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Comment by Seattle3503 | Hacker News Reader

Mozilla's corporate structure has the same problem OpenAI had. Because Mozilla is not a for-profit entity, management isn't accountable to shareholders with a financial stake. Because Mozilla isn't a charity, management isn't accountable to donors. Who is Mozilla management accountable to? A board; mostly made up Baker's associates. It is an incestuous arrangement. If Mozilla were serious, they would change the way management is held accountable. Baker needs someone who will actually hold her feet to the flames.

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.

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>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.

Improve in what sense? As a browser it has bern improving.

No it hasn't, and that's completely objective.

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.

Completely objective? I am not sure we both think its same thing.

I would say proof that Firefox got objectively better is https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/releases/

The only thing that's objective about the link you posted is that Firefox release numbers have been consistently going up.

The numbers are links. You can click them to get more info about what each number means.

A browser that makes bold claims about privacy at every opportunity but still doesn't include uBlock Origin as a standard feature is a major problem.

At this point, even Windows itself includes antimalware software in the form of Windows Defender. Browsers should take note.

This is itself a bold claim.

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.

> the web is also used by grandma and grandpa

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.

> The only people who currently use FF are those who also use uBlock Origin

Mozilla's statistics say under 4%.[1][2]

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-origin...

[2] https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity

These numbers may not be representative as anyone who installs uBlock Origin is unlikely to leave telemetry enabled.

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.

What non-advertising revenue model would pay for both Firefox development, and timely repairs and improvements to advertising blocks? It’d have to be a recurring or subscription model — one-time payments aren’t viable for recurring updates — with no free option (like there is today), as otherwise no one would pay for it (just like today). Solve this and perhaps they’ll make you the next CEO.

> What non-advertising revenue model would pay for both Firefox development

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?

> Use that to subsidize the free version of the browser.

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..?

Exactly!

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.

Not disagreeing with your other points but keep in mind that "better addons support for android" was a self-inflicted problem and an arbitrary restriction. Addons worked to begin with if they weren't restricted to a small whitelist.

Remember last week when we were all supposed to be switching to Firefox to advocate for them?

In 2024, please switch to Firefox https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38806270

Still true. The reason for that is orthogonal to this.

Sadly true, even if they phone it in. Maybe we need a 3rd major web engine? I don't know if that's even possible at this point.

People need to pay some inconvenience for the better cause of web usability, privacy, software freedom, etc..

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 analogy doesn't apply to Firefox though because it is very far from "low funding" as the CEO pay reflects. Not to mention, Firefox was good and was at one point irreplaceable before mismanagement ruined it and continues to ruin it.

I can get behind this sentiment for something like haiku os. I actually make an annual contribution to because they’ve been clear about using it to pay developers/contributors.

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.

Not sure about the terms of the deal with Google, but it may be that she is trying to extract as much personal gain as she can before the termination date.

Perhaps Google will not continue to fund Mozilla and she will have to go looking for another Sugar Daddy.

Mozilla is accountable to Google since Google pays the bills.

Not to sound like snark, but where does the money even come from? I feel like you've ruled out either donors or investors, which really makes me confused over what's left.

A significant part is default search engines sharing revenue - primarily Google at the moment. There are also regular customers, for products like Mozilla VPN or Firefox Relay. And there are donors for the non-profit entity as well, as well as for the entity managing Thunderbird.

But the big money maker is Google's revenue share.

Hmm, I wonder what will be a good performance metric for a non profit entity CEO? DAU?

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