Mozilla announces leadership updates and next chapter

[Posted February 19, 2025 by jzb]

Mark Surman, president of the Mozilla Corporation, has announced leadership updates for Mozilla. This includes a Mozilla Leadership Council made up of executives from each Mozilla organization, and new board chairs for the not-for-profit Mozilla Foundation, the Mozilla Corporation, and Mozilla.ai. The announcement also indicates a desire to further "diversify" Mozilla's focus:

We've recognized that Mozilla faces major headwinds in terms of both financial growth and mission impact. While Firefox remains the core of what we do, we also need to take steps to diversify: investing in privacy-respecting advertising to grow new revenue in the near term; developing trustworthy, open source AI to ensure technical and product relevance in the mid term; and creating online fundraising campaigns that will draw a bigger circle of supporters over the long run. Mozilla's impact and survival depend on us simultaneously strengthening Firefox AND finding new sources of revenue AND manifesting our mission in fresh ways. That is why we're working hard on all of these fronts.

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Sigh

Posted Feb 19, 2025 22:07 UTC (Wed) by josh (subscriber, #17465) [Link] (19 responses)

"While we still mention Firefox in this press release because it's the only thing we do that anyone actually wants us to do, we will also do a thing nobody wants, a thing nobody wants, and ask for money."

Sigh

Posted Feb 19, 2025 22:18 UTC (Wed) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (18 responses)

Well, people want Firefox but I am not sure there is enough people wanting to pay for it to fund it's development directly and ad money is in decline and was already in a uncomfortable position because it was mostly from Google. Google is dominating browser development with Chromium/Chrome and Firefox has become a niche browser.

Sigh

Posted Feb 19, 2025 22:38 UTC (Wed) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (2 responses)

> and was already in a uncomfortable position because it was mostly from Google. Google is dominating browser development with Chromium/Chrome and Firefox has become a niche browser.

Worse yet, that revenue comes from Google paying to be its default search provider, a practice that is being actively challenged in multiple jurisdictions. If Google loses those cases, *poof* no more revenue.

(Of course, it's just Mozilla; Apple receives over $5 billion per _quarter_ from Google for a similar arrangement)

Sigh

Posted Feb 19, 2025 23:24 UTC (Wed) by numgmt (guest, #167446) [Link] (1 responses)

Mozilla could always go back to Yahoo or Bing.

Sigh

Posted Feb 20, 2025 0:48 UTC (Thu) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link]

> Mozilla could always go back to Yahoo or Bing.

Yahoo has been "powered by Bing" for over 15 years now, and Microsoft is essentially in the same boat as Google when it comes to paying for search engine defaults.

Sigh

Posted Feb 19, 2025 23:17 UTC (Wed) by cen (subscriber, #170575) [Link] (5 responses)

but it's probably also true that you don't need 500M+ in revenue to continue developing Firefox.

Sigh

Posted Feb 19, 2025 23:30 UTC (Wed) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (4 responses)

> but it's probably also true that you don't need 500M+ in revenue to continue developing Firefox.

It wouldn't surprise me at all if Google is investing way more that into browser development in a year. The question remains, what is Mozilla supposed to do if not diversify when facing the reality of ever declining market share for their browser? When Microsoft was doing nothing for IE, Firefox was able to run circles around it. This isn't the case with Google.

Sigh

Posted Feb 20, 2025 4:01 UTC (Thu) by milesrout (subscriber, #126894) [Link] (3 responses)

Google is inefficient. Listen to any Google employee's stories about trying to get anything done there through the layers and layers of management. Almost impossible.

It is quite possible to build a useful web browser for less than what Google spends just as it was possible for SpaceX to get to space with literally 1/100 the staff count as Boeing's aerospace division had in 2008.

Sigh

Posted Feb 20, 2025 7:54 UTC (Thu) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

> It is quite possible to build a useful web browser for less than what Google spends just as it was possible for SpaceX to get to space with literally 1/100 the staff count as Boeing's aerospace division had in 2008.

If that's what Boeing had dedicated to Space, then that's very unfair. And if it's not what Boeing had dedicated to Space it's also very unfair. In fact, as I understand the word Aerospace it doesn't even include Space! It means (mostly) stuff with wings, not rockets!

Firstly, of course a small, focussed team is going to be a lot smaller/cheaper than a big team with a much larger remit.

And secondly, the second mover always has the advantage of the previous player having spent loads of money/effort chasing down dead ends. Doesn't stop the second mover chasing down the same dead ends :-) but they shouldn't if they're any good at their job ...

Cheers,
Wol

Sigh

Posted Feb 20, 2025 15:33 UTC (Thu) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link] (1 responses)

You can't build a new browser equivalent to Chrome or Firefox for less than $1B, and if your estimate is less than you are probably not fully accounting for effort needed to handle the complexity and features that are the baseline expectation. Maybe $500M/yr is high but I expect the maintenance costs to be in the hundreds of millions of dollars just to keep a seat at the table. While some reskins line Vivaldi or Brave spend less, they are dependent on Google and MS for ongoing maintenance of the base platform.

I'm less worried about it though because we have 2 high quality FOSS implementations, and sure Chromium is effectively the reference implementation of the web as an app delivery platform but it's not like the IE days where it's locked up with one vendor, both MS and Google have the resources to support development of one flames out and it's FOSS, a larger consortium could be built around it if necessary. I don't know whats wrong with Mozilla tech or community engagement though as they've never been able to build as healthy an ecosystem around their software, Gecko was already a reference implementation of a web browser before KHTML/WebKit/Blink came along, but every time a new entrant took a close look at the available FOSS they did not choose Mozilla tech. It did take them a looong time to pay down the tech debt left by Netscape Navigator 4, maybe that just made the timing bad, but XULRunner didn't take off the way Electron did and Chrome was started way after Firefox existed.

Sigh

Posted Feb 21, 2025 4:13 UTC (Fri) by halla (subscriber, #14185) [Link]

"Gecko was already a reference implementation of a web browser before KHTML/WebKit/Blink came along"

Both gecko and khtml were started in 1998.

Sigh

Posted Feb 20, 2025 3:59 UTC (Thu) by milesrout (subscriber, #126894) [Link] (8 responses)

I am not the only person that would pay something for Firefox if the money didn't risk going to the causes that Mozilla ACTUALLY cares about (Firefox is clearly not one of them).

Sigh

Posted Feb 20, 2025 7:23 UTC (Thu) by ssmith32 (subscriber, #72404) [Link]

Yeah, I still pay monthly, and it is annoying to see the AI project, in particular. As obnoxious as advertising is, at least that's a business. I don't know of any LLM company that has a sustainable business (unless you count sales of shares to investors as their actual business...)

If protonmail can survive on what they bring and what they produce, I agree that Mozilla could certainly survive on less, if it cut management and focused on just firefox.

That said, it still beats selling my info to Google in exchange for a browser... particularly coz Chrome is sooo annoying about it.

Sigh

Posted Feb 20, 2025 8:54 UTC (Thu) by taladar (subscriber, #68407) [Link] (1 responses)

Same here, I would absolutely pay for Firefox if there was a way to just pay for Firefox and not for "Mozilla side-project of the week".

Sigh

Posted Feb 20, 2025 9:48 UTC (Thu) by josh (subscriber, #17465) [Link]

Likewise. I get a huge amount of value from Firefox Sync alone, for instance; I would pay for that.

Sigh

Posted Feb 20, 2025 12:17 UTC (Thu) by Phantom_Hoover (subscriber, #167627) [Link] (4 responses)

I might be misremembering but my understanding is that donations to the Mozilla Foundation, the nonprofit, *cannot* be spent on Firefox, because that’s done by the for-profit Mozilla Corporation. So the Foundation ends up spending donation money on the same diffuse trendy grants that the rest of the American non-profit industrial complex does.

what the actual fuck, Re: Sigh

Posted Feb 25, 2025 11:58 UTC (Tue) by chexo4 (guest, #169500) [Link] (3 responses)

Why in the world are they set up like that? What the fuck

Why it is the way that it is

Posted Feb 25, 2025 13:53 UTC (Tue) by jzb (editor, #7867) [Link] (1 responses)

There's a short post from Mozilla circa 2005 that explains why they created Mozilla Corporation and moved most of the employees to it.

I don't believe that the statement that donations to Mozilla Foundation cannot be spent on Firefox development is accurate. From their 2005 statement "It is hoped that the income from the Mozilla Corporation will help the Mozilla project (including both the Foundation and the Corporation) to be more self-supporting, though donations will still be welcome".

However, even though I believe they can spend direct donations on Firefox development, it doesn't seem that they do or have a way to indicate "I want this donation spent only on development".

Their current FAQ indicates that donations to MoFo are used to "support advocacy campaigns (i.e. asking big tech companies to protect your privacy), research and publications like the *Privacy Not Included buyer's guide and Internet Health Report, and covers a portion of our annual MozFest gathering". It would be interesting to see how they would do if they accepted direct donations specifically for Firefox development.

Why it is the way that it is

Posted Feb 25, 2025 19:38 UTC (Tue) by Phantom_Hoover (subscriber, #167627) [Link]

Thanks for the info. Having looked into it a bit more, I suspect the major reason donations aren’t primarily funding browser development is that they’re a drop in the ocean next to the colossal royalty payment from Google for the search engine default, so it wouldn’t make a huge difference either way. That doesn’t change my overall picture though, which is that if friends want to donate to Mozilla (or Wikimedia) I’ll tell them to only do so if they earnestly wish for it to be spent on Bay Area progressive activism, rather than Firefox or Wikipedia.

what the actual fuck, Re: Sigh

Posted Feb 25, 2025 17:43 UTC (Tue) by kleptog (subscriber, #1183) [Link]

Note that having a corporation wholly owned by a non-profit is a fairly common setup (at least here in NL, but probably elsewhere). One of the main reasons for this is that corporations with shares have a much clearer ownership/management structure.

Suppose you're a cooperative with members, then how the members have influence on the board decisions can be murky or at least for external parties not always transparent. So if said cooperative wants to borrow money and the lender wants to know what they can ask as collateral they have to dig through this and have to figure some bespoke setup.

On the other hand, if the cooperative wholly owns a corporation then that corporation is a separate legal entity and the collateral can be defined as X% of the shares of the corporation.

Similarly, being an employee of a corporation means you only have to deal with the management of the corporation. Being employee of a cooperative means you have to possibly worry about direct influence of all the members and whatever voting structure has been setup.

In the case of MoFo this means the donations can be used to buy services (do X work for $Y) from the subsidiary which makes it legally clear and transparent.

AI huh

Posted Feb 19, 2025 23:21 UTC (Wed) by motk (subscriber, #51120) [Link] (1 responses)

Still exactly zero (0) use cases for the Giant LLM, and they're happy to pee themselves up the wall for it.

AI huh

Posted Feb 21, 2025 13:25 UTC (Fri) by denials (subscriber, #3413) [Link]

Well, Firefix's in-browser translation (using an embedded AI model) is a genuinely useful feature that I appreciate. Way better than feeding your interests and data directly to Google Translate, DeepL, etc.

Direct donations and ethical advertising

Posted Feb 20, 2025 0:28 UTC (Thu) by fraetor (subscriber, #161147) [Link] (19 responses)

I'm always surprised Firefox hasn't gone the route of direct donations, in the way Thunderbird has been doing recently. You can donate to the Mozilla foundation but as far as I can tell none of that money goes towards Firefox. [^1]

On another note, I'm always a bit sceptical of privacy preserving advertising. Not because I don't think it can be done, but because I think it is solving the wrong problem. Most of the debate around targeted advertising focuses on the privacy issues that come from your personal data being used to better target adverts, but I think this misses the inherent potential for harm in targeted ads, regardless of their privacy properties, due to the interests of advertisers and users not being aligned.

[^1]: https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/donate/help/#frequently...

Direct donations and ethical advertising

Posted Feb 20, 2025 2:02 UTC (Thu) by dralley (subscriber, #143766) [Link] (18 responses)

None of that money legally *can* go towards Firefox. You can't take money from a nonprofit and use it to build a product you make profit off of.

Direct donations and ethical advertising

Posted Feb 20, 2025 4:04 UTC (Thu) by milesrout (subscriber, #126894) [Link] (7 responses)

I don't see why you shouldn't be able to. Why shouldn't a charity be allowed to invest in a profitable venture so that it can make more money for its charitable objects?

Direct donations and ethical advertising

Posted Feb 20, 2025 4:57 UTC (Thu) by dralley (subscriber, #143766) [Link]

You don't structure things that way if that is your goal. You would have the corp own a charitable wing, and donate some portion of the profits to charitable activities. But you couldn't just take external donations to the charity and use them to expand the business.

Mozilla is the inverse. It's a corporation owned by a charity. Excess profits can flow from the business to its owner (the charity) but not the other way around.

Direct donations and ethical advertising

Posted Feb 20, 2025 7:15 UTC (Thu) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (2 responses)

Charities, in general, are very limited in what they can do with their money. Typically, they can only use them for direct purposes of the charity.

Otherwise, it'd be too easy to:
1. Set up "Real Honest Charity to Help With Puppies and Baby Seals".
2. Collect the nice tax-free money.
3. Invest the money into "Evil Kitten-Eating Corporation".
4. Profit.

Direct donations and ethical advertising

Posted Feb 20, 2025 13:02 UTC (Thu) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link]

> 1. Set up "Real Honest Charity to Help With Puppies and Baby Seals".
> 3. Invest the money into "Evil Kitten-Eating Corporation".

Wellll.... if you're feeding those kittens to said puppies and baby seals, that's still supporting the charitable mission.

Direct donations and ethical advertising

Posted Feb 20, 2025 18:15 UTC (Thu) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link]

Thor from Pirate Software has an interesting tale on this, he runs a ferret rescue and structured it as a for-profit for the flexibility in funding and spending that gives and just deals with the tax burden that comes along with, along with donations not being deductable. That way there is no restrictions on moving funds between his Twitch or YouTube revenue and the rescue, or running fundraising events, as a for-profit.

Direct donations and ethical advertising

Posted Feb 20, 2025 11:06 UTC (Thu) by kleptog (subscriber, #1183) [Link] (2 responses)

You have non-profits and you have charities and they are not the same.

Non-profit means you don't have shareholders or owners that you pay dividends to.
Charity means you're doing something for the benefit of society.
Some non-profits/charities are government recognized and can therefore accept donations that are tax deductible.

You have non-profits that are not charities. Some hospitals and universities are setup that way for example. You generally can't give tax-deductible donations to a hospital (though it's probably possible somewhere in the world). For profit charities are usually termed social enterprises.

Direct donations and ethical advertising

Posted Feb 20, 2025 23:23 UTC (Thu) by Klaasjan (subscriber, #4951) [Link] (1 responses)

Thanks for clarifying.
Can you elaborate on the extent to which this is true globally and/or is US- or EU-centric?
(Honest question, since I am under the impression that you have some background across regions)

Direct donations and ethical advertising

Posted Feb 21, 2025 9:33 UTC (Fri) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

In the UK at least we have (or had) a lot of non-profit businesses, otherwise known as "Mutuals". Many insurance companies, all Building Societies, Friendly Societies etc. All distribute their surplus to their members (or customers).

When we had the Endowment Mortgage Scandal maybe 20 years ago, it was crazy. People were being compensated because they had a nasty surprise at the end of their mortgage when they couldn't pay it off. But (a) anyone with half a brain should have seen it coming, and (b) they'd had maybe 10, 20 years when they were seriously underpaying on their mortgage. So they got compensated for having too much money in their pocket! (It was caused because when inflation crashed from 12-15% down to about 5%, the insurance policy returns were a lot less in money terms, and insufficient to repay the capital outstanding on the mortgage).

And then the government set up a compensation where insurance companies had to pay policy holders the compensation out of shareholder funds. They were adamant that the money should not surreptitiously come out of policy holder funds. But who owned most of the insurance funds? THE CUSTOMERS! So the government was taking money out of my left pocket to put it back in my right (and taking its cut on the way, of course...)

And places like hospitals, schools, often do take tax-deductible money - they often have supporters groups like a Parent/Teacher Association or a League of Friends, which is legally separate, but collects money and spends it on behalf of the cause, like hospital equipment, or the school playground, etc etc.

Cheers,
Wol

Direct donations and ethical advertising

Posted Feb 20, 2025 5:12 UTC (Thu) by PeeWee (subscriber, #175777) [Link] (9 responses)

I am not familiar with the legalistic details, much less when it comes to US law, but it is not actually a profit if you reinvest all the revenue into developing the product, because revenue equals costs in such a scenario; the definition of profit is revenue minus costs. That is basically how non-profit firms work. A friend of mine worked for one (not in the US though) a while back and told me some of the peculiarities that result from that approach, e.g. if you run the risk of actually turning a profit at the end of the fiscal year you'd better find a way to burn money and be quick about it.

And I never did get why the Mozilla Foundation was not enough in the first place. BTW, Wikipedia says that Mozilla Corp. generated almost $600 million in revenue in 2022. Where does all that money go? It also says there are only 750 employees. Even at $200'000 average yearly salary that'd leave ~450 million. OK, there is some infrastructure costs, office rent and what have you but I don't believe that it is more than personnel costs.

That kind of money even makes me question why they have to explore new ways to generate revenue. Especially in the "Ai" case that seems to be a chicken and egg problem of their own making. Just don't blow money on the latest buzz and wait it out. It *will* go away. Elon Musk recently mused about generating "synthetic" training data because they have run out of actual real data after inhaling the whole of the internet -- a feat, mind you, that only one Chuck Norris has accomplished before, twice of course. :p

Direct donations and ethical advertising

Posted Feb 20, 2025 7:26 UTC (Thu) by ssmith32 (subscriber, #72404) [Link] (4 responses)

Executive payrolls. Coz you gotta pay money to "make" money, or something, something.

Direct donations and ethical advertising

Posted Feb 20, 2025 12:02 UTC (Thu) by patrick_g (subscriber, #44470) [Link] (3 responses)

Mitchell Baker salary in dollars :

2014: 994 000
2015 : 1 022 000
2016 : 1 107 000
2017 : 2 346 000
2018 : 2 485 000
2019 : 3 074 000
2020 : 2 755 000
2021 : 5 648 000

Sources :
2014 : https://static.mozilla.com/moco/en-US/pdf/2014_Mozilla_Fo...
2015 : https://static.mozilla.com/moco/en-US/pdf/2015_Mozilla_Fo...
2016 : https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2016/2016_Mozilla...
2017 : https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2017/mozilla-2017...
2018 : https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2018/mozilla-2018...
2019 : https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2019/mozilla-2019...
2020 : https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2020/mozilla-2020...
2021 : https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2021/mozilla-fdn-...

Direct donations and ethical advertising

Posted Feb 20, 2025 12:46 UTC (Thu) by rschroev (subscriber, #4164) [Link] (2 responses)

I don't understand how someone can bring that much value to an organization like Mozilla to deserve a salary of $994000. As wrong as that already feels to me, over the course of seven years the salary grows with a factor of more than 5. This is an organization that's always struggling to find enough funding, and is risking to loose it's largest source of funding. Don't they have anything better to do with their money than pay some person more money per year than many people will see in their entire life??

Direct donations and ethical advertising

Posted Feb 20, 2025 15:20 UTC (Thu) by excors (subscriber, #95769) [Link] (1 responses)

> I don't understand how someone can bring that much value to an organization like Mozilla to deserve a salary of $994000.

$1M is 0.2% of Mozilla's annual revenue and expenses, and it's equivalent to about 4 software engineers. A CEO will make many decisions that have a much bigger impact than that, so I think it's quite easy to see why a company would consider it worth paying that much (or 6x that much) for someone they believe is making better decisions than the average person, and who would otherwise be tempted to retire or move to another company that pays better.

(Their belief in that person might be wrong, and perhaps someone else would make better decisions, but that seems very hard to evaluate and it's a separate issue from the salary.)

To pick a random open-source-related company of similar size (revenue and numbers of employees), GitLab's CEO received about $27M over the past 3 years, their CFO gets about $4M per year, their CLO about $3M per year, and their new CRO got $23M this year, mostly as RSUs. (Source: https://d18rn0p25nwr6d.cloudfront.net/CIK-0001653482/ef4b...). Mozilla's total executive compensation of $9M/year seems quite frugal in comparison.

Extreme pay inequality in general is probably terrible for society, since it creates wealthy individuals with too much unchecked power, but that's a problem that needs to be addressed by governments through taxes and regulations, it can't be solved by individual companies trying to opt out of the system they find themselves in - they'll achieve nothing but hurting themselves. (So, uh, good luck with getting a government who'll do that.)

Direct donations and ethical advertising

Posted Feb 20, 2025 16:43 UTC (Thu) by rschroev (subscriber, #4164) [Link]

> someone they believe is making better decisions than the average person

I've yet to see evidence that someone like Baker makes better decisions than the average person. We're talking about a non-profit here, with a specific purpose (to strive for an open internet, in this case). The goal here is not to maximize shareholder value, as is the case for regular companies; that at least can be used as some kind of measure for the performance of a CEO, even though it's far from perfect.

In a non-profit, how do you evaluate whether a CEO makes good decisions? Firefox's usage share? That's steadily decreased during Baker's time at Mozilla, so that doesn't exactly justify her generous salary.

When you allow a person to have a salary that big, you attract the kind of person who's in it for the money, not for the actual goal the organization was founded for. Someone who's good at extracting money from the organization. At that Baker's been quite good. At making an open internet, or increasing Firefox's usage share? Highly debatable.

Direct donations and ethical advertising

Posted Feb 20, 2025 12:37 UTC (Thu) by excors (subscriber, #95769) [Link] (3 responses)

> Wikipedia says that Mozilla Corp. generated almost $600 million in revenue in 2022. Where does all that money go? It also says there are only 750 employees. Even at $200'000 average yearly salary that'd leave ~450 million. OK, there is some infrastructure costs, office rent and what have you but I don't believe that it is more than personnel costs.

For Mozilla Foundation plus subsidiaries (including Mozilla Corporation) in 2023: (https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2024/mozilla-fdn-...)

Software development: $260M
Other program services: $40M
Branding and marketing: $68M
General and administrative: $123M
Fundraising and development: $4M

Total expenses: $496M
Total revenue: $653M

The difference between revenue and expenses was invested; as of 2023 they have about $1.2B of cash and investments, which would cover about 3 years of the shortfall if they lost all their Google revenue.

Salaries and benefits are 66% of total expenses ($328M), consultants are 8%, IT is 8%, advertising and promotion is 6%, etc.

The 20 "key employees" (including Mitchell Baker (now-former CEO), directors, etc) have compensation of $9M, which is 2% of total expenses. (https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2024/b200-mozilla...)

Reports of layoffs from Feb 2024 say that "about 60 jobs" were "about 5% of its workforce", implying it had about 1200 employees (though I'm not sure if "it" is the whole of Mozilla or just the Corporation), so that comes to about $270K per employee. Glassdoor suggests US-based non-senior Software Engineers at Mozilla have average total pay of $184K (including benefits), which is significantly lower than some tech companies (e.g. Google is reported as $260K). These numbers are all very approximate but seem consistent enough.

So about two thirds of Mozilla's expenses are the salaries and benefits of non-director-level employees, and it looks like the fundamental issue is that US software engineers are really expensive.

Direct donations and ethical advertising

Posted Feb 22, 2025 15:15 UTC (Sat) by mcon147 (subscriber, #56569) [Link] (2 responses)

Im convinced we could find a lower cost CEO

Direct donations and ethical advertising

Posted Feb 22, 2025 23:11 UTC (Sat) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (1 responses)

> Im convinced we could find a lower cost CEO

....We could save even more money by eliminating the position entirely. Heck, let's go one step further and just fire everyone, that'll save over $350 million!

Focusing solely on cost without considering the benefits is quite myopic, to say the least.

Direct donations and ethical advertising

Posted Feb 23, 2025 9:10 UTC (Sun) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

> Focusing solely on cost without considering the benefits is quite myopic, to say the least.

It's called "Government", don'cha'no.

Sounds like Elon's DOGE, right now. Like when our Prime Minister got Maggielomania and went all penny-wise, pound-foolish. I don't think Westminster has improved since. Mind you it wasn't much better before that.

Cheers,
Wol