Mozilla 2023 annual report: CEO pay skyrockets, Firefox market share nosedives(lunduke.locals.com) |
Mozilla 2023 annual report: CEO pay skyrockets, Firefox market share nosedives(lunduke.locals.com) |
Correct.
For instance, the CEO of UNICEF USA makes 620k a year. https://www.unicefusa.org/about-unicef-usa/finances/financia...
Mozilla is a tar pit designed to prevent alternative browsers forming. Firefox deserves better.
For all those being annoyed by the decreasing usage of FF in favor of Chrome: If Mozilla & FF died, couldn't this create better scenarios?
Idea: Google might get into legal trouble, maybe even having to lose chrome, opening the market or Chrome / Chromium base for a fresh start?
There's a real opportunity here. People are increasingly distrustful of, say, Google. I use it because it's still performant, cross-platform and has sync. But , like many, are increasingly leerly abou tGoogle using Chrome's position to, say, attack ad blockers.
The ultimate question is how does and should Mozilla fund itself? Well, if the CEO can't lay out a vision and deliver on that then why are they still there? Why is their compensation still increasing despite not performing?
Instead we get platitudes about "add on services". Previously it was "VPN services" and now it's "AI services"? It's almost like the future revenue plan is always "<current buzzword> services".
I use both Ungoogled Chromium and Firefox on my main workstation, which runs Fedora Asahi Linux exclusively on Apple Silicon (I never boot into macOS), and should add that on aarch64, my overall experience with every Firefox build has been stellar. Unfortunately, I can't say the same about Ungoogled Chromium.
CEOs are important -- not intrinsically, but to survival. Their actions are important. Their decisions are important. Their attention is important. And there's a lot of competition for good ones. If you get a bad one, it's an existential crisis, and the good ones can always go elsewhere for more money.
Want to help nonprofits and small corps? Support the passage of laws limiting CEO pay.
Is it normal for Non-Profits to not the include Income Statement in their financials? Because Mozilla doesn’t.
https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2022/mozilla-fdn-202...
Openoffice was forked to become Libreoffice and seems to have gotten beter for it.
Time to fork Firefox [1] and take over where Baker dropped the ball because she thought the rules of the game could be changed to make it no longer necessary to play to win.
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.
For comparison, look at what the OpenBSD team has accomplished (and continues to accomplish) with a small core team and they surely do not have hundreds of millions.
IMO Mozilla is default dead and so is Firefox. With 500M of revenue, ~$7M going to CEO is >1% of revenue being sucked by CEO (not even net profit).
From a distant observer, Mitchell is a parasite.
The Chromium Hegemony is winning and Safari is barely alive.
Moz seems like a controlled opposition at this point.
How c[u]ome, with all the power of open source we still do not have an open browser with an open sync infra?.
emotions aside, this is dumb (some words cannot be used). Why can't we, as a group, stop complaining, and actually devote real time hours into developing the serenity browser to work as chrome / brave / firefox?
Why can't we, use the knowledge we have gained from IPFS and actually work on a distributed no server sync platform?
Why can't I, simply stop using the mentioned above software and devote myself into something more hopefully reliable?
I think it is hard to lose your daddy and leave home, but it's something we all have to do in order to actually grow.
But if you feel like you have to act, do so and do a show HN; I’m always willing to give a new browser a try :-)
Since I think apple should open up iOS more, I hope WebKit develops a healthy marketshare outside of that ecosystem.
I will not go further because it will turn into an all-bashing post, but Mozilla ( as you like to think of it ) is dead and has been dead for a long time.
Deal with it.
back in March Moziila announced $30m for A.I. services [0]
what's weird is that wound business strategy is usually "what are our core strengths?" instead we get
> A little over two years ago, Mozilla started an ambitious project: deciding where we should focus our efforts to grow the movement of people committed to building a healthier digital world. We landed on the idea of trustworthy AI. [1]
OK, despite my skeptisism what's the plan
> Mozilla.ai’s initial focus? Tools that make generative AI safer and more transparent. And, people-centric recommendation systems that don’t misinform or undermine our well-being. We’ll share more on these — and what we’re building — in the coming months. [0]
While that's all very nice, who on earth are the customers? Is there a eshop somewhere lamenting "our recommendation system is not people centric" ?
[0] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/introducing-mozilla-ai-i...
[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/mozillas-vision-for-trus...
why was it a goal, I have bo idea
Which is to say, at some point they might become annoying enough for Google to not want to pay them anymore, and then Mozilla would cease to exist shortly thereafter.
So with that in mind, Firefox as a dedicated separate browser with its own engine is an albatross around their neck. A source of significant ongoing investment and cost for comparatively little return. For the Mozilla "mission" and the CEO's personal goals and purpose, a simple rebadged chromium fork skinned up with open-web platitudes is a far better idea in the long term.
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 but it’s also clear that their attempts to add monetizable aspects to Firefox isn’t moving the needle much either.
Given that Firefox has kinda lost the browser war it seems obvious that they should be focusing efforts on other things that further that mission besides dumping money into a browser a tiny slice of people want to use.
Because an ongoing antitrust suit against Google search could mean the revenue they get from Firefox is no longer an option.
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-strings-attached $1–2 million annual salary to sit on her hands and do nothing. (I do think that $7 million per year is pretty gross, though, especially given the current "state of Mozilla".)
Having said that, $7 million for a CEO who isn't earning it really isn't Mozilla's biggest problem, and it's not even its biggest financial problem. If you really want to be critical of its spending, consider this:
The annual budget for marketing and branding every year falls between $30 and $60 million. Per year. This is Mozilla. Empirically, it may as well not even have a marketing department.
When Chrome really started eating into Firefox marketshare 10+ years ago, one of the things that Mozilla folks used to complain about (a lot) is that Chrome's effective* marketing budget was higher* than Mozilla's total budget—browser development and other software eng. included. The perverse thing is that the same is true of Mozilla: you could take its annual marketing budget, pour it into a different org that works on a different browser, and what you could get out of it is an independent browser development company. What's more is that you could without too much difficulty get that company not only to profitable status in pretty short order (given that kind of budget), but get it to usage share that matches Firefox's own (given how low that is). This would take something like 3, 4, 5 years max, provided you have competent leadership.
That's the sort of profligate spending and a lot of other poor decisionmaking at Mozilla that really needs to be addressed if Mozilla is going to turn around. (I have given up hope that this is ever going to happen. I expect it not to.) People hardly talk about this aspect of the business, however—instead focusing on how much Mitchell is getting paid, which, to reiterate, is not in any sense the biggest problem that Mozilla is facing.
-- former Mozillian
Is your claim that this other browser company would ship an open source browser that is a) gpu-accelerated, b) cross-platform, and c) render Youtube, Tiktok, Reddit, bank websites et al. correctly, and be used by millions of people?
Sorry, what? She was underpaid for a few years, so should get a couple mil forever now? Can you at least list out the "several important things?"
Have made zero changes to FF itself, but overall have found local AI a huge help in managing it all.
Seriously, Mozilla cant win. A large voice of people constantly scold Mozilla for anything it does. We’ve heard from Firefox devs on how this bash fest affects them and we expect them to crank out awesome software despite the abuse. Instead of picking the lesser of two evils they say oh, Firefox is N milliseconds slower than Chrome so I’ll use the greater of two evils.
Can we stop beating a dead horse? If you don’t like Firefox or Mozilla fine but don’t act like it’s unusable as a browser. It’s fine, it works, I don’t why everyone is so bothered by minor details when their goals and clearly better than their competition.
Sure it may be slow for YOU (whatever your use case is) or maybe your extensions broke but average users who rely power users to recommend a browser don’t care. If they can open Facebook and Netflix it’s fine. So use Chrome yourself and recommend Firefox to the people this crap doesn’t matter to. And maybe, if they see the numbers tick up, they’ll change course.
Did you say that Firefox is a 'money sink' for Mozilla? The thing that brings them half a billion dollars a year and corresponds to the vast majority of their revenue ... and is the only thing that gives them relevance .. to you, this is a 'money sink'?
Let me donate to support Firefox. Firefox, only. Hell, she can even skim off the top for her pay.
They don’t do this because it would trash the gravy train. So Firefox is held hostage to support a litany of nonsense that lets them travel to conferences to speak about AI.
I use FF is my daily driver for home stuff; work in chrome/edge. When I see things that are wrong, I point them out. We can champion FF for the good things it does and absolutely we can bash CxO club for slowly running it to the ground.
<< Honestly these kinds of posts are tiresome and unhelpful.
Not accurate, this is likely one of the few ways we can exert some minimal level of influence over this. And besides, what did not complaining ever achieve?
One of the reasons firefox is dying is because they are chasing market share and not listening to the users at all.
They look at Edge, Chrome, etc and try to duplicate them hoping to peel off users.
They look everything under the sun but what the actual users of their actual product want... Us users they just ignore us.
Honestly, this news/post made me lose the final shred of hope I had.
:/
[1] Google no longer unilaterally pulls on web standards. Google and Apple adopt a shared, first-class standard for native app development. Web gets "as native" APIs.
[2] No requirement of app store for distribution. Web installs and web as native. No scare walls or hidden-in-the-settings feature flags. The browser runtimes have full extension support with no removal of hooks necessary for eg. adblocking.
[3] First party apps are not defaults, not preinstalled, and more importantly, cannot re-assert themselves as defaults.
[4] If someone searches for your company or product by name, or a 1 edit distance variation, competitor ads can't show up before your website or app.
I think there are two realistic paths for the company. One is to make the browser amazing and edgy in ways that Google and Microsoft can't match (out of the fear of cannibalizing revenue or running into regulatory trouble). Mozilla has a shot at it, but it's unlikely to happen if they have a defeatist attitude about it internally, and are focusing on non-browser pivots.
The other path is to basically turn into some completely different company, throwing money at unrelated pursuits such as AI and hoping that you get lucky. But what gives Mozilla any edge with that?
And Firefox is their only worthwhile product, so moving away from Firefox means they're dying.
I think they mean content recommendation systems used by social media. Mozilla Foundation likes to larp as a social media startup or something. Their big angle is that existing social media doesn't shut out 'bad people' e.g. people with opinions to the right of wherever the American west coast zeitgeist is this year. They want recommendation engines that only serve 'good people', or which engineer people's opinions to be more 'good'.
But of course they don't actually have a social media platform worth a damn for them to impose their own agenda onto, so it'll end up tacked onto a mastadon instance nobody uses, or incorporated into the 'New Page' of Firefox, or maybe turned into a browser extension that tries to block or inject stories on other social media websites. All a huge waste of time and money.
They tried hopping on Blockchain train and ended up jumping back off after getting roasted by JWZ [0] "we are reviewing if and how our current policy on crypto donations fits with our climate goals. ... [although] decentralized web technology continues to be an important area for us to explore."
I guess AI is gee whizz enough to escape the Planet Burning argument for now.
A piece of software - with climate goals.
They had a stab at VR with Mozilla Hubs [1] - and copied off Meta by also not including legs in the avatars! Your personal Hub for only $10 a month. Judging by the code commits it is, er, stable [2]. No-one explained how a GPU driven chatroom meets the climate goals!
Imagine if they put all that effort into innovating the browser.
[0] https://www.theverge.com/2022/1/6/22870787/mozilla-pauses-cr...
You think Pocket and Mozilla VPN sprung up because creating new products was easier than investing more into the golden goose? If Firefox was the end all be all that would be the obvious, safest business decision. Clearly they don’t think it is and that they can get more money through diversification.
A number of people here believe that Firefox is only supported by Google so they can avoid anti trust. If that were the case they’d pay Mozilla regardless of how good/bad Firefox was wouldn’t they?
I think it’s pretty clear all the complaining hasn’t done anything as this conversation has been going on for years but I don’t expect that to stop anyone from getting easy HN karma.
I know dropping XUL, plugins, performance have been issues for people. I see the changes they made as necessary to keep the codebase maintainable and improve performance. What else am I missing?
What is serious revenue?
Google and Microsoft are betting AI will be very relevant to web use. And what amazing and edgy features would Google and Microsoft be unable to match?
Unless people start running for office that won’t just do what corporations want then it’s futile.
Before someone here says that they would be the CEO for less money than Mitchell. Can you get an appointment with the vice president of search at Google and Microsoft? Could you call their bosses and get though?
I'm sorry? My entire life I've been told that CEOs make 1000x as much money as me for golfing and writing a couple emails a week because they're genius Ubermenschen whose illuminating strategic insights add orders of magnitude more value than my measly toil, but you're telling me it's actually because other executives are willing to take cold calls from them? That's why?
I’m not crazy about it either but I don’t lose sleep over it. It’s a browser and management could be better. I know it’s a touchy subject and people may not like to hear it but until I’m downvoted into oblivion I’m going to say this discussion is not worth rehashing time and time again.
The donation suggestion is years old at this point. There is nothing new in this thread.
That usage isn’t what’s constraining Firefox’s resources. Management is. Use Firefox if you like it. (I do, in part.) But don’t argue that if more people use it Mozilla will give a shit; it’s already a material fraction of their revenues and they’re ignoring it.
At the moment, it is unclear how much extra money, devoted to improving what, would increase Firefox’s market share significantly and am not surprised to see them explore other options. Brave, Vivaldi, etc, don’t seem to have figured it out either.
I choose not to be cynical, nor will I allow myself to be upset about it one way or another and wish others would do the same.
Being negative is more likely to scare off new users/contributors than change Mozilla.
What could possibly be more important at "ensur[ing] the internet is a global public resource, open and accessible to all" than keeping competition and choice in browsers, which forces web technology openness and standards?
We've already seen Google's web integrity moves coming, and we can no doubt expect more of that as they continue to dominate. A world with only Chromium-based browsers is one where Google can implement anything they fancy. To me the importance of that overshadows anything else Mozilla can do (that I can think of at least).
Yes .. and that is the core problem. Their relevance (and income) only comes from Firefox and its market share. But for some reason, they cannot bring themselves to acknowledge this. The income they generated from Firefox, should have been re-invested in Firefox. They should have been organized as an engineering company at the forefront of web technologies.
>Given that Firefox has kinda lost the browser war it seems obvious that they should be focusing efforts on other things that further that mission besides dumping money into a browser a tiny slice of people want to use.
That is their strategy. Right now, Firefox is still the only thing that gives them any sort of relevance.
Aaaand that's why I don't use Firefox.
I use Firefox. I want to use Firefox. That Mozilla insists on pretending it's not the one single worthwhile thing they do doesn't make it easy.
Chrome blatant spyware that scans your whole pc ever since google had the bright idea of sneaking an "antivirus" into chrome and enabling it by default. Firefox is better that chrome, but there's lots better than firefox.
This is why it is critical to have a meaningful alternative. Developers and end-users are pragmatic - all things being equal they will choose privacy and openness, but not at the expense of performance and capabilities.
This is why it is so perplexing seeing Mozilla just focus on everything except for the one thing that gives them relevance and is actually important.
Like what? Selling you "premium" subscription to glorified bookmarks service? Or reselling Mullvad with Mozilla logo slapped on top of it?
For non chromium based, librewolf is a clear winner for me. Waterfox is also good. Hardened firefox is also okayish but not ideal.
By not being on the default browser on their operating system? By not marketing it on their world used search engine?
The community was the biggest factor Mozilla had in its favor and the community jumped to Chrome and here we are. It’s nice that you still use FF but their market share makes it clear that you and I are exceptions.
None taken. I am too old to care too much. From my perspective, what will be, will be.
That said, you answer your own question with the very next sentence:
<< It’s nice that you still use FF but their market share makes it clear that you and I are exceptions.
I think you would agree that even with hyperbole of two people using FF, its management is not doing a great job ( euphemism ).
I’m having a hard time thinking how else you’d market Firefox to regular users beyond word of mouth advocacy. I remember Firefox running TV ads once, no idea how effective that was.
Firefox used to be significantly better than IE which drove adoption but since Chrome is heavily invested in I don’t think Firefox can compete purely by being the better browser. The strategy from the “the good old days” doesn’t work here.
Also, I was looking for a specific example. Saying that the C-Suite is bad because market share is down is not an answer without context of how it could have been avoided which is not obvious. How could they have retained or grown the market share they had?
I’m not saying management bears no responsibility but not all companies fail because of bad management alone. They have big, well funded competitors and platforms users can’t ignore. In particular, Windows, Google Search, Gmail, IOS, and Android. So much browsing is done online and default browsers rule there.
Now you could say Firefox should have come to mobile sooner. Firefox OS was an interesting idea that might have had legs but who knows if it would have caught on. That work required them to divert attention away from the browser and they have a smaller warchest to devote on an idea that might not payoff.
self-satisfaction and just being a better person
Does one become a better person simply by staying quiet?
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.
If Google didn't pay for being the default search engine, or tried lowballing, someone else would make a deal instead.
The idea that it's some kind of a proactive antitrust defense is one of the more bizarre ideas that gets repeated on HN.
If you look at the situation in the reverse, what sense does it make? Why would you pay a direct competitor to exist when the amount of money you put in to them is an incredibly large majority of their revenue? Firefox continues to become more irrelevant, and the amount of their revenue they get from Google doesn't really reflect that trend.
I'm not saying the only reason Firefox exists is for Google to point at it. That doesn't mean it isn't a major one. It also is pretty clear to Mozilla because they sure keep trying (and failing) to find other revenue sources
One plausible reason is that Google is not a monolith: the entity paying the money is the Search division, which does not compete with Firefox. Chrome does, but Chrome is not a party to the deal. Search is interested in maximizing their own profit, not in maximizing Chrome's usage share.
> Firefox continues to become more irrelevant, and the amount of their revenue they get from Google doesn't really reflect that trend.
It is a revenue share deal. Firefox gets some specific (agreed) percentage of the search revenue from searches done via the Firefox search bar. If the revenue Firefox gets is stable despite reduced relevance, it is because the revenue is stable.
Relevance doesn't translate to revenue. What matters is the number of users and revenue per user.
This already happened with Yahoo. Mozilla got a ton more money, too.
It was utterly disastrous for them. It turned out that Firefox needs Google as the default more than Google needs them - well, for the stated purposes of the deal, of course.
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 $180M a year.
See how Wikimedia Foundation is basically flush with cash, without getting handouts from its competition (haha), zero ads, and asking users to spare $2.75 here and there.
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 money isn't going back into Firefox development. This is why it is borderline criminal that they choose to focus on everything except Firefox.
Alternatively, what are they without Firefox?
Now Firefox can't be used to make webapps effectively, the only alternative is to use Electron and fortify Chromium's monopoly.
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" :-|
I deeply resent being pushed into subscriptions and you should too.
But it's a recurring revenue what allows you e.g. to hire developers. Sad but true.
My dream is for them to add a privacy-centric email product, a robust enough office suit (e.g., Google Docs) and then a bundle with those and Relay and their VPN.
We do?
Actually, this is a great analogy. We have grades of gasoline because there is a trade-off between anti-knocking and cost. Monoculturing the grade approximates the diversity of requirements worse than honing in on a few points on the curve. As with browser engines, there is a limit to this diversity since each additional grade imposes novel fixed costs in production, distribution and combustion. But I’d be surprised if something as varied as browser engines optimally solves for a single solution.
Similarly Chromium can be configured in many different way, see chrome://flags. It's open source and has a modular design so even further customization is possible.
Different configurations can make different trade offs to appeal more to certain user's needs.
We have diesel and gasoline at least.
However the key difference ethere is somewhat different: We have independent supply lines, starting at different oil fields, going through different refineries, into different distribution networks, which ensures that there is some competition (even oligopolic is better than plain monopoly) and supply chain attacks on one vendor don't havoc the complete supply chain.
For a practical example: Countries were able to massively reduce the dependance on Russian gas and oil recently.
If Google however decides to havoc chromium development all dependants have trouble.
That would be the worst thing for the web. Blink is objectively bad in the first place, and we need more than just chromiumum skins in the market.
I wish they would finish and move to Servo.
I wish Brave or some of the other Chromium Skins would become Firefox based.
Everyone consolidating down to Blink and Chromium is about the worst thing that could happen to anyone that desires an open Web
This hurts because Firefox should have been that embedded framework powering browsers like Brave and electron apps. But that would have required them to invest in R&D to match performance but also to make their rendering engine easily embeddable (with a corresponding investment in documentation and outreach).
Years ago, Gecko had at least some support for being embedded within native applications.
This was apparently discontinued around 2011, though:
https://web.archive.org/web/20110403052816/http://www.h-onli...
https://web.archive.org/web/20210723183100/https://groups.go...
At that time, there were a number of browsers with native UIs that used Gecko, and software to help embed Gecko in other apps, such as:
Camino: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camino_(web_browser)
K-Meleon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K-Meleon
Galeon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galeon
gtkmozembed: https://web.archive.org/web/20110505053545/http://www.mozill...
JavaXPCOM: https://web.archive.org/web/20100626110814/https://developer...
There was also XULRunner, too:
https://web.archive.org/web/20161201115812/https://developer...
Mozilla and Gecko had a staggering amount of potential back then, but it was squandered away, unfortunately.
Do you mind explaining this statement?
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"
Brendan choosing to build on Chrome instead of Firefox probably says more about Chrome’s dominance than Firefox’s technical merits. If all Firefox was lacking was better leadership improving it would’ve been easier. If it was a technical issue that’s probably money that needs spent but doesn’t move the needle which is why the current CSuite doesn’t address it either. Or maybe it was just to get away from the stigma around Firefox that doesn’t exist in Chromeland.
Cryptocurrency and ads are common complaints about Brave. But your main point was right. Eich said Firefox OS was the highest priority. And services or partnerships were needed for user sovereignty.[1]
> Brendan choosing to build on Chrome instead of Firefox probably says more about Chrome’s dominance than Firefox’s technical merits.
Brave's CTO said filling gaps in the Gecko framework would have cost months.[2]
[1] https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/brendan-eich...
Will you name them? Mozilla cut embedding when Gary Kovacs was CEO. XULRunner, Graphene, and Positron were cut when Chris Beard was CEO. GeckoView was not cut.
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...
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.
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.
Given that he refused to apologize, and that the pesky freedom of association exists, which can lead to problems for Mozilla like the Montgomery Bus Boycott did for the public transit system in Montgomery, it was overall positive for Mozilla that Eich resigned. That doesn't mean that Mitchell is a good CEO. It just means that things would have been worse.
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.
I'm a Firefox user, so I have a vested interest in Mozilla's long term health and financial viability. But "marketshare nosedives" appears to be primarily an editorialization to fit the post's larger narrative.
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.
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 thing of the past...
That's an interesting angle. I suppose we could compare against Mozilla's stats on download numbers and telemetry? Though between users downloading from distro mirrors and disabling telemetry (I suspect Firefox users are far more likely to be privacy conscious and/or Linux users) those will also be fuzzy.
It's going slowly down - something that is unlikely to improve unless Firefox gets better distribution channels, especially on mobile. Giving up on FirefoxOS cut them from having the "default" browser anywhere.
They are working on a gecko-based iOS browser since the UE is likely to mandate browser diversity, so maybe that will improve things a bit - though this will only make the situation on iOS on par with Android where Firefox is not doing well market share wise.
Firefox's nosediving market share should represent a catastrophic, company-endangering situation. It's depressing that they don't seem to understand that.
I sense a great disturbance in the Force...
One asshole Mozilla employee responded with "no, the danger is too great" and spouted a crazy theoretical involving someone's pacemaker getting connected to Firefox and malware blah blah blah.
People pointed out that Firefox access people's cameras and microphones, and Chrome offers Web Serial support and users have to allow the permission and pick a device to connect to, a site can't just connect to any serial device.
Cue handwaving about "we have higher standards than that smelly privacy-violating evil browser."
What a bunch of fucking clowns.
It's honestly hard to tell.
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 Mozilla funding, they can (effectively) kill Firefox at any time, and diversifying revenue / building up a war chest of funds is the only defense against that,
just seems silly to me.
As a former Mozillian I don't like the choices Mitchell Baker has made (AI and services are poor plays IMO) but the obsession with CEO compensation at Mozilla has always smelled less like a genuine concern for alternatives to Chrome and more like holding a smaller player to an unreasonable standard.
A more interesting comparison would compare these numbers to the head of Chrome's compensation, and more specifically Chrome's spending and revenue vs Firefox's.
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 infrastructure is not solely dependent on non-European entities.
• Balance the US's outsized role as a gatekeeper for web innovation.
• Support the EU's user privacy and data protection values and comply-by-default with EU regulations.
• Help bolster Europe's economic and tech independence.
What else?
And here is another unpopular opinion. I dont care if her salary is 3 million or even 30 million. If she had managed to bring Firefox to 60% marketshare and bring down Chrome on Desktop, would you have still complained if she was paid 30 million?
The problem is Mozilla is in such a bad shape and she is under performing as a CEO.
Unfortunately people dont learn much from history. And history dictate the only way to solve this problem is that Mozilla think of it as a problem. Otherwise its current status at 10% marketshare is enough to sustain the operation. Nothing bad enough is happening, no interest or incentive for changes. Inertia. Let's keep thing this way.
So yes, it is counter intuitive. The only way to save Mozilla ( or change Mozill's direction, I guess the word "save" is a hyperbole, at least from Mozilla's perspective. ) isn't trying to get more user to use it. It is actually push people to abandon it.
2022 Audited Financial Statement: https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2022/mozilla-fdn-202...
2022 Form 990: https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2022/mozilla-fdn-990...
while in Mozilla a single person is receiving close to 7million dollars!
The best option would be for someone to fork Firefox and perhaps get it sponsored by Apache foundation. Then we can write it off.
Firefox is my daily browser across multiple platforms, and I worry for its future.
[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/mark-surman-mozilla-25-y...
Google's Chromium project push new standards every month or so, and web developers are fast to adopt these standards and don't care about testing it on Firefox anymore. The Chromium monopoly is already a reality.
Yes. They got it fair and square --- they paid Mozilla for it --- and they still are.
When Firefox is no more, the legacy will be Thunderbird and Rust, not the Web browser, and despite how they won over PNaCL, it is Chrome that drives WebAssembly.
On the other hand, it could well become the de-facto standard browser for embedded applications, though. The browser frame can be ported to different UI frameworks quite easily and the code has practically no dependencies outside the project itself.
Also Chromium is there, it's open enough to be a base for Chrome, Brave, Edge, and probably a few more, and it's open source, forkable at any moment Google adds something unpatchably bad. (of course independent implementations are welcome, but the ultimate goal is a healthier web through user freedom, and that doesn't necessitate Firefox directly, a ChromiumFox would be just as perfect)
Last I heard it only borrows Windows 95's aesthetics and nothing more.
Firefox makes a lot of noise about their anti-tracking and pro-privacy features. I liked Suckless surf, but missed the granular JavaScript setting of noscript. And, I have no idea, but Privacy Badger must be doing something I guess?
Organizational baggage?
Who would want them to do that?
And Firefox is actually a very good browser and better than Chrome in some aspects.
If you’re happy with Firefox I’d say just keep using it.
Why should you be looking else where if it is working well for you? Unless you feel so wrong about CEO's pay I dont see how it is relevant until the product quality declined.
“ On January 28, 2020, the Mozilla Foundation announced that the project would henceforth be operating from a new wholly owned subsidiary, MZLA Technologies Corporation, in order to explore offering products and services that were not previously possible and to collect revenue through partnerships and non-charitable donations.[69][70]”
Same as next year will be the year of mass adoption of Linux by consumers.
Yet history and trends point in the other direction
Switching from Chrome to Firefox isn't even nearly as difficult as switching from Unity to Godot (or say, from Windows to Linux). For the average user, Chrome and Firefox are functionally identical. If Chrome kicks off Adblocker, Firefox will be obviously better for a lot of people.
The article states that revenue from services is up from 50 to 70 million. Still only about 10% of what they make from Firefox, but at least that's independent revenue, going up, directly from consumers.
Can someone please provide a rational argument, not a kneejerk emotional response why focusing on the source of revenue that is Google independent and growing is not the better way to fulfill their stated mission, that is creating a privacy respecting and open web? People are acting like Ahab and the whale when it comes to Firefox, there's no point in dumping more resources into the thing if's going down anyway and makes you subservient to a tech monopolist.
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.)
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).
I genuinely think that Mozilla will have to go out of business before she will step down.
Most of EU funding for OSS project is spread out to lots of projects, with relatively small amounts - Gnome got $1M recently and celebrated as a "big" milestone. I'm not saying that this is bad, but that's not how you can fund a core browser team.
recent examples: address bar becomes search bar. referrer header always sent cross domain with full url. webextensions3. hundreds of apis that only benefit ad "viewability" detectors. removal of websocket permission (like you have for notification etc). etc
soon: adding Floc
"Privacy? Awesome! Wait! Wait! Not from us! Ban it! Ban it!"
I'd focus on the "balance of power" aspect. But that can be achieved by marketing Firefox, you don't have to fork it.
This has been on my mind for a long time. It would be good for everyone to have a real alternative to Chrome and it would be good for Europe to be less dependent on the US, as you mentioned.
In time, it might be possible to fund this off donations, but a bit of EU funding would go a long way to getting this off the ground. Unfortunately, the workings of EU funding programmes are a mystery to me.
No fork please. But do pay more contributors to work on the upstream codebase towards benefiting Firefox's downstream.
PS: don't forget eidas 2.0 has a loophole regarding SSL snooping, check EFF's article on eidas 2.0's article 45.
https://lunduke.locals.com/post/5049241/linux-foundation-now...
Edit: checked it, figures are on page 158. they still spend 7,8 M$ on Linux kernel but it’s 2% of the total spend - to be fair a lot of the total is going to the community and related topics. Still a bit concerning. (I still think both the Linux Foundation and Mozilla are great organisations that should get more support to be clear)
I have converted a lot of people in my bubble - also in general FF seems a lot more popular in EU than in the US, not sure why…
| Year | Firefox | Chrome | Other |
| 2020 | 20% | 75% | 5% |
| 2021 | 19% | 75% | 6% |
| 2022 | 18% | 75% | 7% |
Thanks for pointing this out. I didn't read the actual details. I guess I still have too much good faith on these people.
Sigh.
- are their blocking lists public so they can be verified?
- adguard home seems to be a dns based solution that you install in your home... which means it won't help when you're on someone else's wifi
- also adguard is "protecting your children". I just want tracking protection not censorship.
That doesn't translate. A believer in freedom and openness should be compensated more than a counterpart in the private sector so they can work even harder for the causes. They may not be in it for the money, but they shouldn't be punished financially because of their belief, as surely there are no lack of lucrative opportunities in for-profit organizations for them.
Not paying them millions is only "punished financially" if being rich well beyond comfortable is more important to them than the mission of the non-profit.
This "doesn't translate" only to people who have zero business leading non-profits. (Incidentally, capping compensation is an awesome cut filter, to eliminate people who are poorly aligned with the mission.)
Sure, there are classes of people who see something like non-profit CEO as their angle for wealth and status to which they feel entitled, when they can't get the for-profit CEO job they'd prefer. Not only are they innately misaligned with the mission, but they are also completely out of touch with the vast bulk of the people who non-profits typically are supposed serve. Keep them away from non-profits.
The list of major charities with much larger and more complex interests that Mozilla, yet lower executive pay, is quite long. Here is a sample: https://www.charitywatch.org/nonprofit-compensation-packages...
She's massively overpaid, not only when you consider her performance but particularly so.
Yes, particularly they could enable an adblocker by default. Defaults matter and telling people that simply switching to [forked] Firefox to avoid ads would make for a compelling reason for normies to switch. And maybe they'd even stop hemorrhaging users to Brave, which already has this.
Firefox is by many metrics a better browser than Chrome. I don't like everything about it, I think some parts of it are mismanaged, there are some parts that are underdeveloped and some parts that are straight-up frustrating. And do I get upset when teams get cut or features slashed? Yeah, of course.
But it's not lack of engineering that is making Firefox lose. It's antitrust. It genuinely is that simple.
You could replace the CEO with pretty much anyone on the planet and the situation would remain the same. The reason why Firefox is losing has nothing to do with features or engineering at this point, Firefox is already arguably better engineered than Chrome is.
Meanwhile, diversifying revenue is addressing one of the biggest criticisms people have of Firefox, that it is getting too much of its funding from Google. But does that help? No, because people have an axe to grind.
I think these countries are moving to Android/iOS as they get wealthier, but the legacy of FirefoxOS was quite successful. It's just that Mozilla never got much out of it.
"Ok, everybody popcorn up some ideas. Don't be shy."
[one of them opens a laptop and begins fiddling with a flame graph]
Jan 3 2021 210,085,100
Jan 1 2023 193,199,300
Dec 17 2023 185,599,100
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.
I wish I could reproduce it to file a bug report. These stability bugs are the reason I'm hesitant to recommend Firefox to non-technophiles, especially since the web is unusable without at least an ad blocker. While I still use Firefox, Brave seems to be doing a much better job at blocking ads without slowing down.
As they say, acceptance is the first step to recovery.
It could be that my baseline was the Chrome rendering, so any discrepancy was classified as "it's broken".
I have encountered a couple of (financial, natch) sites that insist on a Chromium-based browser in order to do vital operations like download statements. Switching browsers for those few exceptions is annoying, but not a deal-breaker (for me).
I get the same behavior for the people queries like "Barack Obama". (Android 14, Pixel 4a)
Install the Google Search Fixer from the Firefox add on store and it looks exactly the same.
edit: turns out I have the search fixer add-on that is mentioned in a sibling comment installed.