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Reflections on One Year as the CEO of Mozilla

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Re: Reflections on One Year as the CEO of Mozilla

#41

Post by zamadatix »

kgraves wrote: post #26
rl3 wrote: post #9

> Above all, this year has reinforced for me that sometimes a deeply held mission requires massive wrenching change in order to be realized. Yeah, like firing your researchers. What good was that Servo thing anyways? Don't need no PhDs when you can write endless self-aggrandizing blog posts while increasing your own pay.

Did you really expect Mozilla to care about Servo? I'm sorry, but to them it was a experimental toy that didn't make them any money and they saw it as a cost center.

In nearly 2 decades a high 90s percentage of their profit has been search deals for Firefox which is where a lot of the stuff from Servo ended up so I'm not sure it could be construed as unsurprising or useless.

Re: Reflections on One Year as the CEO of Mozilla

#42

Post by kgraves »

This is what you get when you sell your soul to Google and rely on your competitors funding for years on end.

And what does Mozilla of today have to show for it?

A self aggrandising, navel-gazing, tone deaf, hollow templated puff piece which will cause the unfortunate inevitable sad downfall of Mozilla.

There is almost nothing left of this once innovative company, resorting to present a facade as a cover while ignoring the real issue:

Not focusing on making a revenue generating product for over 10 years.

Also, repeat extremely tone deaf in Mozilla laying off their top engineers on Rust, Servo and Firefox and not a single mention of it in this post.

Looks like all those free years of Google money caught up with them.

Re: Reflections on One Year as the CEO of Mozilla

#44

Post by TheAdamAndChe »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #25
8458e112e7b2 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not only that, they do have their other priorities figured out also: https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2021/01/08/we-need-more-than-d... I am actually glad that they came out and put that in black and white. Got me to move to another browser. (I do miss Firefox's multi-container tabs and account containers however but I will survive).

Which did you move to? Is their compensation more democratic?

On my phone, I moved from Firefox to Brave. The overall experience is much better.

I don't know about democratic compensation, but I don't regularly hear about Brave making political statements or picking sides, which matters to me. I still get ads blocked, and I experience far fewer issues.

Re: Reflections on One Year as the CEO of Mozilla

#45

Post by Kye »

It's unfortunate that Mozilla's slow collapse under the weight of being hooked on Google ad money is being used as proof for people who are perpetually mad about diversity and accountability.

The fault is with management that's afraid to disrupt the cash firehose. Not a mishandled CEO hire 7 years ago or the move from the increasingly untenable XUL.

Re: Reflections on One Year as the CEO of Mozilla

#46

Post by [deleted] »

martinald wrote: post #14

Deary me. There is literally not one mention of any concrete product development or launch that I can see in that post. This reinforces my view that Mozilla doesn't really see itself as an actual product company. It seems to see itself as some sort of quasi NGO focussed on the internet. Which is sort of fine, but I feel they would influence much more of the web with better more popular products rather than policy dis…

[deleted]

Re: Reflections on One Year as the CEO of Mozilla

#47

Post by elcritch »

Retric wrote: post #40
elcritch wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The newer Firefox quantum has become my goto browser since it was released. Slower than Chrome but less memory hungry. Unfortunately anytime I hear about Firefox it's often "Firefox removes features" or worse "Firefox disables feature for your good". I literally couldn't log into some old wifi router at an airbnb because Firefox refused to let me visit a non-standard port, with no way to override it. It's not adtech…

Does this no longer work? http://kb.mozillazine.org/Network.security.ports.banned.over...

Not sure, though perhaps I should rephrase to "obvious method" to disable. I tried one config setting and gave up and just used Safari.

Re: Reflections on One Year as the CEO of Mozilla

#48

Post by kmeisthax »

8458e112e7b2 wrote: post #15
ByTheBook wrote: post #8

Firefox market share down 85%, during the same period the executives get a 400% raise. Then 250 employees are fired. It feels like it's just the top brass getting as much money they can before the ship sinks at this point.

Not only that, they do have their other priorities figured out also: https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2021/01/08/we-need-more-than-d... I am actually glad that they came out and put that in black and white. Got me to move to another browser. (I do miss Firefox's multi-container tabs and account containers however but I will survive).

I really hate how people just read the title of this post, got offended, and just constantly link it to say "See guys? Mozilla wants to censor you!" when that's not what the actual post is saying. It is almost guaranteed that whenever someone posts anything Mozilla-related, people bring this up, possibly with an invitation to switch to Brave or something.

The article is specifically trying to criticize social media without sounding like Mozilla is siding with the Capitol rioters. If you want to argue that it's a bad headline, sure - people's continued misreading of it definitely is evidence of that. If you want to argue that it's Mozilla "showing their true colors" and calling for Facebook and Twitter to take over the government or whatever, then I will disagree with you all damned day.

Re: Reflections on One Year as the CEO of Mozilla

#49

Post by Kye »

8458e112e7b2 wrote: post #15
ByTheBook wrote: post #8

Firefox market share down 85%, during the same period the executives get a 400% raise. Then 250 employees are fired. It feels like it's just the top brass getting as much money they can before the ship sinks at this point.

Not only that, they do have their other priorities figured out also: https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2021/01/08/we-need-more-than-d... I am actually glad that they came out and put that in black and white. Got me to move to another browser. (I do miss Firefox's multi-container tabs and account containers however but I will survive).

Did we read different articles? She's explicitly not in favor of deplatforming in there and offers a different course of action.

Re: Reflections on One Year as the CEO of Mozilla

#50

Post by kovac »

Can't we just get together and build an opensource browser? Considering how we are building very complex things without these executives, middle managers and all the corporate bs. It could be our gift to the next generation of engineers like we inherited Linux and give them a fighting chance.
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