Hacker News Reader

>Mozilla invested significant amount of moneys in a lot of projects which all failed: buying Pocket, the tv thing, the smartphone things. Meanwhile, their main product has been losing market share while they barely fought on the marketing side of things.

This right here is the myth that keeps getting repeated without evidence. As I said in a different comment, most of these widely criticized side bets happened long after the market share decline, so the attempt to tie that to cause and effect just doesn't work. And the "significant" money invested in the side bets is almost never quantified (normally people trying to make this argument, once you ask for numbers, are just browsing the 990 for the first time and making random guesses).

The VPN cost seems like it was utterly trivial, the amount to purchase Pocket was never disclosed but I read of fundraising around $14MM and implied valuations in the low to mid tens of millions, which may be the ballpark of what Pocket costed to acquire. And Pocket did bring in revenue, also possibly on the order of tens of millions. So the worst case is that they lost low tens of millions, the best case is that it was a wash.

So that's not nothing, but that's what it looks like to attach these claims to facts. It's probably less than what their endowment earns them in a year, and relatively small against their annual revenue. But it doesn't tell a story of side bets triggering a collapse in market share like people keep claiming.

And it seems like I keep having to repeat this, but these kinds of narratives completely ignore what were likely the real drivers of market share change, which was Google leveraging its powerful position in search, on Android, the rollout of Chromebooks.

>Mozilla did fire an executive with a track record of good decisions for political pressure

Sidebar for this one. Seems like you are referring to Brandon Eich who was CEO for all of 11 days. He was significant to Mozilla in other ways before that, but interestingly, it's his career at Mozilla that most intersects with the period of major collapse in market share.

>while they barely fought on the marketing side of things

Mozilla has long had a rather huge marketing budget that, depending on the person, is something for which they're criticized. I foget the exact numbers, but after software and development, "operations", and legal, marketing is the biggest chunk of spending and it's comparable to those other departments. If you wanted to argue that they are spending too much that actually would, imo, be one of the stronger charges to make against Mozilla, depending on what you think their priorities should be.

He's CEO of Brave which now has a third the amount of market share of Firefox and rapidly rising, while Firefox continues to crater.

I'll happily credit Eich for his successes if he ever again applies his talents to a non Chromium browser. But right now that's Firefox, and hopefully soon, Ladybird.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43336441 (ladybird)

You go build a web engine. I've done it enough and the fight for user rights is a level up now. Brave would have died on the Gecko or Servo hill, and quickly, if we'd been foolish enough to charge up it.

Not that it matters to anyone, but I feel a responsibility to say it: Brendan, you were right and I was wrong about the CEO pay. It still doesn't bother me as a thing in itself, but it now seems like a critical trigger in the cascade of events leading to the MBA types taking over.

I still disagree with a lot of the HN crowd's complaints about Mozilla, and think we're still serving an important function for now. The bulk of the complaints are applying hindsight to decisions that were difficult at the time, and suggesting alternate paths that are ludicrously unrealistic or optimistic. Other complaints are on target, but way overblown. But the complaint that management has been taken over by the industry-standard hype-chasing short term value extraction mindset? I can't point to any evidence that says they haven't. (Admittedly, it's hard to find a company these days that hasn't...)

Brave rejects that extractive mindset.

People see crypto in Brave and shout "hype", but this is false: we started with the premise that blocking ads by default would require a way for users and creators to get paid or pay, especially for users to get paid. This rules out credit cards, and ACH is way too onerous. We started therefore with a two-sided Bitcoin based user-pays-voluntarily prototype, Brave Payments. Brave Rewards using BAT for a three sided (advertisers pay users who may then pay creators) followed.

More generally, we are Web3 builders, we want decentralization including of payments and finance.

People now see "AI" and shout "hype". We've had ML in the browser and of course in Brave Search for years. LLMs are not going to reach human intelligence, they still need work, but they're a useful front end to search. Not hype, better than ten blue links or the SEO-degraded, Google-cross-promo-infested SERP that doesn't even show blue links above the fold on my phone. Being able to post followup prompts with large context is especially useful.

I agree with you on CEO pay. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43156176 for estimated grand total. Around when the Yahoo! deal failed, it seems Mitchell and the MoCo board made a pact for big pay (rumored $250K/yr to board members for doing little). If merited by results, defensible. As things turned out (not merited), red meat laid out as bait to second-rate MBA/McKinsey types who can be successor-looters while the Google deal pays.

> Brandon Eich

To be an elite HN hater, you need to spell my name correctly.

> it's his career at Mozilla that most intersects with the period of major collapse in market share.

This is completely wrong, since I was a founder of Mozilla from 1998 on, so I was there for growth from 0 for Mozilla Suite, then from 0 for Firefox, to the peak after Chrome was out. Did you think I just joined Mozilla in 2010?

Some links:

https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share#monthly-2009...

Note the orange line for Firefox. Statcounter doesn't go back earlier, but we started from 0 with mozilla/browser, grew to a million or two with Phoenix/Firebird, then on to millions from launch on Nov 9, 2004 of Firefox 1.0.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38998243

Lots of decline after I left, but I'll take some blame for decline before I quit, if you credit me for all the growth from inception. Deal?

I apologize for getting your name wrong.

>This is completely wrong, since I was a founder of Mozilla from 1998 on, so I was there for growth from 0 for Mozilla Suite, then from 0 for Firefox, to the peak after Chrome was out. Did you think I just joined Mozilla in 2010?

This marks the first time I've ever heard someone argue that time period B didn't happen because it was preceded by time period A. I think claiming they both did indeed happen is a more coherent interpretation of historical events.

>Lots of decline after I left, but I'll take some blame for decline before I quit, if you credit me for all the growth from inception. Deal?

I actually love Mozilla and everything it's been able to achieve which is why I'm here pushing back against haters in the comment section. There's currently a mass hallucination happening at HN, where commenters are claiming that Mozilla's various side bets from 2020-2025 retroactively caused the market share losses of 2010-2015. Someone motivated to point to your tenure as capable of reversing those losses would have to reconcile that with the fact that your tenure coincided with the biggest collapse in market share. My hope is not that they would endorse that interpretation, but that it would reveal the motivated reasoning of treating market share decline as reversible if only you had stayed.

I would argue the real largest single driver of market share loss was the emergence of Chromium, and Google's flexing of unparalleled leverage to push Chromium out to everyone combined with Embrace-Extend-Extinguish battle plan on web standards. Excluding that from the story, and trying to framing it entirely in terms of Mozilla missteps is unfair to Mozilla, and is what I'm pushing back against.

From the statcounter links I gave:

>>> (31.82-14.34)x100/31.82

54

>>> (14.34-2.37)x100/14.35

83

54% drop from peak to when I left, 83% drop after. No one said "didn't happen".

Time period B shows a clear net drop in market share in absolute percentage terms. You reframed it as a percentage drop from peak and combined it with time period A. That’s a shift in metric and scope, not a basis for calling the reference "completely wrong." It would only be wrong if that period didn’t happen which obviously isn’t the case.

If you insist on percentage points not ratios, then how do you apportion blame to me vs the CEOs before me? I was CEO for ten days. I stood up for it to avoid Mozilla going headless longer (Gary Kovacs stepped down by April 2013: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/gearing-up-for-the-next-...).

If it’s all my fault, kindly say how. You will have to come up with reasons why Firefox continued to fall after I left and to date.

The smartphone things meant Firefox OS?

The TV thing meant the Fire TV version? How much did it cost? How much did Amazon pay Mozilla?

What was Eich's track record of good decisions? He supported Firefox OS. This seems a bad decision according to you. Many people say Firefox was much inferior to Chrome from 2008 to 2017 at least. Eich was CTO from 2005 to 2014. His track record at Brave includes multiple events which led to negative marketing.

Eich's tenure as Mozilla's CEO included failing to prepare for a predictable PR crisis, declining to apologize for harming people, and declining to say he wouldn't do it again.

I grew Mozilla and then Firefox from zero (not 2005 CTO title, from 1998 public [late 1997 inside Netscape] in tech leader role for Mozilla, rainmaker and exec sponsor in 2001 for mozilla/browser which became Firefox) to their heights.

Now I'm growing Brave to 100M MAU (we will pass Firefox as it falls and we rise, likely this October). Take care!

My comment was not intended as a summary of your CV. The 2005 CTO title was enough to establish you didn't inherit 2008 Firefox.

Mitchell Baker also could boast she grew Mozilla and Firefox to their heights. Her tenure after 2008 is not called a track record of good decisions.

Why are you commenting about part of my time at Mozilla to try to put me in a bad light, then when I challenge you, suddenly dragging Mitchell in? I was not attacking her, but you were definitely attacking me. Changing the subject to someone else does not excuse your usual sniping at me.

For your information, Mitchell and I collaborated closely as leaders (I was tech, she was mgmt/legal) of Mozilla from 1999 on to Firefox launch and peak in 2010 or 2011. We also worked after that year to deal with CEO issues, before with her support I became CEO. We both supported FirefoxOS among other projects I was a tech cofounder or sponsor of. Have a nice day.