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Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo

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Re: Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo

#471

Post by sfink »

cpburns2009 wrote: post #223

It continues to amaze me how a company racking in over 500 million a year in revenue can continue to fail so spectacularly. With that income there's no reason they shouldn't be the leading browser. Doubling down on AI is only going to burn more money while they continue to lose market share.

Are you implying that the direct competitor, Chrome, is taking in the same or less? Chrome has a much larger staff (excluding the rest of Google), so I guess they must all be earning a small fraction of Mozilla staff salaries. Such dedicated people!

Re: Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo

#472

Post by fsflover »

glenstein wrote: post #466
wvh wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm still sad they shelved Mozilla Persona due to low adoption. There is a hole in the market around privacy and identity, and Mozilla would be a natural choice to fill it, but it's going to be an uphill battle to get major sites and end users on board. Not a job to be envious about indeed.

And just to add, I kind of mourn FirefoxOS. We couldn't have guessed it at the time, but as of 2025, Google is pushing developer verification and stepping closer and closer to ecosystem lockdown. It would have been a great time for an alternative mobile OS 10+ years in the making, to welcome all the energy that has gone into beautiful projects like F-Droid. If I could time travel into the past, in addition to prevent…

> And just to add, I kind of mourn FirefoxOS.

Today, we have Mobian, postmarketOS, PureOS and many more GNU/Linux OSes for smartphones.

Re: Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo

#473

Post by vondur »

pseudalopex wrote: post #443
ethbr1 wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "other things" is what most people seem to have problem with. Mozilla burns a batshit amount of money on feel good fancies. If it were focused on its core mission -- building great software in key areas -- it would see it can't afford this, because that's the same money that if saved would make them financially independent of Google.

> Mozilla burns a batshit amount of money on feel good fancies. How much?

>$236M on other things This is from another poster. I'm guessing stuff not related to Firefox development.

Re: Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo

#474

Post by sunshine-o »

sfink wrote: post #456
sunshine-o wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Brendan Eich is a rich nerd who probably got cornered in a party by someone smart and signed $1000 check. It is like blaming me for giving $10 to an bump without checking what he was gonna do with it.

No part of this is true, fwiw. His salary at Mozilla was not high and he was a strong advocate of keeping executive compensation low (and as supporting evidence, that compensation shot up soon after he left). He may have made more from Brave, but that was obviously well after the donation. He also never backed down from his donation and the directly implied opposition to gay marriage, only stating that it comes from…

What I meant is he is a guy who have evolved in the center of the tech revolution in the 90s and 2000s. If he is not horribly bad with money he probably made a lot at least in various investments.

So I would guess $1000 was almost nothing to him. He is not really supporting anything by donating $1000.

I listened to him in a interview once, he really feel like a nice guy.

Re: Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo

#475

Post by pessimizer »

rdm_blackhole wrote: post #210
rvz wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This really feels like the beginning of the end for Mozilla, sadly. The moment Mozilla failed to stop being dependent on Google's money whilst being true to their own mission in being a 'privacy first browser' it already was the end and the damage in trust was done. In 2007, the CEO at the time said they could live without Google's money - Now, their entire survival was tied to Google funding them [0] and got rewar…

> The moment Mozilla failed to stop being dependent on Google's money whilst being true to their own mission in being a 'privacy first browser' it already was the end and the damage in trust was done. I understand your position but what is the alternative funding source that could keep a company making a free browser running? Apple funds Safari's development but it's basically a side project for them, Google funds Ch…

> Google funds Chrome's development as side project to their ad business

> Obviously we don't want Firefox to become ad-supported

Firefox is currently ad-supported. They take an enormous amount of money from Google, an ad company.

Re: Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo

#476

Post by sfink »

TrevorFSmith wrote: post #185

If AI feature are on by default then no thanks! This is how to burn what little trust remains: "AI should always be a choice — something people can easily turn off." It has to be opt-in or you're not worthy of trust.

I find this whole "I gotta be able to turn off AI!" thing to be silly, personally. Do you also want to be able to turn off anything that uses binary search? Perhaps anything written in C++? Ooh, maybe it's nested for loops! Those kinda suck, give me an option to turn those off!

My indelicately expressed point is that the algorithm or processing model is not something anyone should care about. What matters? Things like: is my data sent off my device? Is there any way someone else can see what I'm doing or the data I'm generating? Am I burning large amounts of electricity? But none of those are "is it AI or not?"

Firefox already has a good story about what is processed locally vs being sent to a server, and gives you visibility and control over that. Why aren't the complaints about "cloud AI", at least? Why is it always "don't force-feed me AI in any form!"?

(To be clear, I'm no cheerleader for AI in the browser, and it bothers me when AI is injected as a solution without bothering to find a problem worth solving. But I'm not going to argue against on-device AI that does serve a useful purpose; I think that's great and we should find as many such opportunities as possible.)

Re: Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo

#477

Post by glenstein »

macspoofing wrote: post #419
gkoberger wrote: post #275

Having worked at Mozilla a while ago, the CEO role is one I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy. Success is oddly defined: it's a non-profit (well, a for-profit owned by a non-profit) that needs to make a big profit in a short amount of time. And anything done to make that profit will annoy the community. I hope Anthony leans into what makes Mozilla special. The past few years, Mozilla's business model has been to just m…

> What Mozilla is good at ... Firefox - the one thing they do not want to work on is the only thing that makes them special.

>Firefox - the one thing they do not want to work on

I'm sorry but this is complete nonsense. Just this year they pushed 12 major releases, with thousands of patches, including WebGPU efficiency improvements, updated PDF engine, numerous security fixes, amounting to millions of lines of new code. They maintain a codebase that rivals that of Chrome and of the Linux Kernel and push the equivalent of Rust's entire codebase on a monthly basis.

Re: Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo

#478

Post by ethbr1 »

wvh wrote: post #308
gkoberger wrote: post #275

Having worked at Mozilla a while ago, the CEO role is one I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy. Success is oddly defined: it's a non-profit (well, a for-profit owned by a non-profit) that needs to make a big profit in a short amount of time. And anything done to make that profit will annoy the community. I hope Anthony leans into what makes Mozilla special. The past few years, Mozilla's business model has been to just m…

I'm still sad they shelved Mozilla Persona due to low adoption. There is a hole in the market around privacy and identity, and Mozilla would be a natural choice to fill it, but it's going to be an uphill battle to get major sites and end users on board. Not a job to be envious about indeed.

1000%

The two places it's mind boggling that Mozilla doesn't have a product are (1) identity (especially as a provider to 3rd parties) and (2) instant messaging (especially on mobile).

They were important 10 years ago, they're more important today, and the existing providers all have huge privacy concerns.

Re: Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo

#479

Post by tanepiper »

whoisthemachine wrote: post #6

Looking at his LinkedIn profile, he seems to be the MBA type, with little to no technical experience. For the past year he's been the SVP or GM of Firefox, whatever that means. Take that as you will...

His one technical skill is building PowerPoint decks...

Re: Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo

#480

Post by roenxi »

zug_zug wrote: post #354
gkoberger wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, they have over a billion in the bank. Which is both a ton of money, but also goes away quickly when you're a large company paying lots of money to salaries.

So if you have a billion in the bank, you can collect 5% return and never touch the money. So you get $50m a year to pay enough engineers to make a browser. That's plenty of money if they recognize they need a super lean company with 0 bloat and a few highly paid experts who focus on correctness and not bullshit features.

That isn't really the best way to think about not-for-profit schemes like Mozilla. Every organisation eventually becomes corrupted (as in fact we see with Mozilla), so creating an eternal pot of money for something is not strategically sensible.

If good people are in charge, they'll just spend everything and rely on ongoing donations. If nobody thinks it is worth donating too then it is time to close up shop. Keep a bit of a buffer for the practical issue of bad years, sure, but the idea shouldn't be to set up an endowment.

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