In a previous thread (these "Mozilla is dead" threads appear perennially) someone pointed out that Firefox's apparent marketshare drop is potentially indistinguishable from their deployment of privacy-improving features, including stubbing out Google Analytics when "Enhanced Tracking Protection" is enabled.
I'm a Firefox user, so I have a vested interest in Mozilla's long term health and financial viability. But "marketshare nosedives" appears to be primarily an editorialization to fit the post's larger narrative.
I posted some stats from our website a few weeks ago [0], GA was heavily undercounting FF compared to our server-side stats based on UAs.
One other thing to remember, is to check the falling of desktop usage, because a large part of the modern internet users are mobile-only, and the amount of people who use anything but what Google tells them to (or Apple allows them to) is vanishingly small.
> Firefox's apparent marketshare drop is potentially indistinguishable from their deployment of privacy-improving features, including stubbing out Google Analytics when "Enhanced Tracking Protection" is enabled.
That's an interesting angle. I suppose we could compare against Mozilla's stats on download numbers and telemetry? Though between users downloading from distro mirrors and disabling telemetry (I suspect Firefox users are far more likely to be privacy conscious and/or Linux users) those will also be fuzzy.
I would assume that Firefox revenue is proportional to usage and revenue is only down a few percent. This implies that Firefox usage is declining much slower than people say.
Wouldn't that be easy to verify by just looking at the relative market shares of different browsers and checking if there is an 'unknown' browser whose market share is increasing proportionately to Firefox's decrease?
I hope Mozilla leadership realises that Firefox is the only thing lending their company any credibility with their subscription products. Without Firefox, Mozilla VPN and any of their supposed "AI" products are just another also-ran in a saturated commodity market. That "subscription and advertising" line item on their balance sheet relies on Firefox, it doesn't replace it.
Firefox's nosediving market share should represent a catastrophic, company-endangering situation. It's depressing that they don't seem to understand that.
1. Mitchell Baker is also chairwoman of the board of the Mozilla Foundation and is a founding member of Mozilla, and receives no stock compensation because there is none to give,
2. Google can definitionally outspend Mozilla on browser development and has used that to cement their market position for over a decade now, and
3. as long as Google is the primary source of Mozilla funding, they can (effectively) kill Firefox at any time, and diversifying revenue / building up a war chest of funds is the only defense against that,
just seems silly to me.
As a former Mozillian I don't like the choices Mitchell Baker has made (AI and services are poor plays IMO) but the obsession with CEO compensation at Mozilla has always smelled less like a genuine concern for alternatives to Chrome and more like holding a smaller player to an unreasonable standard.
A more interesting comparison would compare these numbers to the head of Chrome's compensation, and more specifically Chrome's spending and revenue vs Firefox's.
I think the general critique is: the performance of a CEO should be tied somehow to the performance of the company, yet year after year, the company performs worse while CEO compensation goes up.
Governments have been creating web/native/mobile apps for some time, which is a trend that continues to accelerate. Firefox continues to limp along but seemingly can't even retain its most ardent fans, and there's no sign of this changing.
What if the EU were to fork Firefox (Openfox?) and fund its evolution of a privacy-first alternative? Among other benefits, this would:
• Help ensure that key digital infrastructure is not solely dependent on non-European entities.
• Balance the US's outsized role as a gatekeeper for web innovation.
• Support the EU's user privacy and data protection values and comply-by-default with EU regulations.
• Help bolster Europe's economic and tech independence.
In concrete terms, what would this fork change compared to current Firefox? Just shouting "privacy-first alternative" is pretty vague. Also, good luck getting enough sustainable funding for that kind of project from the EU.
Most of EU funding for OSS project is spread out to lots of projects, with relatively small amounts - Gnome got $1M recently and celebrated as a "big" milestone. I'm not saying that this is bad, but that's not how you can fund a core browser team.
- Keep Firefox alive as an alternative to Chrome. It doesn't feel like Mozilla is achieving that.
This has been on my mind for a long time. It would be good for everyone to have a real alternative to Chrome and it would be good for Europe to be less dependent on the US, as you mentioned.
In time, it might be possible to fund this off donations, but a bit of EU funding would go a long way to getting this off the ground. Unfortunately, the workings of EU funding programmes are a mystery to me.
Taking up ownership of a large codebase is incredibly challenging. You can't just throw a lot of people at it and hope it works out. It takes time to develop expertise. If the organization orchestrating a fork of Firefox ended up paying many of the existing Firefox developers to work on its fork then it might have a chance
Reposting what I wrote in 2021 [1], still holds true.
And here is another unpopular opinion. I dont care if her salary is 3 million or even 30 million. If she had managed to bring Firefox to 60% marketshare and bring down Chrome on Desktop, would you have still complained if she was paid 30 million?
The problem is Mozilla is in such a bad shape and she is under performing as a CEO.
Unfortunately people dont learn much from history. And history dictate the only way to solve this problem is that Mozilla think of it as a problem. Otherwise its current status at 10% marketshare is enough to sustain the operation. Nothing bad enough is happening, no interest or incentive for changes. Inertia. Let's keep thing this way.
So yes, it is counter intuitive. The only way to save Mozilla ( or change Mozill's direction, I guess the word "save" is a hyperbole, at least from Mozilla's perspective. ) isn't trying to get more user to use it. It is actually push people to abandon it.
I believe the fault lies at the board. They are the ones who approve compensation for the CEO. The problem is it’s unclear to me how competent/independent the members of the board are. I don’t see any face I recognize, but that obviously means nothing. Do people know if there are any good people on the board?
The best option would be for someone to fork Firefox and perhaps get it sponsored by Apache foundation. Then we can write it off.
Firefox is my daily browser across multiple platforms, and I worry for its future.
Maybe, at some point the Mozilla Foundation will acknowledge Firefox as the fundamental pillar of their relevance and existence ... instead of seeing it as this vestigial organ that they can't 'cut loose'[1] ... one can hope.
People complain all the time and nothing changes. She doesn't care and in a month everybody forget that Firefox is in dire straits.
Google's Chromium project push new standards every month or so, and web developers are fast to adopt these standards and don't care about testing it on Firefox anymore. The Chromium monopoly is already a reality.
You have reminded me about this. I failed an interview the other day because the site couldn't work with Firefox. I hate it. I have been forced to install Google chrome for just interviews and other things where Firefox fails. It seems like devs no longer do Firefox tests
I've been using Firefox for years and rarely run into websites where something works on Chrome but not Firefox. The only one I can think of is my apartment's payment portal, and that website is just generally awful.
As long time Mozzilla user since the Navigator days, it is sad to see Firefox going down, while the CEO gets money for nothing.
When Firefox is no more, the legacy will be Thunderbird and Rust, not the Web browser, and despite how they won over PNaCL, it is Chrome that drives WebAssembly.
Not saying the complaint isn't valid, but I see things trending in the right direction. Firefox is fast, support for add-ons is coming (back) to mobile, and Firefox is as free and open and modifiable as always. If we're talking things that are in managers hands, like features and usability, as opposed to user numbers, then the last year was good.
(×_×) We need a modular, open source browser engine desperately; one not beholden to Google or any other for profit entity. The Servo people are trying, but the task is enormous. I don't know what can be done (｡•́︿•̀｡)
Also Chromium is there, it's open enough to be a base for Chrome, Brave, Edge, and probably a few more, and it's open source, forkable at any moment Google adds something unpatchably bad. (of course independent implementations are welcome, but the ultimate goal is a healthier web through user freedom, and that doesn't necessitate Firefox directly, a ChromiumFox would be just as perfect)
The open source solution to Windows is not a os that runs windows applications. It's an OS which has it's own user space and application ecosystem. Sometimes I wonder why folks don't take the same tact with other platforms like the web. Alternatively, if you look at mobile, no one is seriously pursuing alternatives to Android. They just make Android based distros and no one seems to complain. What makes the web different?
If they are prioritizing projects other than Firefox, what are people’s favorite non-Firefox, non-Chrome/Chromium (for obvious reasons) browsers?
Firefox makes a lot of noise about their anti-tracking and pro-privacy features. I liked Suckless surf, but missed the granular JavaScript setting of noscript. And, I have no idea, but Privacy Badger must be doing something I guess?
I guess the question - why can't Mozilla (or at least Firefox) - be like the Linux kernel or the Debian group? They are healthy open source projects, some funding from industry, sure, but they're staying current in the latest tech/comp-sci tech while not beholden to anyone in particular (I hope)
Last time I checked the Linux Foundation had a similar problem, spending 2% on the Kernel development and the rest on the latest tech trends, AI, blockchain, metaverse etc.
I don't know about "Debian group", but absolute majority of kernel developers are full time employees of tech companies. Not sure what would be the incentive for those companies to pay bunch of people to develop privacy-focused browser full-time.
Well, nearly all of Mozilla's revenue (I see numbers around 80-90%) comes from Google. And Google presumably doesn't mind if Firefox users switch to Chrome. I'm not sure if anyone involved actively considers this the goal, but it's possible that this creates some perverse incentives.
Honest question: I use (and like) Firefox and rely on many of its features including password vault. However, should I be looking elsewhere? Any suggestions? (I avoid Google Chrome.)
Firefox will continue to survive for a long time, at least Mozilla has the money to do so for many many years. I would not panic, also because there is no other viable alternative to Chrome or Chrome/Webkit based browsers other than Firefox that I know of.
And Firefox is actually a very good browser and better than Chrome in some aspects.
Why should you be looking else where if it is working well for you? Unless you feel so wrong about CEO's pay I dont see how it is relevant until the product quality declined.
As for the password vault, I suggest you switch to Bitwarden. But for browsers? There isn't really much of a choice, it's either Firefox or Chromium-based.
It's almost as if a competing browser co is paying majority of their salaries and lobbying the CEO to kill the only remaining competition by slowly stopping all development.
I think the narrative provided in the article is actually reasonable. Firefox is practically dead, but even worse with Firefox almost all of Mozilla's income stream is literally just a Google handout.
The article states that revenue from services is up from 50 to 70 million. Still only about 10% of what they make from Firefox, but at least that's independent revenue, going up, directly from consumers.
Can someone please provide a rational argument, not a kneejerk emotional response why focusing on the source of revenue that is Google independent and growing is not the better way to fulfill their stated mission, that is creating a privacy respecting and open web? People are acting like Ahab and the whale when it comes to Firefox, there's no point in dumping more resources into the thing if's going down anyway and makes you subservient to a tech monopolist.
If Firefox is dead then we're left with only two options: Google browser or Apple browser. I'm comfortable with none of them. Google has become a de facto monopoly with Microsoft Edge, Opera, Brave, Vivaldi, Chromium et al pretending it hasn't, and the rest of the market is Apple browser, and I'm not an Apple user and never will be. We should keep Firefox at all costs as a true alternative respecting user choices, such as not mandating manifest v3 and allowing users to control web browsing entirely.
What's the over/under on Firefox still existing in 2030? Man that's a depressing thing to have to say but that feels like that's where things are heading?
There's a real opportunity here. People are increasingly distrustful of, say, Google. I use it because it's still performant, cross-platform and has sync. But , like many, are increasingly leerly abou tGoogle using Chrome's position to, say, attack ad blockers.
The ultimate question is how does and should Mozilla fund itself? Well, if the CEO can't lay out a vision and deliver on that then why are they still there? Why is their compensation still increasing despite not performing?
Instead we get platitudes about "add on services". Previously it was "VPN services" and now it's "AI services"? It's almost like the future revenue plan is always "<current buzzword> services".
While I don't feel as if I have enough knowledge to make a comment specifically about how the Mozilla Foundation is run, I do feel as if Firefox's uncertain future resulting from poor adoption is something that should be given priority given that the web browser market is roughly Firefox vs everything else.
I use both Ungoogled Chromium and Firefox on my main workstation, which runs Fedora Asahi Linux exclusively on Apple Silicon (I never boot into macOS), and should add that on aarch64, my overall experience with every Firefox build has been stellar. Unfortunately, I can't say the same about Ungoogled Chromium.
This just saying, "Bob's rent skyrockets, while his grocery purchasing plummets." No sht Bob is having a hard time buying groceries.
CEOs are important -- not intrinsically, but to survival. Their actions are important. Their decisions are important. Their attention is important. And there's a lot of competition for good ones. If you get a bad one, it's an existential crisis, and the good ones can always go elsewhere for more money.
Want to help nonprofits and small corps? Support the passage of laws limiting CEO pay.
Owncloud was forked to become Nextcloud and seems to have gotten better for it.
Openoffice was forked to become Libreoffice and seems to have gotten beter for it.
Time to fork Firefox [1] and take over where Baker dropped the ball because she thought the rules of the game could be changed to make it no longer necessary to play to win.
Because despite what everybody seems to think, Mozilla spends several hundred millions of dollars every year developing Firefox, and that's not the kind of thing the community can just fork and replace.
Mitchell Baker needs to go. I hold her responsible for much of Firefox's slide in use over the years. She keeps pulling in a larger and larger salary for doing less and less.
I've been critical of Mozilla for a long time, and Mitchell has not been a good leader for the last ~10 years or so.
Having said that, Mitchell was instrumental to several very important things, not all of them in the distant past. She also went years taking annual salary lower than she probably should have been taking. It frankly wouldn't be unreasonable to grant her lifetime emeritus status that comes with a no-strings-attached $1–2 million annual salary to sit on her hands and do nothing. (I do think that $7 million per year is pretty gross, though, especially given the current "state of Mozilla".)
Having said that, $7 million for a CEO who isn't earning it really isn't Mozilla's biggest problem, and it's not even its biggest financial problem. If you really want to be critical of its spending, consider this:
The annual budget for marketing and branding every year falls between $30 and $60 million. Per year. This is Mozilla. Empirically, it may as well not even have a marketing department.
When Chrome really started eating into Firefox marketshare 10+ years ago, one of the things that Mozilla folks used to complain about (a lot) is that Chrome's effective* marketing budget was higher* than Mozilla's total budget—browser development and other software eng. included. The perverse thing is that the same is true of Mozilla: you could take its annual marketing budget, pour it into a different org that works on a different browser, and what you could get out of it is an independent browser development company. What's more is that you could without too much difficulty get that company not only to profitable status in pretty short order (given that kind of budget), but get it to usage share that matches Firefox's own (given how low that is). This would take something like 3, 4, 5 years max, provided you have competent leadership.
That's the sort of profligate spending and a lot of other poor decisionmaking at Mozilla that really needs to be addressed if Mozilla is going to turn around. (I have given up hope that this is ever going to happen. I expect it not to.) People hardly talk about this aspect of the business, however—instead focusing on how much Mitchell is getting paid, which, to reiterate, is not in any sense the biggest problem that Mozilla is facing.
The best thing to do at this point is use one of the privacy-enhanced forks, Firefox is desperate for more cash and will sell you, the user, out for a song.
tl;dr: we need an open source browser & infra, and there are candidates.
How c[u]ome, with all the power of open source we still do not have an open browser with an open sync infra?.
emotions aside, this is dumb (some words cannot be used).
Why can't we, as a group, stop complaining, and actually devote real time hours into developing the serenity browser to work as chrome / brave / firefox?
Why can't we, use the knowledge we have gained from IPFS and actually work on a distributed no server sync platform?
Why can't I, simply stop using the mentioned above software and devote myself into something more hopefully reliable?
I think it is hard to lose your daddy and leave home, but it's something we all have to do in order to actually grow.
I don’t know if we need a new one.
Firefox is still a good (the best?) browser IMO.
Developing a new one is really difficult and many more intelligent people than me have failed doing it.
But if you feel like you have to act, do so and do a show HN; I’m always willing to give a new browser a try :-)
This Mozilla "situation" comes up here from time to time, unfortunately as a long time Firefox user all I have to say is: Mitchell Baker and their clique will only leave when Mozilla is completely dead and even by that time she'll retire and will make a wonderful post about her "legacy" in opensource and the Web.
I will not go further because it will turn into an all-bashing post, but Mozilla ( as you like to think of it ) is dead and has been dead for a long time.
Firefox might be dead soon but Mozilla will probably live on as a VPN company. Opera is also like that. The original browser is dead, replaced by a Chromium reskin, and they're making money from microlending in Africa instead.
Honestly these kinds of posts are tiresome and unhelpful. Yes, Mozilla is different now, yes the CEO makes too much money but if more people used their browser more they might invest more in it in instead of seeing it as a money sink to satisfy people who can’t be satisfied.
Seriously, Mozilla cant win. A large voice of people constantly scold Mozilla for anything it does. We’ve heard from Firefox devs on how this bash fest affects them and we expect them to crank out awesome software despite the abuse. Instead of picking the lesser of two evils they say oh, Firefox is N milliseconds slower than Chrome so I’ll use the greater of two evils.
Can we stop beating a dead horse? If you don’t like Firefox or Mozilla fine but don’t act like it’s unusable as a browser. It’s fine, it works, I don’t why everyone is so bothered by minor details when their goals and clearly better than their competition.
Sure it may be slow for YOU (whatever your use case is) or maybe your extensions broke but average users who rely power users to recommend a browser don’t care. If they can open Facebook and Netflix it’s fine. So use Chrome yourself and recommend Firefox to the people this crap doesn’t matter to. And maybe, if they see the numbers tick up, they’ll change course.
> Mozilla intends to focus on A.I. -- so we can expect more A.I. investment, and possible A.I. services, in the year ahead.
back in March Moziila announced $30m for A.I. services [0]
what's weird is that wound business strategy is usually "what are our core strengths?" instead we get
> A little over two years ago, Mozilla started an ambitious project: deciding where we should focus our efforts to grow the movement of people committed to building a healthier digital world. We landed on the idea of trustworthy AI. [1]
OK, despite my skeptisism what's the plan
> Mozilla.ai’s initial focus? Tools that make generative AI safer and more transparent. And, people-centric recommendation systems that don’t misinform or undermine our well-being. We’ll share more on these — and what we’re building — in the coming months. [0]
While that's all very nice, who on earth are the customers? Is there a eshop somewhere lamenting "our recommendation system is not people centric" ?
> Is there a eshop somewhere lamenting "our recommendation system is not people centric" ?
I think they mean content recommendation systems used by social media. Mozilla Foundation likes to larp as a social media startup or something. Their big angle is that existing social media doesn't shut out 'bad people' e.g. people with opinions to the right of wherever the American west coast zeitgeist is this year. They want recommendation engines that only serve 'good people', or which engineer people's opinions to be more 'good'.
But of course they don't actually have a social media platform worth a damn for them to impose their own agenda onto, so it'll end up tacked onto a mastadon instance nobody uses, or incorporated into the 'New Page' of Firefox, or maybe turned into a browser extension that tries to block or inject stories on other social media websites. All a huge waste of time and money.
Mitchell Baker was important for Mozilla/Netscape in the past. She was the primary author of Mozilla Public License in 1998 (MPL 2.0 is a very good license). I bet that many of us were just infants when she was at Mozilla.
The problem is that many feel that she is not a good leader for Mozilla today, not that she is not a historical figure for Mozilla and the open source community in general.
Yes, we must violently defend the business owners and cororate boards who hire them and sign their checks, while specifically attacking the CEOs themselves.
Wow, nearly 7 million. That’s incredible for a nonprofit CEO. Much, much large orgs have CEOs that get paid 10-15x less. This should be criminal. The taxpayers are being stolen from.
Mozilla Corporation is not a non-profit. It engages in many business relationships and brings in about half a billion dollars a year. How much should the founder-CEO of a 25 year old company with half a billion a year in revenue be making?
woodruffw|2 years ago
I'm a Firefox user, so I have a vested interest in Mozilla's long term health and financial viability. But "marketshare nosedives" appears to be primarily an editorialization to fit the post's larger narrative.
Semaphor|2 years ago
One other thing to remember, is to check the falling of desktop usage, because a large part of the modern internet users are mobile-only, and the amount of people who use anything but what Google tells them to (or Apple allows them to) is vanishingly small.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38533109
sharps1|2 years ago
https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity
yjftsjthsd-h|2 years ago
That's an interesting angle. I suppose we could compare against Mozilla's stats on download numbers and telemetry? Though between users downloading from distro mirrors and disabling telemetry (I suspect Firefox users are far more likely to be privacy conscious and/or Linux users) those will also be fuzzy.
wmf|2 years ago
yawaramin|2 years ago
KennyBlanken|2 years ago
mvdtnz|2 years ago
Firefox's nosediving market share should represent a catastrophic, company-endangering situation. It's depressing that they don't seem to understand that.
nvm0n2|2 years ago
mips_r4300i|2 years ago
I sense a great disturbance in the Force...
KennyBlanken|2 years ago
ksec|2 years ago
agilob|2 years ago
jdksmdbtbdnmsm|2 years ago
petermcneeley|2 years ago
Osmose|2 years ago
1. Mitchell Baker is also chairwoman of the board of the Mozilla Foundation and is a founding member of Mozilla, and receives no stock compensation because there is none to give,
2. Google can definitionally outspend Mozilla on browser development and has used that to cement their market position for over a decade now, and
3. as long as Google is the primary source of Mozilla funding, they can (effectively) kill Firefox at any time, and diversifying revenue / building up a war chest of funds is the only defense against that,
just seems silly to me.
As a former Mozillian I don't like the choices Mitchell Baker has made (AI and services are poor plays IMO) but the obsession with CEO compensation at Mozilla has always smelled less like a genuine concern for alternatives to Chrome and more like holding a smaller player to an unreasonable standard.
A more interesting comparison would compare these numbers to the head of Chrome's compensation, and more specifically Chrome's spending and revenue vs Firefox's.
mort96|2 years ago
ksec|2 years ago
CharlesW|2 years ago
What if the EU were to fork Firefox (Openfox?) and fund its evolution of a privacy-first alternative? Among other benefits, this would:
• Help ensure that key digital infrastructure is not solely dependent on non-European entities.
• Balance the US's outsized role as a gatekeeper for web innovation.
• Support the EU's user privacy and data protection values and comply-by-default with EU regulations.
• Help bolster Europe's economic and tech independence.
What else?
fabrice_d|2 years ago
Most of EU funding for OSS project is spread out to lots of projects, with relatively small amounts - Gnome got $1M recently and celebrated as a "big" milestone. I'm not saying that this is bad, but that's not how you can fund a core browser team.
flir|2 years ago
"Privacy? Awesome! Wait! Wait! Not from us! Ban it! Ban it!"
I'd focus on the "balance of power" aspect. But that can be achieved by marketing Firefox, you don't have to fork it.
jeroen|2 years ago
This has been on my mind for a long time. It would be good for everyone to have a real alternative to Chrome and it would be good for Europe to be less dependent on the US, as you mentioned.
In time, it might be possible to fund this off donations, but a bit of EU funding would go a long way to getting this off the ground. Unfortunately, the workings of EU funding programmes are a mystery to me.
locallost|2 years ago
surajrmal|2 years ago
fifteen1506|2 years ago
No fork please. But do pay more contributors to work on the upstream codebase towards benefiting Firefox's downstream.
PS: don't forget eidas 2.0 has a loophole regarding SSL snooping, check EFF's article on eidas 2.0's article 45.
ksec|2 years ago
And here is another unpopular opinion. I dont care if her salary is 3 million or even 30 million. If she had managed to bring Firefox to 60% marketshare and bring down Chrome on Desktop, would you have still complained if she was paid 30 million?
The problem is Mozilla is in such a bad shape and she is under performing as a CEO.
Unfortunately people dont learn much from history. And history dictate the only way to solve this problem is that Mozilla think of it as a problem. Otherwise its current status at 10% marketshare is enough to sustain the operation. Nothing bad enough is happening, no interest or incentive for changes. Inertia. Let's keep thing this way.
So yes, it is counter intuitive. The only way to save Mozilla ( or change Mozill's direction, I guess the word "save" is a hyperbole, at least from Mozilla's perspective. ) isn't trying to get more user to use it. It is actually push people to abandon it.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28961544
mroche|2 years ago
https://stateof.mozilla.org/
2022 Audited Financial Statement: https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2022/mozilla-fdn-202...
2022 Form 990: https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2022/mozilla-fdn-990...
_m2rf|2 years ago
[deleted]
subins2000|2 years ago
while in Mozilla a single person is receiving close to 7million dollars!
yumraj|2 years ago
The best option would be for someone to fork Firefox and perhaps get it sponsored by Apache foundation. Then we can write it off.
Firefox is my daily browser across multiple platforms, and I worry for its future.
kyleee|2 years ago
macspoofing|2 years ago
[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/mark-surman-mozilla-25-y...
ZeroGravitas|2 years ago
evasb|2 years ago
Google's Chromium project push new standards every month or so, and web developers are fast to adopt these standards and don't care about testing it on Firefox anymore. The Chromium monopoly is already a reality.
kabanda1|2 years ago
PsylentKnight|2 years ago
jqpabc123|2 years ago
Yes. They got it fair and square --- they paid Mozilla for it --- and they still are.
pjmlp|2 years ago
When Firefox is no more, the legacy will be Thunderbird and Rust, not the Web browser, and despite how they won over PNaCL, it is Chrome that drives WebAssembly.
juujian|2 years ago
ykonstant|2 years ago
TheCoreh|2 years ago
https://ladybird.dev/
pas|2 years ago
Also Chromium is there, it's open enough to be a base for Chrome, Brave, Edge, and probably a few more, and it's open source, forkable at any moment Google adds something unpatchably bad. (of course independent implementations are welcome, but the ultimate goal is a healthier web through user freedom, and that doesn't necessitate Firefox directly, a ChromiumFox would be just as perfect)
surajrmal|2 years ago
bee_rider|2 years ago
Firefox makes a lot of noise about their anti-tracking and pro-privacy features. I liked Suckless surf, but missed the granular JavaScript setting of noscript. And, I have no idea, but Privacy Badger must be doing something I guess?
caycep|2 years ago
Organizational baggage?
sjfjsjdjwvwvc|2 years ago
caskstrength|2 years ago
jqpabc123|2 years ago
Who would want them to do that?
waterhouse|2 years ago
wmf|2 years ago
vjulian|2 years ago
PedroBatista|2 years ago
And Firefox is actually a very good browser and better than Chrome in some aspects.
tinco|2 years ago
NegativeLatency|2 years ago
If you’re happy with Firefox I’d say just keep using it.
ksec|2 years ago
Why should you be looking else where if it is working well for you? Unless you feel so wrong about CEO's pay I dont see how it is relevant until the product quality declined.
mewse-hn|2 years ago
aquatica|2 years ago
evasb|2 years ago
layer8|2 years ago
superasn|2 years ago
throwawa14223|2 years ago
evasb|2 years ago
janmo|2 years ago
sjfjsjdjwvwvc|2 years ago
Same as next year will be the year of mass adoption of Linux by consumers.
Yet history and trends point in the other direction
gnicholas|2 years ago
jeroenhd|2 years ago
Barrin92|2 years ago
The article states that revenue from services is up from 50 to 70 million. Still only about 10% of what they make from Firefox, but at least that's independent revenue, going up, directly from consumers.
Can someone please provide a rational argument, not a kneejerk emotional response why focusing on the source of revenue that is Google independent and growing is not the better way to fulfill their stated mission, that is creating a privacy respecting and open web? People are acting like Ahab and the whale when it comes to Firefox, there's no point in dumping more resources into the thing if's going down anyway and makes you subservient to a tech monopolist.
HackerThemAll|2 years ago
zaik|2 years ago
unknown|2 years ago
[deleted]
beginning_end|2 years ago
ls612|2 years ago
mlinksva|2 years ago
endofreach|2 years ago
For all those being annoyed by the decreasing usage of FF in favor of Chrome: If Mozilla & FF died, couldn't this create better scenarios?
Idea: Google might get into legal trouble, maybe even having to lose chrome, opening the market or Chrome / Chromium base for a fresh start?
jmyeet|2 years ago
There's a real opportunity here. People are increasingly distrustful of, say, Google. I use it because it's still performant, cross-platform and has sync. But , like many, are increasingly leerly abou tGoogle using Chrome's position to, say, attack ad blockers.
The ultimate question is how does and should Mozilla fund itself? Well, if the CEO can't lay out a vision and deliver on that then why are they still there? Why is their compensation still increasing despite not performing?
Instead we get platitudes about "add on services". Previously it was "VPN services" and now it's "AI services"? It's almost like the future revenue plan is always "<current buzzword> services".
[1]: https://calpaterson.com/mozilla.html
evasb|2 years ago
wmf|2 years ago
jasoneckert|2 years ago
I use both Ungoogled Chromium and Firefox on my main workstation, which runs Fedora Asahi Linux exclusively on Apple Silicon (I never boot into macOS), and should add that on aarch64, my overall experience with every Firefox build has been stellar. Unfortunately, I can't say the same about Ungoogled Chromium.
1attice|2 years ago
CEOs are important -- not intrinsically, but to survival. Their actions are important. Their decisions are important. Their attention is important. And there's a lot of competition for good ones. If you get a bad one, it's an existential crisis, and the good ones can always go elsewhere for more money.
Want to help nonprofits and small corps? Support the passage of laws limiting CEO pay.
alberth|2 years ago
Is it normal for Non-Profits to not the include Income Statement in their financials? Because Mozilla doesn’t.
https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2022/mozilla-fdn-202...
the_third_wave|2 years ago
Openoffice was forked to become Libreoffice and seems to have gotten beter for it.
Time to fork Firefox [1] and take over where Baker dropped the ball because she thought the rules of the game could be changed to make it no longer necessary to play to win.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38533785
unknown|2 years ago
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harpiaharpyja|2 years ago
boomboomsubban|2 years ago
edflsafoiewq|2 years ago
nojvek|2 years ago
IMO Mozilla is default dead and so is Firefox. With 500M of revenue, ~$7M going to CEO is >1% of revenue being sucked by CEO (not even net profit).
From a distant observer, Mitchell is a parasite.
The Chromium Hegemony is winning and Safari is barely alive.
prakhar897|2 years ago
Moz seems like a controlled opposition at this point.
User23|2 years ago
unknown|2 years ago
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cvalka|2 years ago
ksec|2 years ago
sydbarrett74|2 years ago
j16sdiz|2 years ago
why was it a goal, I have bo idea
username1228023|2 years ago
Having said that, Mitchell was instrumental to several very important things, not all of them in the distant past. She also went years taking annual salary lower than she probably should have been taking. It frankly wouldn't be unreasonable to grant her lifetime emeritus status that comes with a no-strings-attached $1–2 million annual salary to sit on her hands and do nothing. (I do think that $7 million per year is pretty gross, though, especially given the current "state of Mozilla".)
Having said that, $7 million for a CEO who isn't earning it really isn't Mozilla's biggest problem, and it's not even its biggest financial problem. If you really want to be critical of its spending, consider this:
The annual budget for marketing and branding every year falls between $30 and $60 million. Per year. This is Mozilla. Empirically, it may as well not even have a marketing department.
When Chrome really started eating into Firefox marketshare 10+ years ago, one of the things that Mozilla folks used to complain about (a lot) is that Chrome's effective* marketing budget was higher* than Mozilla's total budget—browser development and other software eng. included. The perverse thing is that the same is true of Mozilla: you could take its annual marketing budget, pour it into a different org that works on a different browser, and what you could get out of it is an independent browser development company. What's more is that you could without too much difficulty get that company not only to profitable status in pretty short order (given that kind of budget), but get it to usage share that matches Firefox's own (given how low that is). This would take something like 3, 4, 5 years max, provided you have competent leadership.
That's the sort of profligate spending and a lot of other poor decisionmaking at Mozilla that really needs to be addressed if Mozilla is going to turn around. (I have given up hope that this is ever going to happen. I expect it not to.) People hardly talk about this aspect of the business, however—instead focusing on how much Mitchell is getting paid, which, to reiterate, is not in any sense the biggest problem that Mozilla is facing.
-- former Mozillian
LanzVonL|2 years ago
gardenhedge|2 years ago
laweijfmvo|2 years ago
unknown|2 years ago
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_m2rf|2 years ago
How c[u]ome, with all the power of open source we still do not have an open browser with an open sync infra?.
emotions aside, this is dumb (some words cannot be used). Why can't we, as a group, stop complaining, and actually devote real time hours into developing the serenity browser to work as chrome / brave / firefox?
Why can't we, use the knowledge we have gained from IPFS and actually work on a distributed no server sync platform?
Why can't I, simply stop using the mentioned above software and devote myself into something more hopefully reliable?
I think it is hard to lose your daddy and leave home, but it's something we all have to do in order to actually grow.
sjfjsjdjwvwvc|2 years ago
But if you feel like you have to act, do so and do a show HN; I’m always willing to give a new browser a try :-)
esafak|2 years ago
ivanjermakov|2 years ago
PedroBatista|2 years ago
I will not go further because it will turn into an all-bashing post, but Mozilla ( as you like to think of it ) is dead and has been dead for a long time.
Deal with it.
neurostimulant|2 years ago
kriro9jdjfif|2 years ago
Have made zero changes to FF itself, but overall have found local AI a huge help in managing it all.
Riverheart|2 years ago
Seriously, Mozilla cant win. A large voice of people constantly scold Mozilla for anything it does. We’ve heard from Firefox devs on how this bash fest affects them and we expect them to crank out awesome software despite the abuse. Instead of picking the lesser of two evils they say oh, Firefox is N milliseconds slower than Chrome so I’ll use the greater of two evils.
Can we stop beating a dead horse? If you don’t like Firefox or Mozilla fine but don’t act like it’s unusable as a browser. It’s fine, it works, I don’t why everyone is so bothered by minor details when their goals and clearly better than their competition.
Sure it may be slow for YOU (whatever your use case is) or maybe your extensions broke but average users who rely power users to recommend a browser don’t care. If they can open Facebook and Netflix it’s fine. So use Chrome yourself and recommend Firefox to the people this crap doesn’t matter to. And maybe, if they see the numbers tick up, they’ll change course.
AndrewKemendo|2 years ago
Honestly, this news/post made me lose the final shred of hope I had.
:/
runjake|2 years ago
onyxringer|2 years ago
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unknown|2 years ago
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phpisthebest|2 years ago
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Baldbvrhunter|2 years ago
back in March Moziila announced $30m for A.I. services [0]
what's weird is that wound business strategy is usually "what are our core strengths?" instead we get
> A little over two years ago, Mozilla started an ambitious project: deciding where we should focus our efforts to grow the movement of people committed to building a healthier digital world. We landed on the idea of trustworthy AI. [1]
OK, despite my skeptisism what's the plan
> Mozilla.ai’s initial focus? Tools that make generative AI safer and more transparent. And, people-centric recommendation systems that don’t misinform or undermine our well-being. We’ll share more on these — and what we’re building — in the coming months. [0]
While that's all very nice, who on earth are the customers? Is there a eshop somewhere lamenting "our recommendation system is not people centric" ?
[0] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/introducing-mozilla-ai-i...
[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/mozillas-vision-for-trus...
lupusreal|2 years ago
I think they mean content recommendation systems used by social media. Mozilla Foundation likes to larp as a social media startup or something. Their big angle is that existing social media doesn't shut out 'bad people' e.g. people with opinions to the right of wherever the American west coast zeitgeist is this year. They want recommendation engines that only serve 'good people', or which engineer people's opinions to be more 'good'.
But of course they don't actually have a social media platform worth a damn for them to impose their own agenda onto, so it'll end up tacked onto a mastadon instance nobody uses, or incorporated into the 'New Page' of Firefox, or maybe turned into a browser extension that tries to block or inject stories on other social media websites. All a huge waste of time and money.
wubbert|2 years ago
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givemeethekeys|2 years ago
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evasb|2 years ago
The problem is that many feel that she is not a good leader for Mozilla today, not that she is not a historical figure for Mozilla and the open source community in general.
stalfosknight|2 years ago
jdksmdbtbdnmsm|2 years ago
dougmwne|2 years ago
lupusreal|2 years ago
Correct.
For instance, the CEO of UNICEF USA makes 620k a year. https://www.unicefusa.org/about-unicef-usa/finances/financia...
asadotzler|2 years ago
skrebbel|2 years ago
erulabs|2 years ago
SoftTalker|2 years ago