> Mobile browsing numbers are bleak: Firefox barely exists on phones, with a market share of less than half a percent. This is baffling given that mobile Firefox has a rare feature for a mobile browser: it's able to install extensions and so can block ads.
This is true, and indeed very strange. I use FF on mobile and it works perfectly. So Mozilla's problems aren't only technical, there's also a question of market awareness.
That said, there are also technical problems. Some bugs on the desktop linger on for years and are never fixed.
As described in the article, Mozilla spent a lot of energy into side projects that never went anywhere and were only loosely related to the browser.
This, I have been a long time FF on Android user, mostly due to the ability to run add-ons (ublock etc). Latest update complete botched it. Couple of hnags/restarts every day, jittery UI, unintuitive button placement (e.g. new tab)...
I want to use Firefox (or any decent browser not based on chrome), for several reasons, but this way it gets harder and harder to justify to myself.
What alternatives do we have for non-chromium browsers that have a healthy plugin ecosystem?
>What alternatives do we have for non-chromium browsers that have a healthy plugin ecosystem?
The obvious answer is: none. It always was Chrome or Firefox, everything else was so niche that 'healthy plugin ecosystem' is out of reach. And this very likely won't change for the better, pretty much everyone I know ditched Firefox in favor of chrome by now. We all want to love firefox, but at this point, staying invested seems like a waste of energy.
The situation is weird. I want to give them some money but there is absolutely no way to support firefox development.
A long time ago firefox(program) started asking for donations. I've donated 5$(I was a poor student in Poland[1]). After the donation, I found out that money will not be used for FF development (why firefox page did not mention that?). Long story short it was my last donation to them.
A lot of users struggle with this. Mozilla needs to diversify it's revenue stream, but the options available to them are only tangentially related to Firefox. Basically, (1) the VPN service they are spinning up and (2) Pocket. I opted to pay monthly fees for the full version of Pocket. But what I really want is to pay a monthly fee to support development of Firefox core + extensions.
It's way too early to tell, but it seems like in the long run of history, they could plausibly become most well-known for creating Rust, and mostly forgotten for everything else they've done. Based on adoption trends from huge organizations and projects, we might very well see Rust (or a "Rust++" type analog) powering a lot of key software in 20 or 30 years from now, and who knows, maybe even a lot longer than that. (Maybe a lot shorter, too, but I'm just thinking about hypotheticals.)
I know it's probably not practical to monetize an open source programming language, and they don't centrally manage it, but that seems to be their big differentiator and contribution to the software world as of 2020, as far as I can tell. They were pioneering back when they were driving a lot of the evolution of browsers and web APIs, and providing a way less awful alternative to IE, but by 2020 Google's basically upstaged them in all those areas, and I don't see that trend ever reversing at this point. But Rust might live on in a big or huge way, possibly even long past their solvency as an organization.
So I don't know exactly what I'm trying to say with this post, and I don't know how it could help them financially, but maybe leaning into Rust or other similar very ambitious attempts at fundamentally shifting the software ecosystem could let them remain if not successful, at least relevant and acclaimed. Maybe Servo could've been one of those, but it seems like vaporware at this point (besides the parts Firefox cannibalized, like Stylo).
The latest Android Firefox update also disabled several of the addons I was using, as apparently they are now incompatible until the addon developers do some extra work to fix whatever backward incompatibility Mozilla introduced with the latest version.
I've noticed the opposite. New FF flies for me on the websites I use, such as HN and Stack Overflow. What sites is it slow for you?
Note also that many of the redesigned plugins will be slower than their older, mature counterparts. Give the plugin authors some time to optimize their plugins, and try to cull the amount of plugins you currently use. I've using only Adblock Plus, Tree Style Tab, and Tridactyl.
It's faster to me once loaded. What sucks for me is that I switch between apps constantly. When I reopen firefox, it takes about 20 or 30 seconds for the app to load.
Sorry, I can't risk this account getting associated with my real name.
It's a Nokia 6.1. I've got a lot of apps running, so my guess is that memory exhaustion is causing the app to completely close when switching away. The whole app and previous page then needs to be reloaded when I reopen the app. I think it's the previous page reloading is causing the biggest part of the delay.
What's annoying is that even if I try to switch to another site, it still waits for the previous page to load. I'd like to easily cancel the reload so that I can go to a separate page quickly.
It still works fine on iOS, but that's probably because underneath every browser is Safari. People complain about Apple's draconian choices, but the end result is mostly good for consumers. If people don't like it, there's Android and Tizen.
If anything is being “reskinned” it is Webkit, the rendering engine, not Safari the browser. Webkit is by far superior choice on anything macOS/iOS related because of performance and energy use.
Try the very latest release (81). I wrote earlier[0] that FF79 was too slow to start, buggy on tab switches, and missing most recent sites on the new tab. That's all been fixed as of FF81 as far as I can see.
I also really like the new swipe-url-to-switch-tabs feature =D
The last update seems to have added yet another unnecessary click to access a pinned site (whatever it's called).
It used to be "click on the url bar -> click big site preview", now it's "click on the tab counter -> click the plus icon -> click to dismiss some overlay -> click small site icon".
Yes, the latest update is rather horrible. Regular things take way more taps than before, some useful capabilities are gone (like NOT asking to save passwords in incognito mode!). I hope they are listening to feedback. I stalwartly use it still, but miss the previous version very much.
On the parent issue, Firefox on mobile is great because of the same reason Firefox on Desktop is great. Power over your browser. Which is important since browser exploits are using Javascript to compromise phones.
Of course regular people don't know this and will probably never care. But it's the reason Firefox probably won't die. Because the people who know tech know its strength and will want to use it.
It's shameful for a CEO to get a 400% pay increase, regardless of any other circumstances. But it matters less to me because I'm sure Firefox will always attract enthusiasts who care about their online security.
> Of course regular people don't know this and will probably never care.
except if firefox wills it, they could have an advertising campaign to show regular people that firefox can block ads (the irony!), and is a much better browser experience when paired with all the plugins!
But of course, this threatens the tenuous relationship with google, their major source of revenue. Google keeps firefox alive on a shoestring budget to stop the anti-trust happenings that microsoft went through with Internet Explorer.
So the status quo fits just fine for these parties, and the web browser competition gets worse over time.
Some important features such as about:config access has been neutered in the latest firefox mobile. The ability to fully customize the browser is an important feature for the enthusiast folks you mentioned, so by removing access to about:config they effectively alienate their most important and vocal users.
I have to agree with you, and it makes me sad every day. The entire UX is down the drain for me. Even something that always worked like a charm - URL address bar completion - is now broken. I used to type a 'g' and boom it would suggest Github Participating Notifications as first in line. No longer.. now I consistently see other sites, some of which I only visited once. Now part of browsing is dilligent URL address bar data-entry.
Personally, I use Firefox on PC and would love to use it on my phone.
Literally the only reason I use Chrome instead is because of the flow ui tab switching. I just can't stand the Firefox mobile UI for tab switching. I with there was an extension or something to change it. It's a huge shame.
I have been dying to switch but tab management and switching is so jarring in FF vs Chrome (on Android).
Not only that, but scrolling is also buggy because it keeps accelerating. Insufferable while online shopping, because I like to scroll-stop-scroll-stop-scroll and FF just speeds up the scrolling if the stops are too short.
Still not as good. With chrome flow tab ui I can rapidly scroll through full width page previews, and I can initiate this by swiping from the top down. In Firefox the tab previews are so small as to be almost useless, and I have to press a button.
With chrome flow tab ui I can rapidly scroll through full width page previews, and I can initiate this by swiping from the top down. In Firefox the tab previews are so small as to be almost useless, and I have to press a button.
I don't know if the usage is high enough to make a dent, but Brave seems like a better alternative on mobile: all the quality of Chrome without the downsides.
To expand on the quality point: I used Firefox a long time past most of my laymen friends had switched to Chrome, despite it being painfully slower, and I spent years giving it trial periods on a regular basis. But the quality gap was just too reliable and persistent, with it always being slower, jankier, and less featureful (from a product perspective, I still can't believe how many years it took for them to get per-tab processes). When I've tried it recently on mobile, it's seemed quite a bit slower, and
Combined with a decline in confidence in their ability to be an effective organization that started with Eich's ouster and has only gotten worse over time, it's difficult for me to see why most users would choose mobile FF over Brave. The only advantage i can see is extensions, but it's my impression that most users don't much care to use them.
Firefox Focus also wipes itself frequently, which means that you can't be tracked across sites as easily. I look forward to updating to iOS 14 so I can set FFF as my default browser.
My typical workflow is: (1) search for something in FFF, (2) if it's something I want to stay alive so I can read later, I share it to FF, (3) if it's something that I need to be logged in for, I share it to Safari, where I'm logged into various sites.
It is annoying that I have to manually open FFF each time, instead of being able to use Siri to trigger a search or the systemwide search. Hopefully both of these search options will use my default browser in iOS 14.
In late 2018 we rebased desktop Brave from Electron to a chromium front end fork, so if you tried Brave earlier than then, I hope you'll give it another try. Thanks.
Wait that's not true is it? On iOS, Safari supports content blocker since like iOS 9, and on Android, not only you can get browser ad blocks, you can get OS-wide ad blocks through local VPN blockers.
Not only are problems on desktop that linger for years they change stuff on a whim on mobile and when the users complain about it on Twitter they tell you to shut up and are not very nice about it at all don't want to hear your opinion
If the numbers in these threads are correct (CEO compensation at $2.5m/year, 250 employees laid off) then the entirety of executive compensation would only cover $10k/year of each laid off worker's compensation.
The point is not so much that the CEO's pay directly matches the salaries of the sacked employees, more that the CEO is clearly focused on their personal goals, rather than the organisational goals.
CEO's who reduce their salary in order to keep more staff on in lean times are servants of their organisation. CEO's who sack staff to save money so they can increase their own salary see the organisation as their servant.
It's not a crime to be greedy, but being greedy is a clear signal of your values and goals.
They couldn't keep on all the developers they fired, but they could keep some of them. On top of that, the optics of the situation aren't good for the company brand. Increasing executive pay while firing productive workers, particularly at a non-profit, seems generally frowned upon.
Sure - 20-40 jobs are absolutely valuable. The bigger point is that the indignation towards this CEO is a bit of a strawman, since it's easier to be angry at a greedy CEO than accept the idea that Mozilla may not be viable.
I'm from Spain, so my knowledge may not be translatable, but I will give it a crack.
A business that is set up as a "non-profit" means that it can't pay dividends. If the business earns one million dollars, I can't profit from it. This does not mean there aren't people in the organization with salaries. Sometimes big salaries.
You can have a "for-profit" company owned by a "non-profit" one. The dividends paid by the "for-profit" go to the "non-profit" but those can only be reinvested. In a way, yes, "non-profitness" is inherited.
I guess that the "for-profit" organization provides legal benefits. If one of your child companies goes bankrupt, it shouldn't affect the other ones nor the parent company. I have a few more guesses but I am not confident enough to write about them, especially when I am not from the US.
It’s the converse that is not possible. A non-profit could reasonably have an investment arm that tries to maximize return on endowment (or likewise a for-profit subsidiary, by analogy) and various projects which are funded from the generated surplus.
A for-profit entity owning/operating a non-profit entity would be more difficult to justify without calling on other goals.
Non-profits can have business activities that support their non-profit mission, and many of those business activities are subject to income tax.
So many non-profits split out the profit-making activities into a separate (for-profit) company so that they can keep non-profit financial streams separate from the for-profit ones.
I mean contributing as an outsider. I really have a problem contributing to open source projects of a company where I get the feeling that the upper management is simply filling its pockets.
Non-profit just means that the company cannot make / pay out profit. It can still pay its employees a lot of money. It can still own for-profit corporate entities, take their profit, and spend it on other (non-money-making) causes.
the context is "for-profit" ... if a company is for-profit and somebody is contributing for free then that is a very personal choice - but there are more obvious reasons for not doing so.
Mozilla Foundation has a staff of 80 and "manages" about 1000 volunteers. It's unclear how much donations it gets as they published a consolidated report that includes the corporation. I expect that very little.
Mozilla Corporation has a staff of 750 and $400M revenue (I expect most from the Google search deal).
No, the problem is that people don't understand what non-profit means. It has nothing to do with the internal structure of the company, employee salary (CEO is also an employee) etc. It has to do with external structure, i.e. ownership and distribution of profits (which there cannot be any).
Mozilla CEO's salary isn't even that big, in the large scheme of things.
If you donate to the Mozilla Foundation, then by law that donation can only be used toward the non-profit activities of the Foundation. It cannot go toward Mozilla Corporation activities.
I’m not arguing the law, I’m arguing that Firefox should be a beneficiary of those donations. There is currently no way for anyone to donate to Mozilla for Firefox development, even though that is the main product that people derive value from.
To me, it seems like Mozilla Corporation should not have existed, and everything should have been part of the non-profit foundation.
IIRC if you write what something's for on a check in the memo/for line, it legally has to be used for that purpose for nonprofits, but I can't find a source and I doubt something like that would be a high-priority thing to audit for the IRS.
Donations go to the Mozilla Foundation, which largely does advocacy. The CEO works for the Mozilla Corporation, which makes far more money than the donations.
I think it's a one-dimensional view, assuming that there is no compensation. For starters, most of us work for for-profit companies and use open source to do our jobs.
It's shameful period, non-profit or for-profit. But - don't hate the player, hate the game.
Our entire system has been setup like this for decades. 99% of earnings have been going to the top 1% for decades now.
I understand people who don't want to get behind BLM - I might not agree with them, but I "get" them.
But the fact that the country looked at Occupy Wallstreet and collectively shrugged its shoulders and said "I don't see a problem here" - well, here we are - slowly building back a feudal society while blaming the poorest amongst us for our troubles.
We have an organization where, at the same time they don't have revenue enough for keeping its workers, the decision makers increase their salary. Never mind the legal structure of the organization, that doesn't look to me very ethical.
At the same time, non-profits are suppose to have the mission of improving the world. I understand that the janitor doesn't care about the mission and just want to be payed, but the management should care, at least, about the optics. I, for sure, would not donate (1) to a non-profit if I think that my money is going to be used for buying Ferrari or houses in the Hamptons.
The claim was not that they can't reduce but that an 80% discount was too much to ask of people (and thus also their families). I don't think anyone at any pay level would be happy being paid 20% of similar roles. Perhaps the problem was putting people in these roles in the first place that would accept 20% of market rate. Raising their pay subsequently doesn't make them better at their job!
The quote is not really crazy:
"Executive compensation is a general topic -- are execs, esp CEOs paid too much? I'm of the camp that thinks the different between exec comp and other comp is high. So then i think, OK what should mozilla do about it? My answer is that we try to mitigate this, but we won't solve this general social problem on our own.
Here's what I mean by mitigate: we ask our executives to accept a discount from the market-based pay they could get elsewhere. But we don't ask for an 75-80% discount. I use that number because a few years ago when the then-ceo had our compensation structure examined, 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."
Perhaps they should find someone skilled who is willing to take that 80% discount from market.
Baker has clearly not been worth her increased salary; I don't even think she's worth the original 20%-of-market salary, given how Firefox's market share has dropped precipitously, and Mozilla has been forced to lay off staff.
Sure, you're probably not going to get a 100%-of-market-rate CEO for a 20%-of-market-rate salary, for CEOs who only care about compensation. But I think that's ok, especially given that some CEOs aren't even worth 20%. And you're much more likely to get someone who actually cares about the mission.
I took a major financial hit to be a CEO, and as a CEO I feel personally responsible for the company's success. My compensation is primarily in ownership and stock - I would never take a massive pay raise if my company were failing, let alone repeated massive raises over years of company downturn.
And then to wipe out a massive portion of your employee base? I find it abhorrent, personally.
I'm certainly curious as to why, they have a board and shareholders, no? Regardless, it changes little about my point. I'm not saying a CEO shouldn't earn a nice salary, but to repeatedly take raises during a downturn, a downturn so severe you had to completely gut projects, is gross.
I use that number because a few years ago when the then-ceo had our compensation structure examined, I learned that my pay was about an 80% discount to market. Meaning that competitive roles elsewhere were paying about 5 times as much.
Exactly. The right thing to do here if that bothers you, isn't to hollow out Mozilla, it's to go and take one of those other jobs that you believe you can get.
When I make this argument to tech companies in Vancouver (where typically compensation is an 80% discount from right across the border in Seattle), the response is usually that I can move if I want to.
Couldn't she just have gone and become CEO at a different company if she wanted to make more, like the rest of us do?
I can cite much much more people there if they want to discuss fairness, they better forget and act this line of argument never existed!
I believe they should justify the value they create in this high paid positions compared to all other people making and disseminating the product. There is no justification for this level.
There are lots and lots of families there living on a less fair level of salary but produce much more value (and no damages).
The point isn't to spend it, the point is to make so much money that investments self replicate. At that point, they can stop worrying about money forever and just live off the interest.
Then, you have trust funds for your children so that none of them ever have to work. And when you die, your children will inherit the fortune, so they can do the same for their children, ad infinitum. And if they want a "job" you can start a nonprofit that they can run, so they can be known as successful administrators while you are recognized as a selfless philanthropist who gave away so much money.
I guess it would be hard on their families because they would move off the fast track of multi-generational absolute financial security.
Let's says it's the half after taxes: 1.25M. Spending 3424 a day for 365 days should get you there. You have to realize it's our fault to not understand these poor people.
You take loan for a mansion that can suck such an income dry. Or two, or 5. Add some luxury lifestyle (cars, clothing, vacations, gadgets, expensive restaurants) and you are losing money.
That excludes purely burning cash ie on drugs/alcohol, hookers or living in super-high rental place.
Tax evasion is illegal. What these people do is not (but maybe morally questionable?). Please don't go to an accountant asking to help you in "tax evasion schemes" :)
No tax lawyer but the principle this works on, as I understand it, is having a lot of deductible costs to lower your taxable salary. It works for anyone, just the degree to which you have to invent expenses differs.
There's lots of info about this online but it really depends on your country. For me, things like my commute to work, expenses for my home office (even though I worked in an actual office until corona), and other things can be deducted. The most ironic category is expenses necessary to file taxes.
Most countries also seem to have savings plans where you put money away until retirement and pay taxes only when you're allowed to take it out, after retirement age (after retirement, you have a lower income, so pay a lower tax rate). Of course, you still pay those taxes (wouldn't be a certainty of life, now, would it?), but they're lower.
I'm not defending her argument or agreeing with it, I just think that the rest of the quote adds important context. Quoting that last sentence alone almost makes it seem like the bad excuse a child would make. Her actual point is that asking executives to take an 80% pay cut to go work at Mozilla is going to make it difficult to attract talented people, not that lowering the current compensation would cause the current executive team's families to suffer.
Again, I don't agree with that since clearly the higher salaries are not attracting any talented executives either.
Given that she is barely even worth the lower, 80%-discounted salary, I don't find that a compelling argument.
I would much rather a lower-salary, less-experienced CEO who actually cares about the mission enough to accept that salary, than someone who has presided over an erosion of Firefox's market share and significant layoffs, while still increasing her own salary. Clearly the system is not working by paying their CEO a market rate.
Seriously. The only reason they can say that is because they're in charge of the company and get to make decisions. How fair have Mozilla's layoffs been on the families of the laid-off workers? I bet not all that fair.
> There's a quote from the CEO saying that they looked at the market and felt like they were being underpaid. And they can't reduce their salary now because it'd be unfair on their families.
Yes I read that too, I couldn't believe it.
She can decide to work for a non-profit, work for the good of the Internet and its users. Accept to earn 500k, which put her well in the top 5% earners and let her and her family live a comfortable life even in Silicon Valley.
Or she can go work as an exec for Google/Apple/Facebook, accept that she's just working for a group of people against others, and be aware she'll be actively doing harm to people's privacy and freedom, but rake in a multi-million dollar salary every year.
I'm sure there are plenty of skilled and talented people who would be happy to work as an exec for Mozilla for the meager salary of 500k.
I agree to me it seems like they're admitting that the ship is sinking. The CEO is over 60yo, unlikely to take on another gig after this. The simplest explanation is often the correct one, she's lost her way and needs a nice cushion before retirement. Greed is s very human thing.
The Mozilla execs could all make more money at FAANG companies just down the road from Mozilla HQ. If they left, it would probably be pretty hard to replace them with anyone capable of saving Firefox who would settle for less.
The same is true for most of the engineers at Mozilla. They could go to FAANGs and increase their compensation quite a bit.
So while I agree that the leadership has been bad, executive pay was not the problem. Executive decision-making was the problem. Hiring leaders who could make better decisions certainly won't be any cheaper.
> If they left, it would probably be pretty hard to replace them with anyone capable of saving Firefox who would settle for less.
Its an open source project people believe in. Reduce the pay and you are probably actually more likely to cut out the worst execs and focus only on smart people who want to contribute.
Open source projects are full of smart people who want to contribute and are still often organisational clusterfucks. Unfortunately being smart and passionate alone doesn’t necessarily make you an effective leader.
True, but why is leadership at such an economic premium to development? It's not like the CEO writes a pile of code for 40 hours a week and then puts in another 30 hours on top doing all the corporate administration. It's an necessary but distinct job that complements the technical one but isn't so superior to it.
Yes, indeed a good CEO has offers from elsewhere. But...why isn't the business and governance open-sourced like the codebase?
At the most basic level leadership is at a premium because there are fewer truly good leaders than there are developers.
Now, is every well paid CEO a truly good leader? No. But I’d argue it’s a lot more difficult to assess a good leader than a good developer. There’s a lot more people management, marketing and other soft skills involved. Not to mention the time scales for success are much larger.
I'd say it's actually easy to evaluate a leader, at least one with experience under their belt. You look at the performance of their organization. If they're a CEO, it's especially trivial: you look at the performance of the entire company. If they're a VP or Director of a smaller section of the org, you can still measure that section's performance, though it does get a little muddier.
At a decent-sized org it is nearly impossible to measure an individual developer's impact with any granularity.
I think this should also illustrate that evaluating a leader and evaluating a developer are two entirely different things that can't be directly compared anyway.
The thing is, it benefits the people in professional management roles to promote this point of view and institutionalize practices like outside hires in order to make it a self-fulfilling prophecy. They don't need to conspire about this (in the Adam Smith sense), just echo the notion of corporate management as such a distinct skillset that it needs to be sought out rather than grown and that will eventually come to have its own moat effect.
Eventually you get CEOs making statements that amount to 'I deliver 10x or 20x more value to this company than you, all my CEO peers say so.'
> The Mozilla execs could all make more money at FAANG companies just down the road from Mozilla HQ.
I mean, really? After their record of poor performance at Mozilla?
> Hiring leaders who could make better decisions certainly won't be any cheaper.
It's been blindly obvious for years what they should do, but let's state it again: (1) Build up a fund instead of throwing away the money, so they can be financially independent. (2) Concentrate on the browser and users.
Fortunately, Mozilla has been doing #1 for years, as they mention in their public financial statements.
#2 is a matter of opinion in a couple ways. Work on the browser for the betterment of users has never stopped. Intent has always been there, but we can debate quality of plan and execution.
Worth mentioning is how hard it is to rate performance given lack of counterfactuals. Is there even any golden path of success in all of the solution space? All we know is that what was tried hasn't worked.
Nothing will kill morale as much as executive pay going up while your colleagues are being given their pink slips. That is an executive decision making problem but it directly impacts morale.
> it would probably be pretty hard to replace them with anyone capable of saving Firefox who would settle for less.
That's just baseless assumptions. And considering that this "saving" did not work out so far, it seems they are not even worth the money at all.
On another side, for the money of one of this managers, you could probably get a dozen or more semi-competent people who are more eager to make money and save the project.
I think you highlighted another problem. Why Mozilla HQ is located in such an expensive place? There are plenty of cheaper places in the world (even US...).
Firefox engineers do literally the same jobs as their counterparts at Google. Indeed, most of my ex-colleagues and ex-execs have gone to Google, Facebook, and Apple. (in roughly that order) It's no secret that they appreciate the increased compensation, too!
> The same is true for most of the engineers at Mozilla. They could go to FAANGs and increase their compensation quite a bit.
What % of engineers at Mozilla are in SV and other places where Mozilla competes with FAANG? I thought quite a lot of the employees were remote all over the world.
Why are you so sure that a) Eich would do the job for less, or that b) he'd be able to single-handedly defeat Google on a budget.
Just because someone opposes gay marriage for religious reasons doesn't make them a superhero or saint. Is Brave browser doing better than Firefox with his miraculous help?
Seems like the people angry about this political issue are one key factor in us heading towards an internet monoculture.
> Why are you so sure that a) Eich would do the job for less, or that b) he'd be able to single-handedly defeat Google on a budget.
a) Eich publicly called out Mozilla's current CEO compensation. b) well the current CEO isn't doing that either.
> Just because someone opposes gay marriage for religious reasons doesn't make them a superhero or saint. Is Brave browser doing better than Firefox with his miraculous help?
Exactly, it had nothing to do with anything but people who wanted Eich's head. The same people that are now sinking Mozilla because they have no vision for the company, just virtue signalling.
Firefox lost market the whole time period during which I started Brave and led the team that grew it from 0 to ~20M MAU. Something worked. Of course it couldn't have had anything to do with me :-/.
>There's a quote from the CEO saying that they looked at the market and felt like they were being underpaid.
And they can't reduce their salary now because it'd be unfair on their families. Firefox has a problem.
Yes. The exec team and CEO.
They should be ousted.
"Unfair to their families"? What BS, what about the families of the laid-off?
That chart shows a pretty beautiful 10 year trend. Yep, they are on a sinking ship.
'Failures' on the other hand - that is a loaded word. They are failures, they have failed at making Firefox popular. But what needed to happen to build an alternative world where they succeeded? The browsers that succeeded were Chrome and Safari - browsers sponsored by the owners of the two major platforms for accessing the internet, backed by billions of dollars of corporatyness.
What is Firefox meant to do? Charities aren't innovation engines. Back in the day when they were making progress on market share, the options were Firefox or IE6. The strategy of the Chrome web team is slightly different than the IE6 web team. I'm sour about Firefox wiping out their value proposition when they canned the good extensions - but that happened circa 2017 so it isn't the problem for adoption. They need something radical to be relevant and that isn't a fair ask of a nonprofit.
Operating systems are basically a commodity. Browsers? Doubly so. I don't care who's in charge of Mozilla - if your "product" is your browser, you better hope your "customers" feel charitable. "If everyone donated $2.99.." and etc.
Maybe you just can't run a successful business in the browser space in 2020. It was already plenty difficult in the mid-90's, wasn't it?
No, they succeeded at making it impopular. FireFox was popular they had a shot at cementing market dominance. The were more popular than Chrome and MS's product combined.
But now they are a fringe browser, that already has problems keeping up with the developments on the web.
Note that for Google they are only a fig-leaf in their upcoming anti-trust case. Note that Google pulled a lot of underhanded tricks to get people to switch to Chrome and paying FF may have been just enough to keep Mozilla quiet about this. If it had been a for-profit situation and with a different source of revenues for Mozilla then there is a fair chance Mozilla would have made a case for anti-competitive behavior by Google.
So that money may have acted to Google's benefit in more than just one way.
The unique selling point of Firefox (and especially: mobile Firefox) was ability to heavily customize it and use third party extensions.
Those extensions were the ones bringing in the innovation -> most ideas came from third parties (on a side note: usually for free, since extensions are hard to monetize).
The system just worked and gave many popular extensions like Tab Mix Plus, Ad-Block, Noscript... through basic customization extensions like Classic Theme Restorer (have you ever setup new browser for a grandmother who does not need 50 options everywhere when you right click? can you even do this now in new Firefox? or the new extension model does not allow it) through countless small extensions that changed users' workflows how they wanted. This ecosystem is all gone.
Developers inside of Firefox completely ignored it - they killed the old extension system because they didn't like it, while they did not provide anything that is even 25% as good. I understand that creating a new, better system is hard, but that is their job and core product. Firefox could have been providing the framework on which extensions would sit.
Also, they earned 500 million dollars per year, for years; had over 1000 employees. They couldnt find people who could solve hard problems?
Or maybe it is a failure of project management: developers ignored hard problems, they preferred to work on new, shiny green-field projects. Those new toys are great: they boost the CV, allow to play with new technologies, often are left in half baked state so you dont care about bugs. They also have no users, so nobody will complain, basically no accountability for a project that is never finished and killed after 1-2 years.
We saw many of such side projects in Firefox - all shifting away resources from the core product that is neglected.
Firefox’s decline was already well in progress before anything changed with extensions. The problem was that Google’s ad profits allowed them to pour money into Chrome without needing the browser to be profitable, and their advertisements of Chrome on the most popular websites were hard to counter. Extensions weren’t moving the needle on that and, as many people involved have explained, the old design was a substantial maintenance cost preventing other important changes to remain competitive with Chrome.
The big question is whether there’s a model for browser development which isn’t subsidized by huge companies which profit elsewhere. Short of government support (antitrust, direct funding, etc.) I’m not sure there is a viable path forward.
Let's assume good faith and that executive pay in general at Mozilla was not competitive.
That would be similar to a company noticing that it has been underpaying software engineers and then choosing to bump up compensation significantly.
A question that raises is: do executives (and software engineers?) bring the value that is associated with those pay grades, given that they seem increasingly detached from other roles?
I don't know - are many people here on HN familiar enough with executive-level strategy, connections and work practices to discuss whether that value is justified?
In honesty I believe that some executives are probably capable of using their personal networks to bring on-board significant expertise, industry influence, negotiating power and other talents (such as, frankly, the ability to dominate conversations and sway opinions, for better or worse - as long as it doesn't hurt the company) that are typically hard to quantify or certificate.
If the tech industry continues consolidating into a smaller number of more important companies then it seems understandable that those influence and network effects become more important in order to stay competitive.
I'm not sure if that's fair - those might not be the kind of skills that can necessarily be learned; I'd argue they're frequently side-effects of people's upbringing, social networks, and psychological profiles (including some dark/problematic personality types). But it explains the realpolitik of the situation without demonizing individual decision-makers for what may be rational choices in the environment.
> Let's assume good faith and that executive pay in general at Mozilla was not competitive.
The problem is that this is a very subjective claim. If you think of mozilla as belonging to the same category as tech giants or successful tech startups, and believe it needs to compete with them to attract talent then it's not unreasonable. If you think of firefox as a charity then it's completely insane.
Compensation for charity CEOs, even tech focussed ones (like the EFF, TOR, wikimedia, khan academy) are lower, usually much lower. A number of charities have managed to attract impressive CEOs despite not paying 'market' rates.
It's pure conjecture but I'd imagine that the compensation culture in this case started near the top of the company (given that it appears executive-centric) - perhaps based on conversations with potential hires, vendors, competitors, and so forth.
Given the nature of Firefox, I'd expect many of those third parties would have been anchored in the 'tech giant' world -- perhaps leading compensation policy astray.
You'll find me criticizing them a lot but in their defense: I would probably not have been able to renegotiate that Google deal earlier this year given how Google basically does whatever they want in the browser space for now, so it seems they do something.
That said: to me it comes off as a bit done deaf to raise salaries for top execs in a non profit while firing the people who does the work and also I cannot see how anything should be prioritized if the situation is critical except:
- the main revenue driver and simultaneously their biggest contribution to fulfilling their mission, Firefox.
- initiatives to add more reliable sources of income for the long run.
Deprioritizing Firefox seems crazy in such a situation.
(I know nothing about their actual plans but I could come up with is if they are cutting spending to save up money for an endowment fund, but I guess that is just wishful thinking.)
If it's unfair on your families to be making only a million dollars a year instead of two and a half, what does that say about the ~99% of America who makes less than a million dollars a year?
Also it's just a weird point. Is the point of CEO pay to keep their family in the highest order of lavishness? How is their financial irresponsibility anyone else's concern when it comes to discussing the adequate salary of the position?
> Firefox has a problem. It gets most of its revenue from Google. They need a different revenue stream but their ideas haven't worked.
It's not just that they get most of their revenue from Google -- it's that they're getting most of their revenue from a company that also runs their biggest competitor and has every incentive to push their own product over someone else's.
Apple and Mozilla both have uncomfortable dependencies on Google nowadays, so I wonder if one of them (if not both) are looking to buy DuckDuckGo.
Google may want to do with Mozilla the same thing Microsoft did with Apple during their antitrust case: keep it alive to keep the regulators off their back.
While I understand the frustration, it's unclear to me what the expected solution is for Mozilla. Pay the CEO less until the company does better? Ok but the CEO will presumably just find a higher paying job elsewhere. Then what? Find a cheaper CEO? How does that help fix the slipping market share for Firefox?
Find a CEO whose motivation is more "make the world a better place" than "make millions of dollars a year". $500k is a large enough salary to live well just about anywhere. After that it's just "victory points" in the game of careerism.
Mozilla's last three CEOs (Baker, Beard and Eich) all had worked at Mozilla before. Mozilla appears unable to recruit outside CEOs even with its current CEO compensation.
With her doubtful record of success, it is questionable that the CEO really could find a higher paying job elsewhere.
And Mozilla's poor track record suggests that if Mozilla insists on paying the same CEO salary, they might do well to find a different CEO to give it to.
I think the point is less that this CEO should take a pay cut — although she probably should — but more that the mediocrity + layoffs + exorbitant-CEO-salary situation here reeks of self-dealing.
Better align executive pay with business performance from the beginning. If the business is failing then parting company with the CEO is working as intended.
I agree, I dont think this CEO is special. His argument is flawed on that premise alone. I think they should pull an MS and promote the CIO or a lead engineer.
It would be immoral to to place figurative death on a living persons social status due to actual acts
But it’s moral to let people starve, die of preventable disease due to sitting on your ha day
Welcome to America’s emotional prison
Old people have convinced young people to pander to them until they’re the grave, they’re locking up the judiciary to force themselves on the future
And Americans sit here like coddled children
Isn’t that pretty much living in a sinking ship of a country?
No one here going to admit the top down political failures of the past aren’t able to handle modern reality?
There is no artificial shortage of code anymore. GitHub and GitLab are gutting that labor market. Who cares if they can’t make new code shapes? Business only cares that the machines keep sorting. Self aggrandizing nerds care about code shapes.
Can you even compare Mitchell Baker to Lisa Su in terms of achievement?
Su revived a company on the verge of bankruptcy. Since she was appointed CEO, AMD's stock has soared and they've made themselves a viable competitor against Intel. This has been a massive boon to the market.
It's worth noting that Su has a deep understanding of the underlying technology that the company works on (she's an electrical engineer), which was essential to her success at the company.
Su is an example of merit-based compensation. Baker is not.
overall comp is heavily biased towards stock performance. Given AMD's exceptional performance in recent years it's natural to expect her overall comp to also be quite good.
The reason CEOs are paid well is because they have an important and risky job. And if they bring success by their actions, they totally deserve their millions.
But if the company/organization is doing poorly, the CEO doesn't deserve the high pay. And having the pay reduced, or even not being paid at all for a time if it can help the company is one of the risks CEO should be able to take. It is not unfair for their families if they planned for it in advance instead of taking their high pay for granted. You can save a lot when you are being paid millions.
The Google money is what enabled them to let their core product wither and nearly die without any short-term consequences. They spent a pretty long time with it in that state while pursuing things like a phone OS. Without the Google money they would have had more incentive to keep Firefox competitive.
5% of a few billion users is not nothing. Mostly the decline of Mozilla has little to do with the browser functionality or marketing but with the fact that there are several competing browsers out there that have caught up. E.g. MS ditched IE in favor of Edge. Apple has continued investing in Safari which they also force the usage of exclusively on IOS. And of course Google has similar control point in the form of Chrome. I am a happy Firefox user BTW. But I can see lack of incentive for other people to switch. Any of those browsers gets the job done for any user.
IMHO, 5% is actually fine. That's a robust user base of a few tens to hundreds of million users. Nothing to sneeze at and a good basis for long term existence of the project.
Where Mozilla went the wrong direction is with their commercial activities. Their core problem is that their product is a commodity. It's just not going to bring in a lot of revenue. Apple and Google use their respective browser as a control point for the app store and ads. It's an expense worth making because they both exploit the large number of users using their browsers via other channels. Most of what Google does is motivated by this. Likewise, Apple is selling hardware, apps, and subscriptions.
Mozilla does not have a similarly viable way of generating revenue from their user base. It's an OSS product that users install and use for free. Their core value is actually protecting users against that kind of thing which is a noble thing to do but not a business plan.
That's why Mozilla was initially styled as a foundation. The commercial branch came later and its the commercial branch that is failing; not the foundation. They have no money maker of note other than their search traffic deals. Everything else, including (I'll just call this right now), their recent VPN offering is never going to come close to bankrolling their operation. This follows a long line of failed investments in a mobile strategy that never panned out, various "experiments' that never got off the ground, misc services that they launched and that people promptly forgot about, etc. None of it engaged more than a fraction of their user base. None of it wowed anyone. None of it was more than a me too effort of replicating things that already existed and already were commodities. Mozilla as an investment vehicle for new products only loosely connected to Firefox has failed.
The way out is back to basics. Pull the plug on the Mozilla corporation as soon as convenient for investors and setup the foundation for success and untangle it from the VCs. It will need donations, the search engine revenue looks good as well and ought to be allocated 100% to keeping the browser going. There should be enough to keep an engineering team going. It doesn't need a marketing department, offices in London, Paris, San Francisco, Mountain View, etc. Hell, the rent for that alone could keep a development team going for a very long time. Much bigger things have been built with far less. That shit only ever made sense when Mozilla was styling itself as an incubation vehicle for turning VC money into products. Now that that has definitely failed, time to walk away from that.
And then there's the Rust part of the company. IMHO that's a valid asset where Mozilla has a lot of influence in a rapidly growing community. There's an opportunity there to grow some healthy business around that supporting the many companies looking to leverage that. So far, they run it like a charity. That's a mistake. Aside from Firefox, that's actually the single most valuable IP they ever created. And like Firefox, it lacks a plan for revenue. Rust almost happened by accident. But MS and Apple are now looking to use it and it seems people are doing Rust things in the Linux kernel as well.
I agree with most of this, however I think graphic design and some marketing is still very important. In fact, now more than ever they need that. Engineering should still be the primary focus, though.
> Their core problem is that their product is a commodity.
Even worse, the cheapest comparable alternatives are free. At least commodities can be sold at the market price if you can't differentiate yours enough.
Isn't the CEO pay here a classic example of principal-agent problem?
In a commercial company, there would be activist investors pushing to cut manager's pay and change management. But I'm not familiar with this type of NGOs so well; who is supposed play the role of principal here? And are they not playing it properly?
The for-profit entity (Mozilla Corporation) is wholly owned by the non-profit entity (Mozilla Foundation) and Mitchell Baker leads both organizations. That is a conflict of interest. She should resign from one entity, but there is a compelling argument that she is a failure at leading both organizations.
FYI -- The foundation owns the IP, while the corporation manages software engineering and the Google search deal.
In an NGO they need to secure funding, too much bloat (including director-level pay) could make fundraising more difficult.
...I guess if you get your money from a disinterested Google rather than fundraising there really isn't anyone to push back against inefficiency/poor performance.
Really the board should have been pushing back/course correcting, but sadly even in private companies boards are usually weak af (simply doing the ceos bidding).
> Isn't that pretty much admitting that they're on a sinking ship?
Yes.
They are admitting they are solely reliant on Google's money. Given that Google Chrome is a direct competitor to Firefox and has gained more market share, Google can justify to either reduce spend or stop paying for being the default search engine in Firefox due to its shrinking market share and instead pay more for Apple Safari as the default in iOS, macOS, etc instead.
Mozilla and Firefox will be another geek's relic in this decade if it doesn't find another revenue source apart from relying on Google - A direct competitor in all areas.
If you look at the history of Mozilla's revenue, this conspiracy is ridiculous. Why would Yahoo compete over the Firefox contract if they serve as a hedge against a lawsuit?
Why would you (Google) not prefer for someone else (yahoo!) to pay for something that benefits you? That Yahoo! leadership didn't renew the contract should tell you how much being a default search engine is actually worth. Why would you (actual you) believe that Google would provide nearly all of a "competitor's" revenue? that somehow makes more sense? The pontificating about privacy Mozilla does is total nonsense. They serve their users up to Google's surveillance enterprise without hesitation. They're a puppet to fool gullible hipsters with fashionable social statements.
Yahoo was bought out during the term of the contact. And I don't know the details, but I believe Google pays Apple for the same thing, paying Mozilla isn't surprising.
I was looking for the source of this quote and it's from an interview in June 2020:
"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."
I wish Mozilla created a fundation so people can give to Firefox specifically, as opposed to Mozilla, the same way they did with Thunderbird. I for sure won't be giving to Mozilla until they change to reasonable leadership with reasonable compensation.
I'm not a native english speaker, and I'm curious. Mozilla's CEO is a woman. Why are you referring to her as they? I know about the gender pronouns debacle... But isn't it OK to call her a woman?
I'm using Edge since it saves on battery life, maybe I should just stop with Firefox for a while till they get a new CEO and get their crap together. I never stopped using Firefox, I wasn't somebody who started using it again after Quantum, I just never liked Chrome much, but only ever used it for development purposes.
It is strange that corporations like Mozilla give me some communism flashbacks. In the communist times of Romania, the earnings were privatized (meaning that the party took all the profits and stored them abroad in fiscal paradises) while the losses were socialized and the party imposed austerity measures on the proletariat[1] because of their management failures. I draw a parallel between what happens with the raise of their executives salaries and the layoffs that affected the engineering department. Nassim Taleb wrote a good article about Corporate Socialism[2].
Let's say I'm hired as a coach of a team that's second best in the world (Being the second used browser in the world is NOT a rough hand, other browsers are clawing for >1% for ever and are not coming close). I'm not saying it's easy at all but after 5 years I manage to do NOTHING to stop the bleeding, lose 250 highly skilled people and RAISE MY OWN SALARY 5x...
I'm pretty sure people would throw rocks at me on the street at that point. The cult of the CEO needs to die.
Imagine saying, "well, I know he gunned 20 kids in a school down, but he had such a bad day, he's just couldn't take it." Sure it's probably true, but it's definitely not right.
Meh. Have a floor of 3x average employee and let the pay be proportional to performance. There are natural limits to growth anyway.
HN crowd is a sucker when it comes to Mozilla. These bleeding hearts don’t bleed for furloughed and fired Mozilla drones. They only care about their political agenda not business or technological value.
Does there exist a "market" for CEOs of failing browser companies? I'm not aware of it. Her position would roughly map to that of a junior VP in Google or Microsoft nomenclature. I strongly doubt those people make anywhere near $2.4M/yr.
How did you come up with that comparison? Running a standalone company from the top is very different than the responsibilities of a junior VP in a trillion-dollar organization.
And, not to mention, a VP of engineering at Google probably does make something like that amount of money (possibly more). Directors make ~800k-1m, and VP is two levels higher.
I'm two fences on Firefox doing "too many unrelated things" as the article suggests.
Firefox OS has been pretty much unsuccessful, but it sort of made sense? It started to be made when Firefox was still on top on desktop, but mobile started eating its lunch; and it was clear that Firefox need to do something about it, or the future will be all Chrome and Safari, on the two locked-down platforms.
Which eventually happened, of course, and Firefox share is neglible nowadays on mobile.
The identity management with Persona or what was the name also made sense. People at that time started using Google and Facebook for unified identity, and it made sense to make a decentralized identity.
None of these project ultimately worked, but they made sense?
What never made sense to me was Pocket or Send, or even the teleconferencing they had, but it seems that Firefox doubles down on Pocket now.
We can’t even get developers to use FF, the times I read about it here (and maybe it is a vocal minority idk) that a developer doesn’t like a certain feature. Or they are missing feature X from chrome.
I think it would be a valid strategy if you do go after developers and sysadmins. So pour resources in getting parity where devs think they would switch.
In general whenever I help installing software for someone, I install FF, and I think I have installed in at least a couple dozen computers now.
Aka do a Blender. Blender has gained momentum by getting things right, not adding features nobody wants, or Blender sidegigs.
There is also the problem of addon monetization, Chrome has a whole ecosystem of people earning revenue from add ons. That’s a invested network you have to deal with at some point.
> Aka do a Blender. Blender has gained momentum by getting things right, not adding features nobody wants, or Blender sidegigs.
There is a parsimoniousness about Blender that is really quite incredible. I have rarely used an app that has so successfully resisted feature-creep and bloat. E.g. unlike almost all other 3D apps, it has no radial array tool or feature. Why not? Because you can cook your own using a simple linear array.
Screw modifier is similar, but not the best route for a radial array.
I not knocking blender. I love its austere design philosophy. The add-ons are a case in point. Some very important functionality is not loaded by default (e.g. loop tools and copy attributes). But the devs seem to be saying, 'if we can live without something in the default load, then we should'. Huge difference to bloatware like 3DS Max.
That's a side effect of not listening to developers.
---
Dramatization:
Web Developer: I need non-standard feature that works in IE and Chrome
Firefox: But that's non-standard, you'll be able to use standard alternative in the future
Web Developer: When?
Firefox: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ it's still in draft
Web Developer: But I need to finish my project this quarter
Firefox: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Web Developer: -webkit-something: 1
* 3 years later *
Firefox: The web is full of -webkit-something and everyone thinks Firefox is broken because we support the standard something but not -webkit-something
Firefox: Please remove the -webkit- prefix
Web Developer: I don't support that project anymore
Firefox: But you only need to remove the -webkit- prefix
Web Developer: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
* 1 year later *
Firefox: We will support -wekit-something because nobody fixes their websites for Firefox even when they only need to remove the -webkit- prefix
Web Developer: So you're telling me that we can get away with not supporting Firefox and you'll eventually follow suit?
Firefox: That's not what I meant
Web Developer: -webkit-something-something: 1
---
To be honest I think that Firefox has already crossed the point of no return, in the past Firefox used to have a share of about 30% of the market and supporting Firefox was justified even if that meant writing twice the lines of code, but nowadays the share is less than 3%. Firefox doesn't have enough resources to compete against Chrome with features, and people doesn't care enough about security to justify a broken web for the sake of security.
I don't know whether it's a good idea or not, but rather than pitching Firefox for the mainstream web, I would push Firefox to become the de-facto browser for security sensitive scenarios (ex. online shopping, online banking, taxes, etc.). Supporting a subset of the web makes more sense in a resource-constrained scenario especially because the Servo experiment and the Rust project exist to tackle the security issue.
On the contrary I kinda see the point in the pocket and send to bridge the gap between desktop and mobile for the users that own both.
But the small brainless degradations of the UI in Firefox make me worry about its future.
For example it’s not possible to permanently add exclusions to the privacy shield. Because of it the sites are often broken.
And this is a feature that is directly user facing on the main screen!
Formerly known as "Read It Later", it's a reading list service. You save pages for later reference. There's subscriptions to unlock features.
I loved RIL but Pocket is but a shadow of what it once was.
Similar to Evernote web clips, or Instapaper. I now use OneNote instead with the webclipper plugin, mostly because it puts the clips in a place where I can also add my own notes.
I switched to Joplin. It's completely seamless once I authenticate with the service I sync with and toggle the web clipper support in the desktop app. You can even clip those pages where the site blocks the Evernote and OneNote crawler since it all happens in your browser and on the local clip server.
Best of all, it's all in Markdown. There's a beta rich text editor, but the Markdown editor has a preview and a little button bar for common stuff like lists and formatting.
Firefox OS never made sense unless Mozilla was prepared to pay the backroom bribes and incentives to get it preinstalled on hundreds of millions of phones. And they weren't.
Maybe maybe not. But it's also good to keep in mind who else failed in that space from many different angles. MS, Nokia, Blackberry, etc... If MS with infinite cash on hand could not get into that market then it is likely that chances of success were always very low. And it still might have been the right thing to try despite the chance being low.
You are right that it was a very difficult endeavor.
I think the main bottleneck is not the installation by the vendors, but the apps available.
I believe, what is missing is an abstraction layer between the apps and the OS. If it was possible to create apps for Android and Apple in a generic way and, it was easy to add a third OS, so all the apps could be made available to the new system, a new OS would be not so limited. I know, I know, that is itself a very difficult endeavor.
correct me but those features are denied by apple and mozilla for very good reasons (privacy and security) besides beeing anything but 'basic' (midi anyone?)
PWA's do work, but they are hard to install (not available in the appstore, the user has to go through a non-obvious sequence of steps they won't discover unless they Google it). They are slow (because safari refuses to implement caching of compiled JavaScript or webassembly). They can't store persistent data, so the user experience is terrible (yay - who wants a notekeeping app that deletes all your notes every 30 days?). The data doesn't sync to iCloud. It doesn't integrate with the rest of the OS (no way to share a picture to a PWA for example). The Safari browser engine they must run in is ~3 years behind desktop and Android browsers with supporting web standards. There is no way to do background stuff like playing music, using the GPS for directions, etc.
If you're scared of something, sometimes it's best to invent it and then not invest in it than to let someone else invent it and do a decent job of it.
Classic example: Oil companies "investing" in clean tech in the 90's, sucking up government grants and public attention and never really getting anywhere probably slowed down the switch to renewables by 10+ years.
> And it still might have been the right thing to try despite the chance being low.
This is exactly my take on it.
I think timing was a big part of it, too. They were too late to get a foothold on the current market, but too early to take advantage of the more open platforms coming out nowadays like the PinePhone.
While back Twitter recommended me a tweet from one of Firefox female engineers saying that she was responsible for pocket and updating pocket. many people complain that pocket sucked she claimed them all being misogynists so there's clearly cultural issues at Mozilla.
That's a really big leap you're making there, going from a context free anecdote about someone who got wound up on Twitter to that. And she was claiming that everyone complaining about Pocket was misogynistic? I'm not convinced that's completely true
The basic idea of Firefox OS was actually great, they just didn't quite get the market right. Kai OS is a very successful fork which runs on feature phones.
Kai OS is fundamentally irrelevant though, in the great scheme of things. Mozilla can do billions of irrelevant but self-sustainable projects; that’s not the point. The point of Mozilla is to move the needle in the web ecosystem at large.
It was clear from the start that Mozilla did not have enough to move the needle in the mobile market all by itself. FFOS was a massive waste of time, effort, and money, that even resulted in a loss of prestige for the brand. It sucked the air out of more relevant priorities, diverted (and eventually often lost) their best talent, and wasted time and focus at a critical juncture.
I have an LG WebOS television and it runs extremely smoothly. VS Code is an electron app and nobody complains about its performance.
Ultimately webOS didn't lose because it was web tech. It lost because Android and iOS already captured the market. Windows Phone was a .NET runtime with similar performance to Java, but it failed to capture the market even with billions in Microsoft subsidies.
> I have an LG WebOS television and it runs extremely smoothly.
To counter that anecdote, I have an LG WebOS television and it is constantly freezing, I frequently have to power cycle it just to launch Netflix, it automatically updates itself without my consent, and each update seems to make it slower, or break something. Simply navigating the menu is a pain because of how unresponsive and slow it is, and setting it up required me to agree to a bunch of privacy policies.
To be fair, I blame LG for that more than WebOS. I don't really know anything about WebOS and how it relates to web tech, but I do remember using it many years ago on an HP TouchPad tablet. That was a great tablet experience at the time; way better than anything Android had to offer (except for the larger catalog of apps)
WebOS is smooth but it’s also half-dead. Nobody uses it except LG, and I wonder how long even them will bother with it (I mean, to get an app in their marketplace you have to basically send in a slide deck with all sorts of bureaucracy, it looks like something a low-rent manager would come up with, they cannot be serious about long-term success). It effectively recommends not to use its local APIs, but rather consider the device as a dumb kiosk.
Half-dead is a huge stretch, it's one of the best and most popular TV OS's. It might be hard to develop for, but it has all the apps and features 99% of people want with an amazing cursor concept.
It’s actually not hard to develop for, in my experience. What is hard is having to deal with the commercial silliness - Developer Mode disappearing after a few days? A manual submission process for a very mediocre store? A “recommended” payment gateway? I’ve been holding out on investing serious time on it because I have PTSD from Nokia/Maemo and the parallels with the current webos are (sadly) stark.
People don't complain about VSCode because microsoft tried hard with optimizing performance. But see any discussion about Atom, its "predecessor", or Slack (at least the older version, that was really memory hungry).
Out of all the Smart TVs I've tried (Samsung, Sony, LG), webOS is probably the best in user experience. Naturally, more expensive TVs with better processors run smoother, but my budget UHD TV from LG with webOS 3.0 ran pretty great.
Firefox OS kind of make sense, yet could they implemented ecosystem?
* There are Firefox browser users shocked by spyware addons, it is a norm on mobile. There are no paid Firefox addons. This does not work in "pay or product" reality. Open source and freeware is a small (and awesome) niche.
* There is a Mozilla stance against DRM. There is a lot of paid books, movies, music on Google Play.
* DOM is slow. Javascript has good parts. Google decided in favor of Android apps, not Chrome apps. Also Google Fuchsia.
* Bluetooth, Contacts, NFC, SMS, Wifi [1] access can be asked from OS.
Firefox was not default Windows browser, yet it succeeded. The reason I've never tried Firefox on Android is the loss of Firefox reputation on desktop. Memory bloat, falling behind Developer Tools, constant UI changes, not so snappy UI. Firefox was slow on desktop how could one expect it to perform well on mobile?
The problem seems to me, that Mozilla does not have a platform of users to market to, whereas all their competitors do. It's really the marketing part where Firefox is falling short and I am not sure they can ever do much better on that front.
Regarding Send/Teleconferencing, I think that made sense to. In theory you don't need anything as complicated as Skype or Teams or Zoom and lots of people, me including, use VOIP a lot. It would have been nice to have a simple click to call on the browser itself. Same goes for sending files with a click. Utilities that lots of people use and would give the browser a boost. Unfortunately I think these products failed because the sort of person who needs them is the sort of person who does not like learning new things so even if their current method is 8 steps and takes addition software and is not free, they will keep with what is currently working for them.
Again this might also be Mozilla's marketing falling short.
As someone who likes sites like reddit for the content sharing but hates the time sink the comments section becomes I love Pocket for delivering me highish quality articles and news that I don't have to worry about gettin sucked into some flame war over.
I agree FF OS & Persona were tackling the right problems at the time.
I'm not sure about the solutions they proposed, especially for Persona.
Maybe to tamed.
Shit like this pisses me off. I care for Firefox and the team behind it but how do you get rid of these vampires sucking the company dry? You've got executive pay going up, usage going down. Pivotal leaders being ousted, good workers being released, good features being removed and shit features being added. It's like managers and executives somehow dig their bureaucratic teeth into a successful company/project and then suck it dry while proclaiming "It's ok, everything will be alright. Here, have some AVX-512 or some MEGA OMNIBAR." As if this shit actually matters.
Why is there no system for calling them out on this, swiftly kicking them out and staunching the bleeding?
The tale is as old as time, something starts out as open source, gets popular, gets bought and is drained by the "corporate vampires" you're alluding to, either through acquisition or other means.
The only silver lining here compared to any other type of software, is that legally, this software can never be anything but open source -- so we are all free to fork and attempt to do a better job, and make a valiant try in not repeating history.
The desire to see consistent behavior as incompetence is a shield. Firefox was intentionally destroyed, and gets all of its revenue from the company who replaced it.
It's like Nokia all over again; the plurality of people who are watching this failure predict every step of it, but are denigrated as antisocial, selfish, mentally-ill trolls. As they leave, the ones who remain are attacked more, because now they're outnumbered in every conversation. Then the company fails.
Of course, in this case firefox will never disappear, but stumble along like a zombie, forever, because google needs it for antitrust purposes. Mozilla will do anything but work on its browser, at high salaries, rife with self-dealing and cush jobs handed out to the most connected, while claiming the languishing firefox as its emotional core and charitable mission. The work done on firefox will consist of tests for things that chrome is thinking of doing, or the non-disableable incorporation of acquired companies or partners into its functionality.
There's no system for calling them out on this other than just calling them out on this. They don't have any duty to us.
Lots of people on this thread are complaining about Mozilla doing too many "unrelated side projects".
Honestly as a dev that sounds to me like a culture where engineers are too able to run free. If anything.
But of course swiftly kicking people out to staunch the bleeding - as happened recently - can cause a lot of pain and backlash too. New executives usually cause strategy/org thrash which sucks for everyone at the bottom.
Just saying these things are hard. Executives have to make decisions that suck, doesn't mean they're vampires. May be very painful for them too.
This is not a case of gallivanting engineers running free.
All of the moonshot projects are done at the direction of executive leadership in the hopes to open new profit streams.
In fact some of the more technically promising projects (like Servo) had their whole entire team laid off recently to "refocus" on more of these executive-sourced profit grab moonshots
Do you see any realistic chance of this happening? Generally if a company is captured by a parasitic leadership sucking it dry, that's it, right? Is there anyone on the board whose interests are more aligned with keeping Mozilla alive (probably hard to do at this point) than feasting on it whilst there is still something left to feast on? Presumably you'd need a few such people.
It is a problem that she is both on the board and CEO, which effectively makes her impossible to hold to account unless the board members that want her out would resign if she does not want to make way. That would be a major statement and would put the remaining board members on notice.
The board typically does not get compensated the way the CEO does so they are usually not in a position to 'suck it dry', on top of that they have some responsibilities and if they don't act in the best interest of the company they might be found to be personally liable depending on the jurisdiction and the details regarding their responsibilities.
I should study that to see if there is any way to solve it but frankly, even though FireFox has been my daily driver since about forever I don't see a happy ending here.
> It is a problem that she is both on the board and CEO, which effectively makes her impossible to hold to account
Is this really a problem? The CEO is often a director, and even as chairwoman I doubt anything in the bylaws prevents the board at large from removing her if they wanted to.
Instead, it seems like the board itself is the issue, since they allowed Mozilla to stray so far from its core mission.
Is that common in the US? Because here in Sweden it is regarded as bad practice for medium sized companies and up. The CEO is almost never part of the board here except for in tiny companies.
I served on the board of the Apache Software Foundation for a year and everything about the experience convinced me that it is desirable for the board to be completely separate from the corporate officers.
In fact, I have seen this very debate play out in real life. We appointed a new President of the ASF during my term. That person had been a Director, but when they became President they stepped down from the Board.
For a non-profit charity that relies on volunteers, perfect separation is not always feasible, and especially in the early years when the ASF was smaller the President was often a Board member. But although I can't speak for anybody but myself, I believe that the ASF is likely to continue with an informal tradition of separating Board from Officers for the indefinite future.
A similar cultural change ought to be possible at Mozilla — and perhaps elsewhere.
Yes, having one or more executive directors is standard operating procedure for public companies in the US. Tim Cook, Satya Nadella, Sundar Pichai, et al sit on their respective boards.
Indian here. Extremely common for the CEO to be part of the board. In fact the CEO equivalent "Executive head of company" designation in India before globalization made use of CEO fashionable was 'Managing Director'.
Yeah I remember that. While growing up in 90's and even early 2000's, I always heard praises of someone reaching post of MD. The term CEO became common later.
There are still plenty of MDs in the world, but these days it's mostly used in finance and consulting to represent the first layer of leadership below the c-suite.
It can vary, though; e.g. Kevin Sneader is the de facto CEO of McKinsey, but his official title is Global Managing Partner and his predecessor used Managing Director.
Definitely the normal thing in the UK for companies of all sizes for the CEO to be an executive director and therefore to sit on the board of directors.
It's so common here that I never even considered the possibility of having a CEO who wasn't also a member of the board. It's pretty common for them to also be chairman of the board. Especially for founder CEOs.
This one went nearly 3 years before it had a problem, but as soon as one key started acting up the rest of the row quickly followed. I'll trade up for the latest model (with the touch bar, which I actually like, and physical escape key) the next time I can afford to be unproductive for a couple days.
They're all identical keyboards -- AFAIK, literally -- so if you like it on one (or don't like it on one!), it'll apply to the rest. I have a 2020 MacBook Air and think it's one of the best laptop keyboards I've used in a long time. (And it makes me really hate going back to the butterfly keyboard on my work laptop, even though I found it okay to type on previously. I actually never had any dead keys on it, or on a previous work laptop with butterfly keys, or on a personal MBP 13" that the Air replaced.)
Well, concerning the sucking dry: maybe I'm overly cynical but I wonder if being on the mozilla board is not a nice sinecure (so high effective hourly wage, even if the yearly compensation is not egregious) with a massive CV boost: none of the people I can see on the board of either the corp or the foundation, with the exception of Brian Behlendorf (and I had to look him up) seem to have much name recognition and being on the board of Mozilla might well be the most high profile thing they'll ever do.
Given that, as you seem to agree, Mozilla is probably doomed now no matter what, why would they deprive themselves of these benefits (and possible future similar gigs!) sooner rather than later? It seems extremely unlikely to me the mismanagement is rising to the level of personal liability.
> It seems extremely unlikely to me the mismanagement is rising to the level of personal liability.
Agreed. But the CEOs statement here is very peculiar and might actually rise to that level, the board not taking action in turn might just make them culpable.
It is a very dumb statement, especially for a lawyer, to make.
You mean the "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"? It's pretty funny, especially the word "competitive"? I assume the bit you could see landing her in hot water are the three words "and their families"?
Yes, because if and when Mozilla goes belly up and the CEO has been found to enrich herself with this as her motivation for continuing to raid the till when it was clear that Mozilla was in trouble then you don't want to have stuff like that on the record.
The Martha Stewart case revolved around a similar minor (for her) issue, $45K loss avoided but it landed her in jail. Rich people make stupid mistakes too, whether this is one of those remains to be seen (I think it will pass) even so, it isn't smart when your company is on a multi-year downslide.
Yes, if not for that she would have likely walked. Even so, it further illustrates that minor tricks can have a big effect in the right context. I'm pretty sure that Stewart didn't think about the possible consequences when she did that. Must be weird to sit that high and fall so low.
One of the best and hardest things to do for anything with a board of directors is to establish that EVERY BOARD MEETING starts with a vote on one simple question: "Shall the CEO/Executive Director be retained?" Every company, not for profit or even tiny club that makes this the big question performs it's mission well. Those that don't, well, you get a lot more politics.
I love that idea, it formalizes the board taking responsibility for the continued performance of the CEO, and it may also warn a CEO that the board that hired them is about to flip before it is too late.
Accountability is underrated, and I've been in more than one meeting where there was a surprise no vote from a couple of board members. The result was that problems got fixed quickly.
Imagine if, every quarter, a committee voted on whether you keep your job.
Does this make you more or less willing to take risks? More or less focused? Does this decrease or increase the amount of attention you give to "optics" and politics?
This doesn't bother me in the least. A CEO's boss is the board of directors, period. Every board meeting is a review on the performance of the organization, and therefore the CEO. Most employees do not roll up to a committee, and their review is usually with a supervisor. The board meeting is no different.
It's not just the leadership at Firefox. FF has been hijacked by a bunch of people who have no interest in the browser and sucked it dry while it went down. Sad for the people at Mozilla who cared about the browser and wrote the code.
As an FF user I hope Mozilla does a turn around, gets back its engineering culture and focuses on delivering the best - and most secure and private - browser in the market.
If you have a link or other details I’m interested in who you’re referring to that hijacked/influenced development. I’ve never heard that and am really curious. I too really hope they can turn it around but sadly have been less and less hopeful.
Possibly taking one of the best parts of Firefox, the addons, and replacing it with a system that doesn't bother to support many of the most popular addons.
Slavishly copying Google's plans to nerf the addon interface isn't "the right thing". Thankfully, Google has gone too far by crippling ad blockers and Firefox is unlikely to fall on that sword.
While I definitely agree with changing leadership. I dont think she can be described as parasitic leadership.
She is incompetent, but I dont think she has the intention to drive Mozilla to the ground. After all she co-founded the Mozilla Project, and was the Chairwoman for a long time, long before she was named the CEO.
Why did they not find someone else to be CEO is beyond me though.
I suspect she's been in there for a very long time, is tired, and just want to cash out. She sees her friends working for the likes of Google who made 50+ millions during certain years and see her small 2.5M as nothing.
She's a lawyer. She got the Mozilla deal out of Netscape and AOL. That's the highlight of her career and what she's good at too - that and public speaking. For what it's worth she even recognized this in the past and stepped down as CEO before - but stayed as Chairwoman of course and kept getting the salary.
I really don't really see how her actions can be interpreted in any other light. If she were just incompetent, she would not so blatantly enrich herself all the while laying off hundreds of staff, many undoubtedly more deserving. Did you read their revolting PR statement?
Remember Stephen Elop, former CEO of Nokia? He did an awesome job in reducing Nokia's marketshare (and hence, its market capital) to make the company ready to be acquired by his mother company, Microsoft, at a very low price (cheaper than just one app—WhatsApp which was sold to Facebook).
Or remember Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer? She also did a great job at making the company ready to be sold out to Verizon at low price.
These CEOs know what they're doing. They take care of their personal interests and steal companies for the tech giants.
While I am absolutely pissed ( to say the least ) that Nokia was sold to Microsoft and Yahoo couldn't turn its ship around. I dont think both CEO were doing in their own interest or another companies interest.
Nokia refused to use Android. ( Which was what really killed Nokia ) That was only two possible outcome, either go full force with Symbian or partner with Microsoft. I mean there are so many wrong with Nokia even before Elop joined nothing much could have been done. It turns out the penalty for completely dismissing iPhone and Smartphone was death for their phone division. ( Currently the Nokia Smartphone are manufactured by a JV formed by former Nokia employees and Foxconn, with the name licensed from Nokia )
Elop did however completely neglect the importance of Carrier / Network Infrastructure segment, although arguably Ericsson wasn't competing much and Huawei didn't show up on their radar. ( Yet )
Marissa was trying very hard to recreate Google within Yahoo. She was absolutely executing it. But it is one of those example where I put the argument against execution eats strategy for breakfast.
It is not one OR the other. You need both. The equation times both together. When you have a strategy which trends towards zero or even negative, it doesn't matter how well you execute it.
In the end she failed. The strategy was wrong from the start. I actually thought the other CEO candidate's vision of turning Yahoo in to an Online Media Companies suits Yahoo better. But Marissa got the job, and the rest is history.
As someone who was at Nokia when Elop became CEO and had some (very limited) view into the goings on, as the kids say: "yes, this, +1".
Circa 2010, Symbian was clearly uncompetitive and MeeGo was far behind schedule. There was a fairly ambitious plan to build a new UI framework in Qt that ran on both Symbian and MeeGo -- the Nokia N9 used this with Harmattan, which internally I don't think we ever referred to as MeeGo, IIRC! -- but I'm pretty sure when Elop arrived he took stock of things and thought, "My God, this MeeGo thing is Nokia's version of Apple's Copland project," and it's really hard to say he was wrong.
Looking back, it's really easy to say that he was wrong not to choose Android, but it was seriously considered. The problem was that Nokia insisted on two mutually exclusive conditions: they wanted to use a lot of Nokia-based services so the new devices still "felt Nokia," and they wanted to fully partner with Google and market the devices as Android. And Google wouldn't do it. If you want to call your device "Android (R)" then you use Google services; if you want to use your own, you have to do what Amazon did with the Fire devices. Google wouldn't make an exception for Nokia, but Microsoft -- who by that point had, at least internally, realized Windows Phone was seriously floundering -- would. And so they went with Microsoft.
Absolutely this. I was a Nokia/Symbian fan back when it actually was the industry best. The real problem was that iPhone and Android came around and started executing like 100x faster than Symbian ever did. Nokia was too used to working with software on a Symbian timeline, and it took them too long to see that their only options were to learn to execute on Symbian improvements at that speed (probably not practical), give up Symbian and adopt Android (becoming essentially a vassal of Google), or get buried.
They dawdled and ignored the problem for too long, and were left with selling to Microsoft and adopting their mobile OS as the only semi-plausible way to maintain a strong market position. Both Nokia and Microsoft's efforts ended up being too little, too late.
Nokia was pathological before Elop arrived, but it was still huge, and a huge name. There was more than enough time and money to turn it around. Instead he released his "burning platforms" memo that made everything worse.
From the outset it looked (from the outside) exactly like his goal was as described - torpedo the company and get it bought by Microsoft, returning to the mothership in the process.
It's easy to say this stuff looking in the rearview mirror. Nokia and BlackBerry saw their platforms as their moat that enabled the company. It wasn't obvious that Apple and Google would eat up the market.
Yahoo was similar in a way -- they built a whole array of services around identity way before Google did. Ultimately it didn't work out well for the company.
Firefox and co are open source projects. Couldn't you just create a new company, "Next-Mozilla" or so, and fork off the projects, install a new CEO, take over the developers? You would have to use a new branding, i.e. they cannot reuse the trademark, and they have to make sure that enough people (developers and users) will switch over. But with such bad press, this might not be too hard, if there is one focused attempt for this. Financing is another issue initially, but at some point they would get a similar Google deal. And otherwise, financing like Wikimedia or Internet Archive (mostly donations, right?).
How will you pay for this? Without critical mass you are not going anywhere. FireFox had critical mass, and lost. You won't be able to recover that position without some extremely deep pockets even if you start off from what is there today.
I am not convinced that even if Mozilla/FF got a competent CEO tomorrow and started executing 'just so' that they would be able to recover from their slide, a newcomer would have it harder.
The browser market is so much different now though.
Firefox was originally competing against the pile of steaming garbage that was IE6.
Now they are competing against Chrome which is actually a good browser, and Chrome also has the advantage of having google behind it which can leverage their search/ad monopoly to push Chrome.
The way I’ve heard the story is that by the time of firefox, IE6 was still a really good browser, it had just stayed stagnant for a little too long, and bundled got with Microsoft’s monopolistic behavior.
I think there are more parallels between late IE6 and present day Chrome then you give credit for.
maybe my memory is fuzzy, but I don't have a single fond memory of IE6. I remember it being a revelation how much better firefox was when I first switched back in the day.
Pretty much. But they had not ridden Netscape that far down to the bottom just yet. Don't forget that the roots of Mozilla were seeded in 1998, the Mozilla foundation came 6 years later. Netscape was still hugely popular and FireFox took that popularity and ran with it.
To do this today, with a much more complex product would be no mean feat, back then a browser was a much simpler piece of software than it is today.
Steve Jobs was able to do that with Apple. There is no reason to believe that is not possible with Mozilla. Especially taking into consideration that Mozilla doesn't have to be profitable as a company. Being sustainable would be enough.
Steve Jobs didn't do it alone, there was huge trend transforming all of the music industry, with piarted MP3's over P2P networks, and he rode it, and did so exceptionally well.
What trend should Firefox ride ? And how will it keep that project a secret for long enough, Given that it's all open-sourced ?
Oh tons of ways. The fact that the default search engine is Google is the obvious one, but GSuite is huge for Google - they're competing directly with Dropbox, O365, etc. and GSuite heavily integrates with Chrome.
ChromeOS of course puts them in the OS market, and it's doing very well for a niche operating system - my entire company runs on ChromeOS in fact.
There is a possibility, doesn't matter how low, I like to think about: Group of people leaving Mozilla, forking the Firefox and creating another non-profit.
If played smart Mozilla could be another. I have some ideas about how this could be achieved but Mozilla in its present day configuration would never be able to make any of them work so I'm curious to see if and how they will get out of their current predicament.
So far what I am seeing and hearing does not make me very hopeful.
FF will be my daily driver until they stop updating it, where FF does not work I very reluctantly use Chrome. I suspect that if and when FF dies Chrome will no longer be available for Linux because the main reason for offering it (as an alternative to FF) will be gone.
> I suspect that if and when FF dies Chrome will no longer be available for Linux because the main reason for offering it (as an alternative to FF) will be gone.
There is a bigger reason. Literally every software engineer at Google/Alphabet uses Linux, other than a very few exceptions (likely only a fraction of a percent).
Even if your laptop is a Mac or Windows machine, your source code access is exclusively on your Linux box in the office.
Google is a Linux shop. Regardless of their reputation for dropping products, Chrome on Linux isn't going away any time soon, for the simple reason that they need it internally.
What makes you think Google will drop linux support? As far as I can tell it's in their interest to keep a (2nd class) linux version around: linux is no competitive threat to anything they do, a large fraction of their staff use linux machines, and leaving linux without any viable browser (killing it dead as a desktop and development platform) would concentrate a lot of money, smarts and political power into seeking alternatives that could pose a serious threat to Google.
Precedent. Companies tend to spend effort to keep others at bay but as soon as they are no longer a threat they move their effort elsewhere. As long as FF has a viable territory Chrome will be there to compete with it.
Since ChromeOS itself is just a stripped down flavor of Linux, they can hardly just drop Linux support. Unless they also give up on ChromeOS, which is unlikely but not impossible for Google.
It would be trivial to stop supporting the linux version publicly while still allowing the ChromeOS one, it's not going to compile for regular linux if Google does not continue to put effort into that.
ChromeOS graphics stack is not based on Wayland or X11, so if Google decided to ditch Linux and only support ChromeOS, you would have to maintain the Linux graphics port. That may or may not be a one person effort.
That's reassuring to know. I don't think I would want to give up linux as my daily driver OS and if there were no current browser for it that would be the end.
>FF will be my daily driver until they stop updating it, where FF does not work I very reluctantly use Chrome. I suspect that if and when FF dies Chrome will no longer be available for Linux because the main reason for offering it (as an alternative to FF) will be gone.
I also use FF as my daily driver. However, should FF become unsupported, I'll go with Palemoon[0] rather than Chrome.
In fact, there really isn't anything that could get me to use Chrome. I find its interfaces to be insulting to my intelligence and not at all friendly enough to the idea that I should never see ads or be tracked through my browser.
Auto update strikes again. I'll react to that when it happens. One of the main reasons I use firefox is because I hate advertising, if there is one thing that would make me jump ship that would probably be it.
I don't think your ideas there result in more market share or a sustainable business model to support Firefox. Because fundamentally you're trying to shove a new value (privacy) down the throats of consumers who don't share it, they want functionality first.
I think the goal should be to make Firefox the sane default firstly for business and secondly for consumers. Business users care about privacy and security, yet Chrome and IE are the standard platforms for business webapps.
If you want an example of how misaligned those values are from reality, I need to use Chrome to talk to my doctor. Safari and Firefox aren't supported. That's entirely because Firefox doesn't do enough to make it the default platform for developers and by focusing on the wrong users.
Those are good points, and it’s frustrating that they don’t seem to be in Mozilla’s focus, but do you really believe this could lead to an Apple-style comeback?
Well, I'd certainly hope so or I see myself as a Chrome user in a few years time and that's not the best possible future. I already have to for browser/midi stuff.
Those ideas look solid. It will require the board to make some critical decisions and there has to be a person for the moment. Do we have the analog to Steve Jobs in this situation - Brendan Eich?
JWZ? That would be a fun turn-around, I think the bar/restaurant business is maybe not such a great spot to be in and it would be a nice return for him. For sure I'd trust him to do the right thing from a tech perspective.
Please don't take HN threads into ideological flamewar. We've had to ask you this multiple times. This kind of provocation leads to discussion that is equal parts nasty and brain dead.
It wasn't long ago that comments were shouting that this was the absolute most qualified person to lead Mozilla when others were questioning having a lawyer lead a tech company. Someone with at least a little hands-on experience in building a product really should be something companies look for in leadership.
I mean, sure, Baker's done plenty for Mozilla, but Mozilla has been absolutely lost as to what they're trying to be this past year. It's not a clear cut software company anymore and that's a problem.
> t wasn't long ago that comments were shouting that this was the absolute most qualified person to lead Mozilla when others were questioning having a lawyer lead a tech company.
I don't think you'll be able to attribute that quote to me. Eich fucked up, and should have realized that you can't be leading a flagship of diversity on the one hand and be a bigot on the other. But he resigned (he wasn't forced out, though it might have come to that, contrary to various strong assertions in this comment thread, both Eich and the board are on the record about that). I can't imagine there isn't anybody to be found who is more qualified than Baker but the window of opportunity for turning this around is closing rapidly. FF usage is the only thing that keeps the whole circus alive, when that goes Mozilla will have officially failed in their mission, no matter what the balance on Baker's personal savings account.
> I don't think you'll be able to attribute that quote to me. Eich fucked up, and should have realized that you can't be leading a flagship of diversity on the one hand and be a bigot on the other.
I have a problem with characterizing Brendan Eich as a bigot for donating to a non-fringe political group. IIRC, the proposition campaign he donated to had close to a 50/50 split in support for/against. Eich's ouster crystalized in my mind that Mozilla wa no longer focused on its core mission (the signs were already there - dropped Thunderbird, had an oversized IoT dept). I am speaking as a person who was a vocal Firefox evangelist since the 2.x days
The leader of a large tech company was the government to ensure his gay and lesbian employees can never legally get married, despite straight employees enjoying all the personal/financial benefits of marriage.
I don't care if it had 50/50 support. It's dead wrong. 50 years ago there were places in the US where interracial marriage had 50/50 support or less. Still dead wrong.
There was no forcing. People voluntarily expressed their desire.
* Some people no longer wanted to work at Firefox if he was their lead
* Some people no longer wanted to use Firefox if he was their lead
Now, the organization can easily take any position here. They could say "Yeah, I guess you can't work here, employees who can't work with Brendan Eich. And yes, I guess you have to stop using Firefox, users who can't use product led by Brendan Eich" or they could say "Brendan, looks like you leave or we lose these people" or anywhere in the middle.
This is just people freely expressing their views and advertising how they will act. It is pure liberty and I love it for that.
Because they are supposed to lead those very employees. If you are going to square off over something like this in the workplace then it will - obviously - impact your ability to do your job.
How could he support gay marriage without negatively impacting his ability to lead his devoutly conservative employees?
I’m in favor of equality in marriage and broadly the rights of individuals to live true to themselves and free from discrimination, but if a divisive topic is 50/50, it’s hard to see how supporting one side or the other wouldn’t alienate some portion of your employee base.
Obviously, never taking a stance on any issue is the most middle of the road, career-lengthening tactic to take, but that’s not exactly the world I want to live in either. I don’t have to (and do not) agree 100% with my CEO’s political views; that doesn’t impact his ability to lead nor my ability to execute.
>How could he support gay marriage without negatively impacting his ability to lead his devoutly conservative employees?
There’s no point in making this argument. Mozilla is company headquartered in San Francisco - and AFAIK, has the most “out” LGBTQ employees I can remember of most tech companies.
Just like I wouldn’t be surprised if Mitt Romney got raked over hot coals for not supporting a RBG replacement, I’m also not surprised Eich got kicked out for not supporting gay marriage. It was incredibly deaf on his part.
I think this is a fallacy: either way you're making someone unhappy. It's fundamentally a flawed argument: giving rights to someone it's not taking them away from someone else.
You're not making the "50%" of the people that are conservative unhappy. You are impacting a minority of those, the ones who can't live with the fact that somewhere there is a married same sex couple.
On the other hand you're telling the other 50% that they do not deserve a right. All of them.
So - that "some portion" it's not the same in size.
<rant>And if you ask me, which I admit: you didn't, the portion that believes that they should be able to deny other people a right they benefit from, can pack up an go. The inability of emphasizing with others would make them horrible software designers and developers.</rant>
> On the other hand you're telling the other 50% that they do not deserve a right. All of them.
This sounds compelling, but what happens when you apply it to other issues? What will you say to the "taxation is theft" camp when they demand the right to the fruits of their labor and don't want them to be used to wage unnecessary wars?
Or are you fine with capitalists firing anyone who advocates for taxes to continue to exist?
Are you seriously equating slavery (human right) with voting on definition of marriage (social construct)? Do you think being against brothers marrying their sisters also dead wrong?
> Human rights don't depend on how many people support them.
This is _absolutely_ true! However, the con 50% in this argument argued that "marriage as the union of M persons who X each other" (the pro side doesn't agree on what `M` and `X` should be) isn't a human right, but that "marriage as the union of two persons who are of the kind of persons that can procreate with each other" is. Only one side can be right as to what the basic human right is.
Marriage is a state sponsored contractual arrangement between two natural persons. It has nothing to do with procreation, gender or sexuality in terms of its state sponsored advantages.
Reference to the historical record shows that marriage in feudal times was a merger of families and was not practiced by those without economic power to protect.
My personal belief is that if any number of people wish to form a communal partnership for mutual benefit, they should be free to do so.
The government has chosen one particular arrangement, that of two individuals, and has pre-defined contractual rules regarding the mutual benefits, the protection of assets and of the results of pregnancy (ie children, inheritance etc) of either party to the contract.
It also imposes responsibilities on parties to that contract, in particular their responsibilities for those children.
Other laws, in particular, basic law, says that natural persons are, to quote one popular document, "are endowed by their Creator with inalienable rights". That same basic law embodies the encapsulation of additional axioms, one of which is that "all people are equal under the law".
All of the rest of the "marriage debate" is irrelevant to the underlying legal situation.
And there we come down to the root of the issue - you define marriage as "a state-sponsored contractual arrangement between (at the moment) two natural persons". I define marriage as "a union of a man and a woman that establishes a family and which precedes, in time and in causality, the state". As I said, only one of us can be correct.
If law is the application of rightly-ordered reason to the task of achieving the common good (as I hold) then the _nature_ of marriage determines and limits what kinds of benefits, advantages, limits, and restrictions the state may place upon people. If I'm right, then what marriage and family _is_ matters a lot (and where we should focus our discussion). If we only care about marriage as an act of power carried out by those with the most capability for force, then obviously this is all academic and whatever happens is whatever happens and why get hot under the collar about it?
In the workplace, employees have (broadly speaking) a _legal_ right to be free from discrimination on the basis of protected grounds. If your boss (or their boss, or their boss, etc.) makes it clear they don't support that: that's not a political statement, it's workplace discrimination / harassment.
That a stance against marriage equality happens to overlap with political fault lines is _entirely beside the point_.
>If your boss (or their boss, or their boss, etc.) makes it clear they don't support that: that's not a political statement, it's workplace discrimination / harassment.
I am going to speak plainly. I don't think people in the Valley really believe this argument. Political opinion is a protected class in California yet people feel free to create a hostile work environment for Trump supporters. It feels like there a set of right answers and you can say the right answers or shut up.
> I don’t have to (and do not) agree 100% with my CEO’s political views; that doesn’t impact his ability to lead nor my ability to execute.
If it was only views, I might agree with you. However, it wasn't just views. It was action. And it's easy to see how action can impact a CEOs ability to lead a team of people. Furthermore, we know for a fact in this case, it did literally affect his ability to lead and execute. This isn't a debate. It happened.
Simply put, he could not do his job effectively. So he stepped down. Others will say he was fired, but you can only think that if you think Eich lied.
Well, and yet here we are in a thread that is essentially about how Mozilla collectively failed to do their job under Eich's replacement. It may be obvious that a CEO with a political stance that is anathema to some subset of employees will impact productivity negatively, but it is far less obvious that this negative impact would have been worse than the negative impact of the CEO they wound up with (and who it stands to reason was chosen on the criterion of not being close to Eich politically, rather than anything else).
This only makes sense if you start with the assumption that anyone with any conservative views is fundamentally broken as a human being and they need to be 'fixed' before they can be treated equal to the other 'normal' people.
But do you and all your colleagues agree on everything with all your bosses? If so, how do you know?
What if the boss eats meat or prefer cats over dogs, while you (or other employees) do not?
Please don't reply with "are you comparing [X social cause] with eating meat?", because for some (not me), eating meat might be more important than [X social cause].
One could make an equally (actually more) compelling argument that anyone supporting (state-subsidised/recognised) marriage is being very discriminatory towards asexuals, polygamists, people who for any reason are unable to form a monogamous partnership.
George Bernard Shore:
Forgive him, for he believes that the customs of his tribe are the laws of nature.
I'm still a FF evangelist though it is getting harder by the day.
Eich should have realized that his actions as CEO of a highly visible entity would be viewed in a different light than if he were merely just another nobody. Missing that was his crucial mistake, he could have made the donation anonymously, but decided to do it in his own name making it a given that this would be associated with Mozilla. That was stupid.
But as it was he could have simply apologized and hunkered down, I suspect (based on board members' and Eichs' own statements) that it was the pressure from the employees that made him decide to resign.
Whether a proposition has a 50/50 split or not does not matter, if half your country is made up of bigots that doesn't mean that it isn't bigotry, it just means that you have a very large problem.
He wasn't CEO when he made the donations in 2008, of course. Nor was he CEO when the donations came to light in 2012. Everyone at Mozilla knew about them when he was appointed CEO.
> I suspect (based on board members' and Eichs' own statements) that it was the pressure from the employees that made him decide to resign.
I worked on Firefox from 2000 and full time from 2005 to 2016. Your suspicion is completely wrong. All employees I knew, mostly on the engineering side, were happy with his appointment or at least didn't express any wish for him to step down. That includes the gay employees I knew.
The only Mozilla group that I know of who expressed a desire for him to step down were a handful of people in the Mozilla Foundation (who would not have been part of Brendan's org since he was CEO of the Corporation). They went public with it and got a big PR splash, which I think spawned this meme that there was a clamour of Mozilla Corp employees demanding Brendan's resignation. There was not.
You have posted many comments in this thread but apparently you weren't there and you aren't aware of basic relevant facts. Please show some humility.
The basic relevant facts that I'm aware of are those as reported in the various media and written up from the statements of the participants on the matter.
If those are not to be taken as authoritative then I think we may as well shut down HN because there is nothing that can be debated past that point.
I'm sure there are interesting and probably quite relevant details to be had but your word - an anonymous HN contributor to me - does not weigh as heavy as Eich's own statements on the matter.
Maybe it is you that should show some humility? Or maybe you should attach your name to your profile to show that you actually were in the board room at the time that this was decided. If Eich wanted to record a different history then he was entirely free to do so.
I clearly remember his statement of regret at the time, it seemed sincere as far as I could see and I think that he should have been given a fair chance, but I also understand how he may have decided to step down.
There are lots of stories about what happened in that boardroom meeting, all of them more or less plausible, until the participants speak up to contradict it I will stick to basing my views on the official version.
Eich wouldn't say he wouldn't do it again. He said he was doing a great job as CEO after days on the job.[1] He expressed "sorrow at having caused pain" not regret or apology. He said he wanted to be held accountable but not how.[2] I can understand how it was too little too late for some people.
Fair point. I've updated my HN profile. I'm Robert O'Callahan, formerly a Mozilla Distinguished Engineer. I wasn't on the board, but my claims are not about the board.
Pleased to meet you digitally, and thank you for that.
There are some articles which I've linked elsewhere which quoted some Mozilla employees at the time, which seemed pretty strong evidence to me (names, dates). Of course that is a fraction of the workforce there and it could have easily been blown out of proportion but there were at least some employees who thought like that.
Yes, I replied to your comment in which you linked to such an article. That is the "only Mozilla group that I know of" I referred to. It is worth noting (again) that those people were employees of the Foundation, not the Corporation, and so were not employees under Brendan ... a distinction that seems important, but was (misleadingly, I think) elided by press coverage and the comments of the employees themselves.
Thank you for retelling your 1st-person experiences. I had mistakenly assumed parent was at Mozilla since they spoke with authority, without using reported speech.
It's unfortunate that Brendan didn't get as robust a defense from his board as Ms. Rice got from Dropbox's at roughly the same time (and I'm no fan of Condoleeza Rice, the Bush IIs administration in general, or the "War on Terror". I believed then as I do now, that it was a wrong precedent to set)
> Missing that was his crucial mistake, he could have made the donation anonymously, but decided to do it in his own name making it a given that this would be associated with Mozilla. That was stupid.
So I guess this means no Mozilla leader should be making any private political donations at all, because if they do, Mozilla is at risk of losing half of its (US) leaders in red or blue states.
I sure hope the employees still have jobs, and if not, they have vetted their new board & CEOs past donations.
> Whether a proposition has a 50/50 split or not does not matter, if half your country is made up of bigots that doesn't mean that it isn't bigotry, it just means that you have a very large problem.
Do those employees/volunteers feel equally strongly about their "bigoted" user base? Or are they more morally flexible since that directly impacts their incomes?
> So I guess this means no Mozilla leader should be making any private political donations at all, because if they do, Mozilla is at risk of losing half of its (US) leaders in red or blue states.
That's part and parcel the strategy of the left, shifting the Overton Window of what you're allowed to support publicly until anything representing traditional conservative values is safely out of range.
> That's part and parcel the strategy of the left, shifting the Overton Window of what you're allowed to support publicly until anything representing traditional conservative values is safely out of range.
I strongly disagree: political polarization is not limited to the left. The right has used similar polarizarion and smear campaigns for decades in order to turn out single-issue voters: any politicians who is remotely pro-choice becomes anathema, regardless of the rest of their platform. Hillary Clinton was so effectively smeared, in 2016 a lot of voters disliked her, but couldn't articulate why. Since Reagan, the political Overton window in the US is has been sliding rightwards - not left.
Wow. I am surprised to see someone here such misleading and uncharitable claims. What is your definition of mass murder? What evidence do you have that the right has a strategy of it aimed at black people?
Also, I assume you are objecting to restricting abortion which is a very narrow procedure to broaden to making healthcare illegal.
Trying to hold onto racism, misogyny, and homophobia as “traditional conservative values” is the problem here. There are plenty of conservatives that aren’t in that particular boat.
> Trying to hold onto racism, misogyny, and homophobia as “traditional conservative values” is the problem here.
Repeatedly framing opposing views as "racist", "misogynist", "homophobic" is a perfect example of this. Let's not speak up lest we get labeled with one of those.
I'm not aware of anything in this thread that has anything to do with race and yet that's the first word in the triumphant trio of your counters.
> I'm not aware of anything in this thread that has anything to do with race and yet that's the first word in the triumphant trio of your counters.
They tend to go together. I'll be happy to bet that a large fraction of the Eich defenders in this thread are just using him as a proxy because they sympathize with his viewpoints, and that you will find a disproportionally large overlap with the other viewpoints mentioned above.
>They tend to go together. I'll be happy to bet that a large fraction of the Eich defenders in this thread are just using him as a proxy because they sympathize with his viewpoints, and that you will find a disproportionally large overlap with the other viewpoints mentioned above.
That's as may be. However, as someone who is significantly to the left of the Democratic Party on many issues, not least being that no one has the right to tell other consenting adults who and how they should love, I was left feeling somewhat uncomfortable with the firestorm over Eich's financial donations to a particular cause.
I'll expand on this as I don't wish to be misunderstood. I vehemently disagree with the idea that the government should restrict how, and with whom, we create and maintain relationships. That applies to all relationships, whether they be romantic, platonic, familial or business.
Given that Eich's donation to an anti-Prop 8 group goes against that belief, you'd think that I would applaud Eich's humiliation and ouster.
But I don't. While I certainly wouldn't invite Eich into my life or home because he is clearly not on the side of liberty and individual rights, I do not believe he should be judged on those stances in his professional life.
There is a difference between the personal and the professional, although they have been blurred (both incidentally via social media, and deliberately by those who seek to dehumanize those who disagree with them -- and that's not a right/left thing) in recent years.
Eich's performance as CEO of Mozilla should have been viewed by his statements/actions as Mozilla CEO. And unless he took steps to incorporate his personal biases into the management of Mozilla, they were of no relevance to his job as CEO.
And so, no. I completely disagree with Eich's personal homophobia. At the same time, our professional lives should be judged by our professional actions and statements, not our personal and political actions, unless there's overlap between the two.
I have no doubt that there are those who will disagree with the above. And I'm glad you do. In fact, I'd really like to hear your arguments as to why I'm wrong.
Because I believe that we, as humans, need to have our ideas, viewpoints and opinions challenged on occasion. Even more, just because someone disagrees with me, doesn't make them my enemy or a bad person.
IMHO, demonizing/dehumanizing those who disagree with you is not a reasonable response. Engaging in discourse so that the best ideas can rise to the top, ala Mill's Marketplace of Ideas[0] is a much better response.
In that light, please feel free to disagree with me. When you do, I'd only ask that you keep in mind that I'm human. With my own thoughts, ideas, biases and experience. I don't need to have everyone agree with me. Rather, I want others to consider what I have to say, just as I consider their thoughts and ideas.
That's a pretty balanced viewpoint, the only reason I disagree with it is that Mozilla went out of their way to appear as a progressive employer and player in the marketplace, to then hire a CEO as Eich makes light of that commitment. If Mozilla were any other ordinary tech company then I would agree with you. But this would be a bit like the CEO of Greenpeace going on a whale hunt for sport.
>Mozilla went out of their way to appear as a progressive employer and player in the marketplace
A fair point. Although I'd say that if Mozilla was actually being progressive, they would focus on Eich's professional decisions, not his personal ones.
Perhaps I misunderstand the term "progressive," but I see it as moving us forward in the context of our current culture/society and not as punishing anyone who refuses to conform. The former attempts to bring positive change, while the latter seems to be focused on stifling personal expression.
>But this would be a bit like the CEO of Greenpeace going on a whale hunt for sport.
I think that's a poor analogy for several reasons:
1. Mozilla is a software/technology organization, not an LGBTQ+ advocacy organization. Eich's personal political views are irrelevant to running a tech organization, while Greenpeace is specifically focused on the species diversity and the environment. Apples and oranges, IMHO;
2. Not only was Eich not CEO when he made such donations, I am unaware of any anti-LGBTQ+ actions by him in any of his working capacities at Mozilla (please correct me if I'm wrong). Or that Eich ever brought his thoughts about same-sex marriage into the office;
I may be way off base here, and have no experience working at Mozilla and don't know Eich at all (although the ideas behind the Brave browser disgust me, and as such, perhaps I should just pile on and demonize him just for that).
It's pretty easy to find quite a few publications from Mozilla about their high standards and commitment to workplace diversity, they go out of their way to advertise this, one anecdote in this thread has an interesting bit from a person interviewing with Mozilla that I have never seen or heard about in any other company. They're a pretty large outlier in this respect compared to other businesses, though I suspect that Google and Apple are pretty similar in general but without the shouting it from the rooftops component.
> So I guess this means no Mozilla leader should be making any private political donations at all, because if they do, Mozilla is at risk of losing half of its (US) leaders in red or blue states.
They can, but they had better think this through. Note that money in politics is a problem to begin with, and that your regular votes are anonymous. If you decide to do so in a public way on a controversial subject then you take a risk.
> I sure hope the employees still have jobs, and if not, they have vetted their new board & CEOs past donations.
Writing this from liberal Europe, the American stance against gay marriage is very puzzling, though even here in the EU there are countries where this sentiment is still alive.
> Do those employees/volunteers feel equally strongly about their "bigoted" user base?
They typically don't know. By advertising it the rules were changed, and that was optional.
> Or are they more morally flexible since that directly impacts their incomes?
How many of the HN folk are in the MIC? How many of them are against anything other than heterosexual relationships? How many of them are racists?
We do not know. We do occasionally get a glimpse when someone deliberately or accidentally outs themselves as such and when they do so in the name of a company that tends to reflect badly on that company. Eich made his own bed and chose to walk rather than to lie in it.
Personally I think the bigger problem with Mozilla/FireFox is the lack of focus and as long as that isn't addressed it does not matter who is in the wheelhouse the only thing that it will affect is the rate at which the ship is going down. The way things are going there won't be another Google payday for Mozilla because there won't be a FireFox userbase left.
He wasn't CEO during the prop. 8 campaign. I don't think we want everyone in tech permanently abstaining from politics just in case there might be a leadership role years later.
It was close enough that it mattered, four years to be precise. If it had been decades ago it likely would have been a different matter.
Dutch proverb: High trees catch a lot of wind.
If you become a high tree, in politics or as a CEO then your past will come under scrutiny, and what is found there may very well have a direct effect on your present day life.
It's "close enough" only because you're trying to save face from your incorrect implication/claim you've repeated several times across different comments in this thread that he was the CEO when he did the donation.
It's also worth pointing out that public opinion has swung decisively and dramatically in that intervening time period--at least 20 percentage points IIRC.
It's close enough because right up until his apology Eich did not indicate in any way shape or form that he had changed his views on this. Only after it all blew up did he come with his apology. Sure, he wasn't CEO at the time he made his donation but when he stepped forward to become CEO he was well aware of his own position regarding this and knew that to effectively lead Mozilla would be impossible given his - apparently strongly held - views. At least, I'm assuming people do not donate to political causes they do not feel strongly about.
> Eich should have realized that his actions as CEO of a highly visible entity would be viewed in a different light than if he were merely just another nobody. Missing that was his crucial mistake, he could have made the donation anonymously, but decided to do it in his own name making it a given that this would be associated with Mozilla. That was stupid.
You do realize that all political donations in the US are not allowed to be anonymous right? This was years before citizens united, the only way to donate was through your own name.
Nothing you’ve said in this entire thread has made any sense, please reconsider demonizing someone you don’t know about issues you don’t understand with arguments that are false.
>Whether a proposition has a 50/50 split or not does not matter, if half your country is made up of bigots that doesn't mean that it isn't bigotry, it just means that you have a very large problem.
Morality (or what is "bigoted") is not a law of nature or an absolute, it's a societal convention (even murder is not an absolute "bad" - the US or Chinese or Saudi society deems capital punishment as immoral for example, whereas mine does not. Same for drug use or sale, and tons of other things, heck, even incest - not a big deal moraly in ancient Egypt, Westeros, and/or some parts of the rural South).
>even incest - not a big deal moraly in ancient Egypt, Westeros, and/or some parts of the rural South).
Actually, the only places in the US where incest (between adults) is legal are New Jersey and Rhode Island.[0] Which isn't exactly the "rural south," no matter what the bad jokes say.
No, it does not matter. If you are on the wrong side of history the size of the company you keep is irrelevant.
The US has no problem with capital punishment last I checked (nor do they have a problem with life imprisonment without a trial), maybe not the best example?
So basically, one shouldn't have wrong opinions, especially if they're publicly visible persons. Or rather, one is allowed to have wrong opinions (in private), but voicing them or goodness forbid, acting according to those, ist verbotten und un-Amerikane.
No, it is fine if you have wrong opinions. But be prepared to get the flak associated with those.
Nobody forced Eich to make a donation, but doing so publicly set him up for a confrontation with a substantial chunk of Mozilla's employees further down the line.
Just like a 'mild case of rape' could trip up a supreme court justice nominee. (Or at least, it should have.)
>No, it is fine if you have wrong opinions. But be prepared to get the flak associated with those.
That's not different than Stalinist Russia, the Inquisition, Nazi Germany, McCarthyism, some conservative backwater, etc.
If having "flak associated" with having wrong opinions is acceptable by your book, then those examples were all about free speech too. Their victims just got some heavy flak for their opinions.
Or is it bad only when it involves an execution? Rest assured than in most cases in those regimes an execution wasn't needed either. Most were just fired, or beaten up, or ostacized, or disallowed to advance etc., so that's ok I guess.
Doesn't even have to be the state to give "the flak". In the case of the Inquisition it was the church. And in other cases it has been an angry mob.
> If Prop8 had won, would it have been on the right side of history?
Prop 8 did win. I don't know if it is still on the books; it was rendered inoperative due to a later Supreme Court decision based, so far as one can tell, on neither the text nor the intent of the Constitution. In other words, whether one agrees with the decision or not, it was unconstitutional.
Right, fair point, but I mean, the "wrong side of history" narrative tends to presume that either in the long run, whatever side is right will win, or that whichever side wins will be the right one. I think that's a very dangerous assumption either way that should really not be made into the core of a moral argument. Argue from universal principles, argue from universal emotions, argue from social health, argue from self-interest. But don't argue from your eventual presumed victory as if that's a reason in itself.
>No, it does not matter. If you are on the wrong side of history the size of the company you keep is irrelevant.
Sorry, that sounds like something Nazis or the Maoists in the "Cultural Revolution" would say. "Wrong side of history" is historical determinism and teleologism.
Who is on "the wrong side of history" determined by consensus itself. And it can be as fickle and temporary as anything.
> But as it was he could have simply apologized and hunkered down
Apologize for what? Exercising his right to political speech? His views represented the views of 52% of the Californian voters, i.e. the majority of voters. He's supposed to apologize for, literally, "agreeing with most people?"
If employees were revolting, perhaps him stepping down was the right choice. But suggesting that he should "apologize" for having political views some employees disagree with is completely unreasonable and indicative of a bullying power play.
Eich acknowledged he hurt people.[1] He didn't just hold a view.
52% of Californian voters didn't ask Mozilla employees to trust them with their livelihoods and the culture of the company. A lot of them changed their minds by 2014 too.
Eich expressed "sorrow at having caused pain" which is not the same as acknowledging having "hurt people." This is pedantic but if we're going to talk about what someone else said, we should be precise.
I don't understand your point about 2014. Did Eich make more "controversial donations" that year?
> He declined to say he wouldn't do the same thing again.
Was he presented with a loyalty oath that he refused to sign? What do you mean he "declined to say"? Was he asked to say "I won't do this again" or do you think he should have volunteered such a statement?
In the post you linked he acknowledges having "caused pain" & affirms that Mozilla is a 100% inclusive company. Do you think he should have done more than this?
For my part, I find loyalty oaths odious & refuse to ever participate in them. I support gay rights, gay marriage etc. but if you demanded that I state my support for gay marriage upon your command, I would tell you to get lost.
CNET asked him if he would donate to a Proposition 8 cause again. He said he hadn't thought about it and didn't want to answer hypotheticals.[1]
Eich claiming he wouldn't discriminate against anyone doesn't mean much. He also claimed stripping marriage rights from same sex couples wasn't discriminatory.
I think Eich should have thought about it in the intervening 6 years like many of his fellow Californians. He should have expected his promotion would be divisive since he got a preview of the backlash in 2012. He should have felt remorse for contributing to a campaign that demonized LGBT people even if he still believed they didn't deserve equality. He should have apologized. And he should have explained how he would be held accountable like he claimed he wanted.
I wouldn't want him to pretend to apologize if he didn't mean it. He should have expected the backlash though. He could have withdrawn from consideration and just been CTO.
> Eich should have realized that his actions as CEO of a highly visible entity would be viewed in a different light than if he were merely just another nobody.
You do realize that the donation occurred years before he was appointed CEO, right?
The sequence doesn't really matter though, does it? Eich felt strongly enough about the issue to donate money to it, then moved to become CEO of a company whose main charter is diametrically opposed to such a stance. I don't see how he would have been able to do that without it coming to a head sooner or later.
Also, and this is just a general observation, whether Eich would have been a good CEO or not is a complete unknown.
The other context that's important here is that it's a political topic where popular shifted massively in the same timeframe--circa 20 percentage points IIRC.
You're basically faulting him for taking a position which was reasonable and well within the center of public opinion at the time, which had subsequently become unpopular. And completely discounting the statement he made in the meantime showing that his opinions had, in fact, evolved over time, just as it had for a large fraction of the population.
(Another thing to point out is that the board was aware of the political contribution when he was appointed CEO, and did not feel it was any obstacle.)
Sorry, but no, it being a common opinion does not necessarily a reasonable one.
And one board member did resign over this prior to his appointment.
For us here in NL (where 90%+ of the population supports gay marriage) the whole idea that this is even worth arguing over seems strange, about as strange as coming out pro-slavery would be.
I do realize the exact timing, Eich was CTO when he made the donations, was proposed to the CEO role when this was already known, accepted the nomination, one board member resigned in protest and then it all blew up and Eich resigned from Mozilla entirely 11 days later. Clearly, he did not make the donations in those 11 days.
I could have worded that comment a lot better but the intention seems pretty clear to me: Your actions as a CEO (even past actions) are going to be viewed in a different light than your actions as just another employee, even a co-founder, and what wasn't a problem before the CEO nomination quickly became a real problem, both for Mozilla the progressive entity as well as for Eich himself. Whether the donations were made several years, months or weeks before his tenure as CEO are not important.
The one thing I did get completely wrong - and which I will also acknowledge - is that I thought Eich could have legally made those donations anonymously (it was argued quite strongly during that time that this should be a possibility). I did not realize that this was illegal.
Your original comment is right there for everyone to read. In effect, what you've managed to argue here is first that the sequence of events is very important (your whole argument being that Eich "as the CEO" should have made his donation anonymously), and then, when called on that, that the sequence of events matters not at all.
Sometimes the best response to a rebuttal is just "TIL".
I'm sure Eich is smart enough to figure that one out. He could also have chosen to simply not donate given his position as CEO of a very visible entity.
He must feel pretty strongly about this subject given the fact that he could have recanted but he chose to walk instead.
Fair enough, at the time he was 'just' a co-founder of Mozilla and had not yet made the play to become CEO in 2014, but as recently as 2010 he made another such donation, and there is zero evidence that he had changed his mind at the time.
The term "bigot" is highly loaded, ambiguous term and we seem to be using it in some random cancel-culture way that only applies to selective beliefs and ascribing some sort of "evil" property to the individuals we throw it at. I'll even go out and say that I am a bigot because I am unreasonable about a lot of different topics and points of view that I disagree with.
Here are a bunch of variations of the definition, for your perusal.
Oxford: "a person who is intolerant towards those holding different opinions."
Merriam Webster: "a person who is obstinately or intolerantly devoted to his or her own opinions and prejudices. Especially : one who regards or treats the members of a group (such as a racial or ethnic group) with hatred and intolerance"
Cambridge: "a person who has strong, unreasonable beliefs and who does not like other people who have different beliefs or a different way of life: "
Dictionary.com: "a person who is utterly intolerant of any differing creed, belief, or opinion."
Collins: "Someone who is bigoted has strong, unreasonable prejudices or opinions and will not change them, even when they are proved to be wrong. "
Oxford Learners: "a person who has very strong, unreasonable beliefs or opinions about race, religion or politics and who will not listen to or accept the opinions of anyone who disagrees"
bigot : a person who is intolerant towards those holding different opinions (google definition).
So maybe half of the country is made up of bigots but they are from both side. The other half are those that don't have strong opinions or simply don't care.
> Free Software is an extremely left wing philisophy
That's revisionist history. Free software, and the greater "hacker" community, has historically been libertarian. It's only recently that authoritarian leftism took over.
No. Anyone should be able to support any political cause at any time.
In a free society, we do not rely on force to produce morally correct behavior, except by force of state. We rely on law instead, which conversely requires complete freedom to participate in the democratic apparatus. Anything that messes with that messes with the very heart of a liberal democracy.
Corporations do not have unlimited freedom of association anyways. For instance, we already acknowledge that corporations can't refuse to associate with people on the basis of skin color. Saying that they could, say, fire a black CEO because otherwise their KKK customers would walk out, already doesn't fly; I don't see why it should have with Eich. I think racial equality is important, but political neutrality is at least equally important, because if that fails then liberalism is fucked, and liberalism is the best guarantor of racial equality as well.
Mozilla employees, volunteers, and others used their freedom of speech to say they would exercise their freedom to dissociate from Eich if he continued to support discrimination. Eich dissociated himself from Mozilla so the others wouldn't.
Okay, let me explain that one. I know he says that, and I know Mozilla says that, but "I've decided to leave of my own accord" has simply become such a cliche that it can no longer be distinguished from firing.
In any case, this mostly just supports my view that people don't understand liberalism and why we need it. When an atheist and a christian can sit down together and have a peaceful family dinner without talking about politics, despite the fact that at least one of them thinks that it's a matter of utmost moral importance that the other change his mind, this is a miracle of social cohesion that is crucial to keeping society together. And we're losing it.
Prop 8 banned gay marriage but not gay domestic partnerships. It's a highly technical issue more nuanced than you are saying, despite the unnuanced views of many of its supporters.
If you have a country where half of the population disagrees with the other half, and each half "cancels" the other and refuses to do business with them, the country will grind to a halt.
But we are all witness to the fact that it doesn't, at least so far.
The reason why it does not is that people don't typically wear their politics on their sleeves though the divisive nature of present day politics is not helping with that. So in fact, you may be prophetic, time will tell on that one.
Life in the US is fine. I have no idea what you're talking about. I have lots of friends saying controversial things on Twitter and social media and they're not only alive but have fulfilling and happy jobs.
You are aware that they only reached that number after placing armed guards at the polling places, with large parts of the opposition in prison, missing or exile? Hitler wanted to win that "election" with a majority by any means possible, getting 43% despite all the steps he took were a slap in the face.
Then go back a year to the election of Juli 1932, before the NSDAP got into power. Despite Nationalsocialists and Communists battling it out in the streets, the voter turnout was very high at 84.1%. The NSDAP doubled its previous result and became strongest party at 37.3%.
> Then go back a year to the election of Juli 1932, before the NSDAP got into power.
And by the November elections that same year they had already lost several percent.
> Despite Nationalsocialists and Communists battling it out in the streets
Paradoxically Hitlers campaign at that time ran less on antisemitism and more on restoring law and order as well as fixing the economy. Communism and the near endless pool of unemployed it could recruit from was the great enemy of the moment.
That's a hell of a controversial claim, it's still pretty hotly debated among historians. You could perhaps say that people used the treaty as a scapegoat, but as for Versaille being the actual cause, not so much.
> I have a problem with characterizing Brendan Eich as a bigot for donating to a non-fringe political group
Bigotry is not how, and never has been, a fringe position in the US. If you have a problem acknowledging that...well, it doesn't make it any less true.
That's great, but those of us who were directly affected by his actions—funding a group specifically intended to focus on ensuring we were prevented from accessing certain rights—will probably just dismiss this rather privileged view.
> a bigot for donating to a non-fringe political group. IIRC, the proposition campaign he donated to had close to a 50/50 split in support for/against
What?
What does people's support for a proposition that denies rights to homosexual people do to make it less discriminatory? What if it's worse? "You're not being discriminated against, because 80% of the population are in support of you being discriminated against". This makes no sense.
>I don't think you'll be able to attribute that quote to me. Eich fucked up, and should have realized that you can't be leading a flagship of diversity on the one hand and be a bigot on the other
Who asked Mozilla to be a "flagship of diversity"? What we wanted off them, and what their mission statement was, is a FOSS browser that supported the open web.
Plus, one can be/believe whatever on their personal life, as long as they don't bring it to the office.
Not to mention that penalizing people because they supported one side in a public vote is anti-democratic.
Let’s say that I’m a top notch software engineer working at Mozilla being paid half as much as I could be making at any other Big Tech company because I believe in the mission. Would I believe in the mission if my leadership opposed my fundamental right to be with the person I loved or would I go to one of the other tech companies that are always screaming diversity and pay more?
What side of the fence do you think Eich landed on when it came to health benefits for same sex couples?
Actually there is an "equal except for". Isn't that a pretty trivial concept for a software engineer?
Here's pseudocode that can be expressed in tons of languages:
func compare(a, b) {
if typeof(a) == "marriage" and typeof(b) == "marriage": return false;
return true;
}
Ironically, as we're speaking of Brendan, here's a trivial real-life example where this is the actual behavior: in JS all numbers are equal to themselves, except NaN.
> typeof 1
'number'
> 1 == 1
true
> typeof NaN
'number'
> NaN == NaN
false
In any case, it's quite possible for someone religiously motivated to think of marriage as some "holy" union that is only allowed between men and women because the Bible said so or whatever -- but otherwise have no issue with gay civil rights and would be ok with some civic contract with the same exact terms and rights, as long as it's not called "marriage". Marriage being one of the "sacred mysteries" in many versions of christianity and so on.
Well, if he believes that sane sex marriage is a “sin”, it’s his prerogative not to marry someone of the same sex. But why force his religious views on other people?
>But why force his religious views on other people?
Because religion is also a theory about how society should live, what is sacred/holy/profane/immoral/etc, not just what someone believes for themselves.
Plus, in a sense, he doesn't force his religious views on other people. He asks other people not to step on his religious concept (the marriage as a specific sacred mystery / holy union with specific rules, etc).
Now his objection might be outdated, but it's not some outlandish idea the "beyond the pale" kind, like being in the KKK. Just a few decades ago (not in some ancient ages) most of the US (not to mention the global population) would have agreed with this, including many progressives otherwise. Heck, it wasn't even one of the major demands of gay activists themselves back in the day.
Not allowing same sex marriage steps on some people's religious concepts. Allowing mixed race couples or heathens to marry steps on some people's religious concepts.
Should a priest be allowed to refuse to wed gay couples? I think so. They can go find another priest, so it doesn't mean I am against gay marriage. I just don't see why we should force people to do certain things in their religious ceremonies. Other than that marriage is just a join table, it means nothing so there is no reason to forbid anyone from doing it.
Instead of arguing about whether priests are forced to marry gay couples now (they are not, and this is an easily verifiable fact), I think a more interesting question is - what principle is it that says it's ok for priests to deny marriage to same-sex couples?
In other words, can you please explain why priests should not be forced to marry gay couples? "Force" is a loaded word, of course - I'm not necessarily talking about armed agents going into a church and demanding that a priest perform a marriage ceremony, but rather referring to the full range of coercive actions available to the federal government. For example, if a church refuses to perform same-sex marriages, why should they get tax-exempt status?
Nobody asked, but Mozilla took (and still takes) that role. Witness plenty of comments on HN from Mozilla employees reinforcing that.
I'm all for the FOSS browser company, the 'support for the open web' is already a step in the direction of losing focus. Just keeping up and having a viable alternative browser out there keeping Chrome at bay is a major job (and one they are currently miserably failing at).
> Not to mention that penalizing people because they supported one side in a public vote is anti-democratic.
Actually, it isn't. Actions have consequences, if Eich wanted to be a contributor to that cause he could have done so silently. By doing it in a publicly visible way as the CEO of a large company he made it a political statement and action begets reaction. Eich very explicitly brought his views into the office in a way that a substantial fraction of Mozilla's employees did not want to be associated with.
Besides that, money in politics is anti-democratic.
I've broadly agreed with you in this thread, mostly, but I have to say that last year one of the interview questions I was asked in a Mozilla interview was "What are you personally doing to encourage diversity?"
I felt that that was just a bit hamfisted. All my adult life I've been a feminist [insomuch as a man can be one] and supported this cause. But I had no idea how to answer that question, or I'm pretty sure my answer wasn't satisfactory to the person asking.
I would not work for Mozilla for that reason alone. I don't think such a question has a place in a job interview. I also would never ask such a question of an applicant. TMC is a pretty diverse group but we are so by accident, not by design and we take people on merit, not on their level of activism.
> "What are you personally doing to encourage diversity?"
What? Are you serious? After browsing through the comments, this here is what really ticks me off and solidifies that mozilla/firefox is in a rotting place right now. sad.
Yeah, serious, I mean I don't disagree with the overall goal of improving diversity in our industry. It's not really improving on its own. But as an established white male who is just an engineer, not a manager or HR staff or director of any kind, etc. almost anything I say in response to that question will just come across as patronizing ("some of my best friends are woman or minority engineers!")
I suspect the right answer could be: get out of the way. I did, they hired someone else. I dodged a bullet.
I don't think this embrace of social justice stuff has much to do with Mozilla's rot, BTW. Any business without a clear profit/success model and a reasonably sized workforce will just crumble under empire building and competing agendas. The "SJW" stuff is only notorious in our community because of the way the Eich stuff went down.
I would have been willing to work for half of what I am now to help make the open internet succeed (well, also to work from home, and to get to work with some friends, and with Rust, and other perks). But that whole interview really soured me. I dodged a bullet anyways.
> Actually, it isn't. Actions have consequences, if Eich wanted to be a contributor to that cause he could have done so silently. By doing it in a publicly visible way as the CEO of a large company he made it a political statement and action begets reaction. Eich very explicitly brought his views into the office in a way that a substantial fraction of Mozilla's employees did not want to be associated with.
He didn't bring his views into the office. He had them outside and the alphabet mob lit them as a Molotov cocktail and threw them into the building.
Those employees could have quit and worked somewhere else too. In a lot of ways that would have been great as they could have cut down on a couple of the pointless projects.
By your standard it's impossible for anyone to both have public views that disagree with your own and be the head of any large organization.
> Besides that, money in politics is anti-democratic.
Money in politics is the great equalizer. It's as democratic as it gets.
Otherwise you end up with a handful of media and tech oligarchs controlling all messaging.
> He didn't bring his views into the office. He had them outside and the alphabet mob lit them as a Molotov cocktail and threw them into the building.
He made a public donation in his own name to a very divisive cause. That is a political statement if there ever was one and set the stage for a confrontation with at least a sizeable fraction of the company he as supposed to want to lead.
> Those employees could have quit and worked somewhere else too.
Yes, they could have. And they might have had Eich stayed on.
> In a lot of ways that would have been great as they could have cut down on a couple of the pointless projects.
Contrary to managements' viewpoint programmers are not fungible, and you can't just drop them into each others projects on a whim. What if the bulk of those that left had worked on FireFox?
> By your standard it's impossible for anyone to both have public views that disagree with your own and be the head of any large organization.
Why do you think CEOs are normally speaking quite careful about such public statements? Precisely because there is the possibility of backlash.
Surely this isn't news.
> Money in politics is the great equalizer. It's as democratic as it gets.
Abject nonsense. Money in politics means that wealthy people get to vote many more times than poor people. An equalizer should make everybody more equal, not less equal.
> Otherwise you end up with a handful of media and tech oligarchs controlling all messaging.
> Contrary to managements' viewpoint programmers are not fungible, and you can't just drop them into each others projects on a whim. What if the bulk of those that left had worked on FireFox?
Salaries are paid in dollars and all dollars are fungible. That money could have been saved for a future date, which is coming sooner than they think, when search referrals will no longer pay the bills.
> Abject nonsense. Money in politics means that wealthy people get to vote many more times than poor people. An equalizer should make everybody more equal, not less equal.
Oh but it does. The issue you seem to be having is that you do not want anyone to hear opposing view points. If your ideas are so great they should be able to stay standing when the masses learn about alternatives.
Or are you scared that it might actually change their minds?
>> Otherwise you end up with a handful of media and tech oligarchs controlling all messaging.
> Yes, like Rupert Murdoch for instance. Oh, wait.
Yes exactly. And also like Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey, Sundar Pichai...
At least with the free flow of money someone working in a non-media industry can channel the fruits of their labors to pay to spread their message.
Without that ability you're limited to whatever your media masters decide to let you hear.
> Salaries are paid in dollars and all dollars are fungible.
Dollar donations made to political causes are not fungible when done in the name of the donor (as per the law). And that's the root cause. Whether or not employees would have walked or not you can not know, they very well might have because Mozilla made a big point of attracting those very people.
> Oh but it does. The issue you seem to be having is that you do not want anyone to hear opposing view points. If your ideas are so great they should be able to stay standing when the masses learn about alternatives.
I think you have your parties muddled up here and I think that you are not so much arguing for Eich's benefit as you are arguing for your own and your own views which you have made plenty visible on HN in the past. The people that don't agree with you are 'leftists'.
For instance: "That's part and parcel the strategy of the left, shifting the Overton Window of what you're allowed to support publicly until anything representing traditional conservative values is safely out of range. "
Traditional conservative bigoted values are what they are, if you want to publicly associate yourself with those then you are opening yourself up to - at a minimum - ridicule.
> Or are you scared that it might actually change their minds?
No horse in the race, so not scared. Why would I be?
> Yes exactly. And also like Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey, Sundar Pichai...
In other countries it is called bribery, in the USA it is normal. But that is an aberration, one that is hard to fix because both of the powerful parties in the USA are benefiting from this and effectively manage to keep out any outside contender that does not manage to take over one of the parties (like what just happened to the Republicans).
Or do you honestly believe that Trump embodies 'traditional conservative values'?
> At least with the free flow of money someone working in a non-media industry can channel the fruits of their labors to pay to spread their message.
Which effectively limits the speech of those not so privileged that they have money to spare, who - coincidentally - also happen to be the ones disenfranchised by tricks like Gerrymandering, voter identification, roll purges and a host of other strategies.
Fairness doesn't enter into it.
> Without that ability you're limited to whatever your media masters decide to let you hear.
I read manufacturing consent the year it came out.
> Dollar donations made to political causes are not fungible when done in the name of the donor (as per the law). And that's the root cause. Whether or not employees would have walked or not you can not know, they very well might have because Mozilla made a big point of attracting those very people.
And they might not have cared and moved on with their lives as well. The point of the exercise was to get a scalp to scare anyone else in an executive position from making a public donation. The end result was losing a competent executive.
>> Oh but it does. The issue you seem to be having is that you do not want anyone to hear opposing view points. If your ideas are so great they should be able to stay standing when the masses learn about alternatives.
> I think you have your parties muddled up here and I think that you are not so much arguing for Eich's benefit as you are arguing for your own and your own views which you have made plenty visible on HN in the past.
I'd argue you're doing the same in reverse.
> The people that don't agree with you are 'leftists'.
> For instance: "That's part and parcel the strategy of the left, shifting the Overton Window of what you're allowed to support publicly until anything representing traditional conservative values is safely out of range. "
You also manage to both quote my reply and misquote me back to back. I did not say, "leftists", I said, "the left", which is a standard term to refer to that side of the political aisle. Just as "the right" is a standard term to refer to the conservative side.
> Traditional conservative bigoted values are what they are, if you want to publicly associate yourself with those then you are opening yourself up to - at a minimum - ridicule.
You're free to have whatever opinions you'd like. I really don't care. If you want to label everyone that disagrees with you with terms like that it's your prerogative.
> No horse in the race, so not scared. Why would I be?
You're arguing that anyone that who disagrees with you and has the means ($$$) to promote those disagreements should not be able to do so.
People who are confident that their beliefs will win out in the market of ideas tend not to act that way.
> In other countries it is called bribery, in the USA it is normal.
So buying advertising is bribery now but operating a newspaper at a loss to continue to publish a liberal agenda is somehow perfectly fine?
> But that is an aberration, one that is hard to fix because both of the powerful parties in the USA are benefiting from this and effectively manage to keep out any outside contender that does not manage to take over one of the parties (like what just happened to the Republicans).
Interestingly Donald Trump spent less on advertising in the 2016 primaries than his opponents. IIRC, Jeb Bush spent something like $120M for 3 primary electoral votes and Hillary Clinton spent $1.2 B (yes billion!) in the general election (double Trump's amount). Now that is trying to buy an election.
> Or do you honestly believe that Trump embodies 'traditional conservative values'?
Ha! Not at all. But I believe he's done more to promote conservative ideas and ideals than any other politician of the past thirty years.
In particular reshaping the federal bench and the SCOTUS will have a lasting impact for the next 30-40 years.
> Which effectively limits the speech of those not so privileged that they have money to spare,
Breaking news, people with money can spend it more freely than people without it!
They also get to eat better food and live in safer neighborhoods. There's a lot of advantages to having money and there's not necessarily something wrong with it.
> ...who - coincidentally - also happen to be the ones disenfranchised by tricks like Gerrymandering, voter identification, roll purges and a host of other strategies.
Okay so now that you've given up on arguing against freedom of expression you're trying shift the topics.
> I read manufacturing consent the year it came out.
>You also manage to both quote my reply and misquote me back to back. I did not say, "leftists", I said, "the left", which is a standard term to refer to that side of the political aisle. Just as "the right" is a standard term to refer to the conservative side.
Except what you term "the left" in the US is actually center-right on the political spectrum.[0]
I'm all about freedom of expression and personal liberty. However, I believe that government (because government is the people) has a valid role to play in creating equality of opportunity and assisting those who are, for whatever reason, having difficulty surviving in our society.
> Contrary to managements' viewpoint programmers are not fungible,
In any reasonably written project they actually are. If your experience is that they are not then you have worked with badly written and badly documented projects.
> and you can't just drop them into each others projects on a whim.
Indeed you don't want to mix and match too much. Programmers need a ramp up time and teams need time to have cohesion.
Essentially programmers are replaceable but there is a non zero cost to replacing them.
> if Eich wanted to be a contributor to that cause he could have done so silently.
He did not deliberately publicise his donation. It was not publicly known until 2012 when someone dug up the records.
> Eich very explicitly brought his views into the office in a way that a substantial fraction of Mozilla's employees did not want to be associated with.
> should have realized that you can't be leading a flagship of diversity on the one hand and be a bigot on the other
Is it ridiculous to suggest we should just ignore what people think and do in their private lives?
I both fully support gay marriage and couldn't give a rat's ass about what the maker of my browser thinks about it (Eich donated 1000$ to Prop 8, 12 years ago). The real problem is that you can pay to have laws changed!
These "acts of protest" like OkCupid's banner need to stop. Most likely they care as much as I do (= not), they're just preemptively trying to get on the right side of the argument, trying to win the social justice olympics, to avoid the same fate as Eich.
It's not about you and me. It is about Eich's ability to effectively lead Mozilla while being on the record about this stance regarding gay marriage. How many of Mozilla's employees are gay and/or in favor of gay marriage? If you alienate roughly 55% (possibly much more) or so of a group you are supposed to lead you have just made your life quite impossible. Eich probably did the right thing to resign, he would have had to either come around on the subject (which he did not) or he'd have to walk.
OkCupid is not a part of FireFox, they were simply trying to virtue signal at Eich/FFs expense, and the empire behind OkCupid (not the original founders) has done a lot worse than anything that Eich ever did.
That would have been easy enough to ignore. But the Mozilla employees were another matter.
Money in politics is a problem in and of itself, that doesn't mean that CEOs living in glass houses should not be aware that if they start throwing stones there will be consequences.
That is the problem, the inability of a lot of people to disagree with each other. This completely good/bad classification of people. People can be wrong about gay marriage, abortion, climate change, immigration and a lot of different issues and still be right about a lot of other things and have other virtues and be good persons overall.
Of course. But as a CEO if you decide to wear your politics on your sleeve (which nobody forces you to) then you are making a statement which will likely beget a response.
If a dutch CEO would come out to vote for Geert Wilders' PVV (our ultra rightwing populist party) I'm pretty sure that would have an immediate effect on the company and on its remaining employees.
Employees as a rule want to be associated with companies and CEOs that they feel have their interests at heart. Plenty of them can be 'bought', which is why so many terrible companies with terrible leadership flourish. But Mozilla made it quite plain that they weren't going to be 'that sort of company' and if you say that loud enough and often enough then there are certain things you should not do.
Brendan Eich chose to apply for a leadership position in an organization which wears its stance on diversity issues on the proverbial sleeve. For some Mozilla folks that I know, this stance was a contributing factor in deciding where to work. Going on public record with an opposing stance on this was obviously controversial.
Given that access to health care is a major pain point for queer people in general and health care benefits are employer provided in the US made the matter even more pressing.
So yes, if you choose to apply for a position in an org that has a public stance on an issue, choosing to wear the opposing flag on your sleeve may not be the best move. You’re however, absolutely entitled to your opinion - you just have to deal with the results of your statements.
To be clear, the blacklisting was not, in theory, over "political leanings": it was for belonging to an organization that explicitly advocated the violent overthrow of the U.S. government. There were a lot of issues with the McCarthy era, but this detail is important and generally glossed over.
I see your point but seen in historical light, if he would have more successful (than current management) in bringing Mozilla profit, the same employees might still have their jobs.
The 'argument from alternative universe' is not one that can be won from either side of a debate. What happened happened, this is where we are. All the people here arguing that Eich should not have been ousted are making an argument that might have held up but we will never know. Maybe half of Mozilla would have resigned and then they would not have had those particular jobs either, maybe Eich would have come around after a discussion with employees that were directly affected by his donation.
But we'll never know so this is not a fruitful branch of the discussion.
>Funny you think giving gays and lesbians the same rights as everyone else in this country
I'm a straight, white male with a long-time significant other. We never got married because marriage is a religious ceremony, and we don't share those values (for example, the church's views on gay marriage). At least in my country, being married doesn't give a person any more "rights".
> Is it ridiculous to suggest we should just ignore what people think and do in their private lives?
The problem is that Eich was supposed be leading a team that prides itself for being supportive of the causes that Eich donated against. Bridging that gap became impossible once he was on public record for that.
Having any leadership position requires at least a fundamental trust of the people you’re supposed to be leading.
That is one of the core problems Mozilla has to solve. Are they a browser manufacturer or some 'force for good' (or just there to fatten Bakers' piggy bank on the way down).
It was this event that actually led me to stop caring about Firefox and allow myself to default to Chrome, and I downloaded Phoenix from Blake's blog the day he posted it.
The root of Firefox's problems start with San Francisco. It's inflated salaries and political sideshow have caused an existential threat to Mozilla.
If your opposition to gay marriage was enough to get you to throw away the benefits of Firefox, I think you're not necessarily the target market that Firefox evangelists are.
None of the code of the browser changed when Eich resigned. It still had the same pros/cons, didn't it?
Says someone who is well versed in commenting on an online forum but not an executive for a large nonprofit. Look, I have nothing for or against Baker, but the constant “she knows nothing about her job because she isn’t a programmer” is just tiresome. You don’t have to be technical to be an effective leader. However, it usually does help and you surely do need to know when your company is going under.
I've been CEO of various companies in the past, and am CEO of a much smaller company today (by choice). Not 'large non-profits' but large enough for it to matter to those around me and the people that I employ.
When COVID-19 hit the first thing I did was reduce, then totally stop my pay. This has caused me to take a significant personal hit but it means that the company now has a year and a half of runway left at the current rate of expense.
Nobody got laid off even though we are down to some fraction of our pre-COVID income. Morale is not super high because of course people are still suffering personally because of the whole affair, several people working with/for us including me have been infected, and all of our lives are significantly impacted. But we are still afloat and will get through this crisis with all hands on board and when we do I will make sure to send extra compensation to those people that took a pay cut to make this happen.
So, as one CEO commenting on the actions of another: this excuse is bordering on the ridiculous and I'm surprised that she even mentioned it.
I am not commenting on Baker, I am commenting on you commenting on Baker. Whether or not she should take a pay cut is not the question, although personally I would say that it would be good if she did even if only for optics at this point. My issue is the one where you claim she is unfit to lead because she is non-technical in your eyes: again, this is not a requirement to be a good CEO.
It is not a requirement but it certainly helps when running a technology company. I know some very good companies run by lawyers: investment funds, legal companies and a medical institution.
None of them would run their companies into the ground to maintain their executive pay because they felt that would be 'unfair to their families', this is a CEO that is so self centered that nothing good can come of it.
But besides that, Mozilla - or rather, FireFox - is an important (though now much less important) technology component and a lawyer is not going to run a company making such a component effectively because this is not a regulated industry or a financial vehicle where having a legal background might give you an edge.
When three years from now Baker will have her nest egg completed the husk of Mozilla will quietly die and Firefox right along with it whereas right now there might (and that's a very small might) still be a chance to turn this around.
Regardless of whether you think lawyers make good CEOs, this lawyer is not a good CEO for this company, witness the performance of the flagship product, recent layoffs, the company financials and their recent statements.
Why is that not a valid position to take? Sure you can have good non-specialist or non-technical leaders. Are they better or worse?
I would say without a personal understanding of the challenges of the core business, their judgement would lack that influence. This lacking will absolutely effect the direction of the org. The numbers don’t lie as to the effect.
>This CEO needs to go, needs to be replaced by someone who is well versed in technology instead of in law.
Baker was officially appointed CEO in April, though has been doing the job since December when Chris Beard resigned.
I'm very confused as to how everybody seems to have missed this. I had the first couple hundred posts opened and can not find a single mention of Beard
Previously they had appointed an excellent CEO from within that is universally well respected for his technology contributions and then they fired him after 11 days without cause. Now that guy is a CEO at a different company.
Thanks for the link, wasn't aware of the details. While I 100% disagree with him on marriage equality I don't understand why he was driven from his role that has nothing to do with Proposition 8. Why did his freedom to support a cause with his own money result in him having to resign, seems anti-democratic to me.
I don't know, man. It's easy to get all abstract with phrases like "support a cause" but we live in a concrete world. Mozilla employs a lot of gay people. Prop 8 was viciously homophobic, both in concept and especially in execution of its campaign. How would you feel going to work knowing your boss's boss thinks you don't deserve rights?
A few people commenting is not widespread support. I was at Mozilla at the time and I didn't get the impression that the views you linked were broadly representative.
And FWIW: I didn't personally feel the backlash at Brendan was appropriate, but given that it existed the outcome was probably unavoidable.
I say this as someone who, while living in Virgina and having never lived in California at the time prop 8 was on the ballot (I moved here a few years later), I donated to opposition to CA prop 8 and decided to not get married to my (opposite sex) partner out of solidarity with gay people who couldn't get married in our state.
I never felt that I should be or would be persecuted at Mozilla (which employed a lot of christians, and particularly Catholics), if it had become public that I funded opposition to prop 8. Nor, by the same token, did I think it was appropriate for Brendan to come under fire for funding support for it. I have sympathy for the theoretical argument that it might be difficult to work for someone with personal views incompatible with yours or your identity, but in practice Mozilla was an an extremely open and inclusive place that employed people of all kinds and treated them with respect. (In other words, a theoretical problem which wasn't in this instance a practical problem by any report I heard.)
Although I don't have any actual knowledge, if I had to speculate I would guess there were other Mozilla employees who supported prop 8 (many?). -- especially considering that prop 8 _passed_ with >52% support.
Even though I strongly disagreed with him on this subject (apparently! not that I'd have any way to know other than the media coverage of this), the incident made me feel slightly less safe and welcome there-- because clearly your lawful and constitutionally protected outside-of-work personal/political/religious views were potentially subject to scrutiny. Although not very much so, because it appeared clear to me that the events were primarily being driven by public noise, and not by some internal wrong-think witchhunt.
His views weren't the problem. His actions were. And not thinking his actions were discriminatory.
The CEO is the face of the company and oversees HR. Most people who objected to Eich being CEO didn't have a problem with him being CTO.
Believing different races shouldn't mix is legal. Just saying it in public will disqualify you from being CEO at most companies. Never mind funding a constitutional amendment.
In my experience it's been about a half-and-half split between managers I respect and those that I don't. It's certainly not my preference but I have worked for people who don't really respect me and, very likely, didn't believe I deserved all sorts of things (a living wage being among them).
That said, Mozilla works in a competitive environment. Perhaps it would have made more sense to wait for valuable employees to start leaving before dismissing their CEO. While I find his position on Prop 8 offensive, as others have pointed out, they are entitled to their beliefs.
If I earn $100,000 am I allowed to ask for people advocating for tax increases to be ejected from the company for being wealthophobes?
That isn't as idle a question as you might think on first glance. Denying someone marriage rights is waaay down the list of ways voters can screw each other over through government policy. Most high income earners are in companies with co-workers who literally argue that they should be less well off.
Being anti-gay-marriage is more stupid because the upside is unclear, but we expect people in the same company to put up with bigger differences of opinion on a routine basis. Different religions have gone to war in the past. I don't think many battles have been fought over official marriage rights.
Are you seriously comparing civil rights to a tax increase? Spend 10 minutes today learning about marriage and the rights it includes. I used to think it wasn't a big deal until I actually learned about it. Marriage includes hundreds of legal rights that have a huge impact on a couple's life (and death).
I one time notice that strict job descriptions are incredibly rare. I've only really seen them on factory floors. For laughs I ask a bunch of people in the same function to describe their job. Having asked this a few times it was fun to chat about how different their idea was from their colleagues. Some of them were surprisingly clueless. They thought their job was the stuff that currently consumed most of their time.
I think in programming we've learned (the hard way) that fuzzy input should be rejected. Stuff should do exactly what it says on the can. No mather how sophisticated, if a date object returns political opinion they are not parsed.
Perhaps one day we can do modular job descriptions or functional employment. Accurate task descriptions with actual specs. Well formed execution and response text. The most professional people I've worked with were already strict about what everyone's job was.
Doesn't basically everyone feel they are being denied some basic human rights all the time? Progressives are being denied healthcare rights. Libertarians are being denied property rights. etc.
Looking at from the other side of the globe, as a non-american. I get the impression that in silicon valley, technology is all about skin color, what you have between your legs and what you want to do with what you have between you legs - end of story. Those are the really important bit. Everything else is just the details.
It looks like pure politics, keep conservatives out and keep liberals in. His fault wasn't the donation. His fault was being outed as a conservative.
I think someone should try wearing a trump hat to work at a technology company for a week and see how long they last in the organization.
If you aren't in America, and you're frequenting (largely) American discussion boards, you're going to see the topics that get a lot of discussion - things where not everyone is on board with one side or the other. This of course tilts heavily toward culture issues.
Some people like to wax poetic about getting along with people with whom you disagree. But there's a difference between disagreeing on, say, tabs vs. spaces or fiscal policy or something, and disagreeing about what sort of people do or do not deserve rights. This situation clearly falls in the latter category and attempts to conflate it with the former are very unconvincing.
I'd say the answer to that is the same reason why there was a front page article the other day about which was more important: revenue stream or culture. Comments almost made it feel like people would gladly ride a company to the grave so long as they could feel good about what they haven't accomplished (making money).
How is this anti-democratic? Democracy means the reign of the people - nothing in that concept involves that corporations can't remove someone (pressure someone to step down) because of his views/actions.
To be more precise: In a democracy corporations can still be concerned with their public image and distance themselves from (particularly high-ranked) employees, if they consider them detrimental for their business.
I'll say it again: If Eich remaining CEO would have resulted in Firefox bundling a cryptocurrency (not to mention ads) like Brave does, then I'm really glad Eich left.
I'll also note that Brave went for Chrome's Blink engine, and while that calculus might have been different if he were running Firefox, it doesn't give me confidence that he would have preserved the Gecko engine.
Well, if Brendan Eich stayed CEO of Mozilla, maybe we would now have a kind of firefox/brave mixed browser.
But instead, we can choose between Firefox, and Brave. 2 competitors for Chrome, from which users can choose. So, in the end, maybe it was for the best?
Brave is just chrome with a few additions it’s much worse than a Braved-Firefox would be. I’m guessing he rightly feels he couldn’t use Firefox as his base due to the history.
"We study six browsers: Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox,
Apple Safari, Brave Browser, Microsoft Edge and Yandex
Browser. For Brave with its default settings we did not find
any use of identifiers allowing tracking of IP address over
time, and no sharing of the details of web pages visited with
backend servers. Chrome, Firefox and Safari all share details
of web pages visited with backend servers."
Of course it says that he left. That's how business works. "We agreed upon parting ways, so XY can focus on other projects." It's never "we kicked his ass and threw his stuff out".
He was asked to resign by Mitchell Baker at which point he presented a resignation letter. That is an involuntary termination, which for everybody outside the "C" suite is being fired.
I founded Brave with a pay-cut to $160K/year. Note that due to my not taking anything near $2M+ salary+bonus annual comp when I was at Mozilla, I am not independently wealthy.
I'm not complaining (it was worth doing Brave on many non-material grounds), but you are disparaging out of malice and ignorance. This will not work well for you in life — my two cents!
My correction then but of course as some have said here, $160k/yr for heading the modification of an existing browser and stealing donations of those who don't claim them is considered overpaid.
That said, I wanted to use and like Brave but no gestures so I moved back to Vivaldi to support another overpaid decadent CEO. You can't seem to escape them.
Oh, and 'disparaging out of malice and ignorance', well some have made a good living out of it as we see in our current climate. Not going to name names here but I'm sure you know who I'm talking about.
"stealing donations" is a lie. Brave gave out grants to anonymous browser instances which users could direct to be tipped. For one month we had these flow into a common wallet but we were the source and sender of funds. We fixed this by making the browser hold for 90 days retrying every 30.
You are still maliciously and ignorantly defaming me, with false claims anyone can verify from open source. This reflects badly only on you. Will Rogers' advice, free then and now, applies: when in a hole, stop digging.
I'm just going on what I've read here but I think the biggest point of contention that others have pointed out is if they don't sign up for Brave's choice of proprietary monetary systems [0], including its own which it/you has a stake in, the donatee receives nothing. It seems you're trying to reinvent the wheel (browser), or rather pre-existing technology, and make a profit off of it when even decades ago a donate button worked fine without another middleman trying to shove their greedy hands between you and the donatee. You understand why this irks some people, right?
And threatening people online to basically shut up, who you view as misunderstanding, you're vastly underestimating the expected demeanor of a CEO. As a user you'd expect me to be frustrated sometimes and complain but as CEO, honestly, you should just answer the questions as it doesn't make you look professional when denigrating those who used to be in your userbase. And if anything, the fact that I among many have these questions and they've ran so rampant and unanswered even on this very tech-related forum reflects at least poorly on your company's PR department.
If the recipient does not verify in time, the funds go back to their source: our grant pool, in the case you misrepresented; the user wallet if the user actually provided the tokens.
You are the one doing the denigrating (“to criticize unfairly, to disparage”) here.
We see Eich with his own browser vision and executive style over at Brave, where he is unencumbered by legacy bureaucracy or codebases. He wouldn’t have been as free if he were at Mozilla.
The problem is that we have the person who arguably most understands the domain of web browsers, online privacy, and all the legal and ethical aspect thereof, working on another Chromium-based browser.
I do not need to elaborate on why a diverse browser ecosystem is important, there are enough threads on that already.
Mozilla had this jewel, exactly what it needed to succeed and make the web a better place. He was attacked for his personal beliefs regarding gay marriage, which went against the current popular liberal attitudes, who attack anything they perceive as against them with a fury on the scale of lynch mobs. The web, for better or for worse, gives huge leverage to whoever is willing to make the most noise and be the most unruly.
So Eich was attacked, Firefox market share plummeted, the new CEOs take home four times what Eich was taking home yet add "Pocket" and other misfeatures while funding for Rust and MDN is being cut. Instead of a 95% monoculture of a Microsoft product we now have a 95% monoculture of a Google product. But hey, the guy who doesn't support gay marriage is out of the picture, right? That's a win, right?
Sorry, but you're not going to paint Eich as a victim over what is a totally self inflicted wound.
And there is no argument from utility to be made here either along the lines of 'oh Eich may be a bigot, but look at that nice browser he gave us'. He has to work with the people around him and that scenario would have likely not panned out.
Instead, a large chunk of Mozilla/FireFox' employees may have walked if he had tried to hang on, or maybe he could have come around on the subject in a halfway believable way.
But he chose to walk instead, his loss, and ultimately, possibly our loss too.
> He has to work with the people around him and that scenario would have likely not panned out.
Or it would, since he worked with the same people before the wokefest with absolutely zero complaints from anybody. If people didn't decide having ideological purity and expelling wrongthink is more important than having a good independent browser. Well, they have their purity now. Hope they are happy. Their usage may be in the drain and their perspectives bleak, but at least nobody dares to form an unapproved opinion!
> Instead, a large chunk of Mozilla/FireFox' employees may have walked if he had tried to hang on
Or, somebody adult would explain to them it's actually ok to disagree on some subject, and that't the thing adults do sometimes. Unfortunately, looks like there's no adults in the industry anymore. Or at least not at those quarters.
Out of curiosity, do you know of any companies in your field where the CEO believes you personally don't deserve rights? Would you work for that company? Why or why not? If there is no such company, why do you feel qualified to level this opinion here?
All of the poly people I know work for companies that don't support their right to marry.
I think it's worth pointing out that the ballot prop that Eich supported actually won. It wasn't a niche belief, certainly not at the time. I don't think Eich was the only CEO in America that didn't support gay marriage. What set him apart was that he didn't do a better job hiding his beliefs.
I have no idea what's most CEO's opinions are on political subjects, and prefer to keep it that way. I would certainly work with CEO that has different opinions than I do - in fact, for all I know, I may already be.
My CEO believes only the people who have a baby should receive a bonus (a stimulus of a kind) for having a baby. Those who don't have a baby a specific year have no rights to that kind of a bonus. No group of childless people formed with the intention to cancel him.
It's obscene to paint Eich as the perpetrator of a self inflicted wound for not "coming around on the subject in a halfway believable way", for not trying to appease the mob. "Stop hitting yourself."
My understanding is that Mozilla employees protesting his politics were not actually planning to walk and were disappointed and a little embarrassed that he left. They just wanted some sort of apology.
It looks like the closest they came to working with Mozilla was porting a simple game to Firefox OS. Getting attention at the time doesn't mean they spoke for anyone else. It sounds like you don't know how Mozilla employees felt.
"My gut reaction, is that they [homosexuals] are security risks, but I must admit I haven't given this much thought…I’ll be darned!’” -- Joe Biden, 1973
How many of those that "cancelled" Eich are still going to vote for Biden?
Ignoring the very clear bias/agenda you're trying to present, the lag time of 47 years is huge compared to some other high-profile instances of people being "cancelled". Also you can apologize for something and lack sincerity, which is even more insulting.
Personally I'm not a huge fan of the intense court of public opinion of cancelling, but it's absurd to paint it both as a leftist-specific act, or that if you're a leftist then you're allowed to get away with it.
I believe in people being able to actually talk and treat each other like human beings instead of monsters. The conversation unfortunately is hyper-polarized and many people aren't willing to even engage with someone who doesn't share the same belief set, and to me that is a shame. I don't think it's fair to paint this as a left/right issue. This total lack of engagement occurs on both sides.
I'm not a Biden fan, but Biden has since been a decent supporter of LGBT rights and pushed Obama on the issue. Eich never showed any kind of contrition like that. People can change. I am friends with a number of formerly homophobic people. However, Eich, at least in 2014, displayed no evidence that he had.
Did Eich make any statements at all? I recall he was cancelled out because someone found a donation of his to a political cause. He literally just gave money to a cause.
Imagine if who you supported on Patreon or Ko-fi caused you to be harassed until you quit your job? Imagine if someone says you're a hateful bigot because you openly donated to a podcast. Imagine if a donation to the Trump or Biden campaign caused all your employees to turn against you?
If he was firing homosexuals for being gay, that would be one thing and unacceptable. I grew up around Christians who would say they find x or y morally wrong, but that wouldn't prevent them from working with people who supported x or y, or believing they were human beings who are entitled to their own opinions.
Real tolerance is accepting people who have different beliefs about core issues, and working with them despite those differences.
A piece of paper promising fidelity is a fundamental human right? At most it is a religious construct, by definition not fundamental and far from universal. At a minimum, it is a government or social formality. And in both cases, it is designed to provide stability for the offspring birthed of such a union in societies unaccepting of bastard births.
A marriage is a legal contract, not a piece of paper promising fidelity. Fidelity has not mattered legally for a while now.
Romantic pairing is a common enough human thing that it makes sense to have legal constructs to protect both parties. If you are affording these protections to opposite-sex couples, then it is blatant discrimination not to do the same for same-sex couples. There is no rational basis for making such a restriction, after all.
Legal marriage, as in a civil arrangement, isn't really a right. However, being treated equally under the law is a right.
I am an atheist and yet I am married. I know other atheists who are married. Marriage can have religious aspects, but it doesn't have to.
> Romantic pairing is a common enough human thing that it
> makes sense to have legal constructs to protect both parties.
Why does either party need protection in a romantic pairing? I've been in dozens of romantic pairings but I did the religious ceremony only with the pairing that was expected to produce children.
Wait, "pushed Obama"? So Obama actually needed to be "pushed", because he was of the same opinion as Eich? But it's OK for the President of the United States to be of such opinion, because unlike CEO of Mozilla, he has no authority over the vast giant powers of Federal Government that actually decides what is allowed and not allowed in the country... Priorities!
I'm not going to dig into this, but from other comments on this post, it seems he did make statements that walked back the position specifically regarding lgbtqqiaap+
Yeah Brave's business model always seemed incredibly scummy to me. For ad blocking arguments can be made both ways, but Brave's "let's replace them with our ads" model (I know it's opt-in) just seems like a way to hold site revenue hostage. Either join Brave's network or miss out.
Vivaldi seems like the better Chromium wrapper to me. But my daily driver is Firefox.
FF is my daily driver too, but since Google properties increasingly only work reliably in Chromium, I use Brave for those (without opting in to BAT, which doesn't appeal to me). It's not bad, works fine on Ubuntu, built-in adblocking (but you can install uBo etc.)
He would've had an iconic brand, elite staff, an established business model & userbase, etc. I'd posit he'd have been a much better technology focused CEO then the leaders of Mozilla's current titanic trajectory into obsolescence.
Instead of Brave where he's having to build a product, brand & userbase from scratch & try to force a niche unproven VC business model with Brave.
FWIW, Brave's VC funding is < 10%. No "VC business model", whatever that is, either — I carved nature at the joint using science, proceeding from ad/tracker blocking and reconnecting the necessary parts of the Web's funding ecosystem via crypto.
Yes, that is legal. But what matters is control of the board and how the structure of the foundation is set up. With six voting board members assuming things like who is the CEO of the company is something that they are allowed to vote on (it normally would be) she could technically be out of there tomorrow. But this is politics, it is not a merit based affair and there is a fair chance that two or more of the board members are beholden to Mitchell and that would protect her from any attempt to oust her.
Common in the US, but viewed as bad corporate governance elsewhere. A separation of the roles has been a recommendation in the UK Corporate Governance Code since 1992, for instance.
Not just member, Mitchell is chair of both the parent (Mozilla Foundation) and wholly owned subsidiary (Mozilla Corporation) boards. This is unusual, in my experience.
This is my kneejerk but why do a CEO ever has to be replaced by an engineer?
I mean, when company fails, isn’t the cause that the corporate failed to lead the company, right? They sucked at their job, not at someone else’s job.
Letting managers pretend their lack of some stinky nerdy ability outside of their job description was the direct cause of their failure don’t sound right to me.
The cancel culture surely goes both ways here - Eich was working actively to cancel the marriages of certain people he didn't like. So people cancelled the browser in retaliation and he had to quit his job (or was forced out, who knows).
Most people would probably think it is worse to get their marriage annulled than to lose a job, but YMMV.
If I read the “Appointment to CEO, controversy and resignation” section[1] of Brendan Eich's Wikipedia page then it appears he was cancelled:
- employees publicly speak out, telling him to resign
- widespread media reporting
- an online campaign to have him removed starts
- “online dating site OkCupid automatically displaying a message to Firefox users with information about Eich's donation, and suggesting that users switch to a different browser”
- “CREDO Mobile collected more than 50,000 signatures demanding that Eich resign”
- Eich resigns
I'm not sure how that could be anything other than part of cancel culture, other than it being ahead of the current trend by a few years.
There isn't anything in there about "employees publicly speak out". Some board members (not employees) stepped down but IIRC they did not actually speak out and call for Brendan to resign.
Everyone on that list worked for the Mozilla Foundation, and would not have reported to Brendan as CEO of the Mozilla Corporation (which made that tweet misleading at best). I referred to that group already in the comments here.
AFAIK no Mozilla Corporation employees spoke out publicly in this manner, and internally I did not hear any such sentiments from Corporation employees. On the contrary, a lot of Corp employees expressed anger at that Foundation group ... not because they supported Brendan's Prop 8 position, but because that Foundation group poured fuel onto a fire that was doing great harm to Mozilla.
Mozilla employees were very much against the hatred directed at Eich.
There was even a blog post from a homosexual woman who worked for Eich, where she said what a great boss and friend he had always been to her, how well he treated everyone including gay employees, and how much the hatred directed at him was misguided.
The logical conclusion we have to make is that a political donation or opinion does not necessarily indicate bigotry.
There is an obvious selection bias in support for the boss though. If you like your job it is not smart to publicly speak out against your boss. Perhaps especially if you belong to a group the boss may have some grudge against.
There's also another selection bias against talking in support of somebody who's being cancelled by an internet outrage mob. Perhaps the only reason anybody would feel safe in doing so is if they were a member of the group the mob was purporting to be outraged on behalf of.
Yes, and I'd argue this is the strongest form of selection bias in such circumstances -- and the one that takes the most courage to avoid falling to.
First they came for ... and I didn't say anything.
Then they came for ... and I didn't say anything.
...
Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak for me.
When people select themselves out of speaking up for others because of fear, the purity/outrage spiral can get out of control.
Good point - the pressure goes both ways. Supporting an ousted boss and thereby criticizing current leadership is also risky.
I think the real problem was that Mozilla had built a strong community support on representing certain values and freedoms in contrast to Microsoft (which was the dominant competitor at the time) as being perceived as more trustworthy. Firefox only became successful because lots of supporters advocated it and web sites made an effort to support it.
But this support only exist as long as you are perceived as honest. During his week (?) as CEO Eich (and other Mozilla spokesmen) emphasized that Mozilla as an employer recognized same-sex marriages and provided equal benefits to same-sex spouses. The CEO clearly disagreed strongly with this policy, but at the same same swore to uphold it. Who cares if he believes in it then, right? But it clearly shows that the leadership does not actually care about the values they espouse, which is a broader problem that this particular issue.
I don't really think a browser or other software should have a stance on marriage equality. But the fact remains that Mozilla as organization and employer did have a stance, and the CEO disagreed with this stance - but claimed it wouldn't matter at all.
If the mission of Mozilla has just been to make money, nobody would have considered it problematic. But then again it would never have become successful in the first place without the community support, based on trust.
I think that’s the sort of perverse reasoning that gets you into a purity spiral in the first place. I disagree with plenty of things, morally or otherwise, why would that mean I don’t think other people shouldn’t be able to make up their own minds, and decide for themselves how to live their own lives? The premise of this seems to be that anybody who has a stance on anything can not be expected to tolerate anybody else having a difference stance. I can see how the people of Silicon Valley might come to expect that, but it’s not normal.
But a CEO is expected to lead representing certain values. Often a CEO is chosen exactly due to their values and expected to further them through leadership. You would also think it was weird if the Mozilla CEO was funding campaigns against open standards or open source. Whatever your personal stance on marriage, Mozilla as organization had one stance which the CEO strongly opposed. So it would not be crazy to expect he would want to change their policies.
The damage control strategy was to insist that his values would not affect Mozilla, which is kind of a weird stance to have as CEO.
> would that mean I don’t think other people shouldn’t be able to make up their own minds, and decide for themselves how to live their own lives?
In this context it is worth noting prop 8 was exactly about preventing other people from living their lives a certain way. There is a big difference between disagreeing with somebody life choices and then to actively try to destroy their marriage!
> This CEO needs to go, needs to be replaced by someone who is well versed in technology instead of in law.
i wonder how things would have turned out if mozilla was some kind of cooperative instead of top-down traditional structure
ceo chosen from someone who actually worked there, or brought in from outside, would they have chosen someone different... in this case, would they have already voted them out?
> This CEO needs to go, needs to be replaced by someone who is well versed in technology instead of in law
There are people who are well versed in both. There are several HN posters for instance who are or have been both lawyers and engineers (although I can't recall any specific names at the moment).
I think the big problem is that Mozilla/FireFox receiving money from Google served essentially as a bribe that allowed Google to pull a bunch of anti-competitive behavior that cost FF marketshare.
If not for that we could have easily seen a repeat of Netscape vs Microsoft, but it is hard to consciously decide to bite the hand that feeds you, especially when it is connected to the proverbial 800 lbs gorilla.
I suspect FF would have lost marketshare in any "under Eich" scenario too, maybe not as fast and maybe he would have re-focused the company earlier.
But that's all water under the bridge we are where we are today.
The first year of Chrome's release, I absolutely hated it, not because of the browser itself, but because it felt like a shot to the gut of Firefox and open source development in general.
This is an extraordinarily easy view to take from a position where your boss isn't proudly making an effort to try and prevent you from gaining access to certain rights.
I reckon if everybody who felt like chipping in with their lazy armchair analysis of "SJW mobs ruining Firefox" instead spent their time fixing a bug or two, then maybe they'd be happier with the state of the browser they claim to love so much.
You're right in that he's views are very "20th Century". I don't agree in witch-hunts and the way he was dealt with by the mob (as is very common in today's Western society).
I'm very happy with the state of the Firefox software, and have in the past contributed finanically to Mozilla (not anymore :().
The portrayal of this situation as a "witch-hunt" or being "dealt with by the mob" is a good demonstration of how you personally are contributing to this problem.
I'll say it again – it's easy to portray something as a "witch-hunt" when you personally have nothing at stake. I'm sure it seems pretty abstract, to be honest – a nice and easy thought-experiment about how we should all have respect for everybody else's views and all that.
On the flip-side, we're talking about a situation in which somebody was happy to campaign to prevent a number of their own employees and other people in the wider community from gaining a set of rights. Eich was an active participant in trying to disadvantage me, personally. This is something that I would consider unacceptable for an organisation I would support, and others feel the same way. They are entitled, and should be encouraged, to express that view.
We will each draw our own lines in terms of what we consider to be acceptable behaviour from public figures. Most people would probably object if Mozilla were to appoint a CEO that promoted some other controversial cause – say, mandatory deportation of all non-white Americans. I doubt you'd cast objecting to that appointment as a "witch-hunt".
Personally, I consider funding a campaign against same-sex marriage to be behaviour I'm not willing to accept. And you consider this to be behaviour that you are willing to accept – that is, in this case the benefits of appointing a particular CEO outweigh any concern about the views they hold. It would be way easier for you to be honest about that than to pretend this is anything other that a group of people who don't agree with you.
I didn't sign up to fight a huge internet fucking hate mob.
Dudes an out and proud homophobe and accepted a position of public interest in California. That was always going to be a showdown between the only the tech matters and social justice types. There's no way he didn't know it and there's no way the board members didn't know it. A board member resigned about it before he took the position.
He signed up for and was sent out of the gate as a champion for team tech only and promptly fled the battlefield. Team tech only refuses to accept their defeat.
CEOs tend to have a pretty thick skin. If you think it is a fun job you should try it for a while. And it didn't stop Eich from starting up another company.
Besides that, he wasn't forced out, that part of the narrative is simply false. CEOs have been - rightfully, in many cases - accused of far worse than this and have sailed through just fine. That said, if my employees en-masse demanded that I resigned I might have done so as well. After all, the internet hate mob is easy to ignore but the employees you work with every day are not.
No one working for me demanded I resigned when I was at Mozilla. Six people working for the Mozilla Foundation, under separate management up to a separate board with only the board chair in common between the Corporation where I worked and the Foundation, did tweet demands.
Well, to be fair, he contributed $1000 to a huge real-life fucking hate mob.
Ramble on about 'SJWs' or 'cancel culture' or whatever if you like, but the fact is that social actions have social consequences, and this is an example.
But this kind of consequence is just way over the line. We have a legal system where everyone sat down and agreed on very clearly defined appropriate consequences, while cancel culture is just emotionally driven people taking matters into their own hands, not really different from medieval witch hunts.
You do have a legal system, but nobody in this situation did anything illegal. Clearly what "everyone sat down and agreed on" is insufficient, when both sides are saying that "thing X the other party did was legal but inappropriate".
But they are (attempting to) use ballot initiatives to deny civil rights to certain people, which if anything is worse than getting people fired.
Bottom line: if you contributed to Proposition 8, you did a bad thing, and it needs to hurt. Without a feedback mechanism of some sort, the original 'cancel culture' -- the one that brought us the Dark Ages -- will prevail.
As a straight white cis-male, I have no dog in the fight. But I know right from wrong, and Proposition 8 was wrong.
Proposition 8 did not go through because our legal system was doing its job. That’s the feedback mechanism right there.
Now if you set up a ballot initiative to fire anyone who contributed to it, then that’s fair game, but obviously any remotely sane judge will deny it. (Which is also the feedback mechanism telling you you’re proposing something extremist here.) Now, circumventing the law to serve your own arbitrary version of justice? Who the hell do you even think you are? Fucking Batman?
But nobody suggested a ballot initiative to fire anybody. Not everything requires an act of government. Sometimes social pressures are, and should be, sufficient.
I suggested it, because it would be the correct way to do it, and a good way to realize you’re asking for something extreme.
The social pressures you’re advocating are not a weaker form of serving justice. They are stronger. They circumvent our legal system, they’re arbitrary, they’re simply mob justice. No one can keep them in check and indeed they frequently go too far. This is not ok.
That's rich, considering the "mob" is only asking for the same rights you and I have.
It sounds like you've made up your mind on this issue (or, more likely, had it made up for you as a child), so we'll probably have to agree to disagree.
The mob ultimately has no power, while the government does. Whoever uses force first -- or in the case of Proposition 8, attempts to -- is the bad guy.
It really is that simple. Don't want a culture war? Don't start one.
There's a difference between using force within a legal framework (Proposition 8), and using extrajudicial force (cancel culture).
And that difference is that a sane instance (the law) can reject you if you're being insane, which did happen in the case of Proposition 8, but can't happen with cancel culture.
So you're justifying the usage of extrajudicial force with an already rejected attempt to use judicial force.
And you think that's fair, and you're the good guy.
The point is that the means used to get those rights are harassing the family members of the opposition and getting them fired.
No matter how noble your goal, this is just not how politics is supposed to work in a healthy nation. At all. Quite the opposite, this is analogous to how politics worked when the Soviets killed millions and millions of their own people in order to attain a communist utopia. Do you not see that?
> or, more likely, had it made up for you as a child
I think I've articulated quite precisely why I have my opinions.
Quite the opposite, this is analogous to how politics worked when the Soviets killed millions and millions of their own people in order to attain a communist utopia. Do you not see that?
Yes, I see that misusing government power to enforce unequal treatment for a disfavored subgroup is exactly like what the Soviets did.
Now that you've steamrolled your own position more effectively than I managed to, we're done here.
> misusing government power to enforce unequal treatment for a disfavored subgroup is exactly like what the Soviets did.
It is, which is why Proposition 8 was rejected.
> Now that you've steamrolled your own position more effectively than I managed to, we're done here.
Dude, are you seriously going to be that snide while poorly strawmanning my argument? I’m not at all saying we need to stop gay marriage via govt. I’m saying cancel culture sucks.
Turns out if most of your employees dislike you then it's going to be hard to be an effective leader! This is despite him having had many opportunities to take outs/apologize etc. He could have even lied when apologizing! He made a choice to stick to his "principles" instead. Of course you face consequences for this kind of behaviour.
This is extremely non-controversial in any other social setting, why would running a company be different? Why is being forced out for being a bad person seen as this new phenomenon when people stop interacting with people they dislike _all the time_?
right but it doesn't actually matter. He had a choice and a way to keep his job if he wanted to. People do stuff in bad faith all the time! It's not the sign of perfect morals but it's a thing one can do if they want to keep certain relationships healthy.
He actively chose between "have a good relationship with employees at Mozilla" and "stick to his guns on the issue at hand". He made that decision, and had a hell of a lot of agency in how things turned out.
Granted this was a while ago, but imagine being so committed to anti-marriage equality that you do what he did? Why do you feel the need to carry water for somebody doing that?
Just to be clear. You prefer people lying while apologizing over people who disagree with you?
Do you, at all, consider, at least sometimes, that people that disagree with you might have to say something intelligent about their position? I am not trying to defend homophobism, irrespective of the question of Brendan Eichs action or believes are homophobe, or not. But, I do believe that somebody disagreeing with me, might have something to tell me. I believe even that it is boring to talk to people with whom I agree on everything, although it is comforting and easy. There is value in communicating with people of different believes, standpoints, intellectual fields, religions, or sexual orientation or ... . Therefore, I cannot fathom how people can prefer being lied to.
Have you considered that I _have_ heard these arguments and _have_ listened to these positions, and decided the person is wrong?
In your worldview at what point can I start rejecting people's positions? Why do I have to give ground here?
"you can just lie" is a cynical position, of course, but people are faced with much larger dilemnas. I would like for people to have basic empathy and _not_ finance anti-civil rights movements. But hey, at least a public apology/fix does a bit of damage to the reactionary movement.
And maybe they are actually a different person or have reflected on their actions, and it's not a lie. Nobody's a mind reader.
And when you are directly affected/targeted by the movement that Eich is donating too, it's not just a conversation. The guy was funding an effort to take away your rights.
Maybe consider that "you have to be nice to people trying to take away your rights" is something that relatively few people would actually subscribe to.
Both he and the board say otherwise and his stance was known prior to his appointment. Hell, one of the board members resigned over his coming appointment and that wasn't enough to get the others to not back him.
They "say otherwise" because that's the polite thing to do in this situation. A "voluntary" resignation keeps everyone on good terms instead of producing an inevitable slapfight between Mozilla and Brave. The resignation was pretty clearly under duress, no matter what the official / publicly stated reasoning might have been.
His stance was known, maybe, but it wasn't until after he was appointed that the backlash ramped up to its peak.
If all of the main participants making public statements about something does not convince you that it went down the way it did then I don't think there are any arguments that would convince you at all.
> n I don't think there are any arguments that would convince you
Of course there are arguments. The arguments would be if there wasn't a huge controversy about it. But there was.
Thats the evidence that he was forced out.
If, instead, there was no controversy of note, and nobody had called for his resignation, internally or externally, then in that situation I would believe that they were not forced out.
But thats not what we saw. What we saw was a huge controversy, and we saw people, and even other companies, calling for him to be pushed out of the company.
If this evidence had not existed, then I would believe that they were not forced out.
The last CEO was Chris Beard. Eich was CEO for 11 days. He donated to Yes on 8 not a Christian organization. Donations are public. He resigned under pressure from Mozilla employees and the public. It wasn't because of a formal code of conduct.
Judging by the numerous projects Mozilla has launched and then abandoned in recent years, it seems the people running it are searching for new hit products, instead of investing for the long term on development of services and infrastructure that will benefit humankind for years and decades to come. Quoting from the OP:
"In recent years Mozilla has created:
* a mobile app for making websites
* a federated identity system
* a large file transfer service
* a password manager
* an internet-of-things framework/standard
* an email relay service
* a completely new phone operating system
* an AI division (but of course)
* and spent $25 million buying the reading list management startup, Pocket
On the internet, "recent" is not an very useful word. Even 5 years ago is literally a different era of the web already, so holding someone to account for shuttering things that for all the world seemed a great idea 5 years ago after only a few years because the web itself stopped being interested in those things is kind of missing the point. All those things are attempts at doing exactly what you're accusing them of not doing - all of these started in the expectation that they'd finally be something that could be sustained long term to either generate income or drive up user numbers (which indirectly generates income). What you're actually looking at is how fucking hard it is for a company that's already established on some corner of the web to come up with even a single way to sustain itself by moving into a different corner.
There's no money in making a browser, and even the things that look promising enough for a company that can't just throw 100 million at it because that's not even a dent in their budget almost always turn out to not be promising after even a year or two. When keeping those things running costs you more than you'll ever make back on them, you shut them down. That's what a company has to do.
That list is not "What did Mozilla kill", it's "What did Mozilla unsuccessfully try in order to not go under". It reads as a testament to the reality of how hard it is to make a buck on the web: everyone wants everything for free, and if it's not available for free, hundreds of bunches of folks will make a competing thing that is, and of those hundreds, usually at least one succeeds (and you never hear about the hundreds of failures).
Please don't attack a straw-man. I agree with you: they are "searching for new hit products" -- that's in fact what I wrote above. But that's what profit-seeking businesses do. Is Mozilla a profit-seeking business, or is it a non-profit, or is it neither, or is it both? Is Mozilla truly trying to "put people before profit," as its website currently claims?[a] The answer today, I think, is no. "Sustainability" (i.e., profit under a different guise) is the overriding goal.
No, it isn't: it's what everyone has to do, because you need to make enough money to at the very least cover your expenses.
Mozilla may be a non-profit, but being a non-profit does NOT mean "doesn't need to make money": they still have 750 employees that need to be paid, offices around the world that need rent paid (despite COVID), global infrastructure that needs to be paid for, SaaS for employees and contractors that collectively runs in the tens (if not more) of thousands of dollars a month, etc. etc. and that needs a sustainable revenue stream that isn't "hoping google will foot the bill".
Right now they're losing 7-8 digits a year. Mozilla absolutely puts people before profit, but they sure as hell aren't going to put people before surviving. That would be idiotic: you can't further a mission by going bankrupt.
The pigs that separate themselves in status from the rest of the farm animals horde more resources for themselves even in the face of worsening conditions on the farm (their grain windmill gets destroyed at some point).
The pigs serve as placeholders for Stalinists, but the general dynamic exists in any political situation that accepts inequality, like corporate capitalism in the case of Mozilla.
Javascript has many faults, but go look into the history of how/why it was created and given that context, it's likely many would do far worse than he did.
I'd pay hansomely for Firefox but only if the funds go into development, not into fat cats wallets.
I'd also pay to remove junk like Pocket, or rather I'd consider paying for Pocket as a separate service. It irks me that it's forced into my browser.
I want to be free of Google. This includes Chromium which has too much of Google included. Mozilla is the last hope of a free (as in speech) internet.
On iOS Apple have enforced WebKit so there's little reason to use Firefox. It may have only ~4% market share but it's still my preferred browser. I hope beyond hope that they find a way to recover and rise again.
Though correct, that doesn't improve the situation OP is in - the one we are all in: we want to fund Firefox directly, not some side project and we simply cannot.
Let's say I want to sponsor the Servo project because I believe it's something the world needs. There's no obvious way to financially contribute to the project or to individuals other than randomly sending cash to them via PayPal using their listed email addresses on GitHub.
Ditto Firefox, but the source is in mozilla-central, so I'd have to work out how to deal with Mercurial to get the names/addresses. Another step, another barrier.
I'd also have to figure out who deserves reward, and that's not a minor task either. Then I'd have to repeat this X times for each person that should get paid, then repeat every month. It needs to be centralised to make it easy for the sponsorship.
I'd pay for a supported product. I'll not just donate randomly into Mozilla, because that doesn't let them know what aspect of their work is useful to me.
I don't want Pocket. I don't want VPN. I'd pay for Firefox though, and only Firefox.
Buying a product to solve a problem is very different to donating to a foundation.
> I wish as a community our reaction to Mozilla's troubles was "let's all start donating!" instead of "screw those evil pigs".
But what would that change? You're not donating to the makers of Firefox, you're donating to the entity that owns the makers of Firefox. They'll spend the money on whatever they find interesting or lucrative or politically wise. Firefox might or might not be among them.
Sure, they could fuck it up. Lots of people fuck obvious things up, and Mozilla hasn't been lucky in several of their recent investments.
But if serious money came in through donations, and everyone put "for firefox, keep it simple and good" in their donation box, they'd have to be particularly braindead to put that money elsewhere.
That being said, now that I do some math, it'd take 3.7mm people each donating $10/mo to match their 2018 revenue of $450mm/yr. Which does sound difficult to achieve...
> That being said, now that I do some math, it'd take 3.7mm people each donating $10/mo to match their 2018 revenue of $450mm/yr. Which does sound difficult to achieve...
For normal users who can hardly tell Chrome and Firefox apart and say "Chrome? Firefox? Sorry, I'm using the internet"? Yeah.
For power users? I'm not convinced. JetBrains makes about $250mm a year only from developers. But their focus is on delivering value to developers, making their lives easier and their work more fun. I'm sure Firefox could deliver a lot of value too, but they're focused on the lowest common denominator of all users, not on targeting e.g. developers or web power users and offering them something that Google does not.
But if there's a good chance that the money ends up in political activism or some hobby project at Mozilla ("why don't we build a new OS?"), donations aren't going to work.
Make Firefox a great Developer tool so you don't need Fiddler & co as a developer and sell that as a commercial version, keep the open source version. I don't know whether it will bring in $450mm, but I'm sure it will bring in lots of money.
I would argue JetBrains doesn't make most of their money from individual developers (consumers) but rather from businesses (who in some cases may be freelancers or solo founders).
Firefox offering a browser to companies, that's a better product for them from a security perspective or something, sounds possibly interesting.
But that being said, the competition from Chrome (which is free, integrated with GSuite, and already offers corporate security features) would be stiff.
And of course, Firefox's mission has always put humans at the center, not businesses. Moving from "Google Search $$" to "Business $$" might be a frying pan to fire move in terms of distracting from their core mission...
But still, interesting, and I appreciate your thoughts..
Another way to look at it: mozilla is a sinking ship. Being a CEO of a shinking ship looks bad on the resume and is high risk for the ceo (reputation wise). High risk jobs should get higher compensation than low risk jobs.
I'd certainly argue that for a normal company. For mozilla though, there is a question of why do you even need a CEO? Does Linux have a CEO? I suspect at least some of mozilla's problems is trying to run an open source project with an unsustainable (and very non-diversified business model) as a normal company.
> High risk jobs should get higher compensation than low risk jobs.
I agree with you, but isn't the problem more that they're sinking the ship? To take it to the extreme, if I joined a fortune 50 company as the CEO, and started losing billions a year with my decisions, should the board pay me more because I've created a risk to my reputation?
People aren't paid what they "deserve" but what value they provide to the company. If the situation exists (whether created by the CEO or not) that makes it more expensive to replace the CEO, then unless they plan on firing the ceo, the ceo's value to the company increases because they are expensive to replace.
Or to put another way, life isn't fair and outcomes dont neccesarily align with what people deserve in a moral sense.
Also people aren't paid what value they provide to the company, but what they can negotiate for - for example, if you need your job then your boss can get away with paying you peanuts even if you do 3x the work of your colleagues.
Incidentally, this is the basis of unions - the union negotiates your salary with the union's negotiating power of having the company's entire staff walk, which hurts far more than merely losing one employee.
This is utter BS - not from you, but from the marketplace and economic theory. What's being created here s additional cost, which is then being parlayed as a proxy for value based on the idea that there is normally a rough equilibrium between the two.
> the ceo's value to the company increases because they are expensive to replace.
The CEO’s value in general increases but that of the current particular CEO which is running the company into the ground decreases a lot more than that.
Or maybe, just maybe, it is way simpler.. How big is the temptation for a person just before retirement on a 'sinking ship' to stuff their pockets while possible?
This would be a reasonable argument if they were trying to attract a CEO to an already sinking ship. Being the one in charge when it starts sinking is a different case.
I think it would be a lot more fun if CEOs had to show an actual offer from a competitor in order to invoke the "I need to be payed this much to stay" argument.
Keep in mind the Linux foundation is mostly a vehicle for a bunch of empty suits to cash in on "all things Linux". The influence on kernel development is negligible except for the occasional cringe moment.
Endowments are usually managed by comittee, so yes.
However, if it becomes a more volunteer based organization, you tend to pay people in conferences and other infrastructure. Which is a very different type of thing. You still probably need someone to manage that, but its very different from being a CEO
The author presents firefox market share (a relative term) on one axis and CEO pay (an absolute term) on the other.
The sad reality is that the CEO pay should be a relative metric to tech companies of similar size in the bay area, where Mozilla is based. Or at least US tech companies of similar scale.
As the internet has enveloped the globe in the last 10 years, a huge amount of money has accumulated to this one industry & area. Even if executive salaries were constant, returns from stock at FAANG and startups would, I think, make $2.5mm a pretty small total package for an org like Mozilla.
Eg GitHub founders are now worth billions. A lifetime at 2.5mm wouldn't get you there.
This sucks. It's sad. It's weird. But blaming the good people at Mozilla feels pretty unfair here.
Pay should be relative to your value to the company and the CEO is not providing said value. You are allowed to run a company that gasp drives down average CEO pay instead of herding your pay brackets.
I disagree. Pay should be relative to the market rate for their skills - capped at your value to the company.
If a company needs to buy some widget - and this widget is worth $100 to the company - the company would be foolhardy to ignore the market and pay $100. Instead, the company should be looking at different suppliers and choosing one with the best quality, price, etc. If there is a lot of supply, it might be able to get the widget for $10. If the supply is limited, it might be forced to spend $90. In both cases though, the value to the company is $100.
If this CEO is not performing adequately in his role, then he should be fired. Full stop. But bringing his pay into the picture (which isn't all that much higher than high-level employees at FAANG) is just trying to incite anger in the mob.
If the widget provides $100 of value, just buy it for $100 and save all the manhours wasted in tendering.
Tendering encourages reduction of quality in order to minimise cost. It wastes time, and time is money. And quite often it means that opportunities are lost whilst wading through tedious processes.
Still it makes no sense to pay people millions of dollars when a company is not doing well financially. In this regards what Iwata did while being CEO of Nintendo during hardship (cutting his salary in half and getting no bonus) is the way to go.
Yeah, it really stings when CEO's get paid a lot while their company struggles (especially layoffs, etc).
In the case of for-profit companies like Nintendo, the CEO typically owns a ton of stock. If they turn things around, the financial returns to them will be huge – especially compared to letting the company crater.
Steve Jobs took no salary for years while Apple struggled (great!), and still ended up with several billion dollars, mostly from Apple.
That can't happen with Mozilla. If they cut the CEO pay in half, they'll probably quit and go work somewhere else. Then what?
Do you try to hire some other CEO for a tiny fraction of what they'd earn at an equivalent role at a for-profit company? At a time when Mozilla already looks like a sinking ship? Sorry, most folks who are talented enough to have multiple options would choose something else, even if there are "warm fuzzy feelings" for working at a non-profit.
If you don’t pay competitively, you won’t get someone who can do the job well. You might get lucky with someone cheaper, but it will require that luck.
The fact is that 2.5 million probably isn’t enough to get the kind of turnaround leader Mozilla needs. They have no revenue model. You’re basically handing a CEO a bunch of talented devs and free products and saying “make a revenue stream” for products where their competitors make a better product for free use. Lots of tech companies spend billions and never find revenue streams outside of their core business until they make acquisitions.
> If you don’t pay competitively, you won’t get someone who can do the job well.
I always have to think back to Jon Stewart on The Daily Show, who, in reaction to that exact argument for Goldman Sachs & Co paying out huge bonuses from the bailouts they've just received for crashing the economy shouted: You Don't Have The Best People.
What if you don't get the best people by offering huge financial incentives - what if you just get people who focus on financial incentives and career development, and what if those things do not strongly correlate with actually delivering higher value for the company?
> You’re basically handing a CEO a bunch of talented devs and free products and saying “make a revenue stream” for products where their competitors make a better product for free use.
"Here's a product that brings in 450-500 million a year, see what you can do". The users of Firefox aren't Mozilla's customers, it's Google & Co that are the customers. The users are the product.
> What if you don't get the best people by offering huge financial incentives
You aren’t guaranteed the best people if you do; but you are excluded from getting the best people if you don’t.
If a person is the best person, then all other things being equal (they interview well, like all potential job opportunities equally), they will accept the job with the highest pay. Obviously that’s a simplification of any situation.
Focusing on financial incentives and career development is what makes most of us get better. I study my craft and improve not just because of intrinsic value, but because I can make more money. The extrinsic rewards are the only reason people join corporations, otherwise we’d all work for ourselves. You may not like it, but it is true.
> Obviously that’s a simplification of any situation.
Yeah, I believe it's an oversimplification to the point that it ceases to be useful. All other things are not the same when you're running a privacy-focused "for the public good and the internet" charity vs when you're running a profit-focused "the public good is irrelevant" ad-tech company.
I don't know who the best developers are, but I have a feeling that a few of them are working on open source projects and aren't working on new ad products that would make them dozens or hundreds of millions if they worked for Google.
My impression is that you'll get a narrow field of candidates if "we pay you a lot" is your argument for why they should work for you. And on the flip side, if you say "we pay you well, but not FAANG level", then you exclude some people with a certain personality trait. I'm not sure that you're creating an issue if you don't attract those people when your motive is not "profit above all else" but essentially "profit doesn't matter, we're a non-profit".
A good CEO of a charity would be pumping their excess income back into the charity, so there's either no need to worry about pay or clearly the CEO is wrong.
> The sad reality is that the CEO pay should be a relative metric to tech companies of similar size in the bay area, where Mozilla is based. Or at least US tech companies of similar scale.
Or move to Europe or Asia and get 2-5x output per Google Search dollar.
This article has many problems. One of the main problems is that the immediate reason for Firefox losing market share is totally outside the control of the CEO or anyone else at Mozilla: Google pouring billions into Chrome, both actual billions of dollars and similar resources "in kind", like free advertising on the world's most popular Web properties (i.e. Google's). The best CEO in the world can't magically come up with a strategy to counter that.
Another problem is that it's all very well to wish for an alternative revenue stream, but the reality is maintaining a competitive browser with an independent browser engine and the wraparound service regular users expect (accounts, updates, sync etc) costs hundreds of millions a year. Finding an alternative source for revenue like that is just really incredibly hard. Mozilla's been trying for a long time. Saying "Mozilla needs an alternative revenue stream" is just not helpful at all.
I don't agree that the reason that Firefox is losing market share is outside of the control of Mozilla. Most people seem who stop using Firefox seem to do so for concrete reasons within the control of Mozilla: speed (now perhaps a historical issue), compatibility with sites and user experience (the various controversial changes to the url bar over the years for example). These are all within the control of Mozilla.
I'm sure that marketing is an important point and it's true that Google can promote Chrome in many places. However Firefox gained considerable market share against internet explorer under (IMO) more difficult circumstances: it was pre-installed, Microsoft were considered as or more trustworthy by the public than Google now is and of course some sites could never work well with Firefox as they used proprietary features like ActiveX. Word of mouth is one of the primary reasons that browsers (other those that are pre-installed) are adopted and the word-of-mouth on Firefox has been poor relative to Chrome for some time.
Regarding speed: it's not that Firefox got slower, it's that Chrome set a new performance bar that Firefox had to meet --- and largely has met! Though a cost of meeting that performance bar was dropping XUL extensions, which is one of those changes that people still complain about.
Contribution to Mozilla's defeat of IE is one of the great accomplishments of my life, but having been there for both fights, the fight against Chrome definitely was much tougher. Microsoft took their eye off the ball and basically stopped working on IE for a few years, which gave Mozilla a huge opportunity; no such luck with Chrome. The complexity of Web sites has increased a lot which makes it much harder to keep up and surpass a more well-resourced browser.
The difference in resources between the companies obviously factors into product quality as well. The four-way focus of speed, security, compatibility with an evolving web spec, and extensibility is demanding to say the least.
> Finding an alternative source for revenue like that is just really incredibly hard. Mozilla's been trying for a long time.
What alternate revenue sources have they tried? Outside of their recent VPN offering, I haven't seen anything that they've tried to monetize. They didn't even try and monetize Firefox Send, even though the developers had a monetization strategy from the start.
Yes it's surprising given how many side-projects Mozilla have how few of them have been monetized given that you must assume they have a genuine interest in finding alternative funding.
I'm sure that a number of people would have been prepared to pay for Firefox Send. I know a lot of people who have trouble transferring files too large for email so it surprised me that putting a user interface around backblaze's object store api with Mozilla's brand on it could not be a profitable business.
Pocket was quickly rammed through. Mozilla denied getting paid for the integration. That baffled people who would've understood if it was about money. Mozilla eventually admitted getting paid for referrals. That upset people who felt Mozilla had lied to them.
Sponsored tiles kicked off with marketing drivel about transforming the user's content experience.[1] Addressing users first and being more honest might have worked better.
The Mr. Robot promotion silently installed an add-on with a cryptic name. People thought they'd been hacked. Mozilla denied getting money for it too.
Mozilla treated users like resources instead of stakeholders and lost their trust.
I think Mozilla should have worked on a cloud application suite, like Google and Microsoft have. And possibly they could have done a better job extending it into an ecosystem for other application providers. This is very natural for the company that invented javascript and is a leading contributor to web assembly. It also would have had excellent revenue potential.
I am trying to think what other role can use this excuse of factors out of my control and failure to move the top line metric (in fact moving the other direction) but yet rewarded with a 400% increase in pay
"As of June 2013, Nokia's mobile phone market share had fallen from 23% to 15%, their smartphone market share gone from 32.6% to 3.3%, and their stock value dropped by 85% since Elop's takeover."
"Controversy arose around Elop receiving a €18.8 million bonus after Nokia sold its mobile phone business to Microsoft and he stepped down as the CEO. The controversy was further fueled after it was revealed that his contract had been revised on the same day as the deal was announced."
But you can't write an article about the decline of Firefox market share during the rise of Chrome and blame it all on the CEO.
(Mitchell's only been CEO for a year or so, but it is true that she (and Brendan, before he left) were largely the powers behind the throne since the beginning of Mozilla.)
The main difference here is a US tech Vs UK corporate culture.
Mozilla's approach is "spend lots of cash and grow fast like a VC backed company".
The guardian is a "let's try and have a stable user base and keep the company alive for another 100 years".
In this case, Mozilla's approach has failed badly. I think it's unlikely they'll turn it around without the help of another big tech company making a strategic purchase.
They only survived at all because they owned a stake in Auto Trader Group which was sold off for £600m, allowing their non-profit parent to continue operating. Since then they are just about breaking even with subscriptions. They also (very controversially) employ many unpaid interns to do journalist jobs.
Lots of industries employ lots of unpaid interns. Journalism, Acting, Museums, Charities, Sports teams, Political parties, etc.
On one hand, if people are happy to do work for free, a company would be stupid not to make use of it. On the other hand, governments should probably outlaw it since it really is just a loophole to pay less than minimum wage. ("Volunteer for 2 years for free, and then we'll give you a minimum wage paid position" = "On average over your career, you get less than minimum wage")
Their news operations are subsidised to the tune of ~£30m/yr by the charitable trust that owns them. Not in and of itself problematic, but accumulating a sizeable enough endowment to sufficiently fund operations isn't an option for most orgs.
> ...accumulating a sizeable enough endowment to sufficiently fund operations isn't an option for most orgs.
And one of the claims / complaints of TFA is that Mozilla had a massive income for many years, and could have built up an endowment; but instead chose to live "hand-to-mouth", spending their income on useless failed projects that have nothing to do with Firefox. (And CEO pay of course.)
Not arguing against the overall point but Thunderbird has nothing to do with Firefox either and is still a thing Mozilla's reason for existing is not just their browser.
I get the point you're putting across, but you chose a terrible example. Mozilla cut thunderbird loose years ago, after neglecting it (Thunderbird remained XUL-based long after Mozilla decided that XUL was a technological dead-end). Yes, Mozilla's mission to to make the internet better for all users - not just the web. But I think they forgot what their mission is sometime back.
Mozilla corporation is owned by a non profit. Having a sizeable endowment is hard, but that sweet sweet google money has totaled over a billion dollars so its not like they didn't have the opportunity.
Yes, that totals a couple billion dollars at this point. Mozilla's mismanagement of that money is really unfortunate. Up until 2012 Mozilla ran just fine on about 100MM a year. Why they didn't care to save any significant portion of the Google dollars is beyond me. If they had simply been a somewhat leaner organization they would be in a far better place right now.
Exactly. Asking for donations isn't good enough for the likes of Mozilla.
From the post:
> Mozilla should probably just ask their users for money. For many years the Guardian newspaper (a similarly sized organisation to Mozilla in terms of staff) was a financial basket case. The Guardian started asking their readers for money a few years ago and seems to be on firmer financial footing since.
This comparison doesn't make sense. First of all, nearly all these publishers are moving towards subscriptions. This clearly works for them to give readers other incentives like say remove ads and paywalled content, weekly hard copies, etc. Asking users to donate to a free browser when the alternatives are also completely free to use isn't sustainable for Mozilla.
Given that the closest equivalent replacement is Chromium or ungoogled-chromium which is completely free to use and the latter addresses privacy by removing Google on everything, how can 'donations' work for Mozilla if there are other browsers that exist that users can be used for free?
Replace 'Guardian' with every other online news publisher and you will also get to my disclaimer on where I said 'nearly', especially on subscriptions.
The Guardian knows that they will eventually add paywalls and require subscriptions just like every other publisher as everyone knows 'donations' are not sustainable to fund their 'journalism'. It's all about subscriptions, paywalls, etc.
EDIT: To downvoters: Oh so donations 'are sustainable' for the likes of the Guardian, such that they are still asking their users for years to donate whilst ramping up the registrations and adding a soft pseudo-wall on their content, and the suggestion is to get Mozilla to also ask its users for donations?
What happens if Google decides NOT to renew that contract in the future due to Mozilla's declining market share?
Explain how surviving off of user's 'donations' is sustainable for Mozilla to survive, given that Google is its direct competitor and offers a browser for free (and a similar one without the Google stuff is also free).
downvoter: You made an excellent case for criticizing a different passage in a similar article. The passage you quoted, and the only organization referred to in the article, was the Guardian.
Now you're just generally (and angrily) defending mozilla against a donation model, and ignoring the passage you quoted entirely. A passage which iirc was the entirety of references to a donation model in the entire article.
Well, I wonder if you think it makes sense economically for Mozilla to go through that model for asking its users for money - For a browser. Be honest.
Stupid question perhaps, but I thought Firefox was an open source project?
Why does it need a company with highly-paid executives and HR departments and all that to exist?
If Firefox/Mozilla the company goes out of business then .... nothing changes? Apart from of course a bunch of people sadly lose their full-time jobs and development speed slows dramatically as people are no longer working on it full-time and only volunteers contribute. Maybe some slick marketing goes out of the window and there are no more budgets for server farms to run Pocket (Oh no...</sarcasm>) and other centralised servers for distractions from the main Firefox product etc, but I am sure donations will cover the cost of a few .com domain names to keep those going (I'll stump up the $20 for the first year registrar costs if they need it)
Can everything go back to normal OSS development and distribution with almost-zero overhead (host on github, distribute over torrent/dat etc) if the business fails?
Don't get me wrong: I like Firefox and use it as my main desktop & mobile browser.
The problem is that the modern web is very complicated. Building a modern browser requires a lots of resources and that needs a big team with steady funding.
While the money is available (google) having a team this big requires enterprise level management, which leads to enterprise level shenanigans...
Well web browsers are to complex to maintain by part time Dev unless you have an upstream to rebase on or do not mind in implementing new stuff. You need at least 10 to 20 full time Devs at the minimum and that's if you libaries for all web APIs which clearly Firefox and Chrome are not doing. I wish there was a way to browser modular frankly.
The GP referred to "highly-paid executives and HR departments and all that", not developers.
Still. There are some obvious counter-examples of development of extremely complex projects being community-driven under the aegis of much lighter-weight organisations than Mozilla. LibreOffice is an obvious one; The Document Foundation had (at the last report) total expenses of $679,000, with nearly all of that coming from user donations.
To sustain an independent, cutting-edge, competive browser engine you need several hundred excellent engineers working full-time, at least. No-one's been able to do it with less.
No, it's hard to get. Also tricky is what counts as "the engine" varies from project to project. E.g. Webkit doesn't cover as much functionality as Gecko or Chromium, e.g. the HTTP stack is separate.
Isn't the obvious answer that CEO/executive pay should be tied more closely to performance? I don't root for anyone to lose their job, but in this case, it seems like the leadership of Mozilla is failing to lead them in the right direction. I don't see how that gets rewarded. If my performance metrics at work go down 85% - I'm probably getting fired. In this case, executive performance metrics should be closely tied to the fate of the company.
I understand it's hard to get someone "good" in as CEO of you can't offer competitive pay - they'll just go somewhere else. But I think the last few years of Mozilla and Firefox falling into the realm of niche developer/nerd tools needs to serve as a sharp reminder that even "good" executives can fail.
Time for an ultimatum - offer a reasonable salary with a large bonus based on improving market share. Get someone in there that really wants it.
No it's not obvious.
It's actually the #1 problem in Big corporations' governance.
If you are a For Profit company with share-holders, you can define performance as money gain by shareholders, i.e financial performance.
This is always short term and it's the #1 cited reason why private long term investment has basically disappeared in the last 40 years.
BigCo are managed with a 6m horizon and both eyes lock on the stock prices.
But if you are a non-profit how do you define performance ? How do you define Good ?
What horizon do you set ?
And BTW : why do you think higher comp will lead to better work ?
Was Einstein the most paid individual ?
>why do you think higher comp will lead to better work ?
While I do partially agree, I don't fully. Those who are good at what they do get paid more. Now, that means they generally start competent and well intentioned. No amount of money fixes an idiot with ill will. I think a lot of firms are ignoring that concept in the past 10-20 years.
The short term outlook is also a huge problem. You see it often in action on Bloomberg with the markets. It's Christmas or Crisis every other day, absolutely ignoring long term positions. To me, that's the difference between capitalism and profiteering. Capitalism is a long term infrastructure play to make money (like Disney buying Marvel and setting up the MCU in a way that can create many, many products that build off each other) while profiteering is just turn and burn, short-term plays ignoring more than 12 calendar months.
Perhaps your non-profit question is the real kicker. How does Mozilla measure success? Market penetration? The end of IE? But then by taking in Google money, does that make Chrome a competitor or ally? From a user standpoint, Chrome isn't exactly the "good guys" either due to epic tracking. So that in turn makes a bit of a conflict of interest when you toot your "privacy and user first" horn while you're paid by one of, if not the biggest privacy invader... ever. Financial independence would be a good current metric... but with the ceo pay hike... I doubt that'll happen.
> Isn't the obvious answer that CEO/executive pay should be tied more closely to performance?
Short term or long term? How do you measure performance in a way that can't be gamed? How do you prevent alignment of the company to achieve the metrics you set at the expense of all of the other things that make a thriving corporation?
Oh no, you've gamed the system to maximize your compensation and the long-term success of the company.
Sure setting good metrics is hard, but that doesn't mean you should not set and publish metrics.
What seemed to have happened is that pay was simply increased without strings. There are a bunch of cultural outcomes then across the company when you have this kind of absurdity.
(A previous company I worked for the CEO had a multi-million dollar loan for his family-home/mansion written off by the company/board... the company was losing money.)
Mozilla as many other software companies plays with words and their meaning trying to develop newspeak instead of working on a browser, and most importantly wants to abolish meritocracy because it does not suit their needs of diversity, see: https://blog.mozilla.org/careers/words-matter-moving-beyond-...
So please remember: every time you want to say 'meritocracy', you say 'discrimination' instead. Therefore, any your statement about performance is not valid.
I don't think this is true at the CEO level. A big reason why CEO's get big pay packages is to incentivize all the aspiring middle managers to work hard.
CEOs prior to being hired have little direct power - their power comes from low supply of qualified candidates and they can negotiate extremely favorable terms.
If everyone could be CEO like anyone could be a laborer, they would not get paid well.
> their power comes from low supply of qualified candidates
When they fail, were they among the pool of qualified candidates, or is their qualification determined by whether they get hired for the job? In other words: are they highly qualified at working as a CEO, or is their specialization in getting hired as a CEO/looking like they'd be highly qualified in the actual work?
I recall a study a few years back that found that CEOs did not appear to have a large impact with regards to company success. We're looking at successes and attribute it to the CEO, but when a company fails, there are a million things they had no control over so it's not fair to attribute the failure to them.
Sometimes a CEO is brought in to clean house, sometimes a CEO is brought in to right the ship and stop bleeding, sometimes a CEO is brought in to liquidate everything or make the company attractive to buyers. And yes, sometimes CEOs fail, or succeed.
I find it highly unlikely that people hired for CEOs do not have excellent CVs or success stories to point back to, or a strong network vouching for them. This isn't a level I networking certification. This is a top position with top pay - the idea that there is a subset of people just gaming their way to CEO is hard to believe. That's not to say they don't politik. But I don't think it's like a programmer lying on their first resume about how much of that project they really contributed to on internship.
But that's just it -- the "common sense" qualifications for a CEO position (namely, having pertinent leadership roles in the past) not only don't correlate especially well with outcomes, the correlation is actually negative, and becomes more so the more success they've had (as measured by number of roles).
This isn't consistent with the "rare qualifications create a positive edge, multiplied by lots of leverage" value story, but it is consistent with the "climbers get good at climbing" story. It's also consistent with my anecdotal observations where the biggest executive jumps involved dirty tricks that transferred downwards momentum to the company they springboarded up from.
Are boards stupid? Probably not. My guess is that investors have a cognitive bias towards simple stories and "qualified" CEOs help the board serve up simple stories to their investors while also providing ample opportunity for mutual backscratching. It doesn't matter whether or not they have an actual edge, the story is the product.
It's a good hustle if you can get in on it, but that's the trick, isn't it?
Are you going to cite this so called correlation? I would love to see the study.
> "climbers get good at climbing" story.
This isn't true. There are plenty of climbers - and if all that mattered was being good at climbing, boards would work to save millions of dollars by hiring cheaper "climbers."
>My guess is that investors have a cognitive bias towards simple stories and "qualified" CEOs help the board serve up simple stories to their investors while also providing ample opportunity for mutual backscratching. It doesn't matter whether or not they have an actual edge, the story is the product.
Or, perhaps, experience matters, and they just don't want to give it to people who don't have experience leading large entities. Just like anything else.
I'm sure you trust a plumber of 15 years over his journeyman of 4. Is it some secret evil cabal working against the plumber? No, it's just common sense.
> There are plenty of climbers - and if all that mattered was being good at climbing, boards would work to save millions of dollars by hiring cheaper "climbers."
Are there though? By nature of that kind of climbing, they get thinned out quite quickly, plucked from the wall by those more adept at hyper-competitive climbing without rules and sheer randomness. Here's a short overview with a few links pointing to studies that suggest that CEOs aren't having the impact common perception attributes to them, and whether they succeed or fail often depends on luck: https://www.inc.com/will-yakowicz/study-luck-looking-the-par...
> I'm sure you trust a plumber of 15 years over his journeyman of 4. Is it some secret evil cabal working against the plumber? No, it's just common sense.
Especially in tech, we don't see a lot of old CEOs though, and if we did, that still doesn't explain why any one in particular is chosen: the pool for any age group is large, they'll all have roughly the same number of years in experience. If luck is a large part in whether they succeed or fail in their role, if you continually test, you'll end up with people who rolled the dice and got lucky multiple times in a row, or you'll end up with people who manipulated the dice (or your perception of the dice).
Exactly, it's common sense: it doesn't matter if it's wrong, it's what people believe, so if you want to sell those people something, you'd better play into it.
If I remember tonight I'll dig through my archives and pull up the study.
>Isn't the obvious answer that CEO/executive pay should be tied more closely to performance? What are the implications of optimizing for those metrics over all others?
Define performance? (not trying to be rude, just using a little Goodhartian pedantry)
Turns out about two days ago I moved the Chrome icon back to my Android home screen. The latest Firefox Android version (80.1.3) had a catastrophic UI facelift. The top bar moved to the bottom. The colors are ugly. And there is a race condition between the address/search bar and your finger: suggested items appears at the top of the list with a timing such that it is very likely you hit them instead of the recently visited site you were aiming at.
The article makes me sad, but I am also sad to see time/work being wasted for needless UI updates.
Thanks for the info. Since the capability is still there, maybe they could ask after the update: "would you like to give a try to our new UI?". A reminder a few days later would give the opportunity to commit to the new UI or revert to the old one. That would be IMO classier.
So true. It's really frustrating when UI overhauls are forced. I understand that with all the changes under the hood, they felt that this was the right time, but a tick-tock cycle is more user friendly and UI changes should be rolled out incrementally to avoid disrupting everyone's workflow. That said, after a few weeks I am happy with the new mobile firefox. The url bar on the bottom is actually easier for me to reach with one hand, which I do a lot. And it seems faster and more stable than before.
There was an onboarding screen when you first launched Firefox that offered several choices. One of them was address bar at top. Others include dark mode and strict tracking protection.
I did not get it either, but may have overlooked it.
After the address bar on top, it is possible to disable the suggested search terms, which solves the race condition. It now looks more familiar but it remains:
- opening a blank tap requires a top-left corner tap and a bottom-left corner tap: quite a bit of thumb exercise
- the colors: I cant help thinking of a well-known french porn producer color-style. So I do not mind they are used in incognito mode, but I do for normal mode, which I always use.
Thank you for not using "exponentially". It's way overused.
But if Firefox stays its course and doesn't gain new users, it'll be done for when the next hot browser comes along or current users have enough of what's happening behind the scenes.
I feel like the only thing that can save Fx at this point is a community-funded, community-led fork. The only problem is: this project would need a lot of monies, so unless there's a corporate sponsor (or sponsors) it's unlikely to happen. And corporate sponsorship would require some sort of incentive that makes the investment worthwhile but at the same it it can't compromise the spirit of the project.
Let's say that the cost of a single full time contributor is $200k/y on average. Every 10 people working on the project cost $2mil/year - that's roughly the funds FreeBSD raises each year (and 3-4x more OpenBSD does). And I don't think you can continue independent fork with 10 people; you'd need 30-50 for the fork to make sense. I suspect it would be possible to get corporate sponsorship for the infrastructure needed so I'm not counting those costs but at this scale there's some legal and administrative overhead that has to be taken into account as well.
So the bottom line seems to be that you need around $10mil per year to let Fx survive as a community project. And I'm pretty sure you can't crowdfund that much. :S
If that "fork" was to survive as an independent browser engine with competitive performance and features you'd need at least 10x that number of developers.
The average Mozilla Gecko engine developer can quit and get a job at a big tech company making a lot more than $200K a year, definitely if they live in the Bay Area, and probably even if they don't.
Depends on the country and depends on the state. E.g. in California the basic overhead in terms of taxes payed by the employer is slightly below 10%. Then the personal income tax is 13%. You have to include other costs like matching 401k, medical premiums, other operational costs associated with each employee. $200k doesn't seem that outrageous from the employer POV since the employee is left with around $120k at the end of the day.
Mozilla need to stop sucking at google's teet. I know this is much easier said than done. At some point, the value proposition to google is not going to be that great since they already own the browser market. Not sure about you all, but I use Firefox. I use computers daily and immediately change my search engine to DDG once I have a fresh install.
They need to go after corporate IT departments and say something like the following: buy into our product. Our code is open, we are a charity, and we are here to make the web a secure place and free to everyone. We are here to make sure you are not bullied. They need something like the Linux foundation's model. They need the Exxons, they need the Fords. They need to show how scary it will be if Google wins the browser war again and what it will do to them, just like it would be scary if one single entity started owning the Linux kernel.
I think consumer markets are fickle. I bet if someone uses FF at work they are much more likely to use it at home.
People adhere to their browsers pretty well. I wouldn't change my browser at home just because I use it at work unless I wanted to synchronize my Mozilla/Google account across both computers (and this is often prohibited on enterprise licensed FF/Chrome).
Moreover, many companies make use of GSuite to handle email or collaboration tasks. If you already pay for such features, then it makes sense to follow through the platform and stick with Chrome.
To end, I will say that I use Firefox daily at home and work.
My opinion for the last few years has been that firefox is a total shitshow. There's no innovation in usability whatsoever. All it does is open websites and if you want anything fancy beyond that you'll have to get an extension.
Chrome already does this and markets itself as just doing it better while firefox kinda just passively takes it. Normal users don't read nerdy tech blogs explaining why the latest under-the-hood improvement is cool and improves performance by 0.3% on average.
Just look at vivaldi for a good example of how to do things right: Don't bother convincing people that you're "faster" than chrome and instead spend that time on building actual features.
What does firefox do that chrome doesn't? Vivaldi has tab groups, tiling, full-page screenshots, an option to hibernate background tabs, etc. etc. etc. and even then it struggles to compete with chrome. How the hell would firefox manage without any of those distinguishing features?
I think Gecko doesn't have a chance. I totally believe trying to fight this fact is crying over spilled milk. Microsoft tried. They tried not to lose ground with IE 9. Then again with IE 10. Then with IE 11. Then with Edge.
If Microsoft couldn't win and had to accept Blink, Mozilla can't compete. In its current form, Firefox can’t win. And this critique comes from someone who’s main browser is Firefox. Mozilla can’t compete with Google and Microsoft contributing to Blink (or Apple to WebKit).
From a performance standpoint, Firefox is not better. From a differentiating standpoint, Firefox doesn’t have the extension capabilities it used to. From a user’s perspective, there is very little incentive to recommend Firefox. From a website maintainer’s perspective, every year there is less incentive to support Firefox. This is the same downwards spiral that Microsoft saw.
Gecko will die and Mozilla will have to accept Blink. It’s the hard-cold truth. And all of this is ignoring the fact that Mozilla depends economically on Google.
> From a performance standpoint, Firefox is not better.
Neither is it worse. Firefox is faster at some problems, Chromium is faster at some others. I don't agree that Gecko/SpiderMonkey are doomed, and they certainly aren't doomed on the grounds of performance.
You are correct. But to be fair, that wasn't my point. My point is that Firefox doesn't work properly on as many web pages as Chrome does. This trend will get worse overtime. Why would an end user choose an alternative that breaks their experience with no perceivable benefit?
And yes, there are privacy benefits, but if the end user doesn’t know/doesn’t care then it isn’t a perceivable benefit.
Was Eich a turning point in Mozilla’s failure? I remember almost all my distant family in other parts of the country cancelling Mozilla because of the situation.
(Remember this is the organization being well run previously, until someone dug through private political data and found the previous CEO had made donations that were deemed double plus ungood by a minority of stakeholders.)
The "web" (and mobile) just got big and expensive and Mozilla couldn't keep up. Just look at Apple and Google revenue and it's obvious that Mozilla couldn't sustain.
Compounding the problem is that the more money they made, the easier they could buy out all the Mozilla employees who aren't politically committed against Google and Apple.
Eich was CEO for 11 days. Donations are public. He remained CTO after it became widely known. It only became an issue when he became responsible for making sure Mozilla didn't discriminate.
Firefox market share is certainly down but is usage really down 85%? I thought the market share was down partly because of smart phones and the browser market has expanded a lot of the last 10 years, especially in poorer countries were more and more people get internet access.
The hardest thing to see here is that we don't have a solution. Firefox makes money by setting google as the default search. Google is its biggest competitor. There are no obvious other revenue stream. Also, let's not pretend chrome sucks. Chrome is on top because it is an amazing browser (and you are googling stuff anyway).
Firefox needs to change it's strategy, it needs to pull an Amazon.
Amazon is the type of business that cannot be built. It costs too much, it was not profitable, but it was a stepping stone. Amazon sold books to get people in, built AWS (a separate business) to fund the business, created a fast delivery network (also funded by AWS), and then became profitable.
Firefox needs to find it's AWS if it wants to survive.
Bezos didn’t set out to build AWS, nor did he build AWS “to fund the business”. It was a somewhat-lucky turn of events. Amazon is fundamentally a distribution company that noticed some of their internal services could be sold to others, and it turned out that the market for that was bigger than expected.
I agree that Mozilla needs to get a similar lucky break somehow, but it’s not easy to get lucky on that scale.
It would be plenty of money to do what they need to do if they weren't hiring people they didn't need simply to virtual signal somehow thinking that it will bring more users and just generally spending money where they don't need to. Just take a look at some of their employees Twitter's ridiculous office parties ridiculous retreat party culture.
I have switched from chrome to firefox on desktop just recently, because chrome accumulated so many usability problems that i can not stand it anymore.
Pretty sad because it is the only privacy oriented browser left.
Safari has dropped support for any privacy oriented extensions, and while Chrome might support them, everything you do with it goes through Google anyway.
That while Firefox can run uBlock Origin, has the Facebook container built in and you can even install a 3rd party Google container.
The article suggests that Mozilla should invest in building financial independence. One suggestion would be to build an endowment. Would you have other suggestions on how Mozilla and open-source organizations in general could do to achieve that?
So I think we can all agree that Mozilla's path to success is not obvious and running it is strategically harder than running most companies. You have to find a way to make your free product compete with Google / Microsoft without compromising your core values and also paying your bills.
I am not defending this CEO's pay but I am just curious: how much do people on HN think the CEO of Mozilla should be paid? It's got to be enough to attract someone with extensive management experience at a high-functioning tech company so to me the absolute floor would be like $500k unless the person is retired and doing it for fun/charity.
Or do people not think they need a particularly qualified CEO and would be fine with a more democratic governance model?
> I am not defending this CEO's pay but I am just curious: how much do people on HN think the CEO of Mozilla should be paid?
Mozilla IS a not-for-profit foundation it's primary goal should not be profit.
What revolts people is how much she is paid and how much she increased executive pay _WHILE_ firing 250 people of one of their most successful teams.
Also lets be honest their 'strategy' has shifted from making software people want to use to let's do a UX extreme makeover because that's how Chrome does UX.
I know I should aim for constructive criticism but the UX on the Phoenix release for Android is so annoyingly counter-intuitive it made my blood boil.
Also dropping support for pretty much all addons on Phoenix is yet a major ball drop. The whole point of Firefox is customization and add-ons, if execs fail to see that then they don't understand the product that pays their 400% salary increase.
> It's got to be enough to attract someone with extensive management experience at a high-functioning tech company so to me the absolute floor would be like $500k unless the person is retired and doing it for fun/charity.
> Or do people not think they need a particularly qualified CEO and would be fine with a more democratic governance model?
This line of logic is so prevalent in the world, and isn't evidence-based. The idea that a desire to be compensated a specific amount always correlates with competence & that advertising a position with a higher salary will tend to attract people with a higher competency.
This thinking is likely to have some truth below a certain threshold, at which point people don't have sufficient income to live comfortably and as such have a need-based approach to raising their own salary. This rarely applies at CEO-level.
It sounds like you're arguing that Mozilla could attract a more competent CEO while paying them much less.
How?
Who?
Would you find someone who hasn't previously run a large, innovative tech org? How would you determine that they'd be good at this job? (Remember, switching costs for CEOs is high).
> It sounds like you're arguing that Mozilla could attract a more competent CEO while paying them much less.
The current CEO is well remunerated and seems by many popular accounts to lack competence, so this seems like a relatively low bar as bars go.
> How?
Hiring competent staff at any level is a challenge and depends on many things; there's no magic bullet. I at no point argued that hiring a competent CEO was easy, just that linking salary to competence as part of that hiring process is a faulty metric.
I'd say refining any hiring process by removing faulty metrics would be a good thing. Wouldn't you agree?
I've seen companies overpay for mediocre talent and assume that'll get them good work. Obviously doesn't work – you're right that high salary does not _cause_ high competence.
But if someone truly competent has an offer from the Google Chrome team and an offer from Mozilla, and Chrome can offer 10x more, well, you want to do the best you can.
"well" is not relative to average, it's relative to requirement.
> But if someone truly competent has an offer from the Google Chrome team and an offer from Mozilla, and Chrome can offer 10x more, well, you want to do the best you can.
"Competency" is a complex (& somewhat subjective) thing when it comes to leadership, but if that's your candidate's sole criteria for seeking the role, I wonder if that's who you want running Mozilla. You forget that this swings both directions: motivators are extremely important in leadership of any company, not least one with Mozilla's rights-based values.
Someone with a deep passion for building an amazing browser could reasonably be assumed to also be head-hunted by the Chrome team (and Edge, and Brave, etc...) as well as probably other, non-browser companies that just want their competence. They may also have a passion for supporting the open web, being nice to humans, etc, but they'll still have to justify to their spouse/family why they're turning down the other offers of much more money.
The perfect person could exist here but it's starting to look like very steep odds.
I'd be more for angling at someone with a deep passion for the differentiating factors between Firefox & Chrome (or more specifically, between Mozilla and Alphabet).
If someone has a deep passion for building an amazing browser but lacks any appreciation for why building Firefox might be more worthwhile than building Chrome, then I'd hope they would go work for the Chrome team, as I would not expect them to prioritise aspects of Mozilla's business strategy that differentiate their products.
Or in other words: is there any point in Mozilla existing if they ape Chrome/Google/Alphabet in their approach?
I'd do it for median company salary (edit:cost-of-living adjusted) on a platform of making the best browser experience possible for as long as possible. I wouldn't change much initially, hopefully growing into the job, and hopefully an on-board board would be the check that removes me if it doesn't work. Just throwing my mostly entirely unqualified hat in the ring!
Actually I think Mozillas path to success is quite obvious, but they never bothered to follow it seriously because of their own hubris.
> how much do people on HN think the CEO of Mozilla should be paid? It's got to be enough to attract someone with extensive management experience at a high-functioning tech company
$20k. And give him a bonus depending on the companies performance. Works in other countries and companies, no reason why it should not work there.
In the first place, that so called "extensive management experience at a high-functioning tech company" should be highly paid is a myth and BS. After a certain point the scale of organisation does not change enough to be more worth. And most work is not done by the CEO anyway.
> $20k. And give him a bonus depending on the companies performance.
How do you define company performance?
For a non-public corporation like Mozilla, you'd have to use a metric like market share. Okay well in the first year, how can you earn enough to pay for your kids college or whatever? You'll have to really get those numbers up _fast_.
Things like this is where we get shitty growth tactics like spamming everyone in your contacts or auto installing and preventing uninstall.
Instead I'd much rather have bold investment in long term growth. Innovative initiatives that may take years to pan out.
Devils advocate: you have to pay a top exec more if the company looks like its main product is in decline. Plus 2.4m/year isn't crazy in the scheme of tech salaries - that exec could potentially take other roles that pay even more.
Alternative: move the HQ and most development to Europe, where these ridiculous salaries are not common (see the example in the article of The Guardian boss), but there is still a strong privacy culture.
That might work but how often does that happen really?
SV companies relocate development but never the top brass to Europe as they would lose their pay, status and network.
Believe it or not, just like with dating and real estate, your monetary value is more dependent on where you are rather than how good you are. Shocking, I know.
Exec pay is usually tied to some metrics. Like market share or the revenue in case of Mozilla. (In the corporations it is usually done by offering CEO options with nonzero price.) If the company is not performing well, CEO only gets the basic salary (which is higher than engineer salary, but not too large.)
When Mitchell was given a raise for no reason, it is a sign of corruption in Mozilla board.
This really isn't crazy compensation given the role and the industry. There are many execs making orders of magnitude more [0]. I know there is a bit of sticker-shock for people who haven't heard about top-level compensation, but it's not unheard of, just usually unspoken.
The source doesn't say this isn't tied to metrics. The base salary is only $450k per year [0]. All the rest of the comp is paid out in other ways. I would wager that there are significant compensation thresholds that are tied to metrics (but we, as outsiders, couldn't know what they are or if they are being hit).
> There are many execs making orders of magnitude more
For that kind of negative growth? No, of course not.
> In its fiscal year ending January 31, 2019, for example, Snowflake had revenue of $96.7 million. A year later that number was $264.7 million, or growth of around 150% at scale.
This is why I like Balmer and Tim Cook. Their fortunes are tied to the success of their companies rather than leeching off of it as it dies. I'd posit that any CEO who is not in a Ride or Die relationship with their company does not have correctly aligned incentives for their performance.
$22 Billion to $77 Billion in annual revenue between when he became CEO to when he stopped in 2013. I think that's pretty decent. I think that it was growth in enterprise that they were successful with.
Microsoft's share price didn't go up much because they paid out large dividends. If you look at total return people who owned shares in Microsoft did very well.
(If you look at a company's share price, you will see a drop roughly equivalent to the dividend per share each time dividends are paid.)
I still don't get why companies pay ridiculous amounts of money to get execs from the outside. Every other role is (mostly) filled via promotions, why should executives be any different?
Admittedly, Baker specifically got her role by being "promoted" from a Netscape lawyer and then playing a role in the creation of Mozilla, so my complaint doesn't quite apply. I'd still see letting her go and promoting someone to fill her place as a better alternative to the pay raise.
Saving a declining company will bring enough revenue for future compensation for the CEO. And who wouldn't hire a CEO that saved a sinking company? On the other hand, if the company still goes belly up, well apparently that CEO wasn't so good after all. So high compensation wasn't needed.
I've been using Firefox for more than a decade now. In fact, I switched from IE to Firefox and never made Chrome my main browser. At times, it was difficult as Firefox was really slower than Chrome before Quantum release but I think in recent years it's gotten better. Why did I keep using it? Privacy and open-source.
But after reading this, I think I will switch to Safari. It'll be a tough change after all these years but I believe Apple is more capable of enabling me to keep my privacy more than Mozilla Foundation. I don't regret the donations I made there but it's really sad to see that I paid that money to that CEO guy.
CEO woman*. Mitchell Baker was the one who kickstarted the whole "I'm not getting payed enough in this non-profit" thing and the one who initiated the salaries increase.
I've been donating to Mozilla for years because I truly like their products and the fact it makes cutting-edge technology more open and accessible to everyone. But paying so much to execs in an NPO is just plain bullshit, especially in light of recent events. It makes me sad to see they dropped Thunderbird and laid off people in order to save money, but at the same time pull this crap.
I'm not someone who generally thinks high exec salaries should be regulated or anything - but in the case of Mozilla it's just dishonest: The slogan on their home page is literally "Internet for people, not profit".
> Mitchell Baker, Mozilla's top executive, was paid $2.4m in 2018
but doesn't offer any consideration or speculation as to why this is exaggerated. It's entirely possible that without that particular exec, Firefox would have been even worse off, or would have taken another direction with regards to privacy, etc.
My subjective feeling is that $2.4m does indeed seem too high for such a position. But I have no objective data to support or refute this. It's quite possible that the same person managing a comparable employee base at a FAANG would earn even more.
Employees are judged routinely (quarterly, bi-annual, annually) all the time with high confidence, WITHOUT such "objective" data you are referring to. It seems like OP is simply applying the same measuring stick every other average employees are measured on.
CEO pay is much too high independent on the industry. It would be justified if personal responsibility was on the line, but it isn't anymore. CEOs are just employees by now.
Granted, you have to deal with pressure, but today CEO can just switch companies like underwear. They press KPI on every employee but are themselves nearly exempt from any quantifiable metric aside from turnover.
But in general CEO pay is rising with falling results and falling pay for everyone else.
I was under the impression he was let go not because of performance, but because of controversy and lack of confidence and/or respect from a significant and growing portion of staff. At least that's how I remember it being presented.
Why was your comment flagged? @dang I honestly would request that you look into who is voting down reasonable comments in this thread. They do not deserve voting rights.
I am convinced that the recent "news" against Mozilla's org are nothing more than a smear campaign from Google to destroy the relatively recent renewed support for Firefox against Chrome. Firefox is an alternative to Chrome, and I don't care how much the CEO is making, as long as I can get rid of Chrome in my computer.
I wouldn't care as much if they weren't simultaneously sacking their work force and ending work on popular products. I'm sure Google is trying to paint them in a bad light, but honestly it's not hard with the current leadership and doesn't take any dishonesty.
> Surely such impressive pay is justified by the equally impressive results Mozilla has achieved?
No, it is completely discretionary. I don't consider this controversial because I know it is completely discretionary. Why would it be tied to anything aside from the ability to continue paying that compensation or desire to be compensated that way?
The only consideration of a foundation is the nearly tax-free capital growth rate, 5% net assets grant rate, and whether the TAXED salaries are tolerable. And for them, yes, paying super high income taxes and giving the government over a million on a $2.4m salary per year is tolerable.
The thing is: one botched update and users drop you and never come back.
I saw this once when Firefox deprecated something that the old Jira instance used. The next day Chrome was the default browser and has ever been since.
>This is baffling given that mobile Firefox has a rare feature for a mobile browser: it's able to install extensions and so can block ads.
I'm not sure about the extent to which this is true? I dont think Firefox has extensions on iOS (probably not up to Mozilla). Meanwhile, the extension experience on Android is "bumpy" to put it lightly. Just a few weeks ago, FF mobile broke nearly every single extension (apparently this was intentional, but it makes for a bad user experience)
Firefox is dead. Deal with it. It's just a matter of time.
Web-browser is not very profitable bussines, and by bloating web with more and more complexity, we made sure maintaining alternative implementations is getting harder and more costly.
The Web degenerated into it's natural conclusion - a centralized platform controlled by a handful of corporations extracting value from its users.
Seriously, better start exploring alternatives already if you care about your privacy and freedom, because this route is gone.
I feel like there's another angle here. Perhaps the attempts diversification that the author so decries were an attempt to keep Mozilla relevant even if its flagship sinks.
Also, I don't totally understand why you can expect to get and retain talent while paying way below market rate.
And... suppose the CEO were paid 1M instead of 2M. That's, what, 5 engineers? You could pay the CEO $0 and it would make only a small dent in the recent layoffs.
There are no breaks on the exec comp train, only the end of the line. If the company is doing well the comp goes up, if it fails the comp goes up as a reward to compensate for the risk and attract talent. Until the company goes belly up.
Now might be the right time to distribute donations directly to the developers. The project https://github.com/protontypes/LibreSelery does exactly that. It can probably be set up for firefox exclusively. Then private donations can go directly to a firefox pool, which in turn will be distributed directly.
The title seems misleading. Ok, firefox market share may be down, but I'm not quite sure that 'firefox usage' is down 85%, too. Way more people use browsers in 2020 than in 2009.
And, anyway, I'm going to use Firefox no matter what.
I read an article about executive directors salaries at non-profits, and the gist of it was that good executive directors are expensive because they bring more money into the org; would you rather 90% of $1m go towards your cause, or 50% of $10m?
This doesn't seem to be the case with Mozilla, though. They somehow have the worst of both worlds: inflated executive salaries and a loss in revenue.
I find it curious how much there has been news bashing on mozilla lately...
Anyways, I'm a happy firefox user, their PiP feature is great and the fix they finally did for rendering on macs made it possible for me to use it without it eating my battery. I'm happy there is an alternative to chrome, it hopefully keeps the ecosystem a bit healthier
Why exactly is the revenue stream from Google a problem (everyone seems focused on that)? I don't see Google ending the partnership if just to protect itself from anti-trust action.
I suspect that Mozilla could just consider that near guaranteed income while they worked on other things as long as the browser stayed alive.
People don’t particularly like a privacy-focused company making most of its money from the support of a privacy-invasive giant. Not only is it ironic, it’s always subject to terms and such that may limit Mozilla.
I am frequently impressed with both the level of incompetence that creeps its way into the csuite, and the lack of accountability they can insulate themselves with.
I really like Firefox and Rust. It feels like Mozilla's most important products and I feel, and could be wrong, that when they recently laid off skilled tech people they fired the wrong people. Don't fire the doers!
I'm guessing there are a lot of initiatives with a heavy "SJW" direction that was spared. Most of those are probably not very technical.
I think Mozilla should focus on getting Firefox written in Rust. This will likely make Firefox a safer browser and make it easier to work on. A safer browser is good for privacy which is partly a non-tech thing they should focus on too. Personal privacy and safety.
Donating to Mozilla feels completely pointless when there are people at the top leeching off money without having none of the qualities of a charismatic leader.
I actually just uninstalled the android version of Firefox after using it for many years.
I had downloaded a podcast in advance for a road trip. I went to open it via the Firefox notification and it said "you have no app that can open mp3s" which is wrong. After that I went to Files to launch it manually, but it wasn't there (it must have saved it in a non-standard location). Finally I went into Firefox and couldn't find the downloads page, only to find out they removed that feature.
I was frustrated and shocked by Mozilla's incompetence. I had 3 different methods of accessing that file and they screwed up all of them. Even if these issues are fixed I probably won't return, I need to be convinced Mozilla has fixed its management issues.
> The real problem is not the royalty cuts, though. Mozilla has already received more than enough money to set themselves up for financial independence. Mozilla received up to half a billion dollars a year (each year!) for many years. The real problem is that Mozilla didn't use that money to achieve financial independence and instead just spent it each year, doing the organisational equivalent of living hand-to-mouth.
Imagine a world where a non-commercial open source browser has billions of dollars in the bank, and through the interest alone, achieves total financial independence to pursue development purely on behalf of its users.
I personally don’t think that world exists because any such situation would get pilfered away exactly like this one.
Meh pay doesn't bother me - that's an internal problem for them. What does bother me is firefox on a mac (2018 15inch pro), it just trashes the battery life. Too many tabs open and the fans go haywire, energy usage spikes etc. My mac is at 140 cycles with approx 72% of the design capacity of the battery left, I'm convinced this is because of firefox's bad performance. Might not be but it's the biggest suspect.
I've been using firefox since the really early days and I eventually gave up on mac and started using Brave. Still use it on windows work machines or occasionally on ubuntu where it doesn't have these problems.
piggybacking on this, the performance of Firefox on a Mac with a 4k external screen is abysmal. any action at all takes an extra second or two to perform. not to mention that if i start watching a youtube video it makes the fans go crazy.
i changed back to chrome because of this and it's so much smoother.
I really want Mozilla to succeed. But I just can't bring myself to use Firefox as a daily driver. Just open a few tabs on a top of the line macbook, and a twitch stream and things get very laggy.
I've seen numerous people craving for better container support, which is definitely a killer feature for people going forward towards a more private web. Why isn't Mozilla more actively developing this? Developers were the primary driver behind adopting Firefox during it's hayday - no reason why it can't be again if we have the resources to make a compelling case for it.
I routinely have 100[+]'s of tabs open when working on a project and it has never been a problem so I suspect that this is due to one of the websites you are using or a plug-in.
[+] as in 500 or more. I use my browser windows to keep my 'state' of what I need to read and where I've left off, by the time they are all closed again I'm done preparing for an interview.
What version of Firefox are you running, and what Add-Ons do you have installed? n=1 anecdote: I'm on a 2016-vintage Macbook Pro, Firefox 81.0, 64-bit, with >1100 tabs spread across 6 windows. I'm pushing the limits trying to establish whether to commit to Firefox or Chrome, and so far while lots of people seem to like Chrome, I'm strongly preferring Firefox.
I could not get Chrome to stay stable enough with that much resource utilization, and the most important part I've learned is that Firefox's profiles storage formats are open enough that I've been able to recover from some pretty bad kernel panics (due to the graphics card switching on my laptop; disabling that fixed the panics).
Probably next Macbook Pro refresh cycle from Apple I'll upgrade to the latest they introduce, but Firefox-as-daily-driver has been able to take a lot of abuse from me.
I'm using Firefox on Linux as a daily driver and it's very snappy even with very many tabs opened, playing videos, multiple complex chat UIs and so on. Never really cared to use Chrome even when it was all hyped in the past and Firefox was indeed slower. Today it's a non issue, at least on Linux.
Weird, in my experience on my mbp, Firefox handles the average 120 tabs I have opened much better than Safari. It didn't use to be that way, but they have improved a lot in the past 2-3 years.
I have definitely seen something make the browser extremely laggy, but only the last few weeks. It does seem to be related to certain tabs/sites though, but I haven't figured out which.
For me it is Slack. Slack's JS leaks memory. Several times I notice Firefox really bogging down, I check about:memory and the Slack tab is eating 4GB of memory or more. Once it was nearly 7GB.
So I've had to install an auto-reload extension[1] which simply reloads the Slack tab once an hour, and that contains Slacks stupidity.
Now Firefox is nice and fast, even with hundreds of tabs across many windows.
Better container support would be ace but dismissing FF because of that complaint when no other browser even has that feature is a little like cutting off your nose to spite your face.
Regarding performance on macOS, Firefox runs fine for me and I very very rarely have below 50 tabs open. Have you tried it recently? I had read there were some bugs with macOS but most of those were resolved a couple of years ago.
I feel bad because I've been using Firefox as a daily on both my desktop and mobile for a few months. I've just this week decided to ditch Firefox and accept Chrome, despite it's questionable Google-ness.
Firefox Mobile is generally fine, though I occasionally end up in a state where tabs refuse to load and I need to kill the whole app. Minor annoyance.
Desktop though, when I've got a bunch of tabs open and I close a bunch down by clicking the 'x's, I definitely notice how much Firefox speeds up as I close each tab. What drove the knife in was on the odd occasion that I needed Chrome, opening it up was like a breath of fresh air that was hard to ignore. Pages just seem to load faster and the Chrome seems more responsive under lots-of-tab situations.
Another part is peer pressure - the frontend guys all just use chrome, so pairing is a little bit more frictious. Though there is benefit to having someone in the team who uses something different to Chrome. I just don't want to be that guy.
At least one thing: containers don't have separate settings. I.e. one can't disable adblocking for the shopping container. Or, the very contrary, have a special no-cookies casual browsing container for very limited tracking.
It sounds like you want separate profiles, not containers. The point of containers is that all the settings and addons and saved passwords are still there. If you don't want that, you can create a second profile with different settings and a different set of addons, etc.
Yes, that's what I use (and what I have used before containers). I have simply assumed that containers are - supposedly - a take on modernizing profiles and making them convenient to use.
TBH, those days I tend to use separate browsers, because profile management is significantly less convenient than just running a different program.
Read any HN thread here talking about containers. People love it, but want more features and flexibility - which is only available through third-party extensions at moment (which aren't always easy to find).
I tried really hard to make FF my main browser. I really did. But I was disappointed by their "hybrid" approach to memory use, and I think that continues to make the difference between FF and Chromium-based browsers (to FF's detriment).
And now they switched back to shared memory again, and the moment they did, the browser started hanging again, like it used to do pre-Quantum days.
Chromium's "per process memory isolation" is the right approach, despite all the cries about memory use. I'd rather have that than have the browser hang on me, or have more security issues.
If anything, I think even the future of operating systems is complete process isolation and separation by virtualization tech and encrypting each process in RAM with a different key. The hardware is coming, but it may take another 10-15 years for this to be fully realized.
Market share is down but revenue is generally way up. Not saying it's acceptable just because of this, but that spike in 2017 might have been in response to what they thought was an infinite gravy train.
Year Total
2010 $123 million
2011 $164 million
2012 $311 million
2013 $314 million
2014 $420 million
2015 $420 million
2016 $520 million
2017 $562 million
2018 $436 million
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation
I'd really like Firefox to stay a viable browser. It is now for me, but I fear it might decline to the point it won't be.
As an open source contributor I have to say that Firefox is very hard to contribute to, compared to something hosted on github or similar.
I looked once on the effort required to fork Firefox and run it. It's a big project, but it's not impossible. It would still requires about 10 engineers full time to keep it alive.
I don't have the resources to make it happens, but if a serious fork is ever created, I'll do my best to contribute.
This is an interesting general question that would deserve more attention: What do top executives in a company really do to bring the business forward and how do you measure it? How do you measure today whether the decision to invest 10 billion in drone delivery today will lead to a huge ROI in 10 years?
I think you can't because you can't predict the future which means, the high payment of executives is simply based on trust (by the company owners) that they will do the right things for the company.
At the end of the day, they failed at their original mission:
"It was intended to harness the creative power of thousands of programmers on the Internet and fuel unprecedented levels of innovation in the browser market. "
All of the innovation on web standards, web frameworks, etc. has been coming from FAANG and Mozilla is funded by them. They defocused and have been messing around with all kinds of other stuff.
Not all of the change on web standards has been good or appropriate innovation perhaps exactly because of Firefox smaller clout nowadays. Look at the story of Mozilla's H264 implementation and you'll see it's clearly Google that has managed to throw it's weight around and decide what would become the standard whether it was good or not.
I think their stated mission was different than what motivated the original developers - killing IE. Once that was basically done, things started to defocus.
You also run into the issue of finding a replacement. Given that firefox appears to be sinking who will come in? If someone chooses to come in your going to have to pay a lot more them, and the team they want to bring in. So it will cost a lot more than keep the current staff, and you want the current staff to avoid the increase costs. The only reason firefox staff would be thrown out is if they can't turn it around after everything they tried. Look at yahoo, they were a sinking ship, current staff had no vision, then they hired a new CEO, who spent a ton of money, and it didn't help their situation, and bam a few years later you are sold. It works only if you bring in the right people, like AMD did. It is an uphill battle too. Imagine your career, now in 5 years, your career is gone, now what are you going to do? (This is how mining towns, etc died).
As someone who has used most of the mainstream and mainstream-alternative browsers since Netscape, I'm not sure I understand the position of Firefox in the marketplace.
If I want to minimize friction, I use Chrome.
If I want to use ancient web apps, I use an ancient version of IE.
Could Mozilla exist without Firefox? It's not like that's the only thing they do there. It's by far the easiest thing for them to generate revenue from (by driving Google searches) but the corporation could still exist by monetizing Bugzilla, Rust, Gecko, etc somehow.
Buy Mozilla, fire all the CEO/Staff, bring all the lost Devs back and let them work on the Browser and Rust (and just that), if anything happens with the Chromium development you have your own second browser at hand...and by that way rust itself.
They don't have a browser yet (extremely interesting data), directly compete with google on ads (and search when we consider shopping) and are increasingly using Rust. Getting great engineering talent on top is nice, too.
I feel like the antitrust case of 2001 probably has them shying away from acquiring Mozilla, given that Mozilla née Netscape was one of the major bringers of the complaints.
I'm coming around to management being a key part of Mozilla's problem. Firefox did legitimately find itself in a situation even the best turnaround artist would struggle with, but the situation calls for self-sacrifice at the top when there's so much money available to experiment with new lines of business. Nobody would complain about Pocket if it was just one of an intentional and visible program to find a viable course away from depending on Google.
Pocket is fine. Pocket randomly appearing on the gunwale of the sinking ship to tell you how great it is while the crew takes the life rafts, not so much.
What triggered this exodus? It's not like firefox is bad or worse in any way. I don't think there is a killer Chrome feature everyone wants either. Or is it just the result of the market share of mobile vs desktop?
Someone should set up an organization to strip mine valuable assets and work with them. The popular docs should be possible to copy and extend. There is a tremendous amount of value that could be taken up and made to live again with just the most basic good management.
Just to pick out one example: The Fluent localization framework is the best in its class. Localization is a huge and valuable market. Simply building that out and charging customers could potentially save the organization all on its own.
There is plenty of capital and experience around, so why isn't this already happening? Or maybe it is?
I have a contrarian view that as a private company Firefox has a freedom to do whatever with the money as they see fit . Just because they are a non profit, does not mean that they need to listen to recommendations on how to best run their company. They know that they would be dead in the water if not for google’s money. So their loyalty lies in keeping google happy and their money flowing .
If I was on the board of directors of Mozilla, my main ask from the CEO would be to ensure that the money flow from google does not stop.
If that means that google decides what features make it into Firefox so be it.
Google money is only guaranteed in so far as Firefox keeps its market share. Do you think Google will still be sending them money once their market share is close to 0%? Keeping Google money flowing should be balanced with growing their market share, if only to keep Google money from flowing. Unfortunately, keeping Google happy is orthogonal to growing their market share as what most Firefox users want is basically Brave with more freedom to install extensions. They're getting neither of these right now.
Some people say that Google will keep sending them money no matter what as a defense against monopoly accusations but it is doubtful this would stop the billion fines from EU and others, it hasn't in the past.
I wonder what the boards of these non-profits are doing and who has the power to change the boards? Typically for-profits have shareholders and non-profits have members that can hold accountability - but im guessing both Wikimedia and Mozilla don't have this stakeholder accountability :(
It would seem this CEO is intentionally trying to fail Mozilla. A real pity too as Mozilla’s privacy stance would have probably started to appeal to customers more and more over the next 5+ years.
Mozilla has finally become a company where the pay of the execs is completely decoupled from actual operations. This is obviously more important than keeping the engineers they just sacked.
I'm not much of a FOSS developer but it use to be that if I needed something I would just write an extension or a greasemonkey script. It would mature and others would use it. I couldn't get my web extensions to work properly then they got rejected then I got bored with it. It wasn't good enough to replace the hundreds of truly fantastic extensions we had before. I cant even remember the names!
User.script didn't get the love it needed to build a single community. I never upload anything anymore.
The way a website should look is entirely different from the way it should look for those regularly using the website. It says Hacker news at the top of this page. It consumes space on my screen. (This isn't a thing worthy of discussion. I just remove it, others can use the script. In top down design hierarchies this kind of stuff takes endless arguing with people who never tried to use it like that but, from a position of ignorance, seem to want to dictate how you use your computer then enforce it. There is nothing FOSS about this aditude)
There continue to be lots of FOSS projects that would benefit greatly from browser integration.
I was skeptical about Opera's build in bittorrent client at the time. I couldn't imagine such a thing running un-managed. I couldn't have been more wrong. I looked what it was doing after a while and (while not downloading) it was seeding a hundred files in small groups (4-6) at a time, 1-3 kb upload speed. Perfect for rare blocks. It was a tribute to the swarm rather than the parasite I expected it to be.
would do the trick just fine. The legacy central planning circus would continue to work while the open world of FOSS could move on.
I could think of a dozen such examples...
Take how hiding complexity is the norm nowadays. Firefox could in stead be an entry point to learn managing a database.
Distributed search is also doable if you have this many clients. If webmasters can expose their site search they would do it. Ranking is the only puzzle.
The article's data is until 2018/2019. So, unlike some commentary suggests, this is before the pandemic/job cuts. Mozilla is for sure not in a good place though.
I was really hoping that servo would be much better and safer, but I don't believe there was enough development time invested by mozilla. So currently firefox has no advantages to chrome, not even on mobile anymore since add-ons just went poof for no reason.
Firefox inevitably will have to go the way of a chromium reskin if they can't compete. There's no reason to be doubling your development load when you cant even impliment the features users want.
Thanks for sharing. This is a very informative article. I would like to see a follow up article by someone suggesting what Firefox /should/ do going forward.
This makes me sad. I hope this doesn't mean the demise of Firefox, my personal browser from before it was called "Firefox".
I know many of us will pay for privacy, and even help subsidize those who can't, but they have to be alive first.
At work, I replaced Chrome with Brave, but I still trust FF as the browser for my personal life (in addition to, of course, Pi-Hole, Algo VPN, and a number of plugins; or QubesOS + Whonix when things are really serious).
My case might be somewhat niche, but as a developer, I find myself really struggling to use Firefox for development, due to the awkwardness of the developer tools (or perhaps a lack of familiarity)
This makes it annoying to go from work mode to personal browsing mode, and so every time I try to make the switch to Firefox, I eventually revert back.
Then I discovered Brave, and was immediately familiar. Haven't used Chrome since.
People who mostly use Chrome's developer tools say Firefox's are awkward. People who mostly use Firefox's developer tools say Chrome's are awkward. People who use both say they have different good and bad parts.
Firefox needs to lose Mozilla and refocus: features, bug fixes, developer ease (simpler build, better debugging, ability to embed anywhere through modularity), and most importantly browser privacy.
Get rid of the Google support, let people donate directly to Firefox, provide corporate support contracts, integrate with everything you can like CI, phone, IOT, ...
At this point we as devs (with time) should hard fork the project.
There's no doubt Google's incredible push for browser dominance and underhanded tactics are the reason Firefox no longer has a 30% browser market share. It's my belief though that it's Mozilla's decision to chase that 30% share by imitating Chrome which has prevented them from hanging onto the 10% of the market who liked Firefox because it was Firefox.
For people who don't particularly care about privacy, Firefox has nothing to offer and has a worse overall experience to Chrome.
I made the switch from Chrome to Firefox a year ago when for whatever reason Chrome started stalling. A year in, Containers all the rage, I still hate Firefox because its autocomplete sucks and if I type a/b in the search bar it tries to load http://a/b, what kind of logic is that? This isn't 1995. They literally fixed only this 2 versions ago.
Mozilla bug tracker has lots of bugs which are open for decades.
I live outside of US and I’m annoyed that Firefox does not fill addresses in forms, for example. Because Mozilla does not bother finishing this feature for the rest of the world.
Similarly they have released credit card auto fill recently, and again, US only.
That’s just one of many example.
I still use Firefox, but mostly because it’s hard to switch (reconfigure all extensions, get used to new UI etc).
I would love to see a fork of Mozilla Firefox that gets wide acceptance and adheres to some basic principles (privacy, following standards, etc). But right now, firefox the product is actually still very good, I much prefer it to the alternatives (although the recent android update has included some questionable UI changes)
By abandoning rust they made their billion dollar mistake.
They could have formed whole operating systems and userlands around it, Mozilla will look like Xerox.
They had a golden goose but choose to pursue a dying market and product out of sheer incompetence and stagnation.
The writing is on the wall. I'm not a user (very slow on Mac), but it's very important to have an independent, standards-based, non-corporate player. The web in general needs it and the people need the open web. Maybe they can become a part of the EU?
This is quite the tragedy for the open web. Everyone else has fallen to Chromium, which is a much worse browser for ad-blocking, privacy, (and I'd argue usability) than Firefox. Yes, it's open source, but who will maintain it in a meaningful way?
This article is misleading,... it's suggesting there exist a correlation between executive salary increase and popularity decrease. The reality is that people are - as always - supporting monopolies because it's easier for them and they are lazy.
I believe so, yes. I use FF with DDG and when I need to Google something I do it via the omnibar (alt-down, Google is second choice search engine) rather than adding !g in DDG, because AFAIU it kicks them a few pennies.
An honest question: we're seeing many "independent" browsers that are basically a wrapper around Chromium (Brave, Vivaldi, even Edge now) -- does anyone know why there aren't any (that I know of) similar initiatives based on Firefox?
Gecko is much harder to embed. I've seen a few projects, but they aren't anywhere as good. Chromium had Chromium Embedded Framework long before Electron showed up. The dual-nature of Chrome/Chromium meant that the project was always configurable much more easily.
>Embedding of Gecko is no longer supported. If you currently embed Gecko, you should use an alternate solution, because you will not be able to pick up new security improvements.
They are supporting GeckoView[1], but that's android only.
The Gecko engine is notoriously beastly to build and be wrapped or embedded. Mozilla tried to improve the situation at various points but seem to have since determined that it’s not worth the effort.
The title is a quite clickbaity but the article has good points.
Mozilla has no shareholders so the pay of its CEO cannot be justified by the usual arguments - that shareholders decided it presumably in their best interest. Comparing Mozilla with NGOs seems appropriate.
When CEO's feel they aren't paid fairly, let's raise their salary, yet many millions cannot make enough to have an average life in America.
I'm not an advocate of socialism, but I think there should be more thought about egregious CEO salaries. Like another poster said, why are not CEO salaries tied to performance? Almost every other role in a company's salary is tied to their individual performance.
Can't speak for others but I stopped using Firefox for the following reasons, pretty much in the order of priority.
1. When I learnt about the corporate structure at Mozilla. I simply don't drust any large corporation with matters related to privacy.
2. What happened with Brendan Eich. That just wasn't cool. What someone does in his personal time is non of my business. Virtue signalling of any sort, to me, is a hallmark of the wrong crowd in power. As far as I could see, Eich refused to bend the knee which is an admirable quality considering the fact that internet privacy is an uphill battle against giants.
3. Lack of innovation and getting in bed with Google. If Firefox needed money, all they had to do was just ask. How can they, when they have to pay a CEO millions of dollars.
Now I'm primarily using Vivaldi. Sometimes Brave. I'd support a small, talented and a focused team anyday.
He donated money to a political cause directly against some of his employees, got called out on it and refused to compromise. I'm sure those are admirable characteristics in some situations, as the CEO of an organisation like Mozilla they're suicidal. He doesn't seem to get that even to this day, based on some tweets linked to in this chat and in the article.
"Don't be an asshole" is a pretty good philosophy if you're going to be a ceo of an org like mozilla, and donating to an organisation which seeks to deprive a subset of your employees of their rights then refusing to compromise on it sounds pretty assholic to me. I know in the US it's all unlimited free speech, "but I have conservative views" etc etc, but that has real consequences in the same way that going up to a homosexual person in the street and telling them that you don't think they should be allowed to get married would have consequences - maybe they punch you, maybe they shrink off and feel terrible.
If you had to choose between a great open source browser run by a troubled organisation and a crappy browser run by a great organisation what would you choose? What is best for the users?
Foss folks and hackers would probably choose the latter, where as we've seen with all the FANNGS the world would choose the first.
The question is whether there was any prejudice or he mistreated his employees based on their sexuality. If did he absolutely should have been fired and fired sooner. If he didn't, he seems to have kept his personal beliefs out of his professional life which is also an admirable quality. In that case, he was judged and forced to resign purely based on what he did in his own time with his own money. If we, for a moment, set aside the right/wrong of his action of donating money for a political course, then this entire saga was based on politics that is completely unrelated to Firefox. That's too much politics for a browser vendor and it kind of sets the tone as to how things at Mozilla are going to be.
Yeah, it might be too much politics, and yeah, it sets the tone...but he was the CEO! This culture at least partially came from him as well - give me an example of a CEO with no impact on company culture.
The point is not that he mistreated them, or that making a political donation was wrong, the point is he made a personal decision which is unstandably engraging to his employees affected by that decision. They called him out and he failed to come up with any reasonable remedy.
I switched to Firefox and use it everyday. To me, it is so much lighter, better in performance compared to Chrome, and i only use Chrome for GCP access.
Kinda surprised that its usage go down when it is better than most of browser products.
That chart is sophistry: it's really two charts superimposed and scaled for dramatic effect. It's the kind of thing that makes me think that the writer is either an idiot or disingenuous.
I feel in the next 5 years Mozilla will become a yahoo. Firefox will lose market share and they’ll just brand themselves as another chrome shell browser like Edge or just close shop altogether.
Sometimes an organization needs the detail oriented folk to spend a month crafting bylaws. This can help prevent organizational disaster when a new ‘leader’ arrives and spins the steering wheel wildly.
I'm pretty sure those running Mozilla are convinced it has no future and are focused in extracting the most amount of money possible before it sinks ( or rots ) and jump ship.
> Mitchell Baker, Mozilla's top executive, was paid $2.4m in 2018, a sum I personally think of as instant inter-generational wealth
It’s certainly not if you are in SV. And that number doesn’t even seem high to me, given her impressive background and the opportunity cost. That’s Facebook E7 money. Or Google L8 money. She would easily be hired above those levels at those companies.
On the other hand:
> But then, things are different at the Guardian. Their chief exec makes a mere £360,000 a year.
That’s quite high, for UK standards and for journalism standards.
So let her go to Google and hire Eich back for $400K, problem solved.
Her experience was in legal and operations, not product vision and development. She's a Tim Cook or a Sundar Pichai when what's needed is a Steve Jobs or Sergey Brin.
Let's not gaslight, though: a full-time staffer with a $100k salary costs a company $200k because of insurance, pension, benefits, etc. so yeah, that CEO's salary could pay for anywhere up to 10 people... but those 10 people make literally no difference when the problems are so vast that the only way to even get to "very slowly bleeding dry" levels not not succeeding requires firing over 200 people.
The CEO's salary is too high, but also pretty much irrelevant.
It's pretty simple - for regular users Chrome is faster, has more features, uses less power, and has better website support. It is also aggressively marketed by the largest advertising company on the planet.
It wasn't always this way. For example, FF beat Chrome in battery life until a few years ago, and FF extensions used to be superior in functionality Chrome extensions. Chrome eventually caught up in the few areas they were seriously lagging in, or Firefox shot itself in the foot trying to morph itself into a copy of Chrome (eg. multiprocess architecture, WebExtensions).
Today there is little reason to use any browser other than Chrome / Chromium or Safari (which is still superior on Mac / iOS in a few aspects).
Why the CEO hate? Firefox has finally completed the quantum refactor and is far better than before.
Most of the hate seems political: people keep bringing up supporting a ban on homosexual marriage and how Mozilla shouldn’t have liberal cultural values.
Most of these comments treat her as if she’s a virus, eating away a mozilla. They give an uneasy feeling.
I'm really not a big fan of Google's tracking-friendly browser. However, I hate Mozilla's hypocrisy even more, trying to act like the defendants of privacy, but dependent on mis-aligned cash.
In the end, I chose Chrome as a protest against this hypocrisy.
Disagree. For people caring about privacy recommending Firefox has/had been the default for a long time.
At this point in time many are conflicted. Clearly moz://a is in bed with major privacy violators and can not be trusted, this has been the case for god knows how long. What is the way forward? Rooting they will change course RealSoon now, or just abandoning the ship and hoping once they are put out of their misery something better will take their place?
If anyone from Mozilla reads this, I stopped using Firefox when it stopped being what Chrome became at the time. Fast, light, simple. Go back there if you ever want people to use your browser again, this isn’t rocket science.
It seems to me that Mozilla are more concerned about being a force for "social justice" than about technology these days. That doesn't seem to be a winning strategy for a company,
In American corporate culture (most of the world's corporate culture), CEO pay is not tied at all to performance. The idea is they should be compensated well, otherwise they and their talent (even lack thereof) would go elsewhere.
Even if you really really believe in capitalism, I don't know how that is capitalist. It just seems like a "tails I win heads you lose" arrangement.
The entire company is lost the moment they started diversity hiring they have engineers that have no clue what they're doing tweeting about being badasses moving up the high Life ladder. Just take a look at some of the Firefox team"leaders"Twitter clearly culture problems there.
Everyone I know who uses chrome cited one feature that keeps them from changing to firefox: right click, translate page. That's it. Firefox has some add-ons that are at best 3rd grade solutions to this. That single feature keeps people on chrome, and I can relate. I use a lot of sites in chrome exclusively, we shops that have no English interface for example.
They should have focused on this feature instead of all the useless junk they built into the browser.
containers in firefox changed the game for me. as well as lttp multithreading. it’s unfortunate that they appear to being mismanaged out if existence, as right now as a mac user, I have by far the best experience with it. really disappointing.
He not only was heavily involved with destroying IE's monopoly, he was able to start Brave in a punishing market (competing against Google, Apple, and his own FF) and made it a contender.
But, he wasn't woke enough. And for that, everyone will now pay dearly.
I daresay, learning that someone else is entitled to a competing view is difficult. Allowing others to have a view other than yours means that you and those you agree with may pay a cost. But the cost of not allowing any other opinion whatsoever to exist other than the one you believe in will eventually have a much much greater cost, in many more places than you would think. Mr. Eich once gave $1K to a cause that was anti-gay. He backtracked and apologized but was cancelled anyways. The cost of losing the only open contender to the spyware that passes as a browser is but a byproduct of the immature view that destroyed FF. It will eventually come back to kill those that think you are not allowed to marry your mother, and probably, eventually, to those that think you are allowed to be religious.
> Mr. Eich once gave $1K to a cause that was anti-gay.
And $2.1K to a prop 8 supporter [0]
> He backtracked and apologized but was cancelled anyways.
This is lie and you are re-writing history. I can find no such statement from him. In fact all he said was he wanted to "express my sorrow at having caused pain" [1], the classic "I'm sorry your were offended by that" non-apology. He has never stated that his support of Prop 8 was wrong, he side-stepped the whole thing expecting us not to notice.
> It will eventually come back to kill those that think you are not allowed to marry your mother, and probably, eventually, to those that think you are allowed to be religious
What the... no seriously, what the heck? You can believe whatever you want to believe but you don't get to push your religious values onto others which is exactly what Prop 8 did. Please cut out the BS that this is somehow going to lead to outlawing religion.
I honestly do not understand. He said his personal opinions are not going to affect his decisions. And I'm sure he can believe in whatever he wants - in Christ, Flat Earth and Aliens if he wants.
As outsider it looks like in recent years the most vocal shaming is not of gay or fat but shaming of whoever does not participate in shaming. I really hope that these are not true representatives of LGBT community.
> I honestly do not understand. He said his personal opinions are not going to affect his decisions.
Words are cheap, I don't think it's at all unreasonable to think that some employees might not feel that way or trust him to back up those words with real actions.
> And I'm sure he can believe in whatever he wants - in Christ, Flat Earth and Aliens if he wants.
They sure can and I can choose who I work for. If someone thinks I don't deserve the right to get married (again, people want to gloss over this but he didn't /think/ that, he /thinks/ that) then it's not crazy that I might not want them as my boss and especially at a place like Mozilla that prides themselves on openness and inclusivity. Unlike most companies the employees at Mozilla did feel compelled and safe enough to speak out against their CEO, that doesn't fly at many companies. At a smaller company I worked at I had no protection to call out the president who would always lead the company in prayer before we had a meal even though I'm not religious. I personally think it's encouraging that many gay (and straight) employees did take a stand on this issue.
> As outsider it looks like in recent years the most vocal shaming is not of gay or fat but shaming of whoever does not participate in shaming. I really hope that these are not true representatives of LGBT community.
Then you haven't been looking and your outsiderness shows. Not all of us live in CA and not all of us are protected by labor laws where we do live. I've seen first hand fat shaming and heard plenty of language/jokes/etc that warned me that coming out would be extremely detrimental to my ability to progress and even do my job at some companies. If you truly believe that the backlash to people who are homophobes is worse than the effects of their homophobia then I encourage you reevaluate that stance. Also I'm not sure what you mean by "shaming of whoever does not participate in shaming", the "shaming" was aimed at the person who supported not allowing gay people to marry and the people who defended someone who supported not allowing gay people. You are describing it as if people were mad at other people for not calling Eich out, no, they were mad at the people defending him.
> Unlike most companies the employees at Mozilla did feel compelled and safe enough to speak out against their CEO, that doesn't fly at many companies.
Why don't they speak last years? Do they support how CEO manages company? If not should we believe employees had any say than?
> even though I'm not religious
That's the problem, I'd expect if you was the president these prayers would not have a word. Minority who does not understand other minorities.
> You are describing it as if people were mad at other people for not calling Eich out
No, I am describing people who said not a world of love. Who see only their stance and force it on other people. I by comparison do not care - that's neutral. I am against propaganda and hate speech.
He also said preventing same sex couples from marrying wasn't discrimination. Why should someone trust him not to discriminate when he doesn't know what discrimination is?
A lot of people already voiced their concerns much better than I can [1]. But I'll try.
Because of law.
Uber CEO stepped down after a number of scandals.
I do not work at Mozilla. What I see is several people ask to leave another because who he is. And I do not see mirror action "please leave because who you are". This is discrimination. Law has not helped that person. He was honest not to lie about his believes. He left the company.
I do not know how honest current CEO is. I've heard at least some people left the company because of management actions. I know a lot were fired. I think people hacking source code, helping with bug tracking feel uneasy, I do.
You sound like it is something not discussed before, murder? Share it, please.
I've heard of him peacefully supporting his believes. Is this outlaw? Don't LGBT community do the same? Should LGBT CEOs be fired? Should LGBT employees be fired for what they do?
People hurt, usually both sides. Mutual acknowledgement is a start of a dialog. To expect empathy one should first give it back.
The way you do not see how behavior was not balanced you hurt me. I expect my words could hurt you. I try my best to avoid it.
Equality is a line on the sand. For some reason you've decided only your line is true. Tradition says another line is true. From that point of view your line is subverting the language. And language got hurt a lot, like some words are bastards and there is no equality for them.
The loss of clarity. I am not native language speaker yet I feel language becoming slippery, that hurts. Entire generations could loss sharp of mind just because some people want to change meaning instead of inventing new words. What's in "marriage" for you? How about "unity"? Why do you want all the baggage of forced marriage, child marriage? What would you do with "father" and "mother", "uncle" and "aunt"? What about that stream of he/she? Get noun genders like many other languages if you care that much.
Language is alive. Current state can be just a swing waiting to turn back into nonsense babbling criticized by Orwell [1]. Invent your own metaphors. We have had grammar nazi, now we've got LGBT nazi. Fear us, lie to us, conform us or mob will lynch. Can you imagine what would happen if Brendan asked LGBT employees to step down? If no, please, do not respond.
> Brendan Eich is [the] creator of the JavaScript programming language. He co-founded the Mozilla project, the Mozilla Foundation and the Mozilla Corporation, and served as the Mozilla Corporation's chief technical officer and briefly, as its chief executive officer. [1]
Yes he was only CEO for 11 days, but he literally co-founded Mozilla so it's not like he was only around for a couple weeks.
Eich was CEO for only 11 days, but he was a technical leader at Mozilla when Firefox market share peaked and began its steady decline. He was probably more directly responsible for Firefox product decisions than Baker.
He didn't just make a small donation once. He made a donation to a political campaign that called thousands of people sexual predators in campaign ads because it didn't actually have anything truthful to say in opposition to gay marriage. It was one of the most shameful and disgusting political campaigns in US history. And Eich made his donation after they started running those ads, so he was aware of how his money was going to be used.
And that was why it was an issue that he made the donation. Not because he opposed gay marriage (many people did and still do), but because he supported the wholesale slander of thousands of people.
If the Prop 8 campaign had been run differently, his support would not have been an issue.
All we know is that Eich supported one political movement with money. Show me where he has come put publicly as fearing homosexuals.
We are in a dangerous world of viewpoint discrimination. A belief on a particular moral or political issue does not represent the totality of an individual.
We all disagree on things; some of us on things we consider core unalienable rights and values. But at the end of the day, we are also all human beings.
How is supporting anti-gay movements not an act of homophobia?
I guess you are arguing semantics here, that you have to be literally afraid of homosexuals to be considered a homophobe. Well—though technically correct—this is not how most people use this word, and you know it. In current speech homophobe is anybody that acts maliciously against an LGBTQ+ person or the LGBTQ+ community as a whole.
> All we know is that Eich supported one political movement with money.
He supported at least 2, Prop 8 directly and a politician who opposed Prop 8.
> A belief on a particular moral or political issue does not represent the totality of an individual.
Ahh, ok, so it's perfectly fine to believe that gays should not be allowed to marry while leading a company such as Mozilla?
> We all disagree on things; some of us on things we consider core unalienable rights and values. But at the end of the day, we are also all human beings.
Sorry, no, you don't just get to "disagree" on if I should exist or have rights such as being able to get married.
Absolutely no one is saying you should not exist. I hear this phrase a lot and it's pure religious ideology. Everyone exists. Some people may see you differently than you see yourself, but that doesn't mean they deny you exist. We each exist in our own realities, and part of being good human beings is accepting one another while recognizing those differences in our viewpoints and realities.
> so it's perfectly fine to believe that gays should not be allowed to marry while leading a company such as Mozilla
What kind of company is Mozilla? Is it just about Free Software and an open web? An open web means we need open ideas; and not everyone is going to agree on every idea.
Free software needs to be about keeping the software free. We can't start conflating that with every grievance known to man. There is an underlying connection between Freedom of Speech and Freedom of Software that we've somehow lost along the way.
> He supported at least 2, Prop 8 directly and a politician who opposed Prop 8.
So what? It is literally supporting a political cause. People need to be free to support political causes, even those you may personally disagree with. At one time, supporting gay rights, or saying God didn't exist, or translating the Bible into German were considered horrendous offenses[0]. These people were terrible and those who opposed them were keeping everyone else safe from those corrupt views.
Real freedom means being able to talk about and challenge views without fear of oppression by one's government or community. If we can't talk about and rationally discuss ideas and accept people with different moral compasses than our own, then we're in real trouble.
> There is an underlying connection between Freedom of Speech and Freedom of Software
Freedom of speech includes the freedom to call for your boss to quit, for any reason at all.
> If we can't talk about and rationally discuss ideas and accept people with different moral compasses than our own, then we're in real trouble.
There is little possibility to "rationally discuss ideas" between an employer and an employee. The employer can pretty much ruin the employee's life at will, but even with so many people against Brendan Eich, he seems to be doing pretty well for himself! I'd hardly say that's "oppression by one's community".
That's fascism - "forcible suppression of opposition and strong regimentation of society".
I may disagree on forced marriage or animals abuse or use of personal vehicle, these are controversial topics. I may call them slavery, cruelty, greenhouse gas supporters. And that may be better. Invent new words.
Marriage is an old tradition with huge set of semantics and a set of laws. There is a civil marriage, a religious marriage, prenuptial agreement. These days there is no obligation to perform it. Single person can adopt child.
Sam asked interesting question - can one marry his mother? sister? imaginary friend? pet he loves more than any human? his car? Why government has a word on any of these? And if anyone has such relations - don't ask the government. Call it whatever you want. I have had the day of first sight, the day I've proposed the hand and heart, the day I've asked for children and many more, these are the dearest moments. The day of marriage was not that great by comparison.
how me where he has come put publicly as fearing homosexuals.
He hasn't. But he has come out publicly as supporting a campaign which literally called gays "pedophiles" and "sex offenders" in billboard and televised campaign ads.
And Eich made his donation after the Prop 8 campaign started running those ads.
> Being against gay marriage makes you a homophobe as much as being against minors voting makes you a pedophobe. - nec4b
Except it 100% does not and your statement makes absolutely no sense. One is a right you taking away from a group of people you don't agree with and the other doesn't even follow. What? Being against letting minors vote somehow makes you /not/ want to have sex with children? What is that even suppose to mean other than to be an age-old dog-whistle trying to tie homosexuality to pedophilia?
Firstly pedophobe is somebody who dislikes children not some one who wants to have sex with them (pedophile). You are the one doing the dog whistle thing.
The point is that marriage as well as voting right is not something you can take away as it exists only as a social construct. The state decides who is entitled to a right to get married as well as at what age somebody gets to vote. The society could decide tomorrow that it doesn't care about marriage and that no special rights should be granted to married people straight or gay. And that doesn't make the people voting for it any kind of -phobes.
I misunderstood "pedophobe" as the first google result says it's the opposite of a "pedophile" but it's from Urban Dictionary and I didn't read on to find other uses of the word. That said your response confuses me greatly, how am I dog whistling?
> The point is that marriage as well as voting right is not something you can take away as it exists only as a social construct.
There are a number of groups of people who have felt first-hand that this is simply not true. Both marriage and voting rights have been held back from or taken away from groups of people multiple times.
Now, with the correct understanding of the word "pedophobe" your original statement still doesn't track. You want to equate not allowing gays to marry with not allow <18 year olds to vote as if they are the same concept, they are not. One is taking away a right afforded to their equal counterparts and one is based on not reaching adulthood yet and not being mature enough to make that decision. I sure hope you aren't insinuating that similarly gays are somehow not up to the task of marriage or not mature enough to be trusted with marriage?
You are yet again trying to twist my words into meaning that somehow gay people are inferior. Please stop. It's like you are fixated on finding ulterior meaning where there is none.
Marriage is a social construct as are hundreds of other things we have in a society and as such they are open for discussion. For example, do you support incestual marriage? Do you think people against it are siblings haters?
Well what about the decade of work prior to being CEO? I mean, the guy did create Javascript. For better or worse, it is one of the most popular programming languages in use today.
Funny thing there's a certain document that says "the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed" and that document, by some weird mix of circumstances, happens to be the Supreme Law of the country. But who cares, right? It's all persecution complex when the rights I personally don't care about are attacked. Only rights that are important to me personally are sacred.
Repeat after me: saying "correlation is not causation" "slippery slope fallacy" or "survivorship bias" doesn't amount to an argument. They are thought-stopping words primarily used by midwits who think it makes them sound smart. I see this all the time on HN and it's annoying. Furnish evidence or a solid argument for why he is wrong, otherwise you're no better than him.
The point is to get the person to actually supply real evidence instead of unfounded associations. If someone can't come up with a feasible way they actually are, or even could be causal in nature to discuss, then they probably should be shut down. If someone can't muster up the barest excuse for how their argument makes sense, then I won't be sad to see them stop talking about it.
If someone tried to shut down my argument with one of those excuses and I didn't know enough about each of them to either explain away their influence or revise my theory, my first step would be to figure out what they are. To dismiss them is to just admit ignorance of statistics, and thus the world.
If: “The point is to get the person to actually supply real evidence instead of unfounded associations.” then say “That’s an assertion that you provided no evidence for. Do you have any evidence?” - writing “correlation is not causation” is to make yourself sound smart, not to ask for evidence, which can be done in a much clearer and less passive aggressive way by just straight up asking for it.
If your point is to say that those shouldn't be used in isolation, I agree with you (but I think your point was poorly expressed). If it's to say they shouldn't be used at all, which is what I read your original comment as, then I don't.
Of course my point was that they shouldn't be used in isolation - re-read my original comment, which states: "Furnish evidence or a solid argument for why he is wrong." It wasn't poorly expressed, and you are nitpicking. Though had I known you'd nitpick, I would have said: "Furnish evidence or a solid argument for why he is wrong in addition to it."
Why in the world would you furnish evidence or a solid argument for why somebody is wrong when that somebody didn't bother furnishing evidence or a solid argument for why they are right? It was just a bald-assed claim, and commenting "correlation is not causation" rather than just drive-by downvoting is charitable.
I think the reason that Firefox failed is because of their logo. No, I will not explain, and if you dismiss me without a well-reasoned argument, you're a pretentious mid-wit(?).
edit: ah, "midwit" is a neologism from the intellectual dark web. You're just defending the comment because you agree with it, and pretending it's a question of reason or civility. Who could have guessed?
> Of course my point was that they shouldn't be used in isolation - re-read my original comment, which states: "Furnish evidence or a solid argument for why he is wrong."
Those responses are evidence for why it may be wrong. But in isolation they are needlessly terse. Lack of evidence is not the problem, lack of accompanying explanation of why they are evidence, and how they apply, is.
> Though had I known you'd nitpick, I would have said: "Furnish evidence or a solid argument for why he is wrong in addition to it."
And then it would be much clearer, not because I'm nitpicking, but because it's ambiguous otherwise, and open to the interpretation I came to. Since that's not what you intended, it's better to eliminate that misinterpretation.
The bottom line is that clarity is not a matter of intent, but of interpretation by others. At least one person (me) thought you were unclear, and I suspect others did as well. You can complain that they are nitpicking, or accept that you were misinterpreted, and expressing yourself differently might have avoided the problem. Only you can control that, so it doesn't make a lot of sense to blame other people if they aren't being purposefully obtuse (and I promise I'm not).
In this case it probably is though. They have done everything else than focus on the core product since he left and they continue that trend today even if it's failing one.
Not sure about that, even if I have to admit correlation is quite strong in this case.
Firefox decline in the past decade can also be partly credited by chrome eating the world. Firefox has a huge responsibility too because it became bad (at least performance wise?) at some point (or was it a little over 10 years ago?) and lost users because of this and has trouble recovering even if it has become better at this again, because people either moved on, embraced chrome (or a chromium-based browser) or I don't know what.
I want mozilla to survive and can't really say I support them if I don't use firefox so I came back to firefox after years using vivaldi. But I can see myself going back to vivaldi any time actually. I'm missing vivaldi features, firefox is slower for some/many use cases (mostly because things have been optimized for chrome).
I want to believe but I don't see how firefox can get back its market share. Now everything you build for the web has to be optimized for chrome, many don't even care if it is utterly broken on firefox because it's so niche.
I honestly think that is the main reason though. They are like many others obsessed with identity politics and push away everyone else that disagree (like myself). They send money on worthless (and racist) diversity projects, feminist filmmakers, random projects that they hope to bring in another source of revenue etc.
For example, their VPN service is not actually theirs, it's a Swedish company called Mullvad that actually provides the service. I am already a user of Mullvad and I can't get Firefox VPN. Isn't that kind of strange? Even if I could get it, why would I pay Mozilla extra money for a service that I can get cheaper directly from the provider? Not only that, but Mullvad accepts cash and I believe Mozilla VPN probably won't. So the privacy aspect is already bigger with simply using Mullvad to begin with. They go into the VPN business because they want to make money but paint the picture of that they want to protect the privacy of consumers. It's just a dishonest picture they're painting and I think users sense that a mile away these days. It's the woke mindset that they pretend to care but doesn't really. They just follow like so many other tech companies what's popular to care about in California and completely forget that the world is larger than one US state. And even if they did care, really a VPN service? That market is so overly saturated by hundreds of services it doesn't require a genius to realize that this will be a hard thing to make any kind of dough on.
Their ventures into other things have mostly been failing ones and if they really want to get rid of google the obvious choice is to monetize Firefox itself. I, like many others, would gladly pay for Firefox if I knew it went to the development of Firefox and maybe to other projects that benefits it like Rust, MDN etc. But if I donate today, my money will most likely go to Bakers ridiculous salary.
> I honestly think that is the main reason though.
I am pretty sure this is your biases distorting your perspective. Of course I may be biased as well, but take note that the entire conversation on this comment section is about Firefox's failures, which are numerable, and very little of it has anything to do with what you're talking about. For instance the guy's crazy salary has nothing to do with wokeness, as you well know -- it has to do with all the other reasons this is a dramatic failure of capitalism.
She laid them because there was not enough money to pay them. Focusing on the core product is only option left when the company no longer has manpower to do everything.
It would be an achievement if she shifted focus as soon as she became CEO, but several years later is probably too late.
Also she killed MDN, and that’s a big loss for the internet.
Even though it's how it is currently that's not how it should be. Chrome is extinguishing the web browser right now. This is netscape territory done in a smarter manner than utilizing exclusivity deals with websites and software makers.
Kicking Brendan Eich was for me the first noticeable sign of decline. Politics was just a pretext that gathered support at the time as it was very in fashion to fight for gay marriage and vilify anybody who was against it. The real reason was as usual a fight for power although the details will probably never be known outside of those involved.
Supporting such a change for unrelated political reasons was a mistake, as it always is, because you help serve the hidden interests of others. And the issue that seems important to people (gay marriage in this case) is not even affected in any way by Brendan being sidelined. But you can clearly see the effects that the new leadership - lot more interested in money, power, politics and subterfuge than tech - has had on the product.
This is true, and indeed very strange. I use FF on mobile and it works perfectly. So Mozilla's problems aren't only technical, there's also a question of market awareness.
That said, there are also technical problems. Some bugs on the desktop linger on for years and are never fixed.
As described in the article, Mozilla spent a lot of energy into side projects that never went anywhere and were only loosely related to the browser.
This is all, obviously, a management problem.