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Comment by doctorpangloss | Hacker News Reader

> When the two mix it doesn't always go well (see Mozilla).

you've written more than 20 paragraphs of comments but I stopped here, because if you think this way about Mozilla, a very successful company and philanthropy, you probably are not making generalizable judgements about others

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Mozilla the one which:

* lost market share of its product from 30 to 2%

* spends money on fun projects and acqusitions that generate no revenue, while taking away what the users wanted (addons, extensions, customizing) since supposedly this is hard to do

* spends money on politics instead of core product

And many more

You should read a business book too. Focusing on core product (firefox) should be top priority, especially if it is the only real product that generates revenue.

Soon music will stop and there will be no money, since it got spent on everything else.

The problem is Mozilla's mission is not to develop a browser! They have a browser, and it is what everyone knows them for, but their mission is only vaguely related to the browser. I don't care much about their mission - there are plenty of other charities that have similar missions if I did. I care about a great browsers and they are not delivering that - which is fine as far as their mission, but I'm miffed because I can't get what I want from anyone.

What do business books say you should do when the primary way you lose your market is illegal and anti-competitive business practices from a megacorp in a political environment anathema to punishing anti-competitive business practices?

Please tell me how Firefox was supposed to compete with Chrome being bundled with nearly any download of any software anywhere, and with a one click installer on the Google homepage. The value of that advertising alone far exceeds what Mozilla could afford.

People who think it's Mozilla's failure to have been utterly crushed by illegal business practices are so strange to me.

What did you expect to happen? Why do you think we have laws against this stuff in the first place? How would you have outspent the behemoth on advertising? How would you have overcome a competitor being included with nearly everything done on a computer?

Google Chrome's abuse of installers was so bad that Microsoft had to change how it sets "default browser" because Google was setting itself as the default entirely without user interaction! Tons of the marketshare that went from Firefox to Chrome did not do so intentionally, did not even know, and did not mean to

That argument is a lot less convincing now that Brave (by their previous CTO) has seen exponential growth the last few years while Firefox has just cruised. It turns out Firefox just kinda sucks.

It's funny, because Firefox gained dominant market share in a time when Internet was much younger and Internet Explorer was bundled with Windows.

However Firefox offered something that IE did not have - extensions and customization, so those "in the know" popularized it. Especially abilty to block ads spread as word of mouth.

Then the "in the know" people would install Firefox and recommend it (for free!) to their family and friends.

Now we are in time when Google creates various "manifests" that are a fancy way of saying that they want to cut on ad-blocks in Chrome... so it would be Firefox time to shine again. What do they do? Their CEO (previous one) says that they dont want adblocks and could in fact get rid of them! So opposite of what made Firefox popular in the first place!

Then on top of that they developers of firefox have a big internal problem: they dont want to do what users want (ability to make addons, extensions and customize thing). They dont want to do that because it is "hard". They want to do greenfield projects that nobody is interested in. Note that those developers dont write Firefox for free, they earn good salaries. But management lets them do what they want.

The differentiator for Firefox were extensions - but those were killed, because the team did not want to support them

Business book will ask you "what is the unique proposition of Firefox" - it was adblock now and they want to kill even this.

I think WoodenChair's claim is that Mozilla has been organized as a social organization, which has probably been quite good for the philanthropy side. But it doesn't seem to have been particularly good for the product side, as seen from the decline in market share and perceived quality of Firefox. At least perceived quality in the eyes of techies here on HN.

> you've written more than 20 paragraphs of comments but I stopped here, because if you think this way about Mozilla, a very successful company and philanthropy, you probably are not making generalizable judgements about others

I mean yeah, if you think Mozilla has been well managed over the past two decades, then yeah we're on different planes of understanding the world.

- The only product it makes that anyone cares about, Firefox, has gone from 30% market share in 2010 to 2% market share in 2025. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers

- It has put itself in a position where the vast majority of its funding comes from its main competitor, Google, who makes Chrome. Conflict of interest much? And now Google is being sued for that in an antitrust case. https://www.pcworld.com/article/2772034/googles-search-monop...

- Despite being a non-profit, its CEO was paid $7 million during a period of layoffs in 2023 https://www.i-programmer.info/news/86-browsers/16844-firefox...

- Mozilla was founded to support the development of an open source web browser. That's a critically important mission. Yet, it spends most of its money not on the web browser (maybe why the web browser is at 2% market share). https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2021/mozilla-fdn-202...

- It has started many other initiatives with a big splash that all fizzled (FirefoxOS, Pocket, etc.)

I don't know, doesn't sound like "a very successful company and philanthropy" as you put it. I would call it a *formerly* "very successful company and philanthropy."

Just out of interest, how much should the guaranteed salary of a non-profit CEO maximally be?

I don't know but $7 million seems high for a non-profit that's in the midst of layoffs, dramatically losing marketshare, seems to have no direction, and has all of the other failures I mentioned above as Mozilla did in 2023. But point taken, without looking at a scale of other people in similar non-profit positions, it's hard to judge. I think the other points are strong though.

Guaranteed? Enough to cover living costs.

Everything else should be performance bonuses. Of which Mozilla CEO would have gotten none, based on their failure.

How would you measure the performance, given that it is a non-profit? Which self-respecting CEO who is actually good would go for such a deal? I think it is important to understand that the employees of a non-profit are allowed to earn a proper salary.

I think $7 million is too much for the CEO of a non-profit, but $100K would be too low. You can see that there are plenty of CEOs making more than $1 million: https://www.charitywatch.org/nonprofit-compensation-packages...

Organizations in decline often have to pay above market rate for executives, so it's hard to say that it's definitely too much. Especially when Mozilla spends ~$280,000 on software development, i.e. 40 times as much. Even paying the CEO $0 wouldn't really move the needle.

But, yeah, Mozilla has been fumbling constantly for the past decade, at least.

If success was really determined by a pitch perfect combination of browser development, catering to users with features they most want, being ahead of the curve on mobile and devices, and being flexible and creative with financing.... then we would all be using Opera.

Back when memory management actually was critical, Opera had a light footprint, had a portable executable you could stick on a USB stick. They partnered with mobile vendors to get on phones very early (ahead of the iPhone!), had advanced tabs, an extensions ecosystem, "widgets", Unite (the most impressive browser idea ever imo even to this day), had clearer ideas of what the start page could be, offered to retrieve compressed pages to save data (again back when that mattered), built in ad blocking very early on, and an extremely customizeable user interface

But even they had to give up on Presto (RIP), sold the company to overseas investors, shared user data with ad brokers and develop based on Chromium. If doing everything right is what works, then what happened to Opera?

Successful retirement home for failing CxOs maybe but as company Mozilla was successful 15 years ago then managed to completely squander their market lead while eroding public trust in them by various weird partnerships (like multiple times installing 3rd party addons without consent)

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