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But how will the CEO get millions in compensation for running the browser into the ground while funding her side projects?

Oh sorry, she's chairwoman of the board now, completely different.

I can’t help but wonder where Firefox would be today if Brendan Eich had not been pushed out as CEO

Mozilla was in terminal decline in 2014 so pretty much in the same place as today. You'd have to go back to 2009.

Brendan Eich might not be the perfect CEO. But still I think he would have done better than Mitchell Baker did. He's interested in technology in a way in which she isn't.

Eich wasted effort on FirefoxOS because he doesn't understand business. Now he's a cryptogrifter.

FirefoxOS had potential to pick up the pieces from the outstanding WebOS. We could have seen continued funding for Servo as well.

The business model for FirefoxOS didn't make sense, just like the business model for WebOS didn't make sense. Android was cheaper than free to put on phones because Google was willing to share search revenue with carriers. They would not have done that on a FirefoxOS phone before it reached scale, nor would Microsoft, which was pushing its own phones.

Offering privacy first OS would make perfect sense.

I don't buy it. Apple owners pay premium prices for a perception of increased safety and convenience. I feel that way about what WebOS was. There is always market space available for a device people want.

You feel that way, and WebOS failed on phones.

HP played musical CEOs - 3 in less than a year - and one decided they shouldn't be in the phone or PC business. People loved the phones which were objectively years ahead of Android or iOS. It was not a product failure, but one of management.

People loved the phones, but they didn't buy them. The carriers didn't want to sell them because they don't get paid on the backend. As I said, the business model doesn't work.

The business model for webOS was the same as the one for iOS though. Make OS, put it on devices, sell devices. Sell apps.

FirefoxOS was simply dumped too early. You need TIME to advance in an established market and they simply didn't give it time. They wanted results within a year or two, but growth occurs organically in an occupied market.

In India, an entire telecommunications company was forced to use a fork - KaiOS for Reliance Jio phones because FirefoxOS was abandoned.

FirefoxOS was a terrific idea, but the baby needed time to grow up to teenage level, but was murdered soon after birth

A leader should unite an organisation. You can't lead an inclusive organisation and then cause divisiveness.

And don't forget, these things are not just cosmetic. Not being able to get married could lead to some serious consequences when having kids (e.g. a lesbian couple) and one partner dying.

Personally I would not have pushed to fire him, no, and I'm very pro-LGBTQ+. It was only a small donation compared to how much he makes and the legislation was easily defeated. But I don't work at Mozilla.

So how well did Mozilla do with an inclusive leader?

Well, not very well but it was clearly the wrong leader.

I'm not sure I'd call losing 95% of your market share well, but each to their own I suppose.

Mozilla has been doing terrible.

> And don't forget, these things are not just cosmetic. Not being able to get married could lead to some serious consequences when having kids (e.g. a lesbian couple) and one partner dying.

That is not true. California had domestic partnerships with identical rights and responsibilities as marriage starting in 1999. Eich opposed applying a term that, in his view, carried religious import. That's all.

is there any reason to think it wouldn’t look like Brave just with firefox instead of chromium?

Is there any reason that would be a problem? My main beef with Brave is that it's not really contributing to browser diversity.

Yes. Brave's crypto scam is a problem, and they've done some very controversial things in that regard. Like taking "money" on behalf of sites that didn't even participate.

I don't think the CEO matters. Their entire trajectory was probably fixed the instant Google decided to release a browser.

Yes. The purpose of Mozilla Org, from the perspective of the people paying for it (Google), was to kill Firefox. Mitchell Baker got rewarded because she did her job.

It's hard not to imagine Google giving a little wink as they hand over that check.

I don't think he would've done things differently really. He was also part of the same old guard and wasn't exactly aiming for some radical changes inside Mozilla. Imo one of the only things that could've made Firefox more relevant would've been to focus on an electron alternative, especially early on in 2013-14 as it would've been an entirely new "product segment", which could've made Firefox the standard engine for a lot of apps. But there's no indication that anyone high up at Firefox wanted to do something like that. It's a non-profit and non profits are rather conservative, for better or for worse.

You mean positron? https://github.com/mozilla/positron They did try to build that, and gave up.

They had XULRunner long before that, then of course they ditched it to pursue whatever crap they were pursuing that year.

What a great vision.

Yeah I heard about it, but I don't know why they gave up. There's a lot of stuff that could be done to improve on electron (especially back then), and Mozilla was in a nice position where they controlled their web engine (as opposed to electron), so they could've made a very solid product... anyways that's not happening now...

Edit: okay from what I understand in the blog, one of the reasons for abandoning it was that it was hard to keep up with the electron API changes and keep it compatible. That just goes to show that they were completely outplayed early on, otherwise they wouldn't have had to play catch up by merely being an electron shell around Spider monkey...

>But Tofino is dead (long live the Browser Futures Group!), and Electron compatibility isn’t essential for a viable Gecko runtime. It’s also hard, since Electron has a large API surface area, is a moving target, requires Node.js integration (itself a moving target), and is designed for Chromium’s process architecture, which is substantially different from Firefox’s.

He would have at least avoided getting distracted by every single liberal cause that popped up along the way and kept his focus on technology. You can complain about Brave's crypto stuff, but at least it was trying to solve a real problem with internet monetization instead of being whatever Colorways was.

Sure but that's just a symptom not a cause. Even without making Mozilla turn into a regular non profit that just happens to have a browser project (as opposed to a browser project non profit), the strategy they had just couldn't work.

Every monetization attempt failed (even with stuff centered around "privacy", a niche where Firefox is well known). I've seen numbers that indicated that the Mozilla foundation donations are almost equal to what they profit from their commercial products.

> Every monetization attempt failed (even with stuff centered around "privacy", a niche where Firefox is well known)

Again, though: they have yet to try the obvious, which is allowing people to donate to Firefox.

I have zero interest in supporting all the random distractions that Mozilla engages in, but if they gave me a donation box for Firefox specifically I'd set up a recurring payment today.

They can't in good faith claim to have tried every monetization method when they have never let users earmark funds for Firefox.

> The inability to fund Firefox development is completely baffling to me.

It's hard to imagine that it's for a reason other than "Google wants it that way".

You can fund Firefox by pooling money and pay a developer or a company like Igalia to implement a feature you want. It's not trivial, but given the number of people on HN that claim they would pitch in, someone should really try that.

Folks on HN are good to talk the talk but not really to walk the walk. Not only they could give to developers or company like Igalia but they could also get a Firefox Relay/VPN subscription. They don't even need to use it and their money is going to be 100% profit for MoCo. Also, if we are realistic, the total money in donation that Mozilla could get would probably represent a drop in the ocean compared to their annual budget and the amount of money you need to develop a (complete) browser. It's way more complicated than creating yet another chrome skin.

> their money is going to be 100% profit for MoCo

If you can provide a citation for this claim I'd get a subscription today. I don't pay for their side projects because I don't want them to take it as a signal of demand for VPNs, but if it's truly 100% profit I'd be willing to risk it.

> Also, if we are realistic, the total money in donation that Mozilla could get would probably represent a drop in the ocean compared to their annual budget and the amount of money you need to develop a (complete) browser.

People keep saying this, but given that it's never been tried you have no proof. And even if it were, what harm is there in opening up one more option for those of us who want to be really clear about what we're paying for?

> If you can provide a citation for this claim I'd get a subscription today. I don't pay for their side projects because I don't want them to take it as a signal of demand for VPNs, but if it's truly 100% profit I'd be willing to risk it.

Fair enough. They publish their annual financial report but it isn't splitted per project so it's hard to know for a fact with the public information we have access to. However, it isn't unreasonable to think that at the very least a percentage of the smaller products revenues are reinjected elsewhere in the organization (e.g Firefox) since the goal seems to be to diversify their income sources.

> People keep saying this, but given that it's never been tried you have no proof. And even if it were, what harm is there in opening up one more option for those of us who want to be really clear about what we're paying for?

It's been tried over and over in the FOSS community. Few projects are able to get decent money with donations (e.g. Thunderbird). However, it's nowhere near the complexity of a web browser.

For example, Thunderbird made almost $7M (USD) in 2023 for an average of $20 per donation which is 350k users out of 20M monthly active users [1]. Firefox has 10 times that number of users so we could estimate that they'd make $70M/year. That's far from $500M/year they're doing right now.

[1]: https://blog.thunderbird.net/2023/05/thunderbird-is-thriving...

$70m is just $5m shy of their entire "subscription and advertising revenue" line item, with none of the extra cost of getting that revenue. Your back-of-the-napkin math would suggest that donations could render all of Mozilla's for profit side projects unnecessary and allow them to focus that energy exclusively on the browser. What's not to love?

You're comparing the success case of donations against the failure case of profit side projects.

As I said above, if it's a failure, fine, at least they tried. Knowing that it's possible to replace the side projects with a better model why would they not at least try?

I don't want a single feature, I want a guarantee that Firefox will receive consistent maintenance over time and won't be influenced by Google's opinions about what the web should become. A small monthly donation helps with that in a way that feature sponsorship doesn't.

Why do you believe that a monthly donation will help against Google influence on the web more than dedicated feature work? That seems backward to me.

Yeah right, you're basically talking about a fork because nobody can force upstream to go along with your plan. There are already several forks of Firefox. We don't need more.

No I'm not talking about a fork. There are many things the team at Moco just has no time to work on and will happily welcome contributions.

I'm saying you can't independently fund whatever features you desire without a fork, because upstream is under zero obligation to accept your contribution. They may have a conflicting vision of where development needs to go, or simply be unwilling to assume the risk of taking your contribution.

Implementing a whole ass new W3 spec is not something for a single contractor working on donations to do. That's a recipe for never finishing.

They may be starting from behind, but a clean slate might be to their advantage. It takes a distinguished dev to jump into an old, large scale project. Firefox and Chrome definitely meets both of those factors.

Money is not the Problem with firefox https://preview.redd.it/r9q69xop8n6d1.png?auto=webp&s=59a1d3...

This diagram should be zero-aligned at the very least.

This is misleading. Firefox does not have a CEO, Mozilla does. The Mozilla CEO/chairperson is responsible for many more projects than just increasing the market share of Firefox — whether nerds on Hacker News think that’s what Mozilla should be doing or not is another conversation.

Sure, but their main project still is Firefox, by far. That's the project that has the most impact too. How successful are they with their side projects, anyways?

> That's the project that has the most impact too.

How do you measure impact? If it's income created for Mozilla Corp then I agree it's impactful too, and the CEO's pay does seem justified.

> How successful are they with their side projects, anyways?

Honestly I don't know, I haven't looked at their latest annual report. I do pay for Mozilla VPN, although I'm not a Firefox user.

$75 million per year from subscriptions and ads, according to their latest report (2022 for some reason). Another commenter did some quick math to try to prove that donations were fruitless and found that Firefox could reasonably expect to replace that revenue with a donation box:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40901664

So in other words: the side projects aren't successful enough to justify not accepting donations.

I'm not opposed to a donation box at all, I'd donate myself even though I don't use Firefox.

So what else is it that she did do so amazingly well?

According to this comment† from the very same post on Reddit:

> [Mozilla] in 2018's cash flow was negative ~1 million dollars while in 2022 it actually profited ~167 million.

A reply to that comment‡ states the following:

> Also important is that if you look at their annual reports, while it's still the most significant revenue source, the percentage of revenue coming from search engine royalties (i.e. Google) has been steadily going downwards. Instead revenues from their other services (VPN, Pocket, etc) had been increasing steadily.

And indeed we can verify those numbers on Wikipediaᵃ, where we see "Revenue derived from Google" trending downward every year.

So it seems she's been A) successful with continuing the search engine deal with Google; and B) increasing revenue from their other services (VPN, Pocket, etc.) so that Google's contribution to the revenue pie chart slowly shrinks over time.

† https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/1dg7ejv/co...

‡ https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/1dg7ejv/co...

ᵃ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation#Finances

Mozilla isn't incapable of funding Firefox. It's just that they get most of their funding from Google, and thus they will never be allowed to break free or dominate the browser market again. That is, unless Google gets out of the browser business, which will probably never happen.

There must be some sort of cultural virus attached to Firefox that it has to make money as a commercial entity. Firefox was born from Netscape, a for-profit closed-source project, and while they lost the closed-source aspect of it, the executive class at Mozilla don't want to give up the for-profit segment.

I would imagine that there is caution about becoming beholden to user donations to continue operations. Such a situation would give users a measure of effective voting power in the development of the browser.

If you were starting a project from scratch I could see that as a valid concern, but the current world is one where 80% of the funds to pay for Firefox comes from Google. No one can seriously argue that becoming beholden to your users is a worse situation than becoming beholden to your primary competitor.

>No one can seriously argue that becoming beholden to your users is a worse situation than becoming beholden to your primary competitor.

The C-level execs getting their salaries off that Google money can!

Hypothesis: They are paid (by Google) to keep Firefox unpopular.

I don't think so, but close. I think they're indirectly paid by Google to keep Firefox around as a token competitor for antitrust purposes. I'm sure that's what the "search deal" is really about. Because Google already owns the search market, they don't have to pay for it.

However with falling marketshare there comes a point that when that won't fool regulators anymore. And then there's no point for Google to keep paying.

I would present that situation as evidence that the "competition" isn't really a serious one. But perhaps I am ignorant.

It seems more likely to you that Google isn't serious about Chrome's dominance than that they're totally serious about it and are using Firefox as a guard against antitrust and using their funding of Firefox as leverage to get Mozilla to cave?

>Such a situation would give users a measure of effective voting power in the development of the browser.

Yes, better give it to Google and golden-parachuting C-level execs

That's the same situation basically any for-profit company with a paid product is in, is it not? If people don't like your product or don't see a future in it they will be less willing to pay for it (or donate for it). How is that bad?

That's the difference between profit and rent: the optionality of the product.

As opposed to being dependent on Google. Which is your main competitor. Galaxy brain move from the brain trust at Mozilla, sorry I mean Mozi//a.

Why that is unacceptable; so give it all to Google?

Donations are a way to buy influence. Just wait until they receive a generous donation from M. Soft.

And that situation would be worse than the current one, where 80% of their revenue comes from their only serious competitor?

Their primary “donation” is Google. They’re focused on virtue signaling values instead of real work.

It’s a fantasy land. I was there for awhile.

Yeah, only if the Mozilla foundation was run by the engineers