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Firefox on the brink?

brycewray.com

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Re: Firefox on the brink?

#321

Post by Longhanks »

dehrmann wrote: post #266
jeroenhd wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Genuine question. What is justifying Mozilla Corporation CEO Mitchell Baker's salary? This question is why I don't expect Mozilla to last at its current course. I like their work, but the endless increases in CEO salary while their most important money maker is fledgling is not justifiable.

The increases look reasonable to me, but not when you consider their declining market share. I guess she only returned to the role of CEO in 2020, but she's been in leadership for a long time, and the org's performance has been poor. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitchell_Baker#Negative_salary...

In what world is DOUBLING one's salary within two years while the company overall and, most importantly, the company's absolute flagship product are in continuous decline "reasonable"?

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#322

Post by freedomben »

bcrl wrote: post #198
dheera wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Performance of Firefox has steadily gotten worse lately. My bank's website has massive lag when scrolling (1 second to redraw? Great!), but it works perfectly fine in Chrome. Firefox also gets into a state where screen updates in Streeview are laggy after anywhere from a few hours to a couple of days, but I can't figure out a way to predictably reproduce it on demand. Meanwhile, Chrome is snappy all the time. I also…

This is probably much more your bank's fault than it is FF. I think Mozilla has badly neglected FF to the point they probably deserve to die so a new org can take their place, but the blame for that most likely falls at the feet of the bank for not testing on FF.

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#323

Post by TedDoesntTalk »

RyanHamilton wrote: post #292
Certhas wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Am I reading the documents you link right? Mozilla is wildly profitable. They made a profit of roughly 150 Million dollars last year. They have 1.2 Billion dollars in assets. They have increased revenue from non-search deals significantly (56M -> 75M, up one third). Despite all the gnashing of teeth in this comment section about woke Mozilla, they spent only 5 Million on grants last year. The vast majority goes towar…

If this was a for profit company I could agree with your focus on profit. Their mission statement is: "Mozilla is a global nonprofit dedicated to keeping the Internet a global public resource that is open and accessible to all.". You could argue the importance of market share at some percentages but below ~5% has to be considered a priority one emergency, if your goal is to keep the internet accessible for all. If th…

> If this was a for profit company I could agree with your focus on profit.

There are two parts to Mozilla: a for-profit company and a non-profit company. They are separate. You are reading the mission statement of mozilla.org, not mozilla.com. Mitchell Baker is the CEO of the for-profit company, not the non-profit.

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#324

Post by 21eleven »

Shout out to Firefox Mobile. I have it as the default browser on my android phone and the experience is great. I don't miss chrome at all. Once you get used to the minor UI differences you won't even notice you are not on chrome.

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#325

Post by culi »

Buttons840 wrote: post #215
Vvector wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Raise your hand if you also got a 7x raise over the last seven years.

Okay, now keep them raised if you were also performing worse on every metric each year.

I actually don't think you'd see that many raised hands go down

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#326

Post by gottorf »

mariusor wrote: post #305
tnorthcutt wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would e.g. take 33M users who agree to pay $5/mo for a Mozilla "support subscription" to collect $400M a year. Maybe I'm reading this wrong, but when I do the math (33M x 5 x 12) I get $1.98B. Maybe you meant $1/month?

I'm deeply disturbed of this normalization of software as a subscription service. I want the return of good old days when people could pay once for their software and use it in perpetuity.

I hate the "subscriptionification" of everything as much as anybody, but there is a cost to ongoing updates to software. Especially on something like a browser, where both standards and exceptional behavior contrary to the standards change rapidly.

Maybe we could go back to where people paid once and could pay separately for support?

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#327

Post by ThatMedicIsASpy »

BossingAround wrote: post #50
nequo wrote: post #3

I want Firefox to not be on the brink. I have had no problems with it on Linux over the last few years since I switched from Chrome. I do not wish to touch Chrome with a ten-foot pole.

The one thing I miss from Chrome is the `thisisunsafe` feature to ignore whatever misconfiguration the webpage you're trying to access uses. Recently, one of the dev servers that I tried to access misconfigured HSTS, which made it really difficult for Firefox to access the web UI. I fired up chromium, simply typed the magic word, and accessed it no problem. Of course, ideally, there'd be no misconfigurations, but som…

And I refuse use chrome because I use

full-screen-api.ignore-widgets

which makes videos full screen to the browser size.

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#328

Post by abirch »

mariusor wrote: post #305
tnorthcutt wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would e.g. take 33M users who agree to pay $5/mo for a Mozilla "support subscription" to collect $400M a year. Maybe I'm reading this wrong, but when I do the math (33M x 5 x 12) I get $1.98B. Maybe you meant $1/month?

I'm deeply disturbed of this normalization of software as a subscription service. I want the return of good old days when people could pay once for their software and use it in perpetuity.

I remember the forced obsolescence. There were a few good software packages but many would frequently force you to upgrade from version 12.31 to 13.0 which isn't backward compatible i.e., "This software doesn't run on Windows XP"

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#329

Post by vlabakje90 »

rdm_blackhole wrote: post #255
PaulHoule wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The EU could have a privacy-friendly browser if it funded Mozilla or a Mozilla fork.

That would be a no from me. Considering the recent headlines from the EU wanting to scan every private message on the phones of it's citizens in order to "protect the children".

FIY, that has been rejected: https://fortune.com/europe/2023/10/26/eu-chat-control-csam-e...

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#330

Post by munk-a »

oliwarner wrote: post #224
chii wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

good negotiation skills and friends in high places. Salary has nothing to do with productivity at this level of an org.

> Salary has nothing to do with productivity at this level of an org. That's nonsense. The difference at this level is you're not looking at personal productivity, you should be looking at a much broader interpretation. Except Mozilla doesn't. They've seen flailing commercial performance and have rewarded the CEO and laid off developers. It feels like madness because it is. I love Firefox but Mozilla deserves to burn…

It should always be personal productivity but as a CEO your productivity is how much better you're doing than someone else in that role would. In the modern world too often executive compensation is viewed as "How valuable is this company" instead of "How much is this particular executive adding to the value of this company" - that's why we're seeing it spiral into simply ludicrous numbers.
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