
I know a few HN haters fixate on me as cause of all problems at Mozilla, but if they were playing fair, they'd give me some credit for growing Brave to ~60M MAU or (better metric) 24.5M DAU. A lot of these users came from Firefox. So I can grow a browser, I've done it three times at least. But elsewhere I've written that Mozilla wouldn't have let me do what was needed, in my speculative opinion.
Brave doesn't advertise itself in the User-Agent: header, so statcounter lumps us in with Chrome.
What you cherry-pick as my CTO role from 2005-2014, as if I were some new hire in 2005 who had nothing to do with Mozilla before then or from inception, nevertheless covers a lot of Firefox growth -- we peaked in 2010 or 2011.
So blaming me for decline vs. Chrome is grossly unfair, but I sense an irrational animus on your part.
The advertising industry will never take that as an option anyway. They're addicted to big data now. They have to sell a hell of a lot of less-annoying non-data-mined BAT ads to compensate, or do with less profit. They're not going to be on board.
And these tokens don't really solve the issue. People hate ads. Trading their ads for slightly less annoying ones when they can do without them altogether is not going to work. How many of those 65M brave users actually opt in to the BAT ads?
It's just a non-starter and will always be that. Sorry. It's just another fairytale spun to dig into VC money pools.
Ad revenue adds so much juice to the profit margins, just look at Netflix/amazon prime/etc. None of them could resist the ad tier.
I think about this a lot because I dislike the ad tech industry and would like to leave it (even though I currently work in it) but I honestly don’t know what the solution is besides ads.
The only thing that will do that is a legal framework that forbids tracking so untracked ads are worth more because they no longer have to compete with the tracked ones. After all there will be no retargeting etc. It will have to be purely contextual.
The EU unfortunately stopped short of doing that and created the cookiewall plague in the process. For which they are rightfully blamed.
Ps I don't really hate paying for content but the "sign up for a recurring $20 monthly subscription just to read this one article" like most sites are doing now is complete BS too of course. Of course nobody wants that unless they are already a regular reader.
Their only reason for being involved in social media in the first place is because it gives them a plaything for their forays into censorship and narrative engineering. This is one aspect of the cancer Mitchell Baker has been cultivating in Mozilla
https://treeherder.mozilla.org/perfherder/graphs?timerange=3...
nobody cares about good web stewardship.
Actual people care about performance, ease of use, integration, and capability. And chrome is already good enough now-a-days, which means it takes a huge improvement to firefox for people to switch (not to mention an advertising drive when those improvements come about).
There's a reason why Dvorak keyboard isn't more popular than qwerty, even tho Dvorak is slightly better.
The EU has passed many digital protection laws. Some US states have down the same. Trust in these big tech companies has cratered.
It is strange that a moron surrounded by morons taking Firefox solely in non-good directions could accomplish that.
Other projects like the VR browser are also still alive under the name Wolvic.
Yet people go out of their way to install it even over edge on windows which is kinda the same thing. Sorry this argument doesn't fly. Firefox really lost mainstream appeal.
I was working at Mozilla when she made this comment -- shortly after laying off ~25% of the fucking company -- and it was the final straw for me. I can't speak to whether it was the final straw for others as well, but I can say that in the span of about 8-9 months after those layoffs every single person on my team, many who had been there 5+ years, quit and took "normal" tech industry jobs that typically paid 2-2.5x more than Mozilla. Apparently in Baker's mind it's OK to ask the people doing the actual work to take a massive discount to their compensation for ideological reasons, but when it interferes with her lavish lifestyle it's suddenly unthinkable.
She is truly an anchor around Mozilla's neck, and at this point I've just sort of grudgingly accepted that she'll only leave once she's drained every last drop of blood she can get from the company and from the well-meaning and dedicated people trying to make a genuinely independent web browser. All I can hope is that some sort of phoenix (get it?) manages to arise from the ashes when that finally happens.
perhaps it's because this is what google wants mozilla to be - a lame duck that cannot compete against chrome.
Is there anyway we could blame Google also for the unrest in the middle east?
Instead of developing that finance capability lets cry about how others are supposed to raise funds and hand it to us. Its pure nonsense.
Tech folk who get into details of raising cash are the only ones who have impact. The rest are useless loudmouths.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
We particularly don't want mob dynamics here.
p.s. I have zero opinion about this person or this organization, just in case anyone is worried about that. I just care about preserving HN for curious conversation, which is what the guidelines are written to convey.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
Firefox is an unqualified good to the world. Mozilla (as the nonprofit we once all knew and trusted) ceased to really exist years ago.
Just another zombie corp bumbling along into discount acquistion/liquidation at this point. Once Google stops paying the bills, it'll be stripped for parts and join Netscape in heaven.
It's 100% rational to hold the positions that the CEO has performed poorly and doesn't deserve anything like the salary they are paid (and should probably be removed), at the same time as believing that the people working on Firefox have managed to do a quite good job in spite of the terrible leadership.
Most nerds used Firefox so they didn't use to be worthless, and those nerds care about what happened to the company.
But over the years they’ve spent money on an email client basically no one uses, trying to make a social network, trying to make a phone operating system, and who knows what else. Just huge amounts of money going to what often looks like a complete fools errand. I understand Thunderbird but a phone OS?
Money that could’ve gone to either make Firefox better or to advertise/promote it.
If FF was doing great in the market and they had millions of spare dollars, pursuing other things that match their goals would make sense. But that really doesn’t seem like where they are.
Instead it feels a lot more like if private equity bought an open source project.
Keep in mind that both Firefox and Thunderbird started life as an evolution of the original “Mozilla Suite” which itself was an evolution of Netscape Communicator, which included a browser and an email client. So originally both were part of the core mission of Mozilla.
Thunderbird failed to gain much traction though and it was later spun off — it is now developed by a separate company (a Mozilla subsidiary).
> but a phone OS?
Yes, this does not make much sense to me either.
The other stuff is just me-too insanity from what I can tell. And now of course they’re talking about AI.
A lot of people don’t like Safari because it’s from Apple, the priorities they choose, or the fact that is not fully open source like Firefox is.
There are basically three rendering engines right now. One dominates massively and one looks not long for the world.
That doesn’t seem like a good situation to me. So I don’t want Firefox to die even though it’s not my daily browser.
...so make it your daily browser?
Seriously, there's no reason at all to still be using Chrome. There was a dip in the mid/late 2010s where FF was a joke in comparison, but they're more or less identical in performance at this point.
But I still think it’s better if Firefox exists.
——
My experience has been kind of odd compared to most. I switched to the Mac before Chrome or Safari came out. When Safari arrived it was vastly faster than anything else at the time. So it became my browser.
People on Windows or Linux couldn’t use Safari (I tried the Windows version, let’s not talk about that, ouch). So when Chrome came out, and they left IE/FF, they got the same giant performance jump that I liked so much but associated it with a different product. I’m sure I would’ve done the same thing if I was still on Windows.
Firefox eventually got way better, becoming what it is today. But almost everyone had already moved to Chrome.
I’m left with this sort of weird view of the world. When I did try Chrome it wasn’t noticeably faster than Safari because it was using the same rendering engine at the time, but it had a really different UI design that I didn’t like.
So a huge amount of people really love Chrome because of their experiences, and I hate it for the same reason. All because of the order I ended up using browsers in.
Safari yes, but truthfully nobody gives a damn about Firefox at this point.
>A lot of people don’t like Safari because it’s from Apple, the priorities they choose, or the fact that is not fully open source like Firefox is.
"A lot" meaning a minority of a minority of people. Lest we forget, iOS is superior to Android in at least the US and Japan, and MacOS continues to gain market share at the cost of Windows.
Most people like (or at least want) Apple.
On the Safari topic I was going by the general sentiment I see on HN. The general public couldn’t care less what is or is not open source.
Over the years I’ve noticed a weird (to me) contingent here on HN who appeared to think the best thing for the Internet would be for Safari to be killed so everyone would be forced to use Chrome.
Genially curious, which ones? I only know two:
1) khtml based - Chrome/Edge/Safari 2) Gecko based - Firefox
Third would be Servo? Any browser uses it?
(Edge used to use its own engine, EdgeHTML, but switched to Blink and EdgeHTML is no longer developed. EdgeHTML was derived from the Trident/MSHTML engine, which is also no longer developed.)
Blink and WebKit can both trace their history to khtml, but that was a very long time ago.
Chrome used to use WebKit (before Edge existed). Blink was forked from WebKit and they diverged about 10 years ago. They are now considered distinct rendering engines with different behaviours.
So the big three rendering engines today are: Blink, WebKit and Gecko.
All browsers in wide use today use one of those three.
On iOS, all browsers use WebKit due to OS policy restrictions. Chrome and Firefox use WebKit on iOS. This works, and different browsers continue to have their own respective featureson top.
It is widely thought that if Apple loses the power to limit the rendering engine on iOS due to changes in law, so many web devs will drop testing with WebKit browsers that they will pressure users to install Chrome on iOS instead: "Best viewed in Chrome. Some site features may not work using other browsers...". The same way many web devs already dropped testing on Firefox/Gecko. Those site features may become critical, such as abitiy to sign in or view some kinds of data. Apps will ship with parts of Chrome/Blink directly in the app, saving users the decision.
This is what people mean when they say Apple's rendering engine policy on iOS may be all that's preventing most of the web shifting to Chrome/Blink-only dominance, that you won't be able to avoid if you need essential services online.
Excellent description of the situation. I both think people should get to choose their own browser on iOS, and don’t want them to get to choose their own browser for the reason you stated.
>That doesn’t seem like a good situation to me.
Nothing is stopping alternate rendering engines from being created, but if the alternates are not better and not worth integrating with a browser the resources might be better spent being invested in the most popular one that way it improves the web for the most people.
From a rendering point of view, it’s 100% Chromium. All of its customizations are above the engine, at least as far as I know.
Even if it didn’t it was an independent browser that could have been a competitor until they gave that up.
If 80% of people used Edge but it was still based on Chromium, Google would still have a stranglehold on the web.
It could be a four way tie between Chrome, Edge, Brave, and Opera. Google would still have the power.
None of the forks are required to accept every change Google makes or make their browsers a perfect clone. Edge, Brave, and Opera are all in control of their own destinies in making the best product they can.
This is the problem. There is a MASSIVE sunk cost to get a modern browser off the ground compared to a static target.
Even if you could do it, Chrome is going to keep moving forward. And they have enough power to change things in incompatible ways that everyone will follow because they have the vast majority of the market.
Microsoft made a new modern browser engine. They gave it up because it was too hard to compete with Chrome.
When Apple is forced to let people replace Safari, I fear we’re going to get into an IE6 situation.
It doesn’t matter how good Chrome is, IE6 was great too. But when the company lets it stagnate for years because there’s no reason to invest, or decides to use it to push their advertising business to new heights, we are all screwed until a new competitor comes around.
Firefox only exists because it was built from the Netscape code base. And ‘a modern browser’ was a WAY easier target 20 years ago. What if no group/company can muster enough effort to dethrone a stagnate Chrome?
The web is in trouble. Even tagging along in 3rd place, Firefox is a good browser that could step up in such a situation. But only if development continues. If Firefox dies next year and Chrome stagnates five years from now we’ll be screwed.
Ouch. That hurts.
IE 7 came out in… 2006. So IE 6 just sat there for 5 years. And it’s not like ever upgraded to 7 immediately. Lots of corporate PCs kept 6 for many years longer.
That’s why it has the reputation it does. By 2006 IE 6 was horribly behind FF by every measure. Tons of security bugs had been found. By 2010 it was a total joke but developers were still having to make the modern web work on it, somehow.
If it had been replaced in 2003 or 2004 and MS never paused development no one would remember IE 6 as a dumpster fire.
But once you get a total stranglehold on the market, you can do stuff like that.
But it also had an insanely huge amount of bugs, half-broken features and “I’ll just do it my way” stuff. This was also true already at launch.
Sure, if Microsoft had replaced it in 2003 or 2004, nobody would have such “fond” memories of it even today. But the bad reputation does not come only from the fact that it was not updated for a long time; it also comes from its many problems and issues.
I guess I’m sort of assuming that if they kept new releases coming those bugs would’ve been fixed anyway in time. Which is certainly not a safe assumption.
You can incrementally improve the browser. Blink was not created from scratch.
>But when the company lets it stagnate for years because there’s no reason to invest
There are 2 big differences. The first is that what the web is and how platforms work is better understood. Google continues to invest in Chrome despite their dominance. The second is that chromium is open source. This means that if Google stops investing heavily in Chrome then others can still contribute and improve the browser.
>or decides to use it to push their advertising business to new heights, we are all screwed until a new competitor comes around.
If Google does something bad enough to make users stop using the browser that hurts them. Even taking that to be the case making a Chromium fork without that stuff would be possible given the demand for an alternative. You do not need a whole new browser engine just so you can make a policy change.
>What if no group/company can muster enough effort to dethrone a stagnate Chrome?
They can build off of Chromium instead. There is no need to start from some basic browser and put in a ton of resources to modernize it.
>If Firefox dies next year and Chrome stagnates five years from now we’ll be screwed.
If Chrome stagnates then competitor browsers will surpass them.
I understand all the arguments against Apple getting to lock everyone into their browser.
But the practical effect, I fear, will be disaster when they’re forced to allow it.
Also the fact that most people cannot use it. The vast majority do not have a MacOS computer or Ios phone/tablet.
You’re right most people couldn’t switch tomorrow. Right now Firefox is the only credible non-Chromium browser I’m aware of for Windows/Linux.
Honestly that comment was mostly there to try to forestall the people I expected would come out of the woodwork with vehement Apple hate. And if someone did in one of the replies below my comment.
Not that I think CEOs are worth their ludicrous salaries. It's just that the anti-diversity crowd loves to attack any organization they set their sights on for being "too progressive". So it's relevant to know whether this really is extraordinary.
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FF seems to be in serious trouble. The money mostly seems to go to a lot of different things that keep changing that are not the one thing that people use and want.
What do you believe they spend more on than Firefox?
What they have to do is put firefox back on the map. They deserve criticism for not doing that and for failing at their mission of an open web.
Mozilla feels the need to jump on every new tech fad instead of focusing their efforts on making a really great, sustainable browser, which is what I personally wish was their core mission.