[HN Gopher] Mozilla names new CEO as it pivots to data privacy
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Mozilla names new CEO as it pivots to data privacy
Author : jacooper
Score : 436 points
Date : 2024-02-08 15:06 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (fortune.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (fortune.com)
| altairprime wrote:
| See also: https://blog.mozilla.org/mozilla/a-new-chapter-for-
| mozilla-l...
| bpierre wrote:
| https://archive.ph/rmMEb
| pas wrote:
| Laura Chambers interim CEO, so ... no, Mozilla just fired
| Mitchell Baker, and that's it.
| acomagu wrote:
| I I just heard about him for the first time, why does he hate
| you?
| faeriechangling wrote:
| Long long overdue. Baker did nothing but see Mozilla decline
| while she arranged pay raises for herself and fired engineers.
| Should have been canned for incompetence a decade ago.
| tlivolsi wrote:
| Thank goodness. Mitchell Baker was running Mozilla into the
| ground while stuffing her pockets.
|
| >Doubling down on our core products, like Firefox...
|
| The fact that they acknowledged Firefox at all gives me some
| hope.
| Spivak wrote:
| I mean I kinda doubt any new CEO is going to take an
| appreciable cut to salary. Baker got a bad rap among tech nerds
| for whom Mozilla === Firefox for trying to find literally any
| new market outside Firefox. It's not the golden calf it once
| was and only survives because of Google's hedge against
| antitrust.
|
| 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.
| pgeorgi wrote:
| It's less a "Firefox above all" sentiment, it's that Mozilla
| had
|
| 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.
| mekoka wrote:
| > It's not the golden calf it once was
|
| 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.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| Can you back up these accusations?
| mekoka wrote:
| I think that I'm rather observing than accusing. Which of
| my statements do you need evidence for? That Mozilla
| fumbled despite Firefox having 30% of the browser market
| share? See its market share today. That they played
| wallflower while others were figuring out the front-end
| ecosystem? See the ensuing decade of front-end tooling
| extravaganza, through which Firefox's role was reduced to
| the app that eventually runs your web app (i.e. _you_ the
| community figure it all out). That Firefox was an
| undervalued asset? See their foray into other venues,
| despite Firefox 's untapped potential in being a real
| platform for the web (unlike Android and iOS). That
| Mozilla didn't see Firefox as their Trojan horse to share
| the apps market pie? See their equivalent of the App
| Store and Google Play. That they sat on it to barely make
| it compete with Chrome? Firefox has been my primary
| browser since it was still named Firebird, there was an
| extended stretch during which my faithfulness had nothing
| to do with it offering a better experience than Chrome.
| Indeed, even today, I still have to start Chrome from
| time to time for a few things that FF doesn't handle
| well.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| All that reasoning is claims without facts (and they
| don't match my unsubstantiated beliefs).
| Hasu wrote:
| > 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.
|
| It's necessary because Firefox _doesn 't make money_.
|
| >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.
|
| Mozilla's browser development is funded almost entirely by
| Google. If Mozilla had stepped up to become a real
| competitor, Google would have shut off the money, and
| Firefox would have just died. Google sells ads. Apple sells
| hardware. Mozilla doesn't sell anything. If they want to be
| independent and compete, they need independent income.
| mekoka wrote:
| > Mozilla's browser development is funded almost entirely
| by Google. If Mozilla had stepped up to become a real
| competitor, Google would have shut off the money
|
| That's been the trope for many years. I believed it in
| the past. I'm skeptical it's still the case. Mozilla made
| enough money over the years to risk leveraging some of
| Firefox's potential and buy its own independence. I'm
| also optimistic that Mozilla has always been uniquely
| qualified, with enough resources, know-how, and branding
| power to set up some of the ideas that I suggested,
| relatively quickly.
|
| For instance, if even tomorrow they came out with a
| specialized Business Firefox offshoot, augmented to
| simplify the development of business web apps (e.g. it
| natively understands TypeScript and a few selected
| frameworks; it easily integrates with cloud providers and
| APIs; it simplifies dealing with the local file system
| and databases; basically a special browser tuned to
| _understand_ modern front-end development), companies
| would pay attention. For devs, no need to start playing
| around with complicated tooling. The environment is the
| browser. I know I 'd at least give it a try with no
| second thought. The trade-off to building apps quickly
| would be the need to install that Business Firefox. I
| think it's a decent trade-off.
| AJ007 wrote:
| They could have done a deal with Microsoft, even for a
| fraction of the amount and been just fine. Google's ad
| business model is a cash fire hose. If they actually
| backed off development because of Google's money, then
| it's corruption and particularly egregious because it
| involves a non-profit and a monopoly.
|
| For the record, I'm fine with Firefox the way it is now.
| I use Lynx more than I use Chrome.
| csdvrx wrote:
| I think you perfectly summed it up. Mozilla depends on google
| largesse, which limits its perimeter of freedom.
|
| 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.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| > Baker got a bad rap among tech nerds for whom Mozilla ===
| Firefox for trying to find literally any new market outside
| Firefox.
|
| 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.
| creativeSlumber wrote:
| > Thank goodness. Mitchell Baker was running Mozilla into the
| ground while stuffing her pockets.
|
| Can you please elaborate more on this and ideally provide some
| examples ?
| xnx wrote:
| 2008 to 2022: Firefox market share down 90%. Mozilla CEO pay
| up 700%.
| subtra3t wrote:
| Just a quick note; the market share decrease is relative to
| FF's _original market share_ , in 2008. This may seem
| obvious to some but its really easy to get confused about
| absolute/relative changes when talking about percentages of
| percentages.
| csdvrx wrote:
| Relative is all that matters. A rising tide lifts all
| boats.
|
| Microsoft has grown faster and larger than Google from
| 2013 to 2013: 1000% compared to Google 400%
|
| Firefox relative market share down by 90% is a ripple
| effect of Google generous donations, creating a
| disincentive for innovation.
| tux3 wrote:
| The title chart from this article caught on like wildfire a
| few years ago: https://calpaterson.com/mozilla.html
|
| "Firefox usage is down 85% despite Mozilla's top exec pay
| going up 400%".
| Night_Thastus wrote:
| I'm not sure that FF going down in usage can be put on the
| CEO at this point. There's way too many forces against
| them, it is not a "fair" fight against the only other
| option.
|
| Google is way larger and has deals set in place to ensure
| that basically everyone ends up with it as the default. Let
| that go on for a generation or two and people forget all
| about FF. They cannot compete against that.
|
| As for CEO pay, that's typical. Asking or expecting for it
| to not go up exponentially is pointless, that's just how it
| works now.
| tux3 wrote:
| Without trying to pin everything on the CEO, I don't
| think it's also fair to treat Firefox as helpless and
| doomed.
|
| For another data point we can look at Thunderbird,
| another Mozilla project. Thunderbird had started
| stagnating. It was borderline abandoned for a while,
| until Mozilla made it official.
|
| The community tried to catch the discarded codebase and
| keep it alive, Thunderbird got a new home. Remember we're
| talking about a desktop email client in the age where a
| couple major companies entirely own email, as a concept.
| Email _is_ Gmail and Outlook, it's not even close to a
| fair fight for a small third party email client to
| compete against that.
|
| Nevertheless, Thunderbird is growing again.
|
| https://fosdem.org/2024/events/attachments/fosdem-2024-27
| 28-...
| nozzlegear wrote:
| Am I crazy, or is there no label for the Y-axis on those
| graphs? Do we know how much Thunderbird has actually
| grown?
| leipert wrote:
| Probably screenshots from here:
| https://stats.thunderbird.net/
| amanzi wrote:
| Even us die-hard Firefox users are forced to use other
| browsers just to get full PWA support. If Mozilla makes
| it difficult for fans of their browser to stick with
| Firefox, it's not surprising that non-Firefox users won't
| bother sticking with it or even trying it in the first
| place.
| maxloh wrote:
| Firefox's UI/UX is not as good as Chrome's. Some features
| are either not implemented, or not as good as their
| counterparts in Chrome.
|
| Some examples that come to mind are multiple profiles,
| history manager, and bookmark manager.
|
| See some previous discussions here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36876696
| palata wrote:
| And Chrome doesn't have containers.
|
| I think that it's not a UI/UX thing, honestly they are
| almost exactly the same thing (tabs, URL bar, webpage).
| The difference is that people use what they are given,
| and when you are Google it's easier to be seen by
| everybody.
| manicennui wrote:
| Then what exactly is the CEO responsible for? Is there a
| single thing Mozilla does that is relevant anymore?
| wand3r wrote:
| Tangential, but this spurred an interest in reading a few
| of their annual reports. It seems general purpose LLMs are
| bad at doing this, at least when I asked what annual
| revenue was it confidently said $466m for 2020 but the
| report said 496867 so basically $497m.
|
| Anyone have a blogpost/video/guide on the basics of reading
| financial statements? I definitely could brush up on whats
| important within these statements and how to better
| interpret them....
|
| Edit: the reason I replied here, was because I wanted to
| see how the company did during her tenure as CEO. That was
| the leap my brain took.
| justinclift wrote:
| This should cover it pretty well:
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/browsers/comments/yy986k/can_someon.
| ..
| imadj wrote:
| I'm not OP, but here're the highlights:
|
| - 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...
| wolverine876 wrote:
| Lots of tech companies are laying off people, and generally
| not all layoffs are wrong. How do you distinguish whether
| Mozilla's layoffs, etc, are wrong?
|
| I agree about the pay.
| imadj wrote:
| > Lots of tech companies are laying off people, and
| generally not all layoffs are wrong. How do you
| distinguish whether Mozilla's layoffs, etc, are wrong?
|
| No one is complaining about Mozilla's layoffs in a void.
| Even if they were no layoffs whatsoever, the facts
| remains:
|
| 1. Firefox was neglected and lost a massive market share.
|
| 2. Executives were flourishing while the ship was going
| under
|
| Mozilla's layoffs were just a more tangible symptom of
| her strategy that the browser is a low-priority.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| > the facts remains: / 1. Firefox was neglected and lost
| a massive market share.
|
| What is the factual basis for saying that Firefox was
| neglected? Lots of stuff is repeated around here, but
| it's not impression from any facts.
| imadj wrote:
| > What is the factual basis for saying that Firefox was
| neglected? Lots of stuff is repeated around here, but
| it's not impression from any facts.
|
| Interesting, what do you attribute Firefox's bleeding out
| marketshare steadily over the past decade to if not
| neglect from leadership? Strategy is at the core of the
| CEO role and other executives.
|
| Mitchell Baker actually stated herself, I think in 2020
| at the time of layoffs, that Mozilla needed to focus on
| stuff like decentralized web, artificial intelligence,
| security and privacy network, etc. So yes it seems
| evident that the browser was neglected to pursue other
| endeavors, that mind you, didn't see much success either.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| It doesn't matter what I attribute it to; I'm not an
| expert.
|
| An obvious alternative explanation - really the null
| hypothesis, IMHO - is competition from Google. Google has
| much greater brand power, engineering resources, and
| marketing power than anyone. They could advertise Chrome
| across their incredibly popular ecosystem, including on
| the (possibly) most popular page on the Internet,
| https://www.google.com.
|
| Chrome is a pretty good product, too, and didn't have
| legacy code like Gecko to deal with. I'm not sure what
| any Mozilla CEO could do.
|
| Maybe facing those odds, it was better to invest in other
| things too. Mozilla's mission isn't a web browser, but to
| make the web free and (private).
| bobthecowboy wrote:
| As someone who's nearly exclusively used Firefox since
| before it was called Firefox, I would not say that the
| product itself has been neglected. It continues to get
| better, from my point of view. Like seriously if you're
| reading this and at all interested, just try to switch to
| it for a week, it's great.
|
| _However_ it is factual that its marketshare (and thus,
| relevance (and thus, influence on the web)) has
| dramatically declined over the past decade or so. People
| complain about Mozilla 's tech side quests (and
| occasionally people complain about their social-cause
| chases), but this is the real honest complaint. Firefox
| is trending toward irrelevancy, while Google has
| gradually taken control of this market. Meanwhile, CEO
| compensation has gone up (amid layoffs in the ZIRP era,
| for that matter).
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers
| wolverine876 wrote:
| I know that, but I think it would be extraordinary to
| defeat a (free) Google product that they advertise
| throughout their ecosystem.
| mavamaarten wrote:
| There's a Pocket pun in there somewhere
| wolverine876 wrote:
| I could imagine stepping down because of facing this abuse
| continuously. People seem to see people like Baker as free
| targets in the online social game of ridicule, of who is in and
| who is out - like high school in a way, with people reading the
| signals and participating. Baker and people in similar
| positions [0] must believe that it will never end, no matter
| what they do. Mozilla employees have posted here, talking about
| its negative effect in morale.
|
| [0] I'm having trouble defining what makes a target in the
| game. I think it has to do with power - while people criticize
| e.g., the heads of Google, Microsoft, it's somehow not nearly
| the same level of plain ridicule (IIRC and IME). Others have
| their online following - criticizing Musk, for example, always
| attracts defenders. I suspect it has to do with Baker's gender,
| but of course I can't say for sure: when I imagine a male in
| that role, I don't imagine the same personal attacks; when I
| imagine a female head of Facebook, I imagine worse attacks than
| what Zuckerburg attracts. That is pretty weak, subjective
| evidence, however; I wonder if someone has done empirical
| testing on that.
| tlivolsi wrote:
| What are you talking about? Criticism comes with the
| territory of being the CEO of a company. A CEO is going to
| receive the blame or accolades for a company depending on
| whether it fails or succeeds. People largely perceive Mozilla
| to be a declining company. So, yes, she is naturally going to
| receive the blame for that. What also comes with the
| territory is massive compensation.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| Whatever the justification for commenter behavior (which
| doesn't justify it all in my mind; it just says lots of
| people do it), how does that address my GP comment?
| mariusor wrote:
| I think most people are upset that Mozilla went from a CEO
| with a compensation[1] of ~800K and decent market share to
| one earning around 7mln but with the scraps of market share
| that we have now. Nobody can say if Eich would have done
| things differently, but I guess we'll never know.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22060527
| starkparker wrote:
| Serious question because a few more minutes of Googling
| than I should've taken couldn't answer it: did Baker set
| her own salary, or did the Mozilla board collectively set
| it? Is any of that released by Mozilla?
|
| Laura Chambers, the interim CEO, is listed on Mozilla's
| website as "member of the compensation committee". Karim
| Lakhani's chair of the compensation committee and has been
| on the board since 2016. So I'm assuming the same people
| who decided to pay Baker $7M/year are still there?
| wmf wrote:
| CEO pay is always set by the board (the compensation
| committee is usually a subset of the board). It may be
| the case that the CEO demands certain comp and the board
| composed of their friends grants that request, but it's
| still the board.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| Also, the CEO is often on the board.
| manicennui wrote:
| It's hard to imagine why are people expecting something
| tangible from someone making millions per year while laying
| people off.
| neilv wrote:
| A CEO willing to take a modest compensation package (only
| enough to be middle-class comfortable, like Mozilla's engineers
| should be) might be signal that they're really aligned with the
| non-profit mission.
|
| 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.
| diggan wrote:
| I cannot read the submission article, but I can read the
| statement from Mozilla/Mitchell Baker
| (https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/a-new-chapter-for-
| mozill...), which doesn't mention either "data" nor "privacy".
|
| 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?
| sandebert wrote:
| Oh dear, that statement didn't fare well when I applied
| bullshit.js.
|
| https://mourner.github.io/bullshit.js/
| zzleeper wrote:
| Wow you weren't joking:
|
| > 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:
| slater wrote:
| "What are the connections between this bullshit malaise and
| how humans are bullshitting with each other and bullshit?"
|
| haha
| kunagi7 wrote:
| I will keep this script around. Half of the article became
| "bullshit" and that shows to which kind of public is this
| information directed to.
| maxloh wrote:
| To try it yourself, run the following statement in the
| DevTools console, await import("https://esm.s
| h/gh/mourner/bullshit.js@master/src/replace.js")
| bluish29 wrote:
| > Mitchell Baker is stepping down as CEO to focus on AI and
| internet safety as chair of the nonprofit foundation
|
| > 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.
| alecco wrote:
| Will her compensation change? Hmm
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| > But AI has given the nonprofit foundation and its cofounder
| Baker a fresh sense of mission in creating alternatives to tackle
| deepfakes, data privacy issues and the power of big tech. It
| launched a Mozilla.ai startup last year and Mozilla Corp. is
| focused on product extensions like Mozilla Monitor that wipe
| subscribers' data off the web.
|
| 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".
| lenerdenator wrote:
| It's also worth noting that Facebo - er - Meta has been one of
| the few to train its models on data it actually has an
| unambiguous legal right to.
| sp332 wrote:
| Llama models were trained on Books3.
| lenerdenator wrote:
| Ope. Shit, nevermind then.
|
| I thought they'd pull it from, y'know, the massive dataset
| their users generate and that they have unambiguous legal
| rights to in perpetuity.
| victor9000 wrote:
| Well, it was either continue down a path of irrelevance or try
| something different. Hopefully this means a brighter future for
| Firefox.
| martin_drapeau wrote:
| Focus on data privacy may ring a bell with people using ad
| blockers. Not for the regular joe though. They just want things
| to work and Chrome just works.
|
| I wonder what percentage of internet users use ad blockers?
| That would pretty much represent the market cap for Firefox.
| asddubs wrote:
| I've heard the number 30% tossed around before, but I'm not
| sure how accurate it is
| bachmeier wrote:
| All the problems Mozilla has are summed up in this one sentence
| (taken from the Mozilla blog post):
|
| > 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.
| altairprime wrote:
| > 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
| blowski wrote:
| Bad idea because it's LinkedIn, which has a shady reputation?
| Or that her profile doesn't look good? Or something else?
| bachmeier wrote:
| See my answer here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39303697
| hosteur wrote:
| I am probably just slow but why is that a bad idea?
| ploum wrote:
| Let say for a moment that it is acceptable for the CEO of a
| corporation working on the independence of the Web to not
| have her personal independent webpage.
|
| 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...
| halvo wrote:
| It is literally difficult for me to understand the problem
| through your condescension
| ploum wrote:
| I'm sorry I'm sounding condescending. I was trying to be
| funny. The point is that there are so many problems that
| it is even a problem to list them. Those problems are so
| evident to me that I didn't thought people might not
| understand it.
|
| 1. Linkedin is a platform promoting a closed-garden
| vision of the web while Firefox is seen a the last stand
| against that closed vision.
|
| 2. Linkedin is owned by Microsoft. Microsoft has been the
| biggest opponent to Mozilla and still is, even if it may
| be topped by Google in that place.
|
| 3. Linkedin is known for its terrible security practices
| regarding personal datas. It is also a big seller of
| private data. Which goes against "promoting privacy".
|
| This tells a lot from a symbolic perspective. But it is
| not only symbolic:
|
| 4. You need a Linkedin account to view the link. Meaning
| that the very first step of the news CEO is requiring
| users to have an account on a rival platform which
| harvest their data if they want to know who she is.
|
| 5. It means that the new CEO find her Linkedin account
| more important that any personal website, if any, which
| is philosophically the opposite of Mozilla self-
| proclaimed mission.
|
| I hope it is is clearer and you understand that, yes, it
| is a big deal. CEO position is mostly symbolic. The very
| first move and the fact that nobody at Mozilla even
| realized that it could send a bad signal is enough
| indication that nobody there even understand the original
| mission anymore. Nobody there cares about privacy. Nobody
| there cares about the independence of the Web.
| 2cynykyl wrote:
| > I was trying to be funny.
|
| You succeeded!
| TheRoque wrote:
| What he means is that as a CEO of a corporation that is
| supposed to defend things like openness, privacy, power
| to the users etc., it's ironic that the only tool to see
| her profile is from a Microsoft-owned company, which is
| quite the opposite of most of Mozilla's core values
| (well, mostly regarding privacy).
| karaterobot wrote:
| I don't find myself reacting to any of that with the angst
| it seems this inspired in you. If someone doesn't have a
| personal website, it doesn't make me think they hate
| independent websites or privacy. And if they don't have a
| personal website but someone on their staff needs to link
| to a persistent, business-oriented online profile, LinkedIn
| is about as good as anything I can think of.
| zilti wrote:
| Because you have to create an account, be logged in, and
| agree to be tracked. In other words, the opposite of the
| mission of Mozilla. They've long had a reputation as one
| of the worst offenders, and they're owned by Microsoft,
| which is obviously not known for respecting user privacy.
| shiandow wrote:
| > even if the new CEO is talking about talking about
| privacy.
|
| Intentional or a typo?
| altairprime wrote:
| Absurd, how? Can you be more specific and plain about what
| you believe is wrong, without the oratory rhetoric? You've
| presented a list of evidence in support of some point you
| have in mind, but we need you to plainly state your beliefs
| -- not just your arguments in support of them -- if you'd
| like us to consider your views.
| jononor wrote:
| These things are somewhat ironic, given the focus of the
| states mission. But is it /really/ a reflection or
| explanation of any serious problem that the organization
| has? Is is really an indication that the interim CEO is not
| capable?
| bachmeier wrote:
| Because you have to create an account, be logged in, and
| agree to be tracked. In other words, the opposite of the
| mission of Mozilla. They've long had a reputation as one of
| the worst offenders, and they're owned by Microsoft, which is
| obviously not known for respecting user privacy.
| ploum wrote:
| That. Exactly.
|
| Nothing to add.
|
| Anybody without a personal ten years old website using some
| hand-made HTML should probably not be CEO of Firefox.
| xethos wrote:
| Being in love with the tech doesn't make someone a good CEO.
| Notably, sometimes standing too close to a problem prevents
| one from seeing solutions. Let's maybe start with actual
| admonisions against her (and her replacement's) relevant
| qualifications, achievements, or character (or lack thereof),
| instead of grabbing pitchforks and venting about how she's
| the wrong person to get a greenfield browser off the ground;
| simply put, that's not where Firefox or Mozilla is at right
| now.
| ploum wrote:
| "Being in love with the tech doesn't make someone a good
| CEO."
|
| I never said that this was a sufficient condition. I said
| it was a necessary condition.
|
| We have spent decades trusting tech-illiterate CEO's
| because "they knew the business and knowing the tech was
| useless".
|
| See the result for yourself in every single company.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| It has nothing to do with tech. It's about a "pivot to data
| privacy" linking to one of the worse offender is terms of
| privacy invasion, that's just _insane_. It 's as if say
| announced pivot to cloud computing and did so on a website
| hosted on AWS.
| dylan604 wrote:
| I have more respect for people that use hand-made HTML over
| some JS library that makes unreadable code
| Gualdrapo wrote:
| The HN hivemind sometimes likes vintage web development and
| web design _so much_ it becomes really weird.
| ploum wrote:
| What I find weird is how many professional web developers
| contact me to ask what theme I'm using on my blog, a
| straight HTML website with 42 lines of inline CSS. I even
| was asked once with JS library I was using. (there is no
| JS, it's a blog !)
|
| None of those sending me those emails bothered to even look
| at the code. None even thought it was possible that this
| was _NOT_ a "theme" somewhere on the web.
|
| Yet I'm seen as the weird one in the industry.
| sergiomattei wrote:
| I don't understand how a couple of naive emails
| translates to the disrespect of an entire class of
| people.
| palata wrote:
| Well the parent expresses surprise at _how many such
| emails_ they receive. I don 't think the disrespect an
| entire class of people, they just say "it's not a couple
| naive emails, it's a lot more than I would expect".
| maxloh wrote:
| You mentioned "professional web developers", not
| "professional UI designers".
|
| That's the point.
| maxloh wrote:
| I always find it frustrating to read HN comments expressing
| hatred towards mobile and whitespace-rich designs.
|
| These designs exist based on user research, as most people
| find them pleasant and intuitive. I don't understand what's
| wrong with these design patterns.
| pas wrote:
| Microsoft went with whatever Windows 8 was based on user
| research too. Just because someone did a few interviews
| it doesn't make it good. :)
|
| In this case I have to agree though. Linking to LinkedIn
| is simply ridiculous. What's next, linking to a high
| school yearbook?
| SiempreViernes wrote:
| _Really_ hard to tell if this is sarcasm or an extremely
| niche elitist.
| palata wrote:
| When you pay 6M, I think you have the right to be slightly
| elitist. Isn't that the whole argument for such indecent
| salaries? "But they are one of a kind! We have to pay them
| that much otherwise we're screwed".
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| I'm not sure why people think tech asceticism would grant
| people the ability to successfully run a large company.
|
| 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.
| aunty_helen wrote:
| Three cheers for someone who has become hated by the only
| community that still use Firefox.
|
| 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.
| actualwitch wrote:
| If you are suggesting that people who still use firefox hate
| Mitchell Baker, you are mistaken.
| Vt71fcAqt7 wrote:
| You're right. Some of us are using forks with Mozilla's
| telemetry removed.
| actualwitch wrote:
| I can assure you, the amount of people who daily forks of
| ff is even smaller than the amount of people who hate
| Mitchell Baker.
| temp0826 wrote:
| Can't tell if sarcasm. Long time user (and often
| evangelistic) of firefox and loathe the turns she took as
| ceo.
| actualwitch wrote:
| I don't know how to be any more clear, as someone who used
| firefox since 3.0 and talked to plenty people irl who use
| firefox - the haters are a vocal minority that only exists
| on forums.
| temp0826 wrote:
| It's not exactly dinner table conversation, and average
| internet-users probably wouldn't care much about the
| implications of such a company and situations, sure. The
| misgivings aren't justified among many who are aware of
| the details? Shouldn't non-profits deserve some scrutiny
| when they're seemingly being mishandled?
| actualwitch wrote:
| It's rare enough to warrant a discussion in passing
| wherever I notice it. Usually people use it because they
| don't want google monopoly and I have not seen anyone
| have the kind of burning passion for looking into pockets
| of women CEO's as in the comments here. I disagree with a
| lot of the decisions she made, but looking at suggestions
| for improving ff marketshare in this thread I am happy
| that she was at the helm and not random hn'ers.
| doix wrote:
| I would assume the vast majority of Mitchell Baker haters are
| FF users (or rust enthusiasts?). Why else would someone hate
| her?
| wolverine876 wrote:
| It's part of the online 'game' to jump in on ridicule? You
| see it all the time, even on HN.
| aunty_helen wrote:
| I am suggesting that and I'm basing that on every Mozilla
| does x thread I've read for the last 2-3 years.
|
| If it wasn't for the hatred, I would probably not even know
| this person's name.
| actualwitch wrote:
| If you judge things based on hn threads, you'd think google
| is going to be bankrupt tomorrow while having 0 users. It
| is still the most popular search engine in the world.
| cpburns2009 wrote:
| You're probably right because we've left. I was a Firefox
| advocate for the longest time. I used Firefox since v3.0, and
| before that Mozilla and Netscape. I only recently switched
| over to Brave in the past year or two. I'm doing my part to
| switch friends and family over too. The only thing Mozilla
| has accomplished in the past 10 years was releasing Rust, and
| that was before firing the whole team.
| actualwitch wrote:
| What did brave accomplish that is worthy of advocacy?
| Shitcoin and ublock inspired adblock?
| cpburns2009 wrote:
| Two things. First, an Android browser that's as fast as
| Chrome (a reskin) with a built-in ad-blocker. Sure you
| can install uBlock Origin on Firefox for Android but it's
| noticeably slower than Chrome. Second, a continuation of
| the old Firefox spirit as a privacy focused browser.
| Firefox has since lost that spirit and has been chasing
| after Chrome since at least 57. The shitcoins are a
| passing fad. Just turn them off.
| actualwitch wrote:
| So you discount mozilla actually implementing and
| maintaining a separate multiplatform browser engine and a
| whole ass language for that and instead find more value
| in forking other people's work and adding rudimentary
| features on top of it? I would have imagined someone who
| used to be firefox advocate since 3.0 to be used to
| getting subpar performance.
| cpburns2009 wrote:
| Rust is independent now, and Mozilla fired most of that
| team a while ago. Mozilla has little to show for raking
| in $500 million a year from Google.
|
| Firefox never was slow on the desktop in my experience.
| Chrome was faster for the first few years. SpiderMonkey
| always lagged behind V8 in benchmarks, but general
| performance of the browsers has been equal since the
| early or mid 2010s.
| baq wrote:
| Chrome's path of 'number go up' growth which Google seems to
| now require from their products will be increasingly evil.
| We've managed to stop attestation, but I'm afraid they'll try
| again and in different ways, more subtly and quietly. Firefox
| better be ready with both the browser engineering and a massive
| marketing push when this happens.
| Macha wrote:
| It's clear the previous CEO's strategy was not working - neither
| from a level of personal appeal to me, or for population at large
| measures like market share, so I'm hoping this means a positive
| change.
| subtra3t wrote:
| I'm surprised I had to scroll so far down to find a reasonable
| comment that did not immediately insult Mitchell Baker.
|
| 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.
| M2Ys4U wrote:
| She's not leaving Mozilla, she's returning to her old
| position of Executive Chair
| subtra3t wrote:
| Sorry, my bad. Thanks for correcting, I've edited my
| comment.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| Greedy person insinuates themselves into a charitable
| organisation (corporate structuring notwithstanding) in order
| to take $millions for themselves whilst sacking engineers and
| reducing the organisations effectiveness, allegedly.
|
| You: 'why is everyone being mean, we should wish them well'
|
| I mean, what's this "more" that you want? Are you sure that
| what you're calling "shallow attacks" aren't just statements
| of truth that show someone to be an awful person?
| samth wrote:
| The idea that Mitchell Baker "insinuated herself" into
| Mozilla is ridiculous. She was an early Netscape employee,
| one of the original creators of the Mozilla project, and a
| founder of the Mozilla Foundation.
| sgift wrote:
| Uh yeah .. Michelle Baker, who is one of the founders of
| Mozilla, the writer of the MPL and who played a role (for a
| time as the volunteer general manager of the mozilla org,
| then later again as an employee) in everything from
| Mozillas rise to - unfortunately - now its decline by being
| part of the org had "insinuated" herself into Mozilla. You
| obviously lack the knowledge about Baker and Mozilla to
| have any business making statements on this topic.
|
| (If you wanna tell me that Michelle Baker recognized before
| mozilla.org even existed that it will have a meteoric rise,
| that the person who would have been CEO instead of her took
| himself out of the race and that that would allow her to
| make millions as CEO of Mozilla, all I can say is: I doubt
| that she has a crystal ball _that_ good.)
| manicennui wrote:
| A lawyer working for a large organization wrote a license
| that nobody needed or wanted. Amazing.
| subtra3t wrote:
| > Are you sure that what you're calling "shallow attacks"
| aren't just statements of truth that show someone to be an
| awful person?
|
| I believe that is something that can only be said by Baker,
| or people who know her sufficiently well. I assume most of
| the commentors here who are criticising Baker do not fall
| in either of those categories.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| No. She isn't entitled any "best whishes" or respect
| whatsoever when she's been draining Mozilla's money straight
| to her own pocket "to cover the needs of her family".
| Parasitic behavior deserves shaming, that's it.
| subtra3t wrote:
| I don't believe that her past actions need to be taken into
| consideration when wishing her the very best for the
| future.
|
| 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.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| I hope people are less judgmental and more compassionate
| toward my and your errors. Shaming, IME and in my belief,
| is a toxic act in service of the attacker; it makes the
| situation worse, and even the attacker feels worse and is
| degraded (though they feel powerful).
| manicennui wrote:
| Are you the CEO of a company with half a billion in
| revenue and hundreds of employees? Get a fucking grip. I
| would absolutely expect strong criticism if I were in her
| position and did what she has done.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| > Get a fucking grip.
|
| Is that intended to be persuasive? Intimidating? Does it
| make the point stronger or weaker? Are we wiser for
| having read it?
|
| The unrestrained acting out is not reserved for Mitchell
| Baker.
| westhanover wrote:
| Shame is how our societies function. When someone acts
| outside of the norms of the society they are shamed. It
| is healthy and normal human behavior.
| faeriechangling wrote:
| Hard for a community of devs to sympathize with a leader who
| did not admit to their own incompetence and instead of
| stepping down fired 250 devs while giving herself a raise.
|
| 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.
| the_overseer wrote:
| She was a parasite that governed the decline of firefox while
| making herself ultra-rich. Stop bootlicking! She and her type
| of people are the reason things are as bad as they are. She
| is a cancer. People like her must be eradicated in order for
| society to progress faster.
| tux3 wrote:
| Congratulations to Mozilla for making it through this era!
|
| "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
| SiempreViernes wrote:
| They are getting a new CEO, not becoming a cooperative...
| gkoberger wrote:
| I worked at Mozilla back in 2012, as we were pivoting to
| FirefoxOS (a mobile OS). I was very low in the company, but for
| some reason sent Mitchell an email detailing why I thought it was
| a bad idea.
|
| 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)
| lolinder wrote:
| It's interesting to hear this, because from the outside
| Mitchell's tenure has seemed to be a disaster, with a complete
| inability to stay focused on one thing for long enough to make
| a difference.
|
| 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?
| gkoberger wrote:
| I agree with everything you said. All I can say in response
| is that being a great community leader and open web advocate
| doesn't always square with someone who has to make a profit
| for hundreds or thousands of employees.
|
| 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.
| animal_spirits wrote:
| Mitchell baker was making 6.2 million dollars a year at
| Mozilla in 2023.
|
| Source: https://www.theregister.com/AMP/2024/01/02/mozilla_
| in_2024_a...
| gkoberger wrote:
| Yes, that's a lot of money.
|
| But if you're a CEO good enough to turn Mozilla around
| given the constraints... you could make a lot more
| elsewhere. If nothing else, you'd get stock, which would
| correlate with your performance.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| > But if you're a CEO good enough to turn Mozilla around
| given the constraints... you could make a lot more
| elsewhere.
|
| Why? Why does pointing mozilla in the right direction
| require such rare skills?
|
| Or is this because we're only looking at existing CEOs
| for hiring?
|
| If the rareness is about having the right industry
| knowledge and vision in a CEO, I bet you can get better
| results by hiring a company aimer and _separate_
| managerial co-CEO and using the money you save for 20
| more devs and 5 more marketers.
| gkoberger wrote:
| Imagine running a company. That's hard enough.
|
| Now imagine your market share is down a ton (and
| decreasing), and there's no clear way to change that
| trajectory.
|
| Then imagine that despite being CEO, you're owned by a
| non-profit. So, you have a boss, and your boss has
| different goals than you do.
|
| Then imagine attracting and retaining top talent, while
| not being able to give out equity.
|
| Then imagine that your product is free. You can't charge
| more for it; you give (almost) everything away for free
| and there's no clear path to monetization.
|
| And then imagine that almost all of your money comes from
| your biggest competitor, and your only lever is to
| negotiate (from a position of weakness, because they're
| much bigger) a deal every 3 years in order to keep paying
| your employees.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| That sounds really hard!
|
| But I don't see why it needs particularly rare skills.
|
| And lots of people do really hard jobs for much much much
| less money.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _don 't see why it needs particularly rare skills_
|
| I don't either! But apparently they're rare. One pays
| dearly when trying to go cheap, or broaden the pool in
| seemingly innocuous ways, in executive recruiting.
|
| > _lots of people do really hard jobs_
|
| Fortitude is necessary, but by itself insufficient.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| > I don't either! But apparently they're rare. One pays
| dearly when trying to go cheap, or broaden the pool in
| seemingly innocuous ways, in executive recruiting.
|
| Do we have good evidence for that, or is it just what the
| people that hire CEOs tend to think?
|
| When I think of disastrous CEOs that I've managed to hear
| about, they weren't cheap. They got paid huge amounts to
| cause their disasters.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Do we have good evidence for that, or is it just what
| the people that hire CEOs tend to think?_
|
| I think so, and it's largely in the attrition of start-
| ups due to executive leadership breaking down. Start-up
| founders are already a rarefied group; that so many break
| down or flip out or can't handle all the balls in the air
| is telling. (There is plenty of academia on the topic. It
| doesn't support massive paydays. But certainly single-
| digit millions, _i.e._ life-changing money for someone
| who may already be rich.)
|
| > _got paid huge amounts to cause their disasters_
|
| Look at the state of the company they took over. Golden
| parachutes are often required to woo top talent to a
| trash pile because top talent knows the world is
| stochastic.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| > Look at the state of the company they took over.
|
| Yes, I'm specifically thinking of companies that were
| doing fine when they took over.
| bluGill wrote:
| There is the problem. There is evidence a great CEO can
| make a difference. And if a great CEO wants millions they
| are worth it. However nobody knows how to tell a great
| CEO from bad.
| nativeit wrote:
| That sounds like the old advertising idiom, "Half of all
| advertising works, but you will never be certain which
| half," or something similar anyway. I think there is a
| very distinct "lightning in a bottle" component to great
| and/or successful companies. Combinations of effective
| teams, aligned motivations, good timing, a leader who can
| identify and leverage all of those elements to great
| effect, and some X factors that are simply unknowable.
| That may be just a slightly more nuanced way of saying
| they're lucky, but also good fortune in externally
| changing scenarios is certainly one of those unknown
| factors. I think the ability to recognize, organize, and
| effectively leverage all of the elements such that a
| company is well-positioned if/when the external factors
| line up in their favor is what defines a great CEO. I
| think that ability is akin to naturally talented
| musicians. Most people can, with enough time and effort,
| learn to play a guitar very well. They still won't be
| Jimi Hendrix. The downside is, you can't force it or fake
| it (at least not for very long). I think of parallels
| with the difference between the British and American
| versions of the TV show "Top Gear" that was being
| produced in the mid '00s. The original British show was
| the lightning in a bottle, and became one of the most
| successful TV series on the planet. The lifeless copy
| they attempted in the US followed the recipe
| meticulously, and was cringeworthy.
|
| (Edit: Missed the word "never" up top)
| ryandrake wrote:
| The necessary skills are not rare, but the roles are rare
| so people start to _think_ the skills are rare. I get a
| lot of grief for this opinion but I think most HN 'ers
| could do the job of "CEO of whatever company they
| currently work for". It's not rocket science. We have
| this mythology around CEOs that they are such outlier
| smart, special, hardworking people, but really it's just
| that the top of the pyramids contain few people.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| Shadow the CEO of a well-run large company around for a
| couple of weeks.
|
| _I_ wouldn 't want that job, and I'm not sure I could do
| it.
|
| Always being on-call, and having to constantly context
| switch and synthesize questionably-accurate material from
| reports, to make important decisions.
|
| (And that's not even broaching the political tasks...
| which are required, because it's the only way to become
| and remain CEO)
| ryandrake wrote:
| Definitely wanting the job is separate from can do the
| job, although to be honest, I would be happy to get paid
| $6+ million for the job "Fail to turn around Mozilla".
| Heck, I'd be willing to do it for 10% of that
| compensation.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| That's glib.
|
| No one is hired to fail, and no one tries to fail.
|
| They're hired to try and succeed, and sometimes it
| doesn't go that way.
| palata wrote:
| > I wouldn't want that job, and I'm not sure I could do
| it.
|
| There are many jobs that I wouldn't want and that are not
| paid 6M a year. There are some things that I can do that
| not everybody can do, and still I am not paid 6M.
|
| You can try reverting it: a CEO earning 6M a year could
| not necessarily be a firefighter. Yet firefighters are
| not paid 6M a year. And they actually risk their life.
| bawolff wrote:
| > And lots of people do really hard jobs for much much
| much less money.
|
| I would consider most min wage jobs harder than what i
| (computer programmer) do. Compensation is often inversely
| correlated with how shitty the job is.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| Hard as in "undesirable" isn't the same as in "the skills
| to do it are rare", though.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| Why would those skills not be rare? How many people do
| you know that can do all that? I know vanishingly few and
| I suspect most do too.
| fabrice_d wrote:
| Imagine being both the CEO of the corp and the chairwoman
| of the non profit. Damn!
|
| Remember Mitchell killed FirefoxOS (I know you were
| likely happy about that @gkoberger), and now Mozilla is
| complaining about not getting level playing access to
| other OSes. Guess what, when you have no platform, you'll
| be forever a second class citizen.
|
| Baker is a good motivational speaker, but should never
| have been allowed to made any operational decision.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| Technically FirefoxOS is still around:
| https://www.kaiostech.com/ . It's now an OS for feature
| phones. It's no longer owned by Mozilla but they did have
| a lasting impact, that's what I mean. And many of their
| throwaway projects have gone that way. For example
| Firefox VR browser is now Wolvic. https://wolvic.com/en/
| . It's the great thing about open source, the work is not
| lost.
|
| But Mozilla had no chance in the real smartphone market.
| If Microsoft couldn't manage to attract developers with
| their billions and dedicated hardware, Firefox supplying
| only the OS and no hardware just had zero chance to make
| it mainstream. It would have been relegated to the same
| position as Sailfish: A cool curiosity but not
| interesting enough for anyone but some hobbyists to
| develop for.
|
| I don't think it was a bad idea trying: At that time the
| duopoly in the smartphone market was not as firmly
| established and there were other open projects like
| Ubuntu as well. They might have attracted a huge party
| like Samsung (after all, they did go for Tizen in the
| end!) and things might have worked out differently. But
| the choice to drop it was inevitable at that point.
| fabrice_d wrote:
| FxOS failed commercially because it tried to be a "me
| too" product, with the same distribution strategy as
| Android that relies a lot on carriers. For that to work
| you need to get support from key apps in the carriers
| markets, and FxOS never managed to get Whatsapp on board.
|
| KaiOS got Whatsapp support thanks to shipping in India
| with a single carrier (Jio) that has a very large user
| base. Deployment in the rest of the world has been a
| struggle and the company is not in great shape.
|
| All that to say that Mozilla could have kept the lights
| on for a couple more years and get access to large
| markets. Hard to predict what would have happened but we
| certainly would have more diversity in the OS space.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| The only path to FirefoxOS success would have been if
| someone like Samsung hitched their wagon to it.
|
| Which would have been because they thought they could
| make more money using it than Android.
|
| Which probably wouldn't have bode well for user-friendly
| changes to the base image.
|
| Android's value prop to manufacturers was "Was to sell a
| lot of mobile phones, but not have to pay for most of the
| development? And get a working Maps solution? Here you
| go." Which Google could afford to torch money on.
| fabrice_d wrote:
| I think you're wrong but we'll never know :) What is true
| is that some of the interest from carriers for
| alternative OSes was indeed that they didn't like to be
| handcuffed to Android and iOS.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| Are we using carrier and manufacturer differently?
|
| And I'd imagine carriers don't, as they'd no doubt love
| to go back to the feature-phone days, but they're all
| (individually) too weak to do anything about it.
|
| Only aggregated can they offer the resources to support
| an alternative.
| geoelectric wrote:
| Worth noting Fabrice was one of the primary devs on FxOS,
| and I believe _the_ primary dev on KaiOS. I 'm pretty
| sure he's familiar with the history.
| jacquesm wrote:
| I use Kaios every day and I'm happy it exists but I'd
| have been even happier if it had just been stock Ubuntu
| with some phone specific bits thrown in. I actually
| bought a phone like that but it eventually stopped being
| serviced. But that was the best phone I ever had, this
| one is a distant 3rd after all my previous Nokias.
| doktrin wrote:
| Even if Mozilla reallocated all their resources and
| dedicated themselves 100% to building a mobile OS, I'd
| personally be surprised if they were able to secure any
| meaningful market share. Talk about playing against a
| stacked deck.
| gkoberger wrote:
| No, I'm not happy. I was gobsmacked by how smart the
| people working on it were (you included), and was so
| proud to work a few desks away from such amazing
| engineers.
|
| My thoughts that FirefoxOS was mismanaged from an
| executive level are in no way a reflection of the work I
| saw coming out of your team, and I took no pleasure in it
| shutting down. I felt the executive team got caught up
| too much with things like presenting at Mobile World
| Congress, at the cost of a ton of focus.
| phatfish wrote:
| FirefoxOS was a moon shot. The sort of project a profit
| making company burns a few 10s of million on in the hope
| it somehow works out.
|
| Mozilla should have been focusing on the one thing anyone
| cared about, the browser. Rust and Servo were the correct
| risks to take. But I know, hindsight is 20/20.
| RHSman2 wrote:
| Those constraints can be turned into positives depending
| on your point of view. Imagine what you could do?
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| I don't have any insider knowledge but:
|
| > your only lever is to negotiate (from a position of
| weakness, because they're much bigger) a deal every 3
| years in order to keep paying your employees.
|
| It's entirely possible that Mitchell Baker was
| responsible for getting hundreds of millions of dollars
| extra for Firefox when they switched search provider and
| then back, invoking a clause in their agreement with
| Yahoo.
|
| Which seems like some pretty skilful playing of a bad
| hand.
| palata wrote:
| I think that the "it's paid a lot because it's super
| hard" is generally a bad excuse. Many things are super
| hard, many people make a lot of sacrifices to be among
| the bests at what they do. Yet they don't earn that much.
|
| When the thing you are good at is being a CEO (as opposed
| to, say, being a teacher), then you are very lucky.
| Because other CEOs before you managed to make it
| acceptable to earn an indecent salary for _just doing a
| job_. Ok, let 's say they don't sleep at all, so they can
| work 2-3x as much as the average people. Are they paid
| 2-3x more? No! They're paid orders of magnitudes more.
| That's indecent.
| pyrale wrote:
| > Why? Why does pointing mozilla in the right direction
| require such rare skills?
|
| Because it basically requires to beat a monopoly power
| that has repeatedly used its unrelated lines of business
| to crush competition in the past?
|
| Growing Mozilla is probably as hard as growing
| diapers.com as an independent company.
| x0x0 wrote:
| I suspect a ceo could have asked for a pay package of
| massive bonuses correlated with marketshare. My
| understanding is the board has pretty wide discretion to
| set pay, and following years of steep marketshare losses,
| who would question such an arrangement?
| gkoberger wrote:
| Based on this thread, I think... everyone would question
| such an arrangement.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| They've been dropping long enough that a pay package
| almost entirely based on increasing market share would
| have gotten a lot less objection from me at least.
| lexicality wrote:
| yeah but she ran it into the ground
| wkat4242 wrote:
| For a company that has a declining marketshare like
| Mozilla it's really way too high IMO.
|
| Her salary kept going up as the marketshare was going
| down...
| bawolff wrote:
| I mean, being a succesful ceo at a declining company is
| much harder than being one at a growing company. At a
| growing company you just have to not screw up, and a
| declining company you have to actually turn things
| around. It doesn't seem totally unreasonable to get
| higher pay doing a harder job (presuming she is actually
| good at her job)
| lolinder wrote:
| Given that nothing has turned around, it's hard to point
| to any evidence that she's doing a good job. The best she
| can claim is that had anyone else been CEO things would
| have declined even faster, and that's not something
| anyone can prove.
| bradly wrote:
| > Her salary kept going up as the marketshare was going
| down...
|
| You'd really need to decide if you thought their
| marketshare would go down faster or not with someone
| else.
| bamboozled wrote:
| Welcome to Elon Musk at Tesla.
| paledot wrote:
| I'm no great fan of his (anymore), but Tesla's market
| share or at least market _size_ did do very well during
| that period, not to mention the stock price going nuts.
| And this was all before he took a sharp turn at the
| corner of alt and right.
|
| The controversy is not over whether or not he performed
| his duties effectively as CEO, it's over the disguised
| self-dealing that produced the comp package in the first
| place.
|
| The milestones were reasonable, the rewards were not.
| anonym29 wrote:
| Please correct me if my understanding is wrong here, but
| isn't the current situation after the judge nullified his
| comp package now that he has done a phenomenal job
| growing the company, has taken $0 in salary for the last
| 5 years, and is now receiving no stock compensation
| either?
|
| Sure $50bn+ is unreasonably large, but isn't $0
| unreasonably small?
| brnt wrote:
| On the other hand, if you work elsewhere, your not
| turning around Mozilla.
|
| I worked in academia, now government, in HPC/data-sciency
| positions, so the overlap/competition with finance and
| big tech is large (and a lot of people move there and
| back again). Let's just say, we have far more interesting
| problems ;)
| mardifoufs wrote:
| Not really. A Non profit ceo will always take a pay cut.
| You can't expect big tech salaries in a non profit, and
| if they can truly get a better salary elsewhere that's
| probably what they should do if they want that type of
| revenue. The thing is, they usually can't. A non profit
| ceo is not typically very well suited to be a big corp
| executive, and vice versa.
| gertlex wrote:
| Maybe relatively low salary for a typical CEO (no
| comment)...
|
| 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.
| andrewpolidori wrote:
| No exit but racked up 10s of millions of dollars in
| increasing salary since 2017 while laying off 250 employees
| ekianjo wrote:
| low salary lol
| javajosh wrote:
| _> was good to Mozilla employees, but it's hard to square the
| picture you paint with the complete lack of direction_
|
| 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?
| riversflow wrote:
| It's pretty straight forward to me. "$CORPO_STOOGE does all
| the things that make you a great leader and talks in
| platitudes that seem genuine! That makes them a decent
| person!"
|
| 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.
|
| [1] S1E12 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkG7x-hwqN8
| Geisterde wrote:
| The most psychotic person ive ever known started his
| leadership by saving someones job after they made a
| mistake. Everyone assumed he would be a great leader, my
| skepticism proved right.
| chrsig wrote:
| > Mitchell was a great community leader. That doesn't always
| translate to being a good CEO or leader of a business
|
| I think this statement from the parent addresses your point.
| Perhaps them stepping down as CEO will result in more focus?
| Time will tell.
| karmelapple wrote:
| I think the "squirrel!" behavior has to do with getting
| revenue in the door.
|
| 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]?
|
| 1. https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/moco/
| geoelectric wrote:
| I also worked for Mozilla in that time period (I left just
| before they canceled FxOS) and found Mitchell to be an
| inspiring leader. OTOH, the track record over the last few
| years suggests she's not as great an executor.
| patientzero wrote:
| I think people remember a Mozilla that never was. Mozilla was
| saved by Firebox which Mozilla the organization would have
| successfully blocked if their institutional processes were
| not the reason their community was frustrated.
|
| 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.
| kossTKR wrote:
| She gave herself 20-30 million dollars while the company tanked
| in every measurable way and devs got fired.
|
| 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.
| baal80spam wrote:
| I would also reply to emails when earning 30 million dollars.
| It's not THAT hard.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| I'll even stay up late to write them!
| gkoberger wrote:
| Oh my god, Google her.
|
| 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.
| kossTKR wrote:
| Straight from wikipedia:
|
| 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/2
| 0...
| Vt71fcAqt7 wrote:
| Balmer worked at Microsoft for 20 years before becoming
| CEO. And even then I'd say he cared about MS more than she
| cares about Firefox.
| faeriechangling wrote:
| Ballmer was also an okay CEO, he missed mobile but he
| didn't miss cloud and made MSFT a crapton of money.
|
| Definitely no star, heck back in the day he tried to
| convince Bill Gates to stop investing in this dead end
| "Windows" project because OS/2 was obviously the future.
| But certainly not a train wreck like Baker.
| smegger001 wrote:
| He also killed the Microsoft courier duel screen tablet
| as he didn't see it as integrating well with office.
| Killing possible the best designed consumer tablet at the
| time allowing Apple and Google to own mobile.
| Mailtemi wrote:
| I've followed your advice, 'Google it.'
|
| "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.
| meandmycode wrote:
| I'm not entirely sure what parasitic upper class is, but
| getting paid over 2 million while the company you are in
| charge of dives, and then in response saying you should be
| earning 5x more.. truly nobody needs that kind of money..
| maybe this isn't 'parasitic upper class' but it's certainly
| what's wrong with the world
| faeriechangling wrote:
| You either die the hero or live long enough to see yourself
| become the villain.
|
| 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.
| Jochim wrote:
| She laid off 250 people in 2020 and proceeded to raise her
| own salary by $2,000,000 per year over the following two
| years. Whatever her prior record is that behaviour is
| despicable.
|
| 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.
| gkoberger wrote:
| Hey, I agree. I was very against the layoffs (I built
| this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24135032), and
| at my own company I have a very strict layoffs-are-the-
| absolute-worst-case-scenario rule (which I got from
| working at Mozilla back in 2010; we were proud to have
| been one of the few companies who had never done layoffs
| back then!)
|
| I think Mitchell has made many bad decisions the past few
| years. When I saw the news, my gut reaction was to post
| something negative. However, having known her and known
| all the work she put in early, I wanted to post a
| counterbalance. She wasn't a great CEO (and the $$ is a
| very bad look), but she's done a lot of good for the
| community over the past 20 years.
| dig1 wrote:
| > 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.
|
| 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".
| gkoberger wrote:
| Mozilla was originally the Netscape browser, which was a paid
| browser. All browsers were paid at the time, until IE came
| along and was bundled for free with Windows. Firefox broke
| that chokehold, and make an open web possible.
|
| 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.
| sitzkrieg wrote:
| this kinda stuff is often way more important than any code
| of course!
| Macha wrote:
| Honestly, it sort of is.
|
| Someone who'd got it wrong would have opened the door for
| the kind of IP clawback we're seeing with the cloud tech
| startups wanting to pull people into their companion SaaS
| products.
| EasyMark wrote:
| and openai is definitely becoming less open every week
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| "Firefox to be free and open source. "
|
| 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.
| datadrivenangel wrote:
| Firefox keeps getting better?
|
| Are there any major features or reason that chrome is
| better these days?
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| "Firefox keeps getting better?"
|
| In which way?
| neltnerb wrote:
| Firefox definitely gets better, as much as it frustrates
| me sometimes. It's not hard to come up with examples,
| I've yet to see any other browser use persistent or
| temporary containers per tab and per site - just to name
| the most obvious.
| PurpleRamen wrote:
| It becomes better after it became worse. It's not that
| hard to make it better after you burned all the bridges
| who lifted your product into the sky. Though, at this
| point, there isn't much left anymore outside the core-
| abilities.
| genman wrote:
| Firefox has been always the best browser as it is the
| only open and free (as free from adversarial incentives).
|
| Unfortunately many people (especially here) have
| advertised Chrome instead, naively believing Chrome to
| have these important properties.
|
| Chrome has always been the controlled frontend for Google
| business and Google is readily willing to hurt the
| browser to aid its business and keep its dominance.
| FeepingCreature wrote:
| Firefox has yet to top Firefox 57.
|
| Bring back multi-row tabs.
|
| Actually, while we're at it, bring back XUL. And
| apologize to all the addon developers and users they
| straight up lied to.
| wvenable wrote:
| > Bring back multi-row tabs.
|
| I can't live without multi-row tabs but it's totally
| doable in current Firefox. It's now possible with just
| CSS. It still breaks every so often when they make big UI
| changes but it's manageable.
|
| It's the reason that Firefox is my main browser.
| EasyMark wrote:
| If that's your main reason have you tried vivaldi?
| EasyMark wrote:
| dropping anything goes xul was a large improvement in
| security. Extensions still have a lot of power.
| rascul wrote:
| I've been led to believe that xul played a large part in
| the memory leaks, security issues, and poor performance
| Firefox was known for.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Are we only allowed to compare to chrome?
|
| I miss session manager, tab mix plus, a few others.
|
| I _really_ miss having a gesture extension that runs at
| the GUI level, so it doesn 't stop working while pages
| are loading and lag all the time and not work in certain
| places. And that one isn't even about XUL, they simply
| refuse to implement the mouse callback in the new system.
| x0x0 wrote:
| Yes.
|
| For a long time, chrome has had significantly better
| memory use. I really tried firefox again 2 or 3 years
| ago. If you have to keep jira open all day for work, it
| was unusable.
|
| Regardless, your comment illustrates why Baker should
| have been fired for cause. Browsers are not really
| evaluated on technical merits past a minimal quality
| threshold. Rather, browser marketshare is built on
| distribution -- like any business.
|
| And firefox was incompetent at that. Google has
| effectively used search; Microsoft effectively uses their
| OS; Apple effectively uses their OS, etc. And all
| products work this way: this is the reason Slack sold to
| Salesforce, ie Microsoft was using Office's distribution
| to effectively clobber Slack with Teams. The same reason
| that Google pays billions of dollars to Mozilla and Apple
| to be the default search engine.
|
| What could have been done here? I dunno, but focusing on
| technical measures is not the right lens. BD is and was
| the necessary component, and that could have started with
| companies that don't want to see Chrome be the sole
| browser in the world. What could you have done to get eg
| Facebook or other companies with large web properties to
| ask their users to use Firefox? What partnership could
| have been forged with Microsoft when they were broadly
| uninterested in browsers? What could you have done to
| make Firefox a better browser for technical users
| specifically? etc.
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| Firefox could have build a niche, e.g. be clearly the
| best browser for developers - like native autoreload API
| support. Or the most secure one. Or be the best browser
| for power users. Or or or. But you need a vision for
| that.
|
| Apple started their comeback with developers who liked
| the combination of a slick UI, commercial software and a
| unix shell (Got a G4 Cube around 2002 or so, then a
| Macbook). Dominating that niche made them hip and then
| everyone wanted one. The rest is history.
|
| Everyone uses Linux, even if MS did everything to push MS
| on servers. And don't forget Apple spend millions
| (billions?) on pushing OSX to the server two (I had some
| XServe and XSans). But Linux dominated, and not because
| of Red Hat.
|
| Many people and perhaps in the future everyone uses
| Postgres, even if MS and Oracle spend millions
| (billions?) to prevent this.
| jononor wrote:
| Are there other browsers that have successfully built a
| niche? And how does one use that to bring in enough money
| to sustain a reasonable sized organization? To me it
| neither seems easy, nor any guarantee of success.
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| Well Mozilla got >$6.000.000.000 - so I do thing this is
| enough money. Do you think they would have needed more
| money?
|
| Brave currently tries to grow from the secure niche. I
| think Chrome started from the developer niche, with
| developer tools, being embeddable, open sourcing a
| rendering engine etc.
| jononor wrote:
| I am not sure clawing back a significant amount of
| marketshare can be done with any amount of money. As long
| as there is no access to a distribution channel that is
| similar in size and low friction to what the other
| browsers have, it will at least be extremely tough. Far
| from "easy".
| plorkyeran wrote:
| 7 years later Firefox still hasn't caught up to 2017
| Firefox in functionality. Using ancient versions of
| Firefox isn't an option, so I switched to Vivaldi.
| mejutoco wrote:
| I can only think of @scope in css
|
| https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/:scope
|
| I have no problem with Firefox staying as it is. But do
| not push new products via it. Focusing on the things
| other companies cannot copy (privacy, extensibility for
| the user) is definitely the angle for Firefox IMHO.
| Jochim wrote:
| A personal gripe is FF's refusal to implement WebSerial
| or any form of screencast functionality.
| zilti wrote:
| Just use a screencast tool. It's a browser, not an OS.
| Jochim wrote:
| I'd rather not use something that's less convenient, less
| consistent, and generally worse.
| rozap wrote:
| Every thread about Firefox there's a comment like this
| and I truly don't know if we're using the same browsers.
| Firefox keeps getting better and faster, while chrome is
| getting more bloated and aggravating.
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| "better"
|
| What does better mean? What is better in the last 10
| years? And I'm not trolling, I'm interested in what 10
| things FF got better for you in the last 10 years.
|
| Say, I have been buying on Amazon 10 years ago using FF.
|
| In which ways has FF made that better or easier for me as
| a user? Can't think of anything with Amazon.
|
| The only things I can think of: More secure when
| misclicking somewhere and better video on Youtube.
| saint_fiasco wrote:
| Firefox's built in password manager is pretty good, ten
| years ago you had to install a separate extension for
| that.
|
| The synchronization of browser tabs and history across
| devices is also very good nowadays, so if you look at
| some product on Amazon with your phone on the way home,
| you can continue the same browsing session on your
| regular PC right away.
|
| There are also multiple profiles. That helps in case you
| have multiple Amazon accounts like one for shopping, one
| to mooch off your cousin's prime video subscription, and
| one to work with the AWS console for your workplace. I
| think you couldn't do that out of the box 10 years ago.
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| Good points, I concede for some users and perhaps the
| majority there is progress.
|
| (For me - and probably many others - though I use
| 1password since the beginning, have 50 tabs open so sync
| is a challenge and never understood to use the profiles,
| perhaps I'm too stupid or the UI is bad)
|
| When it came out I thought profiles was a good idea,
| eager to use it, but it's often difficult to say what is
| in what profile. AWS is clear, and banking, but reading
| some articles? For me to work the UI would need to be
| smooth so I don't need to switch profiles just because
| something is in the other. Perhaps I'm not focused enough
| ;-) It then was too complicated for me to use and switch
| and I dropped it.
|
| Writing this in FF, where would I need to click to switch
| profiles? I have a drop down on the right (it's not in
| there), I have a drop down on the left (also no
| profiles), I have a menu at the top(can't find it there)
| and a drop down in my sidebar (no profiles in there).
| schmorptron wrote:
| Sync has no problem with lots of tabs - I routinely have
| multiple hundred open on multiple devices and firefox
| sync just does it's thing without complaining.
| orthecreedence wrote:
| Multi-account containers are a feature I use tirelessly.
| Standardized add-ons are great too, so people can release
| one add-on and hit multiple browsers. I also really like
| Firefox sync for sending bookmarks/tabs between devices.
| Firefox is also extremely fast nwadays, and comparatively
| easy on system memory.
|
| These are things that have improved in the last decade. I
| also like the fact that FF isn't owned by an Ad company
| that pushes binaries supposedly built from an open-source
| project controlled by an Ad company.
| dehrmann wrote:
| > No innovation
|
| Except for Rust.
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| I thought we were talking about the browser, but yes I
| like Rust a lot, although I switched to Go because the
| benefits of the borrow checker were just not worth the
| effort in my use cases. I would wish more main stream
| languages would experiment with owner transfer though
| a = 3 do(a) // can't use a
| pmontra wrote:
| I never paid for Netscape and I used every single version
| of it.
|
| 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...
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape_Navigator
| wvenable wrote:
| > I never paid for Netscape and I used every single
| version of it.
|
| Businesses paid for it. It was free for non-commercial
| purposes.
| pmontra wrote:
| My internet connected computers were owned by a business.
| They were desktops inside my company's building.
|
| However I dug more and I found this at
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape
|
| > Netscape Navigator was not free to the general public
| until January 1998
|
| so either I don't remember well (maybe my company had
| actually bought some licenses) or nobody was paying no
| matter what. I remember everybody else and I downloaded
| Navigator from Netscape's site without having to go
| through any authorization process.
| wvenable wrote:
| I always used Navigator/Communicator for free personally
| but a lot of companies (especially big companies) bought
| licences. I'm sure many companies did not pay for a
| license but there was more than enough that did to make
| Netscape a viable and growing business.
|
| There was a brief time where Netscape Communicator filled
| the role that Outlook fills now.
| EasyMark wrote:
| Netscape was never open source during that phase though,
| I think that's the point. Moving to firefox was a huge
| improvement for the internet community.
| Animats wrote:
| I paid for Netscape. I bought it as a boxed product at
| Fry's in Palo Alto, CA.
| dig1 wrote:
| > Mozilla was originally the Netscape browser, which was a
| paid browser. All browsers were paid at the time, until IE
| came along and was bundled for free with Windows. Firefox
| broke that chokehold, and make an open web possible.
|
| 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.
| sydbarrett74 wrote:
| IE didn't gain share because it was free (Netscape was,
| as well). It gained share because, with Windows 95 OSR
| 2.5, it because integrated into the operating system and
| no longer had to be downloaded separately.
| VancouverMan wrote:
| While being bundled made it easier to start using IE,
| that didn't guarantee that people would try it, and it
| didn't guarantee that they'd continue to use it on an
| ongoing basis after that.
|
| It may not be as obvious now, but at the time, IE often
| offered a better experience for both users and web
| developers.
|
| IE tended to be faster and stabler than its competitors,
| and releases like IE3 and IE5 offered a number of
| innovative features and technologies.
|
| IE coming with Windows clearly didn't prevent a large
| number of users from switching to Firefox once Firefox
| started offering a better experience, and then to Chrome
| once it started generally offering a better experience
| than both Firefox and IE did.
| sydbarrett74 wrote:
| Netscape _always_ had free editions. It was simply closed-
| source until 1998.
|
| Baker may be a savvy lawyer, but that doesn't make her a
| good technologist.
| panick21_ wrote:
| > I worked at Mozilla back in 2012, as we were pivoting to
| FirefoxOS (a mobile OS). I was very low in the company, but for
| some reason sent Mitchell an email detailing why I thought it
| was a bad idea.
|
| Do you still have that? What was your reasoning?
| gkoberger wrote:
| I don't, because it was on my corp email.
|
| 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.
| JohnFen wrote:
| Interestingly, though, FireFox OS was forked to become
| KaiOS which can now be found on just about every feature
| phone on the market that I've seen.
| diggan wrote:
| > FireFox OS was forked to become KaiOS
|
| Damn, I wasn't aware of this. I had a big interest in
| FirefoxOS when it was developed, so much that I named one
| of ours dogs after one component of it (Gaia). I was
| always sad that FirefoxOS (tried) to pivot to IoT instead
| of continuing to iterate on the idea, seems KaiOS is
| worth looking into.
| fabrice_d wrote:
| There was no IoT pivot. This was just a corporate play to
| get rid of the FxOS team. Ari got a nice exit package
| from doing that.
| panick21_ wrote:
| I think there was kind of a need for such a software, not
| just phones. But not sure why Mozilla was the company to
| deliver that. And not sure it would be a money maker.
|
| Nokia also had an internal 'next gen small OS' that they
| also killed during that time.
| binarymax wrote:
| I'm going to throw my hat in the ring to say FirefoxOS and the
| phone (of which I bought the first beta version) were IMO great
| ideas and they should have stuck with it. The iOS/Android
| duopoly really needed a web-SPA option. Maybe they were too
| early (rust & wasm would have helped a lot with the speed),
| maybe it was too difficult a task...but I really wish they had
| succeeded.
| bsimpson wrote:
| They did in a way, just after they had given up.
|
| There's a whole series of popular phones in India that ship
| FirefoxOS. I think they're sold by Jio, a carrier there.
| rjsw wrote:
| Not just India, there are several Nokia/HMD models that run
| the same fork [1] of FirefoxOS, I am thinking of buying one
| in Europe.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KaiOS
| fabrice_d wrote:
| Unfortunately KaiOS is not in great shape currently.
| rjsw wrote:
| I was looking at the phone mainly to use it as a 4G WiFi
| hotspot.
|
| What is wrong with KaiOS itself?
| fabrice_d wrote:
| KaiOS is struggling because business on the low-end
| segment is very hard. Which means that the technical side
| is cutting corners and you end up with a lacking product
| in important areas like security. (disclaimer: I worked
| there and left recently)
| mardifoufs wrote:
| It basically got pushed out by android as even very low
| end devices can now mostly run android sort of ok, right?
| JasserInicide wrote:
| It would have gone the way of the Palm Pre guaranteed. They
| just don't have the cash compared to Apple/Google
| jahnu wrote:
| I think it's an unpopular opinion but I think it's actually
| not an impossible goal today. One well run org making an OS
| for phones that put the user not profits first is possible.
| Just like Linux was in the 90s.
| duped wrote:
| I feel like developing consumer software products that focus on
| privacy is like pouring a glass of water on a forest fire. If
| the goal is a free, fair, and private web then those need to be
| the most economical and profitable values for all software
| developed on the web. If Mozilla offered developer focused
| product suites that made it so it was super cheap and easy to
| develop a website that was private _by default_ then markets
| would do the rest.
| VancouverMan wrote:
| If Mozilla is truly going to be taking privacy seriously,
| they should start by reading the Firefox Privacy Notice:
|
| 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".
| SentientOctopus wrote:
| I'm also an ex Mozilla employee and I 100% agree. Mitchell is a
| great human being and I respect her immensely!
| apapapa wrote:
| It would have been nice if they would have been successful with
| their OS
| jacquesm wrote:
| It is very nice to see your inside view. For me as an outsider:
| Mozilla _is_ FireFox and that that doesn 't seem to have
| registered with Mozilla management is irritating me beyond
| measure because it means that (1) I don't have a way to sponsor
| _just_ FF and not the rest of Mozilla and (2) that quite
| frequently FireFox suffers because of resource depletion or
| crazy experiments that benefit Mozilla but harm FF.
|
| 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.
| gkoberger wrote:
| Back when I worked there (2010-2012), a lot of people thought
| Google wouldn't renew the deal. So there was a scramble to
| figure out how to make enough money to avoid layoffs.
|
| 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.
| pas wrote:
| okay, but did they figure it out? it seems they are stuck
| between two worlds.
|
| 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. :/
| Rapzid wrote:
| Yeah you'd think if FireFox is their golden advertising
| goose they'd, you know, make it embeddable and add the
| ability to fully style scrollbars so it'd be suitable
| across the board for modern development. And you'd think
| 500m a year would be enough to do this.
|
| But here we are. And with FireFox fading I'm wondering
| how they plan on having a real impact with their mission.
| MrMember wrote:
| Wouldn't someone else step in? It was Yahoo for a while.
| Firefox market share is pretty pitiful these days but the
| default search engine is still worth _something_.
| redeeman wrote:
| > and, even if you don't currently use Firefox, a huge reason
| why we have the web we have today.
|
| and maybe especially if you dont use firefox :)
| gkoberger wrote:
| I worked at Mozilla because I saw John Lilly (CEO at the
| time) speak in 2009.
|
| 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.
|
| Source: https://wordpress.tv/2009/07/08/john-lilly-mozilla/
| jahnu wrote:
| I really want to thank you for this post. An upvote isn't
| always enough.
| sickofparadox wrote:
| As Mozilla's #1 hater I wish them all the best. The specific
| mentioning on doubling down on firefox specifically is exactly
| the kind of change I have said again and again they need to do.
| We shall see what comes of it, but for once, I wish them well!
| jmyeet wrote:
| Good. Note that language like "has chosen to step down" doesn't
| really mean anything. It could still practically mean they were
| fired, as in they were given an ultimatum of step down or we'll
| fire you.
|
| 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.
| throwaway918274 wrote:
| Is the new CEO gonna continue to get millions of dollars while
| Firefox slips deeper and deeper into irrelevance?
| 0x5FC3 wrote:
| I've always used Firefox. I've long converted my friends and
| loved ones into Firefox users, going in depth about the pros of
| using a browser that does not exist solely to profit off their
| data and impose their rules onto a free internet (somewhat) that
| I grew up on and live off, to this day.
|
| 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.
| wokwokwok wrote:
| Everyone: Mozilla sucks and hasn't done anything useful in the
| last ten years.
|
| 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.
| paxys wrote:
| Also everyone: Chrome is too dominant we need an alternative.
|
| Ask them if they have tried this fantastic alternative called
| Firefox and you'll get silence.
| TheCleric wrote:
| Not necessarily. I firmly think we need a non-Chrome based
| alternative, and through actual use, think that current
| Firefox ain't it.
| derac wrote:
| I only use Firefox and it's great. I actually use Librewolf
| and it very rarely has issues with sites. What do you think
| is wrong with it?
| TylerE wrote:
| If you only use Firefox how do you know that it's great?
| My general impression is that Firefox is lagging far
| behind in many areas. It hasn't gotten worse, probably
| gotten better, but the other players have gotten MUCH
| better.
| derac wrote:
| Oh I use Edge at work actually and Chrome when
| occassional things break (mostly Google services). I find
| them very much the same. What differences stand out to
| you?
| CharlieDigital wrote:
| I use Firefox for personal browsing on mobile and
| desktop.
|
| Chrome for work.
|
| I do not sense, in any way, any difference between the
| two in day-to-day and even during development.
|
| However, FF on Android has extensions and my mobile
| browsing experience is more or less ad-free with not much
| extra effort from me.
| macNchz wrote:
| I've had Chrome, Safari, and Firefox open pretty much all
| day every day for the past decade+ and find them to be
| overwhelmingly alike. What is Firefox missing?
| TheCleric wrote:
| This is a great question. A lot of it I can't quite put
| my finger on. It just felt off. Which makes it impossible
| for them to improve since it's not concrete.
|
| I know for a fact one of the things I hated was that I
| was hoping to get vertical tabs working, but the vertical
| tab extension I tried at the time felt clunky and only
| duplicated the tabs in both horizontal and vertical. To
| disable the horizontal I'd have to edit a custom css
| file. This all felt very amateur hour. And I think I even
| went through the effort of doing so and it broke
| something else in the process (possibly my fault).
|
| Admittedly I don't have a good solution for this even now
| in my daily driver (Ungoogled Chromium), so it's not a
| firm "They need to fix this." I think I was just turned
| off that a solution boiled down to "create a custom
| config file".
| TylerE wrote:
| At least on Mac, the font rendering is different. Hard to
| exactly quanify, but I'd say Firefox seems less crisp and
| also less bold/lighter weight.
|
| It's not night and day, but with your comment visible
| side by side in both they're clearly _different_
| _somehow_.
| macNchz wrote:
| Perhaps something particular to your machine...out of
| curiosity I overlaid screenshots of HN on both on Mac and
| Linux and the text was nearly pixel identical, though
| Firefox seemingly has a taller default paragraph line
| height than Chrome. There were a handful tiny differences
| in individual character rendering and spacing, but so
| minor as to be basically impossible to identify without
| quickly flipping back and forth between the overlaid
| layers while zoomed in.
| TylerE wrote:
| I don't entirely trust screenshots for this sort of
| thing, S don't funding is going on at the sub-pixel
| level.
| derac wrote:
| I use a heavily modified version of this for vertical
| tabs, which works very well.
| https://github.com/refact0r/sidefox
|
| I'm not sure if Chrome is as customizable, but I don't
| believe so.
| TillE wrote:
| Same, I use Firefox 90% of the time and I have no idea
| what all the complaining is about. My only real issue is
| that fullscreening videos on macOS sucks (ie, it takes
| forever).
|
| I certainly don't personally care about declining market
| share, that's not my problem. Mozilla makes a good
| product. Chrome has become the default browser thanks to
| Google's muscle (and also making a good product), and I
| dunno what grand strategy is supposed to compete with
| that.
| hobofan wrote:
| Even if every single person that is aware of how problematic
| Chrome's dominance is would switch to Firefox right now, that
| wouldn't move the needle in any measurable way.
|
| 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.
| TylerE wrote:
| They lost all that good will when they _fired_ all the rust
| team.
| influx wrote:
| Most tech CEOs would have been able to take advantage of and
| ride the wave that Rust brought...
| azinman2 wrote:
| I'm curious... by doing what?
|
| 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?
| TremendousJudge wrote:
| Is there "financial success" to be made in programming
| languages? Usually companies use them to promote their own
| product environments, which is how they make money, but not
| through the language (or the compiler, or the interpreter)
| itself
| azinman2 wrote:
| That's kind of my point. What would be the play for Rust?
| Mozilla is all about open source-it's hard to imagine
| some enterprise scheme here, or what that would even be.
| lolinder wrote:
| Mitchell Baker wasn't CEO while Rust was growing up, and within
| six months of taking up the position again she'd laid off
| Mozilla's Rust team. It's totally fair that she gets exactly
| zero credit for Rust's success.
| shp0ngle wrote:
| I don't want to be so alarmist, but... haven't Brave kind of
| eaten Firefox lunch here?
|
| 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.
| presentation wrote:
| It hasn't in the sense that barely anyone uses Brave.
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| If trends continue (of course no guarantee they will) it
| looks like Brave might surpass Firefox's market share in the
| next few years
| sharps1 wrote:
| Brave's usage curve is still going up and the MAU is
| approaching 70 million. Firefox has another 115 million
| monthly active users. By Chrome's numbers either is barely
| used.
|
| https://bravebat.info/brave_browser_active_users
| sebtron wrote:
| Having an independent engine is not necessarily about privacy,
| it's about... Well, independence. If Google gets away with
| Blink being the only viable engine, they can push any bullshit
| they want (e.g. WEI) and we'll have to live with it. A
| Chromium-only future is one where "the web" is just another
| name for Google's walled garden.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| > Blink being the only viable engine
|
| Don't forget Apple devices, which use a different engine.
| Until very recently (or very soon?), iPhones could not use
| Blink, afaik.
| em-bee wrote:
| _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)_
|
| 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?
| shp0ngle wrote:
| Pick your battles... easier to cherrypick your own stuff on
| top of already existing codebase. At least you need to worry
| only about a small patchset rather than _own rendering and js
| engine_ just for a very abstract concept of "avoiding
| monoculture", and instead of focusing on CSS rules and JS
| optimization and whatnot, you can focus on things that matter
| for your goals
|
| 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.
| lolinder wrote:
| > 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.
| burkaman wrote:
| That isn't alarmist, but almost all privacy features in Brave
| are already in Firefox as well. Looking at this page:
|
| - 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/.
| srid wrote:
| Praising Brave is an unpopular opinion on HN. Yet many of us
| myself included (silently) use and enjoy Brave.
|
| I too lost interest in Firefox a long time ago, about the time
| they evicted Brendan Eich revealing internal politics.
| cpburns2009 wrote:
| IMHO the best selling point for Brave is on Android because
| it's Chrome with a built-in ad-blocker. Firefox was always
| noticeably slower than Chrome on Android. They were usually on
| par on desktop except for the occasional website that would
| lock up the JavaScript engine and freeze Firefox.
| weinzierl wrote:
| We will see which kind of data privacy they pivot to this 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.
| solardev wrote:
| I hope they can at least spin off the browser division into its
| own entity. Mozilla the org has become some sort of wannabe think
| tank that people are vaguely aware of but mostly just ignore.
| Meanwhile, Firefox has been circling the drain for a decade...
|
| This is a group that gets way too much money from Google and
| doesn't know what to do with it...
| thesausageking wrote:
| I can't think of any important things Mozilla has created since
| pushing Brendan Eich out 9 years ago. That's almost a decade and
| billions in revenue they've burned through.
|
| 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.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| Rust, for example. How many organizations the size of Mozilla
| create two revolutionary products in unrelated fields?
| depr wrote:
| Didn't Netscape create Firefox?
| wolverine876 wrote:
| Netscape, on its deathbed (and I think due to Baker's
| efforts, in part), open-sourced the Netscape code. Mozilla
| was created by ex-Netscapers, developed that code, and
| released a few versions of a Mozilla browser, which
| followed Netscape's idea of integrating browser, mail
| client, webpage editor, other stuff (maybe IRC client?).
|
| Sometime later, a few Mozillians decided the web and
| Mozilla needed a simple, sleek, fast browser, and built
| Firefox.
| azemetre wrote:
| Didn't the CEO literally fire the entire rust team, not start
| the team?
|
| I guess that's a surplus good if you meant for all these
| highly skilled engineers taking their talents to other
| companies.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| Did they? They helped Rust form it's own foundation and
| spun it off.
| azemetre wrote:
| Yes they did:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24143819
| wolverine876 wrote:
| That doesn't match your prior statement.
| jacooper wrote:
| Compare that to what Eich achieved with brave in that period.
| jononor wrote:
| I am a bit unsure how to interpret this... Has he achieved a
| lot, or nog so much, comparatively?
| devit wrote:
| They could consider dropping Gecko in favor of Blink, which would
| save a lot of engineering resources that could be used to
| implement features instead of web compatibility, and would
| effectively guarantee that Firefox will be always strictly better
| than Chrome (since it would be Chrome minus the Google
| antifeatures plus the Mozilla features).
| jhaenchen wrote:
| We need more engines not less.
| breathen wrote:
| Being "pro-data-privacy" as a browser vendor seems like an
| inherently contradiction in terms. It's like apple feigning
| interest in protecting consumers when they run their own ad
| network.
| dingi wrote:
| Mozilla should handover Firefox to a separate entity and continue
| with their wishy washy projects. Only thing they are doing right
| now is ruining Firefox. I'll surely donate to such an entity if
| they solely focus on Firefox.
| 7thaccount wrote:
| In case you were wondering how they make money...this is from
| Investopedia:
|
| " 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."
| eduction wrote:
| I'm confused as to why Baker is not running things while a
| permanent CEO is found.
|
| 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?
| dexterjs wrote:
| In my experience interim CEO are used to make unpopular
| decisions in the company and then removed, kind of like getting
| New Coke and then as everyone gets mad you bring back Coke
| Classic but now with cheaper ingredients and everyone is happy.
| duped wrote:
| When you fire someone you don't generally keep them around the
| office
| iowemoretohim wrote:
| But she's still the Chairwoman of Mozilla Foundation.
| AdmiralAsshat wrote:
| Still waiting for a Mozilla-branded email domain/provider.
| They've already got their Mozilla-branded partnerships with the
| VPN and now the data scrubber. Not sure why they're sleeping on
| email. That seems like an obvious thing that I would pay for.
| tux3 wrote:
| It's not the worst idea. The Linux foundation will let you buy
| a @linux.com email (for people who want to feel like an
| important Linux person).
|
| 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(tm) whenever someone
| sends an email, such marketing value, very viral.
| lucideer wrote:
| > _Mitchell Baker is stepping down as CEO to focus on AI_
|
| & 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...
| sicromoft wrote:
| https://archive.is/rmMEb
| jokoon wrote:
| Well Finally!
|
| 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.
| wolvesechoes wrote:
| One leech moves to leech elsewhere, another one rises in its
| place. There must be a leech.
|
| "What has been will be again, what has been done will be done
| again; there is nothing new under the sun"
| MentallyRetired wrote:
| I feel like data privacy is always the last throe of a company
| before hanging it up. I hope that's not the case with Mozilla.
| Not a big enough market cares about data privacy to make it a
| primary marketing message, unfortunately.
| aaa_aaa wrote:
| Good riddance. State of mozilla shows she was not fit for the
| job. It is too late anyway. Years ago, she should have been fired
| for her post after the death of a veteran mozilla developer.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| Oh wow. This is great. Mitchell Baker was not good for Mozilla at
| all.
|
| I don't know Laura Chambers but I hope she will do a better job.
| davidguetta wrote:
| I'm an engineer.
|
| 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 ?
| tenebrisalietum wrote:
| > what privacy means and entails in context to web browsing
|
| 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.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Defaults matter. Not loading ads, logging keystrokes, and
| broadcasting metrics on startup would be a good start.
| hexagonwin wrote:
| > Mozilla now makes most of its almost $600 million in annual
| revenue from promoting Chrome as the default search engine on its
| home page.
|
| This isn't that related to the topic but isn't that supposed to
| be Google, not Chrome?
| renewiltord wrote:
| Mozilla is back at trying to find PMF because what they set out
| to do they achieved: the web is now standards-compliant and
| almost all browser engines are almost entirely open-source. The
| web is truly cross-platform and open. This is a blinding success
| and entirely due to Mozilla's operations in the 2000s that
| brought standards-compliance and open-source to the forefront.
|
| 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.
| apapapa wrote:
| Can someone turn Mozilla around at this point? Hopefully...
| BadHumans wrote:
| My biggest problem with the old CEO was her unnecessarily large
| salary while laying off the entire Servo team and then some. If
| this new CEO is still making nearly 3 million then I don't think
| we have fixed the problem.
| DaOne256 wrote:
| https://archive.ph/rmMEb
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Related: official Moz post
|
| https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/a-new-chapter-for-mozill...
| speckx wrote:
| Can this new CEO please concentrate on the core product, which is
| the Firefox browser, and not all these other services like VPN
| and monitoring of personal data?
| nikisweeting wrote:
| I hope new CEO re-invigorates Pocket, there haven't been new
| features in aaaages :'(
| jml7c5 wrote:
| A great goal for Firefox would be "the archiveable, downloadable
| internet". Make it easy to download stuff off a page, even if the
| site is adversarial. I should be able to right-click and download
| an Instagram photo or a YouTube video. Integrate something like
| archive-it (the Internet Archive tool) for full-page downloads.
|
| 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.
| neonate wrote:
| http://web.archive.org/web/20240208175632/https://fortune.co...
|
| https://archive.ph/rmMEb
| linuxandrew wrote:
| Does Mozilla even need a CEO and its weird company+foundation
| structure? They should run it more like KDE or TDF and use that
| $6M to pay a few dozen engineers.
| manicennui wrote:
| $6 million does not pay a few dozen engineers.
| bmoxb wrote:
| 6,000,000 / 24 = 250,000
|
| Seems like enough to me.
| paulvnickerson wrote:
| Hopefully this person doesn't have the "wrong" ideological
| opinions [1]
|
| [1] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/brendan-eich-steps-
| down-...
| beretguy wrote:
| Can we pivot to tab groups?
| dang wrote:
| Related ongoing thread:
|
| _A New Chapter for Mozilla_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39302624 - Feb 2024 (8
| comments)
| rnd0 wrote:
| What does "pivots to data privacy" mean, in this case? They're
| getting out of software (firefox, seamonkey, etc)?
| Pufferbo wrote:
| They have many more products which they can profit directly
| from, rather than just deals from other companies (i.e. Google
| as the default search).
|
| 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.
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