Are the market share counters correct? Like, a bigger percentage of Fx users are more likely to have blockers and privacy settings enabled, compared to users of other browsers.
Last time I checked our company's visitor distribution, GA showed far less Fx usage than server logs, for instance. Not a huge number for Fx in the latter case, but better than 3% at least.
I also feel the constant focus on a single person's salary to be a red herring. I mean, it's not ideal, but if their salary were to be axed, it wouldn't really make Fx more competitive or better in the slightest. I don't think anyone chooses not to use Fx based on one person's salary, and there are other reasons why Fx is at the lower end of usage worth focusing more on.
So not trying to excuse anything, just would like the focus to be redirected. Everyone always touts Pocket and the salary as these big things here on HN. But the masses don't care. It's not where the problem is.
In many discussion of this kind it is a red herring indeed, but not in this one. First, her salary could be used to pay for several developers. Second, her salary does not correspond to the results. You pay execs for the result, not for their title. If she can't do her job well, she shouldn't be paid millions, that's all.
The company still needs a CEO, so it’s not a matter of “fire her and spend the money on 30 developers.” (At what, 100K per year including benefits and overhead? Good luck with that.)
Instead, it’s a matter of “fire her and hire a replacement” at $Xmm per year. So what is her replacement cost? I vaguely remember her raise being tied to increasing her compensation to be more in line with other CEOs, so it may be the case that there is no meaningful savings to be made there, or even that a competent replacement would cost more.
And, as the other commenter said, this is not the root cause of Firefox’s struggles. I don’t know what is, but I do observe that people on this site seem to hold Mozilla to a much higher standard than Google, quite unfairly in my opinion.
For reference, it looks like Wikipedia's CEO is paid ~$400k. 3m is a really unreasonable salary, and the attitude she has for why she deserves it is even worse, and seems antithetical to Mozilla's brand/image/beliefs.
The argument is that by paying too much for one exec, you are taking away money that could be invested into the product either directly or via more staff with different skills.
On my app Firefox usage (based on nginx logs) is 15% (~200,000 users, mostly desktop, half in the us).
My guess is that mobile market share is much lower though
Last time I checked our company's visitor distribution, GA showed far less Fx usage than server logs, for instance. Not a huge number for Fx in the latter case, but better than 3% at least.