Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Firefox usage is down despite Mozilla's top exec pay going up

calpaterson.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 1001 posts

Re: Firefox usage is down despite Mozilla's top exec pay going up

#31

Post by m0zg »

Jonnax wrote: post #13

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. It gets most of its revenue from Google. They need a different revenue stream but their ideas haven't worked. Their executives are clearly failures. But with such high pay, they're cashing out. Buying themsel…

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.

Re: Firefox usage is down despite Mozilla's top exec pay going up

#32

Post by bmarquez »

ckastner wrote: post #10

The article notes the increase in pay and states > 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…

The article compares it to UK based NGO's that don't pay over $1.3m USD.

What about US based NGO's? I don't know where to find this data.

Lastly, a FAANG may or may not pay more, but they're certainly in a much better financial position than Mozilla to pay a high salary.

Re: Firefox usage is down despite Mozilla's top exec pay going up

#33

Post by k_ »

ecmascript wrote: post #11
robin_reala wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Repeat after me: correlation is not causation.

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.

Re: Firefox usage is down despite Mozilla's top exec pay going up

#34

Post by londons_explore »

shp0ngle wrote: post #18

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 happ…

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.

Re: Firefox usage is down despite Mozilla's top exec pay going up

#35

Post by drdaeman »

guerrilla wrote: post #16
deanclatworthy wrote: post #8

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 p…

> better container support What's wrong with the support it has? [1] [1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account...

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.

Re: Firefox usage is down despite Mozilla's top exec pay going up

#37

Post by manigandham »

doublesCs wrote: post #29
jameskraus wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An exec worth millions/year in tech needs decent compensation to take the career risk of steering a declining company.

This is cartoonishly circular: exec needs millions/year because that's the only way to attract a person worth millions/year.

Why is that circular? If someone is worth that much then you must pay what they're worth to get them.

Whether they need someone that expensive is up to the organization to decide.

Re: Firefox usage is down despite Mozilla's top exec pay going up

#38

Post by onion2k »

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.

Re: Firefox usage is down despite Mozilla's top exec pay going up

#39

Post by enriquto »

Jonnax wrote: post #13

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. It gets most of its revenue from Google. They need a different revenue stream but their ideas haven't worked. Their executives are clearly failures. But with such high pay, they're cashing out. Buying themsel…

> And they can't reduce their salary now because it'd be unfair on their families.

This kind of bullshit infuriates me to no end.

Re: Firefox usage is down despite Mozilla's top exec pay going up

#40

Post by mtgx »

deanclatworthy wrote: post #8

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 p…

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.

Post reply on HN