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Mozilla 2023 annual report: CEO pay skyrockets, Firefox market share nosedives

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Re: Mozilla 2023 annual report: CEO pay skyrockets, Firefox market share nosedives

#211

Post by surajrmal »

CharlesW wrote: post #53

Governments have been creating web/native/mobile apps for some time, which is a trend that continues to accelerate. Firefox continues to limp along but seemingly can't even retain its most ardent fans, and there's no sign of this changing. What if the EU were to fork Firefox (Openfox?) and fund its evolution of a privacy-first alternative? Among other benefits, this would: • Help ensure that key digital infrastructur…

Taking up ownership of a large codebase is incredibly challenging. You can't just throw a lot of people at it and hope it works out. It takes time to develop expertise. If the organization orchestrating a fork of Firefox ended up paying many of the existing Firefox developers to work on its fork then it might have a chance

Re: Mozilla 2023 annual report: CEO pay skyrockets, Firefox market share nosedives

#212

Post by nine_k »

macspoofing wrote: post #55
nine_k wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the situation is simple. They are rendering one service that their users value, and it is making Firefox. They should ask (not require) payment for that service. Yes, what they should do is basically to run a Patreon subscription, clearly marked "For the continued development of Firefox". At a very accessible level of $3 / mo on average , and merely 5M subscribers over the world, they'd have $15M monthly, or…

>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…

> instead of investing in it and making it a core pillar of their strategy.

What are they investing in now?

> Mozilla was (is?) flush with cash.

It's not neutral cash, it's Google's cash. The point is to get off the needle of Google's handouts and become independent. Maybe then there'd be less incentive to slowly drive Firefox towards irrelevance.

> what are they without Firefox?

With a small bit of conspiracy theory, that would be "mission accomplished" :-|

Re: Mozilla 2023 annual report: CEO pay skyrockets, Firefox market share nosedives

#213

Post by xcv123 »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #98
chrisco255 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Brendan's personal political donations were his own business unless he made it some organizational goal or priority for Mozilla, which he never did.

> Brendan's personal political donations were his own business Eh, a CEO is a quasi-public figure. Those weren't his personal business entirely. (Consider a gay employee at Mozilla or partner.) That said, the solution was chastisement and a public apology. Not termination.

> the solution was chastisement and a public apology

Not all gays are in favor of gay marriage. The solution was to let him have his political opinions, and simply agree to disagree, like adults.

Re: Mozilla 2023 annual report: CEO pay skyrockets, Firefox market share nosedives

#214

Post by waterhouse »

jqpabc123 wrote: post #52

To the casual observer, it appears the CEO is being paid/rewarded to shed Firefox users. Who would want them to do that?

Well, nearly all of Mozilla's revenue (I see numbers around 80-90%) comes from Google. And Google presumably doesn't mind if Firefox users switch to Chrome. I'm not sure if anyone involved actively considers this the goal, but it's possible that this creates some perverse incentives.

Re: Mozilla 2023 annual report: CEO pay skyrockets, Firefox market share nosedives

#215

Post by nine_k »

fabrice_d wrote: post #206
evasb wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

> it made it easy to pull hundred of MB of nodejs dependencies

That's exactly what "more embeddable" is. It made itself easier to turn into Node.js, Electron, etc. I don't think it was a pure coincidence.

Re: Mozilla 2023 annual report: CEO pay skyrockets, Firefox market share nosedives

#216

Post by nottorp »

nine_k wrote: post #41
hellotomyrars wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The goal is obvious and not new. Firefox as a product is only useful to them as a handout from google to use as an antitrust defense. The problem is that Mozilla hasn’t been able to find any product that generates any meaningful revenue. It makes perfect sense for them to try to be an entity that can exist without their biggest competitor tossing them scraps. How they should achieve that is certainly up for debate bu…

I think the situation is simple. They are rendering one service that their users value, and it is making Firefox. They should ask (not require) payment for that service. Yes, what they should do is basically to run a Patreon subscription, clearly marked "For the continued development of Firefox". At a very accessible level of $3 / mo on average , and merely 5M subscribers over the world, they'd have $15M monthly, or…

They have a donate button. Which is all about subscriptions. Which is why I went away without even doing a one time donation, as my original intention was.

I deeply resent being pushed into subscriptions and you should too.

Re: Mozilla 2023 annual report: CEO pay skyrockets, Firefox market share nosedives

#217

Post by neilv »

mort96 wrote: post #202
Osmose wrote: post #187

Worrying 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.

An additional critique is that surely one of the many true-believers in old-school Internet ideals of freedom and openneess could lead for 1/10th the compensation

Then put the money saved towards allocating tens more top, full-time, aligned engineers to projects.

When I see leaders of a non-profit personally drawing more than is necessary to lead a comfortable life, I see a conflict between the mission and personal enrichment.

(There's the argument that non-profits need money, and supposedly you can't get good people to generate money except by hiring people who are personally money-motivated. But the evidence I see is that it looks like money and power potential attracts self-interested careerists, and you get people building fiefdoms, and incestuous relationships among them. Get an honest, smart, true-believer board, and anyone who tried to draw millions of dollars in compensation, or assemble an org chart of careerist execs, would get a regretful, "Sorry, this isn't that kind of 'non-profit' vehicle for wealthy executive lifestyles and careerists, and we don't seem to have alignment", as they gently dropkick the misaligned people out the door.)

Re: Mozilla 2023 annual report: CEO pay skyrockets, Firefox market share nosedives

#218

Post by bee_rider »

mrazomor wrote: post #171
Semaphor wrote: post #148

Earlier 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…

The person you quoted seems to have just generated this hypothesis out of nothingness, so it isn’t as if they are on super solid ground in the first place. However, I think it is worth pointing out that we’re all vanishingly small percentages of the population; your existence doesn’t tell us much or contradict them, I guess.

Re: Mozilla 2023 annual report: CEO pay skyrockets, Firefox market share nosedives

#220

Post by ksjskskskkk »

freedomben wrote: post #43
username1228023 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been critical of Mozilla for a long time, and Mitchell has not been a good leader for the last ~10 years or so. Having said that, Mitchell was instrumental to several very important things, not all of them in the distant past. She also went years taking annual salary lower than she probably should have been taking. It frankly wouldn't be unreasonable to grant her lifetime emeritus status that comes with a no-str…

May I ask what you did at Mozilla? i.e. were you an engineer on Firefox?

mozillian usually means mamagers. unless they are really old timers.
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