Does no mechanism exist to fire Mitchell Baker or, at least, addressing her leadership at Mozilla?
She answers to the board. I guess they're happy with her.
She's also the board chair so answers to herself, see https://wiki.mozilla.org/Board
Mozilla 2023 annual report: CEO pay skyrockets, Firefox market share nosedives
201–210 of 349 posts
Re: Mozilla 2023 annual report: CEO pay skyrockets, Firefox market share nosedives
#202Worrying about Mozilla CEO compensation when 1. Mitchell Baker is also chairwoman of the board of the Mozilla Foundation and is a founding member of Mozilla, and receives no stock compensation because there is none to give, 2. Google can definitionally outspend Mozilla on browser development and has used that to cement their market position for over a decade now, and 3. as long as Google is the primary source of Mozi…
I think the general critique is: the performance of a CEO should be tied somehow to the performance of the company, yet year after year, the company performs worse while CEO compensation goes up.
Re: Mozilla 2023 annual report: CEO pay skyrockets, Firefox market share nosedives
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
I posted some stats from our website a few weeks ago [0], GA was heavily undercounting FF compared to our server-side stats based on UAs. One other thing to remember, is to check the falling of desktop usage, because a large part of the modern internet users are mobile-only, and the amount of people who use anything but what Google tells them to (or Apple allows them to) is vanishingly small. [0]: https://news.ycombi…
> a large part of the modern internet users are mobile-only, and the amount of people who use anything but what Google tells them to (or Apple allows them to) is vanishingly small. I'm a Chrome user. Both on desktop and mobile because of the built in syncing. If I were able to switch to Firefox mobile (Android), I would. But the rendering is often broken or awkwardly different on Firefox mobile. I thought this is a t…
Is it? I use Firefox on android (and desktop) and I have to drop to chrome about once a year for rendering issues.
Re: Mozilla 2023 annual report: CEO pay skyrockets, Firefox market share nosedives
#204I guess the question - why can't Mozilla (or at least Firefox) - be like the Linux kernel or the Debian group? They are healthy open source projects, some funding from industry, sure, but they're staying current in the latest tech/comp-sci tech while not beholden to anyone in particular (I hope) Organizational baggage?
Last time I checked the Linux Foundation had a similar problem, spending 2% on the Kernel development and the rest on the latest tech trends, AI, blockchain, metaverse etc.
Re: Mozilla 2023 annual report: CEO pay skyrockets, Firefox market share nosedives
#205I feel like this question is a decade too late, but FF is open source right? Why hasn't Mozilla been jettisoned years ago?
Because despite what everybody seems to think, Mozilla spends several hundred millions of dollars every year developing Firefox, and that's not the kind of thing the community can just fork and replace.
I see. I asked the question because I legitimately didn't know, and haven't heard any conversation about it. Maybe that's because continuing Firefox outside of Mozilla seems like an insurmountable task, but doing nothing seems like a guaranteed dead end. I've been waiting a very long time for the ship to right, and it ain't happening.
I guess if what's Firefox needs is a reliable source of funding, at least recognizing that is a necessary first step. Who knows, maybe it could happen somehow.
Re: Mozilla 2023 annual report: CEO pay skyrockets, Firefox market share nosedives
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
>They should ask (not require) payment for that service. Sure - let them squeeze out the last drop of their one and only cash cow before it becomes utterly irrelevant - instead of investing in it and making it a core pillar of their strategy. >See how Wikimedia Foundation is basically flush with cash, Mozilla was (is?) flush with cash. Browser market share and corresponding user eyeballs are immensely valuable. That…
With Mitchel Baker at helm, all the initiatives that would make Firefox more embeddable were cancelled to cut cost. Now Firefox can't be used to make webapps effectively, the only alternative is to use Electron and fortify Chromium's monopoly.
I'm not a Baker fan at all, but no such initiative was cut under her leadership, because none existed.
Electron won not because chromium was more embeddable, it won because it made it easy to pull hundred of MB of nodejs dependencies. Everything else you could do already before with XulRunner...
Re: Mozilla 2023 annual report: CEO pay skyrockets, Firefox market share nosedives
#207Honest question: I use (and like) Firefox and rely on many of its features including password vault. However, should I be looking elsewhere? Any suggestions? (I avoid Google Chrome.)
Safari is fine (if you have a Mac), it’s great on battery life and I actually use it for web dev. If you’re happy with Firefox I’d say just keep using it.
It's not. No uBlock Origin.
Re: Mozilla 2023 annual report: CEO pay skyrockets, Firefox market share nosedives
#208Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hmm. I am willing to explore it a little further. Does one become a better person simply by staying quiet?
You could try being supportive instead. But hey, the current strategy has worked out so well thus far, please continue until the market share reaches 0. Mitchell really seems to care about these comments. Oh wait, she probably doesn’t read HN does she? Oh, but the Firefox devs probably do. Well I’m sure they’re just as moved and powerful enough to affect the kind of change you want to see in the organization.
>Oh wait, she probably doesn’t read HN does she? Oh, but the Firefox devs probably do.
All the more reason to insist that Firefox is the important bit then? What does a Firefox dev get from "Ah yes sure we only care about Firefox, but if that's what Mozilla wants to do they have all my support in continuing their path to irrelevancy"
Re: Mozilla 2023 annual report: CEO pay skyrockets, Firefox market share nosedives
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
I posted some stats from our website a few weeks ago [0], GA was heavily undercounting FF compared to our server-side stats based on UAs. One other thing to remember, is to check the falling of desktop usage, because a large part of the modern internet users are mobile-only, and the amount of people who use anything but what Google tells them to (or Apple allows them to) is vanishingly small. [0]: https://news.ycombi…
> a large part of the modern internet users are mobile-only, and the amount of people who use anything but what Google tells them to (or Apple allows them to) is vanishingly small. I'm a Chrome user. Both on desktop and mobile because of the built in syncing. If I were able to switch to Firefox mobile (Android), I would. But the rendering is often broken or awkwardly different on Firefox mobile. I thought this is a t…
Are you using uBlock Origin in Firefox on Android? If not, then try it.
You'd have to prise it from my cold dead hands. By far the best mobile browsing experience.
Not entirely perfect, there's a bug where I'll occasionally get a grey screen on a tab. Hasn't happened enough for me to do anything about tho.
But still orders of magnitude better than my experience with Chrome on Android.
Re: Mozilla 2023 annual report: CEO pay skyrockets, Firefox market share nosedives
#210Worrying about Mozilla CEO compensation when 1. Mitchell Baker is also chairwoman of the board of the Mozilla Foundation and is a founding member of Mozilla, and receives no stock compensation because there is none to give, 2. Google can definitionally outspend Mozilla on browser development and has used that to cement their market position for over a decade now, and 3. as long as Google is the primary source of Mozi…
I think the general critique is: the performance of a CEO should be tied somehow to the performance of the company, yet year after year, the company performs worse while CEO compensation goes up.
Right, but part of my point with #2 and #3 there is that "browser share" is a really poor choice for the performance metric in question to tie compensation to.
Browsers just duking it out on features and ease of use is not how the browser market works—Google can and does leverage their dominance in non-browser markets to boost their browser, and Mozilla is not going to raise their browser share against tactics like that if they simply focus really hard on making a better browser.
Tying it to a more functional goal like successful diversification of revenue makes much more sense (even if you disagree with how they did it in this particular case).