Mozilla names new CEO as it pivots to data privacy
fortune.com
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She not only responded in a very gracious way, but also followed up months later to check if my feelings had changed. While they had not, she didn't owe me anything and I really appreciated her attentiveness. Mitchell really cares about Mozilla and its community.
Mitchell was a great community leader. That doesn't always translate to being a good CEO or leader of a business, however Mitchell is a huge reason (if not THE reason) why we have Firefox today – and, even if you don't currently use Firefox, a huge reason why we have the web we have today.
So, while I haven't been the biggest fan of Mozilla's decisions the past few years, I do want to give credit to Mitchell for everything she did for the open web and open source. She was a supporter before anyone really cared, and played a huge part in getting is to where we are now over the past 20+ years.
(I am glad this is the direction they have chosen! Here's a 2015 post where I write about how I think Mozilla should focus on data privacy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10698997)
Mozilla in recent memory has reminded me more than anything of the dogs in Pixar's Up ("squirrel!"), constantly chasing after the latest shiny tech fad while neglecting the fundamentals. They've been a follower on everything and have failed to lead on anything. Mitchell's justification for stepping down as CEO seems to me to follow this same pattern: she's stepping down in order to focus on AI and internet safety.
It's good to know that she's a decent person and was good to Mozilla employees, but it's hard to square the picture you paint with the complete lack of direction I've seen during her tenure. Maybe Mozilla was in a much worse situation than I thought at the time she took the position?
I have no inside information, but here's my guess at what happened. John Lilly was a great CEO. When he left, there was a gigantic void. They hired Gary Kovacs, who started the "squirrel!"-ing. He wasn't well-liked, and used Mozilla as a stepping stone. So going forward they only hired from the Mozilla community, which is a small pool – both of people who could do it and people who wanted to do it. I'm not sure if Mitchell wanted it or not, but I don't think there was a lot of competition.
Being the CEO of Mozilla is not a good job, and I imagine it's really hard to fill. There's a ton of pressure, relatively low salary, no equity, no exit.
Source: https://www.theregister.com/AMP/2024/01/02/mozilla_in_2024_a...
But doesn't seem like Mozilla is a typical company; not built around selling a product... so maybe that merits a different type of CEO with different skills not normally desired by the companies paying 10s of millions to their CEOs.
I'm no business person, so I could be completely wrong about what's needed at the C-level to keep Mozilla afloat. My view my be warped by assuming the vast majority of companies do not make money the way Mozilla does; but maybe there are more Mozillas than I know about.
I'm not following extremely close, but it seems like Mozilla is chasing what can be turned into a product. Things that involve setting up a monthly subscription, whether it's VPNs, keeping your name out of certain tracking databases, etc.
I wonder how Mozilla used to be funded vs how it's now funded?
The web is a better place with a non-profit-driven group like Mozilla in it... but is Mozilla Corporation becoming more money-driven than it used to be, even if it can't turn a profit? Or can it turn a profit, because it's not the Mozilla Foundation [1]?
I think we see this a lot, with companies pulling in too much money from IPOs or venture capital, pissing it away on unfocused growth, and if they are lucky back where they started. Or unlucky and bankrupt.
I don't think their processes have ever been better, they got initial and later injections of code from outside. Rust/servo was the moment when I thought they might turn it around, but their bus has always gone in the direction of the same cliff.
Because greenfield parallel rewrites of giant production codebases have such a fantastic track record, that we might as well add "in a novel programming language we're inventing while we're at it" just to make it interesting?
Not saying the comp package was justified. But it was a job doomed to fail.
With regards to be a good "community leader", it sounds like it might be true for the devs, but it is completely false with regards to its user base. Pocket and other commercial moves were made in a very underhanded way that angered many, for good reasons, and they repeated these types of mistakes many times over.
Since a very long time the worst enemy of Firefox has been Mozilla, let's hope it changes.
Isn't there a fundamental tension between "be good to employees" and "strong sense of direction"? If you are focused as CEO, then you must neglect a fraction of your employees at any point in time. This is a side-effect of focusing on one direction, while maintaining capability to go in other directions in the future. If you don't neglect some of your employees and project, then you come off as being distracted and without a strong sense of direction. Is there some way to square this circle?
It’s not hard to train oneself to act empathic, socially normal, but lack vision, ideas of your own. OP described how little it actually takes to make such a lasting impression; two conversations.
In 2015 some colleagues and myself were invited to pitch an idea for an Instagram clone. The financier was recently widowed woman who was all kinds of generous with us. But she also mentioned she feels there’s plenty of nobodies in the world, Zuckerberg can share. They can peddle products on her platform as her husband wasn’t that rich.
We learn to be a certain way publicly.
I think this statement from the parent addresses your point. Perhaps them stepping down as CEO will result in more focus? Time will tell.
Nah. I have a quote that I think about often on this topic, from none other than Bojack Horseman[1]:
Bojack, "Well, do you think I'm a good person... deep down?"
Diane, "That's the thing, I don't think I believe in deep down. I kind of think that all you are is the things that you do"
$CORPO_STOOGE is just a sociopath who follow the suggestions of "Lean In" as a behavioral guide of motions to follow. That doesn't make them a good person, just maybe a more pleasant manipulator.
To me that speaks volumes about the quality of management, and much as I'm sympathetic to your feelings I wonder what FF would have been like today if Mozilla had not been eternally distracted. I suspect that without FF Mozilla funding would dry up overnight and that alone is something they should respect.
Basically, how do you make another ~$100M/yr in case Google money goes away?
It's 2024, and Google still pays (more like ~$500M/yr from Google now) and Mozilla still exists. But it was hovering over people's heads back then, and still is.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation#Finances
they are spending serious startup money every year on nothing. it's as if they got the google disease with the google funds. :/
That said, since it was MoCo and not MoFo, I think the specific numbers were never divulged. Take the rumor mill and my recollection with a grain of salt.
IMHO, this is far too stretched. Give me a single project or initiative she pushed successfully that became a part of "the web we have today".
Mitchell was a lawyer at Netscape, and used those two things to (with others) spin Firefox off into a non-profit (controlling a for-profit). No, she didn't write any code, but she is directly responsible for forming a company that enabled Firefox to be free and open source.
From the Wikipedia page [1]
> The first few releases of the product were made available in "commercial" and "evaluation" versions; for example, version "1.0" and version "1.0N". The "N" evaluation versions were identical to the commercial versions; the letter was intended as a reminder to people to pay for the browser once they felt they had tried it long enough and were satisfied with it. This distinction was formally dropped within a year of the initial release, and the full version of the browser continued to be made available for free online [...]
Maybe the misunderstanding is because (from the same page) the original plan was to have a free version only for academic and non-profit organizations and make everybody else pay. That wouldn't have had a chance even ~30 years ago especially because building a browser was much easier than now. The features were so much more limited in 1995. No JavaScript, no CSS, the only one that mattered was loading and displaying text and images on the page without blocking until everything was downloaded. The Mosaic browser was blocking. Minutes staring at a white page waiting for something to appear...
And die.
And spending >$6.000.000.000 to do it.
As a 30 years user, it's just so sad to see Firefox going down down down. No innovation, no progress since the introduction of tabs. At least the sell-customer-data-for-marketing-experiments phase is done. And at least it's not unusable slow like it was for some years, so the bare minimum works. And it somehow survived the XUL/extension debacle. But it's 2024 and I'm through my 10th vertical tab extension (Tab Center Reborn for now) since using FF. How is FF supposed to work with >20 tabs open? The only reason to use it for me is it's open source and not owned by M$ or Google. Would there be another open source browser with traction, I'd be gone in a second.
Besides which – forming a spin-off company seems like super basic stuff for a lawyer? Why are you describing it as if it’s some crucial innovation?
Baker may be a savvy lawyer, but that doesn't make her a good technologist.
AFAIK The Mozilla project (initially started by JWZ) started when Netscape made its browser open source. The reason for this was the loss of market share due to free IE. Firefox came a few years later as a spin-off from the Mozilla Application Suite. Mozilla/Firefox's popularity correlated with Linux's because we needed a good open-source web browser on Linux (and BSD), not because she saw some opportunity to make an open web possible.
> No, she didn't write any code, but she is directly responsible for forming a company that enabled Firefox to be free and open source.
Unlike Brendan's role (excluding javascript), she had a small part, but I would not call it significant.
There's a whole series of popular phones in India that ship FirefoxOS. I think they're sold by Jio, a carrier there.
With KaiOS 3 not receiving many app updates necessary to continue functioning (WhatsApp, most importantly) I'm not sure how long it'll stick around, but it certainly left its mark on the mobile phone industry.
She also wrote this incredibly rude and grotesque obituary for Gervase Markham after he died of cancer (working for Mozilla until the end). You are welcome to disagree, but Gerv contributed just as much to Mozilla as Mitchell did.
https://blog.lizardwrangler.com/2018/08/07/in-memoriam-gerva...
And a well written reaction here
Having their personal beliefs belittled by a CEO after their death is frankly disgusting. I will be switching off of Firefox, I wish I had seen this earlier.
She's the reason we have Firefox and the modern web? What in the actual flippin bizarro dimension?
Besides being a member of the parasitic upper classes the leeches on all of our work while robbing to live on yachts and in mansions i don't see what she excelled at.
It's depressing how much this class of people is filled with nepotism, favours, family and an almost aristocratic talentlessness besides the random figureheads appointed PR.
I also disagree with her salary while layoffs were happening, however recent raises don't negate the fact that she also built Mozilla from the start.
She's not a member of the parasitic upper class. She was laid off from Netscape 20+ years ago, and just never stopped. She kept volunteering for free, and eventually lead the charge to spin it off into its own entity.
You can dislike where Firefox is headed, or be upset about Firefox layoffs (I was: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24135032).
But to act like Mitchell lives in a mansion while leaching off people?? She started from nothing and worked hard on the same mission for 20+ years.
She wasn’t up to the job but decided to stay there because it afforded her a higher salary than ANY OTHER company would ever hire her for because very few people are worth salaries in the millions and Baker was not one of them.
My problem with Baker wasn’t her compensation it’s that her desire for that compensation caused her to occupy the CEO seat and tank Firefox. I’d rather Mozilla had paid her 50 million to retire and find a new CEO, it probably would have turned out better than to let somebody incompetent do a job because she was selfless in the past.
Leeching is precisely how I would describe someone who demands more and more money each year from a company that's declining due to their own mismanagement and at the same time takes money from those who earn less.
Negative salary-achievements correlation controversy
In 2018 she received a total of $2,458,350 in compensation from Mozilla, which represents a 400% payrise since 2008.[15] 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."
In 2020, after returning to the position of CEO, her salary had risen to over $3 million (in 2021, her salary rose again to over $5 million,[16] and again to nearly $7 million in 2022[17]). 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). Baker blamed this on the COVID-19 pandemic, despite revenue rising to record highs in 2019, and market share shrinking.[18]
In other words, no she definitely is. She fired 250 devs while doubling her pay multiple times to live a luxurious life while lying about the cause. People have to feed their families, she doesn't need that much and this is not good community spirit.
It gets even more interesting googling bit further and becomes a brilliant example of either "money corrupts people" or "i'm romanticising my upperclass upbringing", because she apparently went from patos filled stories about her dad paying just above minimum wage (lol) to firing 250 devs while she ran with the money:
"[about her parents] So I would call them progressive. I would call them really focused on -- well, so for example, he would never pay minimum wage. They ran a small business. It was pretty-- Weber: Doing what? Baker: -- hand to mouth. A pewter factory, making wine goblets and gift items out of pewter. Not so easy to do in the Bay Area, which is expensive. And so he would hire someone at minimum wage. But he had a period of time -- it was six weeks, or two months, or three months, or whatever it was-- after a probationary period, and then he refused. He felt he needed to pay a living wage."
https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/20...
"According to the company's filings, Mitchell Baker's compensation went from $5,591,406 in 2021 [PDF] to $6,903,089 in 2022." Did not continue to dig further.
Mozilla tanked a lot, even Thunderbird is doing better recently. So definitely part of the 'parasitic upper class.
Do you still have that? What was your reasoning?
I remember the gist being that we were trying to compete against the two biggest companies on the planet, and (outside of some concerns about security) nobody seemed to really be complaining about the two options. If our goal was to bet the company (financially) on it, it made no sense to try to undercut Android... at the time Android was open source and ran on dirt cheap phones.
I remember a big part of it being "nobody wants a phone that doesn't have Angry Birds on it". I wasn't specifically worried about that one game (although it was insanely popular at the time), but rather all the apps – Uber, Facebook, etc. We had no ability to make parternships of that level happen. Especially since some of those companies (like Facebook) were trying to build their OWN phones at the time.
I just didn't think there was a market for a phone with no apps, that was positioning itself as the "cheaper" version of an already cheap (and ubiquitous) competitor. And I wouldn't have cared, if it wasn't for the fact that we had to move the entire company towards building this – which we did for a few years.
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/firefox/
Firefox could then be modified to remove the need to mention "Google", "Microsoft", "DuckDuckGo", "eBay", "our partners", "our third-party ad platform", "a third-party referral platform", "our campaign marketing vendors", "sends Mozilla", and any other companies/organizations/third-parties we find referenced in that document.
A privacy-respecting browser would never collect nor send any data beyond that necessary to provide its core web browsing functionality.
Any functionality that might compromise a user's privacy should not be bundled by default, and would instead have to be explicitly opted into by manually installing an extension that provides such functionality. This would include Firefox's/Mozilla's own "telemetry".
Best example: Steve Jobs
Could you explain this assertion?
and maybe especially if you dont use firefox :)
Someone snarkily asked him about Chrome, and he responded that Chrome was a victory for Mozilla – the mission was an open web, and choice was what Mozilla was fighting for. I thought it was a very healthy view.
It seems like the perfect time for it, with the other platforms enshitening.
> Chambers says she won’t be seeking a permanent CEO role because she plans to move back to Australia later this year for family reasons.
Here's my optimistic educated guess: The board finally caught on to the fact that Mitchell is an overpaid failed CEO for a "company" (e.g. weird for-profit entity that runs a "non-profit") propped up by its largest competitor to avoid anti-trust accusations. Its only real product has dwindling, barely mattering, marketshare (<5%)^. Chambers, being from the board and not the executive structure, is obviously a caretaker "for cover" while the new CEO search goes on.
^If you're curious about an expansion on this, my opinions on it based on their financial statements are in our podcast episode "How Does Mozilla Make Money?" from a year ago: https://pnc.st/s/kopec-explains-software/bdecab32/how-does-m...
As an outside observer, I don't know the company culture directly, but I have to assume Baker is not the type of person to just leave that role. If she wanted to leave, she could stay until a permanent CEO has been found.
It must have become obvious by now, even to the board, that Mozilla has been a sinking ship under the destructive influence of Baker.
Growing dissatisfaction within the employee base could play a role. But judging from the comfortable bubble they live in due to google money coming in regardless of performance, it seems this is more about the board seeing the stagnation that endangers their own future income as well.
I would not be surprised if, internally, the resignation was planned together with Baker already 2-3 years ago, and her pay rise was part of the internal deal to compensate her.
I helped create Librewolf, which originally was still called Librefox. Mozilla complained about the "fox" part of the name. While that behavior is probably understandable, it shows the type of company Mozilla has become, where a small irrelevant open-source skin of Firefox is seen as a threat. Mozilla, unfortunately, has long been a wolf in sheeps clothing, working together with Google behind the scenes to harm the open non-commercial internet.
That's a pretty strong claim, probably one that requires providing further proof of that happening, than just pointing to "comfortable bubble due to google money" and Mozilla defending their trademark.
Mozilla started to implement some nice privacy-preserving features, all the while knowing that including a google search with search suggestions as you type means that literally everything people type into the address bar gets send to google, making privacy impossible.
The almost endless money flow from google, independent from performance, led to a strange company culture where nothing mattered anymore except having a good time with co-workers. Without the correct (monetary) incentives, there is no pressure to innovate.
She didn't blog about this in https://blog.lizardwrangler.com/. Given that the last 3 blogposts are about company changes, the lack of a post about this event smells of resentment.
Not totally unheard of. Sounds a bit like OpenAI for the most part.
> Its only real product has dwindling, barely mattering, marketshare (<5%)^
While competing with browsers bundled with operating systems. A bit of nuance.
Chrome too competes with browsers bundled with operating systems (Edge, Safari). It seems to be doing okay, even on desktop.
It seems mostly to focus on "Vision", "Strategy", "Outstanding Execution" and other corporate-speak stuff.
Anyone who worked with Laura Chambers (new, interim CEO) in the past want to share what kind of changes one could expect from them? More business/marketing stuff or back to engineering focus?
> Her bullshits will be on delivering bullshit products that bullshit our mission and building bullshits that bullshit momentum. Laura and I will be working closely together throughout February to ensure a bullshit transition, and in my role as Exec Chair I’ll continue to provide advice and bullshit in areas that touch on our unique history and Mozilla characteristics.
> Laura’s bullshits will be on Mozilla Corporation with two bullshit bullshits:
await import("https://esm.sh/gh/mourner/bullshit.js@master/src/replace.js")>Doubling down on our core products, like Firefox...
The fact that they acknowledged Firefox at all gives me some hope.
People often say you need to pay the big bucks to get a good funding-raiser, but bringing in money isn't the only job of the CEO there.
Can you please elaborate more on this and ideally provide some examples ?
- Firefox usage is down despite Mozilla's top exec pay going up: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24563698
- Mozilla CEO says layoffs needed amid shift from browser: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23332810
- Mozilla cuts 250 jobs, says Firefox development will be affected: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/08/firef...
"Firefox usage is down 85% despite Mozilla's top exec pay going up 400%".
https://www.reddit.com/r/browsers/comments/yy986k/can_someon...
If they can't find a way to bring in outside money that isn't from Google they're gonna have a bad time if Google ever stops feeling threatened by US regulators, and making bets on new products is the only real thing you can do. Edge has proven in an embarrassingly public way that being a better browser under the hood doesn't get you more users.
Can you blame people for not understanding how a company who once had one of the most dominant and influential applications on the Internet, managed to fumble, by basically acting like a wallflower and letting the ecosystem figure the future out?
> Any new market outside Firefox
Why was this even necessary? Firefox has always been an undervalued asset at Mozilla. They sat on it and seem to have barely invested enough effort to make it decent enough to compete with Chrome. Back in 2009, if you'd asked me where I saw Firefox 10 years from then, I'd have said that in 2019 it's more than simply a browser. It's a platform competing with Apple and Google for apps, but on the web. It would have a core web browser with various derivatives. For example, one aimed at general purpose browsing (the FF we know currently), one for business apps (e.g. specialized browser augmented to understand better languages than plain old HTML/CSS/JS and built-in libraries for business apps; think Visual Basic, Notion), one for game apps, one for education apps, and more. Mozilla would provide tools and toolkits to make it easy for devs to just build apps for the web, so that they don't have to fight with the front-end. Apple is doing it for iOS, Google is doing it for Android. I still don't understand why Mozilla couldn't see itself sharing this cake with Firefox when it had 30%+ market share.
1. Firefox as baseline product declining
2. Lots of failed experiments to find new revenue streams while staying true to its mission
3. Baker's CEO salary rising several-fold
4. Engineers laid off for cost reduction
Any three of them might well be okay, all four together look terribly self-centered on Baker's part.
Maybe I am a tech nerd, but for me Mozilla is Firefox. We have thousands of privacy-oriented companies and organizations, but there is only one independent browser. I am fine with Mozilla finding some other ways to make cash, but it they have a mission, that's the browser. So if I see money being spent (vs money being earned) on something that is not Firefox, I am sad. Now, they are free to do as they want, if they want to drop Firefox, that's their right, but that would make one less good thing in this world.
Imagine if Firefox included perfect ad blocking + antitracking (ex: reporting a standard canvas size, having multi account container on) out of the box. Add an AI API so that users who have very basic questions wouldn't need to interact with a search engine. I don't think it would fare well with google.
Google money has unfortunately created the perfect innovation trap: it removed the incentives that Firefox could have had, to create a product that users would want that could have a positive feedback loop on what users want.
Instead, Firefox is what google want: an hedge against antitrust.
I don't think the previous CEO could do anything to find out a new market when isolated like this from market signals (like donations which are the equivalent of sales: a signal that what you are providing is what users want)
I think Google is also stuck in a local optimum trap: it can't innovate out of ads and tracking. Its own technology had to be taken by OpenAI as an outsider, with Microsoft money, to deliver a product.
> Edge has proven is an embarrassingly public way that being a better browser under the hood doesn't get you more users.
Edge is yet another proof that Google technology was sound, but is better managed by outside companies.
The network effect from google created the eye of Sauron, with little else to show on. It acts as an incentives to anyone who cares about privacy or products not being killed.
I think it's a tragedy because Google has been strongly incentivized to cut off the seeds it saw, to put more money and labor on its core offering, if only avoid the risk of cannibalizing its core business.
ABC/alphabet was about edging that risk, trying to diversify by recognizing business is inherently risky, but you have to make wild bets to get alpha.
Unfortunately, it may have been too little too late: 10 years later, I don't think Google has the money or the manpower to try to do that at a scale that matters.
Even if it did, its bad reputation for culling out products doesn't inspire trust: personally, I'd rather run llama.cpp than make any bet that Gemini will still be operating in a few years, and for free software I'd trust Microsoft over Google.
It's a tragedy, because it has had ripple effects on Firefox, taking similar wrong decisions to cut really innovative technologies (Rust) before they could grow.
There's now almost no programmers on the board or in senior leadership positions. The interim CEO they picked is an MBA who ran a business line at AirBnB.
It seems like another case of MBAs taking over.
Later, others notably Niko Matsakis and Patrick Walton (apologies for leaving yet other folks’ names out) took Rust to 1.0.
Mitchell didn’t know what Rust was until I explained it, wasn’t CEO when we made it an official project, but was CEO for this:
https://www.zdnet.com/article/programming-language-rust-mozi...
Huge fan, you were pushed out unfairly - it's wild that you were fired for donating money to a vote that passed. It was a normal and popular opinion at the time.
I guess that’s a surplus good if you meant for all these highly skilled engineers taking their talents to other companies.
Sometime later, a few Mozillians decided the web and Mozilla needed a simple, sleek, fast browser, and built Firefox.
& from her own blogpost on this announcement[0]:
> I will return to supporting the CEO and leadership team as I have done previously as Exec Chair. In addition, I will expand my work [... to ...] more consistently representing Mozilla in the public [...] through speaking and direct engagement with the community.
I cannot believe Baker doesn't read at least some notes on community sentiment around her various decisions at Mozilla; it must take an astounding level of cognitive dissonance for her to see herself as a suitable candidate for "direct engagement with the community".
[0] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/a-new-chapter-for-mozill...
I'm no fan of Baker, but the least we can do is wish her best wishes and hope for a great future for all parties involved. I didn't like her when she was CEO at Mozilla, I don't like her anymore now that she isn't CEO at Mozilla but that doesn't mean I have to resort to shallow attacks on her character. I expect more from HN.
Edit: Corrected mistake about Baker no longer being at Mozilla. Thanks to @M2Ys4U.
She was simply a parasite and her character is being attacked because her character is fucking awful. With enough money for her family to live comfortably on for eons she fucked with hundreds of lives while driving a business into the ground.
What I don’t understand is people’s blind worship of the upper class and their entitlement to firing hundreds of people while boosting their salary while being incompetent and how they deserve to have nice things said about them when they leave the company they exploited.
I wonder how many times in a row it would take of you being fired by the CEO who completely mismanaged the company, while massively increasing their own salary multiple times, before you stop wishing them well.
In fact maybe the problem is that you are wishing her well. She's exploited other people enough to be doing well enough on her own. She doesn't need anyone to wish her well. Maybe the least she deserves is to not be doing well at other people's expense. What about those people?
Being nice isn't always the right answer. When people do bad things, there should be negative consequences for them, otherwise that signals to them that their behavior was appropriate. It wasn't. You are doing the morally wrong thing by wishing her well.
This is slightly unrelated to the point I was trying to make, but I don't think us commentors are entitled to make passes at her character or doubt her motives. Perhaps from your position it seems like an objective fact that Baker was engaging in morally dubious acts (I personally don't think so) but that still doesn't give you (or any of us!) a right to judge her. We do not know her personally so I don't think we have any right to shame her at all. That's just my opinion, I know its controversial, feel free to argue.
Argue is the wrond word there, it makes it seem like I'm silently judging you from a higher pedestal (though I suppose this entire comment gives off that impression) but if you have any questions feel free to ask me. Again this makes it seem like I'm in a position of superiority, I don't know of a better way to phrase it.
> Enter Laura Chambers, a dynamic board member who will step into the CEO role for the remainder of this year.
"Laura Chambers" is a link to her LinkedIn profile. Nothing you can do but shake your head if it didn't occur to anyone that putting that link in the post announcing her appointment was a bad idea.
In what way?
(Footnote: OP’s reply is in another thread.) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39303697
Nothing to add.
Anybody without a personal ten years old website using some hand-made HTML should probably not be CEO of Firefox.
The decline of Firefox's popularity didn't happen because the CEO uses LinkedIn, arguably one could say that the resistance to trends would be more harmful than helpful if you're aiming to improve browser marketshare. The problem for Mozilla is that the internet is not mostly weird nerds anymore.
During Chrome's rise to popularity I don't think focusing on privacy was the popular thing to do, but the tides do seem to be turning and Mozilla could benefit from riding this wave again.
I know, absurd, but let’s assume.
Let say for a moment that it is acceptable that the personal independent webpage is replaced by a monopolistic platform trying to centralize the web.
I know, absurd, but let’s assume
Let say for a moment that we don’t care that the platform is owned by one of the biggest competitor of the corporation. Historically and currently.
I know, absurd, but let’s assume.
Let say for a moment that it is not a problem that the platform is one of the worst offender when regarding privacy of its users and handling personal data, even if the new CEO is talking about privacy.
I know, absurd, but let’s assume.
Let say that to there’s no problem in requiring every person clicking this link to have an account on the linked platform to know who the privacy-oriented new CEO is.
I know, absurd, but let’s assume.
Let say that nobody at Mozilla considered it to be a problem as the introductory post of the new CEO…
Also everyone: oh, this rust thing is nice.
Hm. Not every toy you make is a winner, but I think it’s fair to say that while maybe it wasn’t a commercial success, we all ought to say thank you for supporting rust and servo while it was growing up.
Ask them if they have tried this fantastic alternative called Firefox and you'll get silence.
When it comes to quasi-monopolies like this, the "problem" are the passive consumers that will just use whatever comes pre-installed and pre-configure (and when it comes to browsers isn't associated to Microsoft). Coincidentally, that behavior is also what keeps Firefox/Mozilla alive by being able to charge for the default search engine configuration.
Google seems to be a much more competent company for example. They have Go. How have they been able to find financial success with it?
> Baker, a Silicon Valley pioneer who co-founded the Mozilla Project, says it was her decision to step down as CEO, adding that the move is motivated by a sense of urgency over the current state of the internet and public trust.
Mitchell is not leaving and stepped down on her own. I hope that this still means a good change for Mozilla.
Chambers is stepping in temporarily, and Fortune offers some details: "Chambers says she won’t be seeking a permanent CEO role because she plans to move back to Australia later this year for family reasons. 'I think this is an example of Mozilla doing the right role modelling in how to manage a succession,' says Chambers."
If it's only going to take a matter of months to find a new CEO, and Baker has been doing it since 2020, and before that from 05-08, what difference does it make if she keeps running things a few/several more months? Why have a third person running things temporarily?
Yes, Brave subtly pushes some crypto nonsense, but it also delivers on privacy, it focuses where it matters. (It also bundles IPFS and Tor in the base install, I believe.)
And you can say "oh it's still Chrome!" but - Chromium is FOSS, and to me, it shows that Brave focus on what matters (data privacy) and not on what doesn't (writing their own HTML, CSS, JS engine).
I don't agree with the opinion that browser needs to have its own rendering engine to be able to be focused on privacy. I think it's the opposite - using Chrome engine helps Brave to focus on what matters.
But it's just me. It's fun to build own browser engine, I get it, I just don't know if it's time and money well spent.
It's not about fun, it's about denying Google the right to exercise complete control over the way that the web evolves. Having independent browser engines with substantial market share is the only path to a web that isn't just an extension of Google, and we shouldn't be relying on Apple alone to bear that weight.
That said, the success of this strategy for containing Google depends on having market share, which Mozilla's recent strategies have completely failed to do, but that has less to do with their independence than it does with Mozilla's focusing on just about anything other than Firefox.
but avoiding a browser monoculture does matter. having all browsers built on chromium is a serious problem given the way google treats chrome. see the latest decisions regarding extension support and adblocking all of which will end up in chromium. do you think brave will have the resources to fork chromium to avoid those changes?
it's not my fight though. If Mozilla thinks burning all these resources on their own engine is a good thing then, burn ahead. there are worst things to burn money on in the end. and it's not my money...
At least rust came out of all that.
Don't forget Apple devices, which use a different engine. Until very recently (or very soon?), iPhones could not use Blink, afaik.
I too lost interest in Firefox a long time ago, about the time they evicted Brendan Eich revealing internal politics.
Most people are just... inundated with ads. Try using a stock Chrome with no ad blockers for just a day. It's absolutely miserable. But every time you add another "setup" step you add potential breakage.
Now, I can just give someone Brave and they can have the same experience most of us do on HN!
- Chromium customizations: Not necessary in Firefox
- Client-side encryption for Brave Sync: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-firefox-sync-keeps-...
- DeAMPing: I think AMP has been dead for a few years now
- Limiting network server calls: I think this is a bit tangential to privacy, limiting calls is generally good but it doesn't mean you're transmitting less information. Brave's post comparing different browsers' first startup network calls is from 2019, not sure how Firefox performs today.
- Query parameter filtering: https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/toolkit/components/a...
- Better partitioning for better privacy: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Privacy/State_P...
- Referrer policy improvements: https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2021/03/22/firefox-87-trim...
- Fine grained / temporary permissions API: This is nice, I don't think Firefox has this.
- Social media blocking: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/enhanced-tracking-prote...
- Bounce tracking protections: https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2020/08/04/firefox-79-incl...
- Limiting the life of Javascript: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/firefox/firefox-rolls-o.... Not explicitly mentioned but I believe Firefox does have this 7 day limit as well, in addition to other protections.
- Private windows with Tor: Firefox doesn't have built-in Tor integration, but the actual Tor Browser is built from Firefox.
I think Firefox also has one or two features that Brave does not, like Multi-Account Containers, and some paid services like https://relay.firefox.com/.
It fits with the goal of an open internet, is easy to sell to users, and it's unlikely that Chrome will add the feature, since Google owns YouTube. And there's an obvious route for monetization: sell cloud storage for archived pages.
There are thousands of crappy browser extensions cashing in on demand for downloading x from y website
What happens to an org with a goal when it hits the goal? It has to find a new goal or dissolve. It's tempting to say that dissolution is the right thing. But if you have accumulated resources, I imagine it's hard not to direct that at something else you care about.
The standards-compliant web was a big deal. I cared about that a lot. Many of my friends were Firefox ambassadors or whatever. Kids were installing Firefox on computer lab machines and hiding the IE icon. It was a different time.
I don't really care about data privacy like that, but maybe there are others who care about it like I cared about being able to view the web on a Linux browser with as much fidelity as IE on Windows. I find it unlikely since I think techno-optimism is a galvanizing goal and techno-pessimism is a limiting one. But that's just my opinion.
Overall, I'm quite happy with what Mozilla did. It makes sense they have to cycle CEOs till someone finds out what sticks.
She needed to go. I wish it would’ve been sooner.
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/we-need-more-than-deplat...
> We need more than deplatforming
the article you've linked explicitly states that deplatforming is an incomplete solution and that what should really be happening is increasing transparency.
Progressives are like 8% of the electorate, she probably wouldn't like what would happen if there were more censorship of political opinions
I like that it's not something like FirefoxOS where they need to invest years of R&D playing catch-up. Relatively simple to set-up. And free advertising for the Brand™ whenever someone sends an email, such marketing value, very viral.
This isn't that related to the topic but isn't that supposed to be Google, not Chrome?
Mitchell making $6.9M in cash compensation of a $600M revenue company is the equivalent of:
- Chuck Robbins of Cisco making $655M/year
- Mark Benioff of Salesforce making $360M/year
Maybe let's look smaller:
- Fidji Simo of Instacart making $29M/year
- Patrick Collison of Stripe making $166M/year
When you look at it like that, Baker's compensation is quite absurd.
(And for more comedic value than anything serious, similar to Tim Apple making $4.4B/year...)
At some point she stopped believing in the long-term prospect of Mozilla, or in its mission, and decided she would get hers before it was too late.
In a way, I humanly sympathise.
Seems like enough to me.
I don’t think Firefox will ever see double digit usage again, but I hope there can be some kind of turn around and privacy focus built into my browser.
If it wasn't for the hatred, I would probably not even know this person's name.
I dunno about that. I'm a Firefox user and I dislike Mozilla as an organization and think that Mitchell Baker is completely incompetent. The modern browser space is a shitshow and Firefox is just the least worst option out there.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/end-of-support-firefox-...
Before people start arguing with me yes I think the latest news is they eventually got rid of it.
But it was weird man
You can disable every single setting, including making changes to about:config and it will continue to phone home.
By "phone home" you mean the fact that it looks if there's newer versions to update itself? That's a good thing.
And yes, you can disable it.
Ironically, it has been Facebook with its release of Llama models and hat you can run yourself that has actually increased end user power and control with respect to AI. Having something that you can run on your machine (either owned or rented) is intrinsically more empowering and private for the user than sending your data off to some other company subject to their rules and their notions of “safety”.
I wonder what percentage of internet users use ad blockers? That would pretty much represent the market cap for Firefox.
But let's be real: she should be fired. She had no vision for Mozilla. Her pay went up as Firefox market share went down. Her strategy revolved around "<buzzword of the year> services". Most recently, that was "AI services".
Now Mozilla has already spun out the Rust Foundation (in 2021). I'm not sure what their strategy needs to be but I think it revolves around doubling-down on Rust, kind of like how the Apache Foundation incubates a bunch of projects. Just like we have Webkit, that could mean creating Rust browser components and a browser entirely based on that, kind of like how they tried to with Servo in FF.
Memory safety is simply too important an issue for reliance on C/C++ in the long term. Provably correct programs and components are (IMHO) going to become increasingly important.
Stop playing around with [buzzword] (currently "AI"). Double down on Rust.
This morning at work when I opened Firefox, instead of a blank tab it showed a popup advert saying “New device in your future?”. I found this string on bugzilla.mozilla.org, and apparently it's supposed to be an advert for setting up a Mozilla Account.
This is too stressful. I need a tool I don't have to second-guess all the time.
I've used Firefox for 20 years. I wish it would go back to behaving like a not-for-profit I can trust.
(Also, if anyone from Fedora is listening, please consider whether having this sort of user experience in an app installed by default harms your reputation more or less than GNOME Web would.)
Firefox rely comes to mind (which is a great product that I personally use and pay for). They probably want to focus more on those areas.
I truly hope this stops with new management.
When you look at their latest products, it seems like they were starting to sell user data, it was quite scary since Mozilla is like the most respected company when it comes to privacy.
Finally. After lining her pockets and running Firefox into the ground for 15 years.
Quite hilarious Mozilla took this long to realize how she was slowly destroying the company to the point where it is beyond saving and incapable of making money other than being on Google's payroll.
I don't know Laura Chambers but I hope she will do a better job.
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/a-new-chapter-for-mozill...
" Mozilla Firefox Mozilla releases its annual financial statements each November for the previous year. The company’s latest revenue numbers are from 2020 when the browser brought in nearly $497 million, 88.8% of which came from royalties.
These royalties refer to the percentage of advertising revenue Mozilla receives whenever someone uses the built-in search engine that the Firefox browser provides.
In addition to search royalties, Mozilla earns money from donations and from sponsored new tab tiles, which can be disabled."
A New Chapter for Mozilla - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39302624 - Feb 2024 (8 comments)
Dev teams find it easier to slap "Use Chrome for best experience" or the more annoying "Your browser is not supported" on web applications instead of maintaining compatibility for another browser, but can you blame them?
I've thought long and hard about the "free" internet. The free internet, the trove of knowledge, the bleeding edge of what technology has to offer, one of the more important places where humanity advances. Also perhaps regresses in the veil of psuedo anonymity.
Pixels, cookies, beacons, benign sounding words all used to profile and map everything about you on this internet. To sell you more ads, to keep the % increase over past quarter at acceptable rates.
This rant is exaggerated, inaccurate and perhaps emotional coming from me. The internet is something I hold dear, my privacy is something I hold dear. From time to time I see myself type "dat" and FF autocompletes it to "data.firefox.com", say a little "oh well" to myself and click the return key. I click on the yellow button at the bottom of the page and stare at the MAU chart for a good few seconds before Ctrl+W and going back to whatever I was doing. Small up spikes made me happy, but the downward trend does not make me sad, since I have accepted it. Maybe somebody crazy and determined will fork the project, if it comes to that, but maintaining a browser is a tall ordeal and maintaining is not enough.
Baker at some point after laying off hundreds of Mozilla employees said something along the lines of "I could be making more elsewhere, so this little pay increase to myself is no biggie" (not her words at all, but this is what she meant).
I have waited so long for this news. A long, long, time. Maybe now, FF can ship security patches as fast as Chrome does, maybe now the small upward spikes in the MAU chart won't be so small anymore, maybe now Mozilla will stop making Pocket a thing, maybe now the days of free internet are extended a little more.
I have created some websites.
I have worked at an personalized ad startup (criteo)
I have read on crypto, own some.
Despite it I have exactly ZERO F** IDEA of what privacy means and entails in context to web browsing. Last thing i read was that 'anonymous' stuff were actually not anonymous, and that anyway someone could track you even across IP. And yeah also there's the NSA it knows anything about you anyway.
Could someone ELI5 ?
The most private browsing you can have is when no other party besides you (A) and the site you are bringing up (B) are part of the communication.
- TLS, formerly SSL, provides transport security - meaning eavesdroppers that might be listening in to A and B above will only see encrypted data.
- DoH provides transport security for the system that resolves DNS names to IP addresses (needed for your browser to connect to a site). DNS is distributed and not authenticated by design, meaning the DNS server your browser talks to could be redirected or intercepted. DoH prevents at least your ISP or public Wi-Fi network provider from doing that.
So those are things that increase privacy. The following decrease privacy.
- Web sites themselves run code (Javascript) which can communicate back with the server in the background.
- Javascript and HTML cookies allow websites to store arbitrary data on your computer - not typically too much data, but enough to store a unique identifier that can be used to recognize you. Other data your browser provides to Javascript, such as screen resolution, installed fonts, and mouse events, can also be used.
- Websites often import code from other servers - such as gathering metrics, delivering ads, etc. The code these servers run often reports data back to them and stores their own persistent data such as cookies, etc. Adblocking is a popular way to reduce this impact.
These are ways "tracking across your IP" can be done. This persistent data can also be used to correlate your visits, so that, even if you are not logged in to a site (e.g. anonymous), the website can still know who you are.
None of the above really addresses what a website does with basic statistics and information it collects after it is transmitted and has made it completely out of the browser. In most cases you've given this data voluntarily and it's needed to conduct a service, such as purchase history from an e-commerce site. That's really a separate privacy thing and not possible to directly address using browser technologies.
Edge already has a copilot and looks like Chrome has something in the works too. I am afraid this strategy will only push Firefox more distance from prime time.
- The one that puts the data subject in the focus and protects the end user
- The one that aims to cut out Google and tries to hand out pieces of the cake to other companies.
I hope not the second kind again. We've already been there with Mozilla's investments into Cliqz GmbH and Hubert Burda's empire.
Meanwhile Firefox marketshare is pathetic and money can dry up. Chrome killing extensions too! Google must be happy of installing those people in charge of Mozilla.
[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/brendan-eich-steps-down-...
"The hate of men will pass, and CEOs leave, and the power they took from the people will return to the people. And so long as CEOs leave, liberty will never perish."
Today's a day of hope
This is a group that gets way too much money from Google and doesn't know what to do with it...
"What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun"