Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo • Hacker News Board

Re: Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo

#811

Post by gwd » Wed, Dec 17, 2025, 11:14 AM UTC

rvba wrote: post #805

CuriousRose wrote: post #658

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fully agree with this. - Mozilla SSL Certs - for corporations that don't want Let's Encrypt - Mozilla Mail - a reliable Exchange/Google Mail alternative (desperately needed imo) - Thunderbird for iOS - why is this not a thing yet? - Mozilla Search - metasearch that isn't based on Bing/DDG/Google - Mozilla HTTPS DNS - although Cloudflare will probably always do this better All seemingly low-hanging fruit with brand al…

Nobody wants this. People want firefox.

That's like saying, "Nobody wants Adwords; people want Chrome." True but besides the point. Salaries have to be paid somehow.

Some options I can think of for paying salaries:

- Go the Wikipedia route, stay entirely free, and beg for donations on a regular basis

- Start charging for Firefox; or for Firefox Premium

- Use Firefox as a loss-leader to build a brand, and use that brand to sell other products (which is essentially what GP is suggesting).

How would you pay for developers' salaries while satisfying "people [who] want firefox"?

Re: Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo

#812

Post by account42 » Wed, Dec 17, 2025, 11:14 AM UTC

tigroferoce wrote: post #589

tikhonj wrote: post #508

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're significantly underestimating fully-loaded cost per person + other expenses. An engineer making a $200k salary is going to cost the company something like $300k, and there are some additional fixed overheads. And $200k is quite a bit less than your competitors are paying. So you're looking at something more like 150 employees total of which <100 are going to be pure engineers, and that's stretching your budget…

Working at Mozilla should be more than money. $200k/year is more than enough to be happy in most of the world. You don't need to compete on rock stars that must live in San Francisco, and focus on people that are happy with a high paying job and have enough idealism to accept "only" $200k/year.

Exactly. One of the biggest problems with Mozilla is that they see themselves as akin to Google et al.

Re: Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo

#813

Post by gwd » Wed, Dec 17, 2025, 11:16 AM UTC

account42 wrote: post #803

gkoberger wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They do work on it. A lot. But the issue is browsers don't make money. You can't charge for it, you can't add ads to it, etc. You're competing with the biggest companies in the world (Google, Apple), all of whom are happy to subsidize a browser for other reasons.

That should not be a problem for a nonprofit which the Mozilla foundation supposedly is.

Non-profit doesn't mean non-revenue. They don't have to pay their investors, but they certainly need to pay their developers.

Re: Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo

#814

Post by account42 » Wed, Dec 17, 2025, 11:19 AM UTC

pseudalopex wrote: post #481

vondur wrote: post #473

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

$236M included facilities, administration, marketing, and so on.

Yes, they should trim most of that fat.

Re: Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo

#815

Post by qwertox » Wed, Dec 17, 2025, 11:29 AM UTC

> People want software that is fast, modern, but also honest about what it does.

I want my browser to be able to run uBlock Origin, so therefore people want more than just what is specified above. I did quit using Google Chrome because they banned uBO (I know the command-line-flags hack still works, but for how long?).

If Firefox also bans uBO through removal of Manifest v2 without offering a proper alternative, then it's just as big of a piece of crap as Chrome is. Due to lack of real choices, I could as well move back to Chrome. I'm currently using Vivaldi.

Re: Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo

#816

Post by account42 » Wed, Dec 17, 2025, 11:29 AM UTC

gwd wrote: post #813

account42 wrote: post #803

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That should not be a problem for a nonprofit which the Mozilla foundation supposedly is.

Non-profit doesn't mean non-revenue. They don't have to pay their investors, but they certainly need to pay their developers.

Most nonprofits don't generate "revenue" from their "product". They provide a valuable service and get paid by people who agree with the mission.

Re: Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo

#817

Post by the_biot » Wed, Dec 17, 2025, 11:30 AM UTC

mmooss wrote: post #720

the_biot wrote: post #659

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a fair question. It's of course my opinion, not hard fact, but here goes: - They have for years been trying to add stuff to Firefox that nobody wants, and were privacy violations. The "marketing studies" come to mind. - They have for decades been wasting their time and money on everything BUT Firefox, and failing at literally all of it. You can't help but notice the stellar incompetence of Mozilla leadership.…

> They have for decades been wasting their time and money on everything BUT Firefox They invest the vast majority of their resources in Firefox. And they have had some incredible successes: Rust, Let's Encrypt ... > How can somebody like Mitchell Baker be making millions of dollars a year while simultaneously seeing Firefox market share drop to damn near zero? Maybe there was no realistic way to do better. Maybe than…

> They invest the vast majority of their resources in Firefox.

Says who? I have never seen figures that show this. It also doesn't excuse the gigantic amounts of money wasted on irrelevant things, or executive salaries.

> And they have had some incredible successes: Rust, Let's Encrypt ...

That's pretty charitable. LE was a wider industry initiative, and while Rust was incubated in Mozilla AFAIK, they also let it slip through their fingers.

> Maybe there was no realistic way to do better. Maybe thanks to Baker, Mozilla still exists.

How on earth are you defending her behavior? It was utterly shameless and indefensible. Do you work for Mozilla?

> Mozilla needed and needs to find other products

No, it doesn't. It needs to bank its giant wad of cash and learn to live off the interest plus whatever it can get in donations. Mozilla does not need to be a for-profit company, it needs to be a non-profit making a browser. That was always supposed to be the mission, from day one.

> Do you really think they could make Firefox so good that the non-technical public would go through the effort of dropping Chrome

They did when IE was shoved down people's throats, and Firefox was the better browser. They did when Chrome came around and started taking over. Most people even now get pushed to Edge or Safari, yet still end up using Chrome. People switching browsers is a thing.

Re: Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo

#818

Post by Orygin » Wed, Dec 17, 2025, 11:47 AM UTC

LunaSea wrote: post #495

philipwhiuk wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's not defending "THE FREE INTERNET" at his new place. (Which for the record, is less important than physical freedom).

Maybe that has to do with Brave not getting a free check to the tune iof $500M Google every year. That makes it more difficult to create "free internet" type projects.

Probably comes from the Crypto scam integrated into the browser.

I find it funny some people shit on Firefox for adding Pocket, but defend Brave for adding crypto scams to the browser.

Re: Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo

#819

Post by graemep » Wed, Dec 17, 2025, 11:50 AM UTC

hermanzegerman wrote: post #785

fsflover wrote: post #779

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you saying that a warrant canary isn't useful?

He is saying that no one outside of the US will trust them with their data, because of the US Cloud Act and similar legislation. There is a reason Proton & Co are based in Switzerland and not in the US

They can compete where the alternatives are also US based services.

They can compete in the US.

There are also many people who are more concerned about privacy from businesses than from governments. There are also people who are more concerned about privacy from their own government than a foreign government.

Although the Cloud Act and similar issues with the US are much discussed here, I see no sign it loses American big tech much business.

Re: Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo

#820

Post by account42 » Wed, Dec 17, 2025, 11:50 AM UTC

CamperBob2 wrote: post #352

this_user wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What even is an "AI browser"? It's a browser, it's mainly supposed to render web pages / web apps. There is no obvious reason why it would need any AI features.

It is really incredibly nice to be able to highlight a passage, right click on it, and select "Summarize" or "Explain this." That's all FireFox does at the moment. It's an option on the right-click menu. You can ignore it. If nobody told you the evil AI thingy was there, you would probably never notice it.

It's a lot nicer to exercise your brain and maybe learn something.