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Firefox on the brink?

brycewray.com

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Re: Firefox on the brink?

#201

Post by Chabsff »

dheera wrote: post #131
FirmwareBurner wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Staff-level engineers are routinely paid upwards of 1M these days Yeah, at successful high performing trillion dolar tech companies like Nvidia or Apple, not broke*ss underperforming companies like Mozilla. >6M for a CEO doesn't sound unreasonable. It's unreasonable when you take into account Mozilla's lack of performance over the years. Where is their success, other than being kept on life support by being bankrol…

> Where is their success Huh what? I use Firefox and I'm actually very happy with it.

Somehow, I don't think a single person enjoying the browser justifies 6 Million dollars a year in executive overhead alone.

That's what what success means in this context: Something that makes that expense worthwhile.

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#203

Post by jwells89 »

DrBazza wrote: post #130
irrational wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only because of iOS, I assume. But it looks like Apple might be forced to open things up and allow other browsers to run on iOS. If that happened, I'd expect Safari to drop like a stone.

And MacOS. And I hope Apple doesn't manipulate the "power usage" data that always claims Safari is the lowest-power best-battery-saver browser on their platform. I run Safari on MacOS for only that reason, that it allegedly gives me an extra hour or so out of my laptop vs. Chrome or Firefox. Of course, I should actually benchmark myself and find out.

In my experience it depends somewhat on the sites/web apps one uses (some are not well optimized for WebKit), but Safari definitely tends to be easier on the battery. It seems to try harder to get to an idle state and keep CPU usage down where Chrome and Firefox are happy to keep the CPU spun up, perhaps due to a “speed and bells and whistles at all costs” mentality in development (traditionally browsers have been marketed on speed and features rather than efficiency).

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#204

Post by smallerfish »

tiahura wrote: post #60
loganmarchione wrote: post #36

Mozilla also just posted their State of Mozilla 2022 (this includes financial statements). From what I've read, it seems that expenses are up and revenue from search deals is down. https://stateof.mozilla.org/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38530382 https://www.ghacks.net/2023/12/05/mozilla-earned-close-to-60... Firefox's market share has been on the decline since 2010. https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market…

[flagged]

Interesting that only 1 out of 17 people in the senior management group is a technologist, and she's a senior director. No VPE, no CTO. Says a lot about the organization's priorities.

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#205

Post by taylodl »

croes wrote: post #174
taylodl wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Compromised morals? WTF is the CEO of the Mozilla Foundation doing to earn $7M per year in salary? What about the Mozilla Foundation forcing out Brandon Eich because of a personal donation he made to a cause they didn't like? Morals my ass! I stopped using Firefox the day they kicked Brandon out and here's the kicker: I don't agree with the cause Brandon supported but I agree his employment shouldn't be affected by d…

So you shoot yourself in the foot to teach Mozilla a lesson? We all lose if it's only Chrome.

Last I looked Safari isn't Chrome.

Also, anybody can use the Gecko web rendering engine, yet project after project after project has picked the WebKit or Blink rendering engines.

And no, I haven't "shot myself in the foot" - when I replaced Firefox I found two great browsers: Brave and Vivaldi.

The better question is why you continue to support a compromised organization?

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#206

Post by tomashubelbauer »

dheera wrote: post #162
benjaminsuch wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but this is not the criteria for a company to be successful or not.

Since when do you get to define the criteria? I'm a happy user, I consider that a success in my book.

I am also a happy Firefox user, but that doesn't preclude me from seeing that Mozilla is a failing steward of Firefox.

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#207

Post by mikeryan »

munk-a wrote: post #65
ekianjo wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Mozilla Corporation CEO Mitchell Baker's salary? What a ridiculous question. Obvious the chief captain on the Titanic is not responsible for the Iceberg jumping at the boat.

I think it's a pretty reasonable question when the salary is so incredibly out of line with what developers make. Is the CEO singlehandedly responsible for productivity equal to that of sixty or so developers?

CEO salaries aren’t, and never have been, relative to the rank and file salaries.

The question is how much you need to be to get a competent executive relative to the open market.

You can argue whether they’re getting what they’re paying for but this doesn’t seem to be out of line relative to the leaders of other, similarly sized organizations. Also a non profit has to have higher salaries as there’s not a lot of room to offload that to bonuses or equity.

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#208

Post by underdeserver »

dheera wrote: post #126
_dark_matter_ wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Routinely??? I don't know of one staff level that gets paid that much

https://www.levels.fyi/companies/facebook/salaries/software-... https://www.levels.fyi/companies/amazon/salaries/software-en... https://www.levels.fyi/companies/google/salaries/software-en... https://www.levels.fyi/companies/apple/salaries/software-eng...

These are all senior staff and up. Not one of these is staff level.

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#209

Post by lambda_garden »

jml78 wrote: post #72
irrational wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only because of iOS, I assume. But it looks like Apple might be forced to open things up and allow other browsers to run on iOS. If that happened, I'd expect Safari to drop like a stone.

Crazy thing is that I know a few Linux users that would love to have safari on our Linux machines for syncing. Firefox on iOS is a horrible experience. My desktop I have switched to Vivaldi so I can easily sync tabs between desktop and phone. I don’t love Vivaldi but the overall experience is superior to Firefox on both. Would prefer safari on my Linux desktop and use it on my phone

I'd rather have proper Firefox on iOS than Safari on Linux.

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#210

Post by nine_k »

loganmarchione wrote: post #36

Mozilla also just posted their State of Mozilla 2022 (this includes financial statements). From what I've read, it seems that expenses are up and revenue from search deals is down. https://stateof.mozilla.org/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38530382 https://www.ghacks.net/2023/12/05/mozilla-earned-close-to-60... Firefox's market share has been on the decline since 2010. https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market…

I can imagine that the CEO, or maybe a few other top officers, may say: "This is me who is bringing in all the search deals, which means all the money. Come on and try to oust me."

Mozilla is an open-source project. When an open-source project somehow loses its way, it's often forked by a new team of contributors who have a better idea. This happened several times: Open Office / Libre Office, MySQL / MariaDB, X86 / X11.org, hell, even GCC / egcs in the 1990s.

But this likely cannot happen to Mozilla, which is basically kept afloat by Google handing it some money for keeping it as a default search engine, about $400M a year currently [1]. There is little chance that an alternative "Better Mozilla" organization would collect as much, or at least half as much, to support a fork. It would e.g. take 33M users who agree to pay $5/mo for a Mozilla "support subscription" to collect $400M a year.

Maybe a web browser can be maintained for less than 400M, but likely not much less. The modern web is fiendishly complex, and you need both a desktop version (three platforms) and a mobile version.

[1]: https://www.pcmag.com/news/mozilla-signs-lucrative-3-year-go...

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