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Comment by stephen_g | Hacker News Reader

That’s irrelevant. People were starting to see alarm bells ringing when her salary had quadrupled to $2.5m (this is in 2018 or 2019 I think?) while market share was dropping, it should have stayed basically around there until she turned things around with an increase as an incentive.

Instead it doubled and then increased again (wasn’t it more like $7m by the end?)

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And someone said yes to that. Think about that for a second.

The product's global importance is now a tiny fraction of what it was 15 years ago, and the person during whose tenure this happened was recently making 10x as much as back then. TEN TIMES.

And whoever approved that obscene compensation thought this was a good idea.

It’s almost parasitic, suck the host of it’s resources and dump it when it’s near death for the next host...

I used to be a big Firefox fan, but the last 10 years made me abandon it, I don’t even check if my sites work on it anymore because the market share it has is so tiny. My time is better spent making sure it works with Safari...

> It’s almost parasitic, suck the host of it’s resources and dump it when it’s near death for the next host...

Over the past few years Mozilla has increased revenue while reducing the percent derived from Google with expenses slightly down.

Only the percent has reduced, but the actual revenue from Google has been growing over the years.

Mozilla is also making 10x as much revenue as 15 years ago, has massively increased cash reserves, and is finally starting to diversify its income streams.

And it's absurd to put the fault for the declining market share purely at the feet of Mozillas leadership. Not to say they were blameless, but when Google threw its weight behind Chrome, including massive ad campaigns on billboards, pushing it on its web properties, and regularly breaking Firefox on their own websites for no technical reasons, you can't reasonably expect Firefox to just magically maintain their market share. That said, at the upper end you could look at Germany, where Firefox is still between 10-20% (depending on the estimate you look at), as what could have been achievable more broadly.

You know who approved this compensation? The compensation committee.

This committee has 3 members. One of which was… Laura Chambers, the new CEO. Source: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/leadership/

So she basically decided how much she would be paid. For me it's a clear conflict of interest.

They explain here how the compensation for the CEO is decided: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2021/a...

It's basically based on what other similarly-sized tech start-ups pay. Which is ridiculous to me as Mozilla is basically a Google-funded open source project.

Also, who was on the nominating committee when Laura Chambers was nominated to the Mozilla Corporation in the first place? Baker. With one other member of the compensation committee, and another person.

This seems also to be a conflict of interest to me.

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