Having said that, I find the timing of this site very suspicious, as if it were part of a secret PR campaign for improving Mozilla public image, after the recents layoffs.

Why would I support mozilla, when they make donations on my behalf to the OPSEC of the so called radical left through riseup.net (So called because all these groups work in the interrest of american corporatism).

When Mozilla goes bottom up, and something new springs from its rotten carcass, then I will consider contributing financially to a free and open internet.

It's a for-profit company, that happens to be owned by a non-profit instead of shareholders, but that doesn't change the way they operate.

I am surprised they didn't consider charging Firefox Enterprise for companies.

Add to uBlock Origin

It's explicitly written as their "step 1".

I don't envy Firefox here... despite being fan-favorite of nerds, it is just about 9% on desktop and declining, while <1% on mobile.

In total, it is less than 1 percentage point more popular than Samsung Internet (the weird bundled Chrome thing on Samsung, with 3 percents).

By extension - the best SEO guide is almost certainly the first listing for 'SEO guide' on google.

Learning of the manual once you get used to it is better because, You get answers to questions that you did not know you had . It gives you a comprehensive understanding of the entire feature set, not just the stuff that looks important now .

Copy pasting a implementation of stackOverflow/ w3schools etc usually keeps us in search and copy loop, constantly searching for some snippet without fully understanding how or why. Many times we end up spending a lot of time in frustration when the full solution is hack from four different places and they don't seem to work together.

That sounds like pretty solid technology industry experience for an exec, no?

It looks like an organization that fired all's the vanity-metric chasing PMs and is coming back to "first principles"

I am well aware of her tenure and good work at Mozilla (from public sources). The argument I was making was that the failure to execute is correlated with not understanding technology well enough. Certainly not claiming that's the only factor, but it might play a part in it.

How will you make expensive long-term bets otherwise? The proof is in the execution, or the mis-execution.

1. Mozilla retired Firefox OS in 2016/17. And in a couple of years, a fork of it (KaiOS, which shares 95% of the same code) gets pre-installed on upwards of 80 million (probably more) units. It could have been a lot more if the OS was better; it really had a shot at low-end phones and TVs.

2. If the team says they need to commit tens of millions of dollars and half a decade or more to create a new, safe programming language for browsers and a prototype - will the CEO approve? And if yes, wouldn't it have been entirely based on advise from others in the room?

3. The world needs an efficient browser engine for multi-core devices coming with bundled GPUs. Requires nearly a decade to get right - how does one commit to that unless the complexity (and not just the rewards) are fully understood?

4. The failure to sell the Servo vision (safety, multi-core) to device manufacturers ultimately rests on the CEO. Instead, the Servo team got axed.

Every technology company needs a CEO who deeply understands the technology.

I expected the CEO of Mozilla to have experience with software engineering.

The fact that MDN, Servo and Dev Tools team got the guillotine instead of execs and marketing speaks for itself.

And I'm saying that as someone who'll admit to having been critical of Mozilla in the last two days.

https://answers.thenextweb.com/s/mitchell-baker-aGY62z

"Executive compensation is a general topic -- are execs, esp CEOs paid too much? I'm of the camp that thinks the different between exec comp and other comp is high. So then i think, OK what should mozilla do about it? My answer is that we try to mitigate this, but we won't solve this general social problem on our own.

Here's what I mean by mitigate: we ask our executives to accept a discount from the market-based pay they could get elsewhere. But we don't ask for an 75-80% discount. I use that number because a few years ago when the then-ceo had our compensation structure examined, I learned that my pay was about an 80% discount to market. Meaning that competitive roles elsewhere were paying about 5 times as much. That's too big a discount to ask people and their families to commit to."

Imagine that c-suite types may just work for the salary, too, like many of the fellow engineers among the readership of this site. They care about the mission, but they also care about making enough money to support their other obligations (like family and kids) and tend to choose a well-paying place when they can. They try to sell their skills and knowledge not very much below the market rate.

Let's say: hey engineers, how about cutting your salary to $60k? It's close to the US national average, it should be "enough". If you think $60k is too little, ask your colleagues from EU, from India, to say nothing of Africa.

I bet some very mission-driven engineers will remain. But a lot would eventually leave.

Same applies to a lot of values of x in CxO. And you do want highly qualified people there.

(Serious comment, not some challenge to test how quickly Godwin's law can be invoked)

Yes, as a regular developer I think 2.5 mil is pretty crazy for a salary. But even if the C-suite "tightened their belts", that wouldn't bring the company around.

Maybe the company _would_ fall apart, as they say, or close enough. I don't know. If you followed the news by Mozilla over the years, you could notice the trouble they had with finding the next CEO, multiple times.

In the meantime, if MDN is the "gold standard" and so on, where were all the donations to Mozilla from developers around the world to keep the site running?

It's extremely self-serving to ask the employees of an essentially public good company to reduce their salaries to be able to produce the said public good.

Personally, I worry about the death of Servo the most. But if a more niche concern, apparently.

Of course her work history prior to Mozilla wouldn't make her a strong recruiting choice for a $2.5m executive position. But that's a bit of a false premise, as the Mitchell of today has nearly two decades of executive experience that she did not have prior to Mozilla. If you include the totality of her career (inclusive of Mozilla), she very much does have the work history to be a strong candidate for market rate executive positions.

That being said, it does seem like she's just coasting on her prior momentum and is no longer materially contributing anything of value to Mozilla. In which case, Mozilla would be better served with her stepping down and someone else taking the reins. But that'd be true irrespective of whether she was paid market rate or below.

> Ummm...webkit?

I said it was a plausible alternative, not that it was the only one. Both KHTML (itself spurred by Mozilla's release[1]) and Webkit after Apple forked KHTML, could have also destabilized Microsoft's browser dominance. But I'm not very confident either of them would have done so - KHTML may not have had the resources to achieve what Firefox did, while Apple had the resources but Webkit at the time was only targeting Apple's Mac platform.

> Also,it's somewhat ironic you point to the non-profit foundation as her success story, while she makes "market rate" pay by virtue of her being CEO of the "for-profit" side of things.

In the context of her success story, you can't look at each side in a vacuum. The for-profit side only exists because the non-profit side created it as a wholly owned subsidiary. And the non-profit would never have been able to grow Mozilla to where it's at today without having created the for-profit. The hybrid structure thus optimized Mozilla's potential and has generated billions more in income than Mozilla otherwise would have, while also protecting those billions from being syphoned off by private owners or public shareholders, allowing it to be re-invested into Mozilla's mission. Taken as a whole, it's a point of success that bolsters her case for being a strong recruiting choice for a $2.5m executive role.

[1] KHTML's development wasn't predicated on Mozilla, but https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tldf1rT0Rn0 gives the impression that Mozilla's existence nudged it out of a development lull

It's a very frustrating thing about this site, because, ironically, most people here think of themselves as nearly perfectly rational and open to new ideas, but in fact the opposite is almost always the case. If I think of myself as perfectly rational, that ironically gives me a way to think that anyone who disagrees with me must be trolling or must be saying something obviously wrong, even if I don't take the time to work out what that might be.

I admittedly added that just to complain, expecting it to trigger another wave of downvotes - because frankly, I don't care about getting downvoted. What I care about is how often this site turns into an ideological echo chamber for one of two popular worldviews, and on some level I wanted to try to call attention to that.

That's not true, I downvoted the past because it complained at being downvoted.

On an individual level the thing to do would be to upvote downvoted posts if they make some sense, they don't have to be great to be upvoted.

How do you measure how good a CEO is? Is having to let go 25% of your staff, axing the security team and stopping new developments indicative of good performance?

I would say that's a very naive view that idealizes the process (and I say that as someone who is very pro market), especially as you rise up in ranks and especially in this instance where a non-profit is failing to execute on their core mission.

I've seen people go from board advisors in relatively large companies to IKEA store workers or long term unemployment. It's more about who you know and how you play politics than your ability to provide value to the entity, a lot of politics gets played the higher you climb. The market value for these people could very well be higher this still has nothing to do with the value they provide in their current role - it could very well be that a less qualified (in general market terms) person could be a better fit for this unique organisation.

And the tech people who are the ones who actually do the tech work, people expect of mozilla have to go.

I don't know any universe, where this sounds right.

I think among the engineers you'll find a bunch of qualified people for that job.

Speaking from some personal experience at another company (a small one, 20-30 people).

Execs good at giving a good impression, and making money for themselves.

Presidents good at winning the elections.

But that's a bit unrelated to being good for the company. Or the people in the country.

I think/guess that some altruistically motivated engineers could save Mozilla and Firefox if they got to replace the current execs.

Your vision of a better world is miopic.

The ceo of MSF, who imo does a great job, is paid 120k a year.

Brian Chesky, AirBNB ceo, is paid $0 right now, because at least he can recognize how tone deaf talking about your companies financial struggles is whole you're still taking full comp.

I feel like the CEO is absolutely in the wrong here. If they're making 20x what a technical writer or tester is making, it absolute is a bad look not to take a paycut when you're sending 250 people into the street.

I can guarantee that you’d find a perfectly willing CEO somewhere in the people laid off now if you told them you’d only pay them 500k.

Being CEO of Mozilla could attract highly qualified, passionate people, who are not primarily driven by "competitive compensation". You know; the same impulse that underlies the whole open source movement.

Why should their CEO get any money and not a pink slip? Their mismanagement and financial games caused the company to have to lay off 250 people.

If mozilla want to be more like EFF and focus on the advocacy aspect then maybe they should be similar paid. Even better, merge the two organizations and replace the leadership with the one in EFF. No need to go and look for a CEO willing to be paid 1/10th of current wages as there is already one available doing that now.

This is not about an abstract CEO. This is about a CEO who is a total utter failure that could only get this job in a non-profit/corp hybrid.

There would be a very long queue of people willing to do any of the C-suite jobs for $500k.

Would that be a bad thing? How? I'm sure somebody would step up to make decisions, and you never know, they might actually be competent. The odds don't seem markedly worse.

After all, as much as there are complaints about Brave, he managed to make a legitimately well known contender from scratch in a world that already has seen many other browser attempts go nowhere (and of course, he in some form created and grew Firefox).

Of course, "cancel culture" means you have to throw out someone from being CEO, even if that means the whole internet will suffer greatly, because he had a different opinion than whatever was woke.

Which is a shame, because the net loss to everyone is much much much greater than the $1000 dollars he gave as a donation, even if it is acceptable to destroy someone's life because they have a opinion that disagrees with yours.

I don’t really understand why we should do that... we aren’t stockholders in Mozilla, nor are we customers of them, or even employees. Why should we demand that anyone is fired?

Un(?)fortunately, donations to the Mozilla Foundation are only a few million dollars a year--mostly because they don't do anything particularly interesting. (Seriously--look at https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/ )

This stinks and the result is the Brandon Eich and Leni Riefenstahl who did not actually discriminate anyone are given same treatment as other people who were directly responsible for discrimination or genocide.

Based on the very little information we have this is a case of someone having wrong opinions but not being an actual danger to anyone.

> Can you explain it in such a way as it would make sense for LGBTQ people but not, say, people of color?

no, because I disagree with him and I don't really know of a good reasoning for it. (The only non-contradictory one (a low bar) being that the federal government should not be allowed to decide who can and cannot marry)

Regarding slavery it was a good faith response, also it was tongue-in-cheek response.

> Being pro-slavery was never a valid political position.

It was, it also no longer is, with progress we improve what is a valid position and what is not. Once upon a time in many places abolishing slavery was not a valid political position.

Ultimately these are moral decision that each of us needs to take responsibility for.