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Three Mozilla Board Members Resign over Choice of New CEO

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Re: Three Mozilla Board Members Resign over Choice of New CEO

#41
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft isn't a fair comparison. They have other, multi-billion dollar cash cows to rely on. I don't think they're unfounded. Nearly every developer I know uses chrome, and chrome dev tools. This wasn't always the case. Market share can be a lagging indicator, i think it's a little short sighted to suggest they're okay. They're not! Forking isn't a sin. Diversity often a result of forking. Take a look at this graph…

Firefox has equal share with Chrome and most of the techies I know still use Firefox. Not having every private test URL of stuff you're working on sent to Google is reason enough. I do have several dev friends that use Chrome. They're usually mobile devs unconcerned with privacy (they have everything in Google).

    > Firefox has equal share with Chrome and most of the           
    >techies 
    >I know still use Firefox. 
    > Not having every private test URL of stuff 
    >you're working on sent to Google is reason enough. 
And where does Mozilla money come from ? tell me.

Re: Three Mozilla Board Members Resign over Choice of New CEO

#42

This article links to an earlier WSJ piece that gives more information about Eich's background ( http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2014/03/24/mozilla-picks-insider... ). He invented Javascript in 1995, co-founded Mozilla, and helped start Firefox. It seems to me he's very well qualified from a historical as well as technical perspective. Questions about his mobile expertise seem misplaced, considering that his technical co…

The article could have been clearer, but this is the important bit:

The three board members who resigned sought a CEO from outside Mozilla with experience in the mobile industry who could help expand the organization’s Firefox OS mobile-operating system and balance the skills of co-founders Eich and Baker.

So it's not about the Prop 8 thing at all.

Re: Three Mozilla Board Members Resign over Choice of New CEO

#43
post #23

Off-topic, but that's a weird statement from the WSJ: "Firefox is the world’s second-most-popular Web browser on personal computers, with 18% market share, according to Net Applications, a web-analytics consulting firm. That trails Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, with 58% share, and just ahead of Google’s Chrome, with 17% share." Here's what I found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers : Chrome…

Net Applications is. It’s right there in the Wikipedia article you are linking to. Net Applications measure unique visits and do country level weighing of data. The article is also quoting Net Application’s desktop numbers. That might explain the difference, at least partly.

Overall I would argue that the statement in the article, while accurate, can be misleading. It should probably include mobile usage numbers (though the sentence you quoted makes clear that they don’t – and on mobile phones Firefox isn’t much of a player anyway) and maybe note that market share measurement of browsers can be unreliable.

Re: Three Mozilla Board Members Resign over Choice of New CEO

#44

This article links to an earlier WSJ piece that gives more information about Eich's background ( http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2014/03/24/mozilla-picks-insider... ). He invented Javascript in 1995, co-founded Mozilla, and helped start Firefox. It seems to me he's very well qualified from a historical as well as technical perspective. Questions about his mobile expertise seem misplaced, considering that his technical co…

Lots of people, including AFAICT a large chunk if not a majority if the tech community, consider same-sex marriage to be a human rights issue. To them, yes, it would be better if he had fought Prop 8, assuming they didn't just take it for granted.

Re: Three Mozilla Board Members Resign over Choice of New CEO

#46
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Net Applications numbers are far more accurate than the 3 in the table above.

"Net Applications numbers are far more accurate than the 3 in the table above." This strikes me as curious, as I don't know of any popular websites who would agree with that statement, since their own traffic more closely matches that of the wikipedia numbers. Can you explain why you'd make that claim?

So, I really can’t speak to their accuracy, but apparently their network of tracked webpages is quite big, they are measuring unique visitors (not page loads) and they are doing country level weighing of the data.

Whether that makes them more accurate? I really don’t know. But I could very well imagine that for those tracking firms their sample is heavily US and Europe biased (where different browsers as in the rest of the world might dominate), so doing some weighing may increase their accuracy. Or not. I really don’t know.

Some light googling does reveal that this is a highly contentious topic with people from all sides screaming at each other about questions of methodology. Do with that info what you will.

Re: Three Mozilla Board Members Resign over Choice of New CEO

#47
Hmm, something's amiss. Archive.org's record of Mozilla's website says that Mozilla Corp only ever had 5 board members. The WSJ seems to imply they had 6. Assuming Moz's own website is accurate, Katharina Borchert only joined around the time Eich was appointed.

Either way, the numbers don't quite add up. If there were only 5 board members, and only 2 of them wanted Eich, how did he get chosen? And even if Katherina was already on the board, that's still 3 vs 3.

Mozilla is an incredible force for good. Hope they get through this quickly and get back making the web better.

Archive.org: https://web.archive.org/web/20140322233528/http://www.mozill...

Present: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/moco/

Re: Three Mozilla Board Members Resign over Choice of New CEO

#48
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Net Applications numbers are far more accurate than the 3 in the table above.

"Net Applications numbers are far more accurate than the 3 in the table above." This strikes me as curious, as I don't know of any popular websites who would agree with that statement, since their own traffic more closely matches that of the wikipedia numbers. Can you explain why you'd make that claim?

Well, just one data point, but I have a consumer-facing site that sees a few hundred thousand visitors a month with only 6.1% of those coming from Firefox in the last month.

On the flip side, Chrome usage dominates among visitors on my development-focused blog at 61.7% and IE trails Firefox (22.2%) at 9.5%.

Re: Three Mozilla Board Members Resign over Choice of New CEO

#49
post #43
post #23

Off-topic, but that's a weird statement from the WSJ: "Firefox is the world’s second-most-popular Web browser on personal computers, with 18% market share, according to Net Applications, a web-analytics consulting firm. That trails Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, with 58% share, and just ahead of Google’s Chrome, with 17% share." Here's what I found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers : Chrome…

Net Applications is. It’s right there in the Wikipedia article you are linking to. Net Applications measure unique visits and do country level weighing of data. The article is also quoting Net Application’s desktop numbers. That might explain the difference, at least partly. Overall I would argue that the statement in the article, while accurate, can be misleading. It should probably include mobile usage numbers (tho…

Thanks, I didn't see that on the Wikipedia page.

Still, while I know it's not good to say "data" and "gut feel" in the same sentence, I just have a very hard time believing that IE usage is trending upward while Chrome is trending down. It just doesn't add up.

Re: Three Mozilla Board Members Resign over Choice of New CEO

#50
post #38

This article links to an earlier WSJ piece that gives more information about Eich's background ( http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2014/03/24/mozilla-picks-insider... ). He invented Javascript in 1995, co-founded Mozilla, and helped start Firefox. It seems to me he's very well qualified from a historical as well as technical perspective. Questions about his mobile expertise seem misplaced, considering that his technical co…

> Questions about his mobile expertise seem misplaced, > considering that his technical contributions helped > pave the way for mobile web apps. How ? Apple in my opinion was the most influential actor regarding the development of mobile apps.The first HTML touch specific api came from apple... Apple defined what modern mobile apps means.

He did say mobile web apps, not mobile apps. And given that almost all webapps run on JavaScript...
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