LWN: Comments on "A new CEO for Mozilla"

A new CEO for Mozilla

dsommers — Mon, 12 Feb 2024 19:07:15 +0000

Jim Whitehurst.

I was at Red Hat when he was CEO there. He understands open source incredibly well. And he had no issues mailing internal company wide mailing lists to get input to where the company should go next and discuss things openly with everyone. At that time he even ran Fedora his own little setup at home and didn't mind digging into stuff.

He is a leader who is easy to trust, as he understands the core principles of open source and interacting with communities openly and honestly. And he is capable of admitting errors.

The question is more if Mozilla would be interesting for him.

A new CEO for Mozilla

mb — Mon, 12 Feb 2024 16:56:18 +0000

>"Browser market share" hasn't been a technical/engineering problem for the better part of three decades.

Yes, you are absolutely right.
Mozilla barely engineered anything that could have helped the user in the last decade.

Instead they decided to burn the money and implement anti-features and shift GUI elements from one place to another and back and actively cripple their product (FF on Android).

That's certainly not how you (re-)gain market share.

A new CEO for Mozilla

paulj — Mon, 12 Feb 2024 16:46:07 +0000

I didn't write that success required succeeding with their browser. I wrote "steer the organisation towards success" - with what product or service I left open.

She has not succeeded there has she? Taking higher and higher pay, as revenues decline, is not a path towards success. Rather, it is asset stripping.

A new CEO for Mozilla

pizza — Mon, 12 Feb 2024 16:41:42 +0000

> Surely the core job of a CEO is to navigate the changing market dynamics and steer the organisation towards success? "Decline less swiftly" isn't really what I would call success.

When most of your competition no longer exists, yes, "decline less swiftly" is a considerable accomplishment.

(Even infinitely-more-resourced-Microsoft canned their in-house engine in favor of a Chrome reskin)

> You could have had several absolutely industry-leading, trend-setting, engineers if she'd been on $5m less pay.

"Browser market share" hasn't been a technical/engineering problem for the better part of three decades. Heck, raw engineering prowess has _rarely_ ever driven market share, in _any_ market.

A new CEO for Mozilla

paulj — Mon, 12 Feb 2024 16:31:04 +0000

Surely the core job of a CEO is to navigate the changing market dynamics and steer the organisation towards success? "Decline less swiftly" isn't really what I would call success.

You could have had several absolutely industry-leading, trend-setting, engineers if she'd been on $5m less pay. Or 1 absolutely world-leading eng, plus 20 to 40 top-class engineers. And she'd still have been paid /generously/. Surely the organisation would have been more likely to reverse the decline in that case?

A new CEO for Mozilla

Wol — Mon, 12 Feb 2024 15:53:07 +0000

> The numbers are:
> $7m/a and barely 4% market share, constantly falling share during the last decade.
> These numbers speak for themselves.

Only if you're blind to market economics.

You do realise those EXACT SAME figures could apply to the UK Supermarket market over the last 20 years or more?

Sadly, Mozilla has been following the TYPICAL path followed by any medium-sized fish in any mature pond since about - when? - I'd say 1980 in my experience. Others would quite likely put an even earlier date on it.

Cheers,
Wol

A new CEO for Mozilla

mb — Mon, 12 Feb 2024 15:35:43 +0000

>She is responsible for the things under her control -- ie the direction and steps Mozilla takes

As is any other CEO of any other company.

The numbers are:
$7m/a and barely 4% market share, constantly falling share during the last decade.
These numbers speak for themselves.

>or could actually be in _worse_ shape.

There's not much share left to loose.
It can't get much worse.

That's worth $7m/a? I don't think so.

I hope that the new CEO takes the right path now.
I'm not against $7m/a per se. But only if the product is excellent. FF went far away from that.

A new CEO for Mozilla

pizza — Mon, 12 Feb 2024 14:53:50 +0000

> She is not responsible for the path Mozilla went?

She is responsible for the things under her control -- ie the direction and steps Mozilla takes -- but she has only tenuous influence over what the rest of the industry does.

In other words, even if every decision resulted in the objectively best possible outcome, Mozilla could still be in the same position it is now; it could be in better shape, or could actually be in _worse_ shape.

I do know, that at the end of the day, Mozilla has always been a relatively small fish in the pond, and at this point, there are what, two other (considerably larger) fishes left still swimming?

A new CEO for Mozilla

ojeda — Mon, 12 Feb 2024 14:08:25 +0000

I am aware -- the things I listed enable you to do new things, even if only performance-wise, e.g. "fancy games" that Josh mentioned.

A new CEO for Mozilla

LtWorf — Mon, 12 Feb 2024 14:04:10 +0000

We were talking about user's perspective, not new APIs to achieve the same things.

A new CEO for Mozilla

ojeda — Mon, 12 Feb 2024 11:09:28 +0000

10 years ago HTTP/2, HTTP/3, WebGL 2, WebGPU, WebAssembly... were not available, and things like asm.js, WebGL 1, WebRTC were very new anyway.

A new CEO for Mozilla

LtWorf — Mon, 12 Feb 2024 08:37:14 +0000

> You may want to examine substantially more broadly than the bubble of users you are in. Users want games (both casual and fancy), high-quality videoconferencing with screen sharing, sites that load quickly and securely, sites that work on mobile devices with limited/unreliable bandwidth while providing nice features, sites that include real-time communication with other users, and many many many other things. Pretty much any functionality you could want a computer to do, users want to be able to do on the web.

All of this was available 10 years ago. That was his point.

A new CEO for Mozilla

mb — Mon, 12 Feb 2024 07:00:10 +0000

>Your comment implies that Baker is responsible for the decline and fall of Mozilla

She is not responsible for the path Mozilla went?
What exactly did she get $7m for?

A new CEO for Mozilla

milesrout — Mon, 12 Feb 2024 03:16:18 +0000

Your comment implies that Baker is responsible for the decline and fall of Mozilla. But that's not necessarily true. Maybe the alternative would have been an even faster decline and a bigger fall. Or maybe it would be ascension to great heights.

I am no big fan of what Mozilla has done for the last few years, but it also hasn't been unusual. They've done what basically everyone has done: lost focus on technology. They're not unusual in that, and so you'd need a pretty unusual CEO to do something different.

A new CEO for Mozilla

ssmith32 — Sun, 11 Feb 2024 06:04:12 +0000

Um, that's a rather singularly important employee when diagnosing strategy misteps.

I would say they were rather closer than you contend they were.

A new CEO for Mozilla

zaitcev — Sun, 11 Feb 2024 02:48:05 +0000

Mitchell Baker was compensated lavishly for presiding over the decline and fall of Mozilla.

WebSerial for Firefox

dilinger — Sat, 10 Feb 2024 04:32:06 +0000

Thanks, but the description says it supports Windows only.

I honestly don't mind using chromium for the webserial stuff; might as well since I maintain it. I use firefox for most things, and then chromium for a few other things that work better there.

WebSerial for Firefox

pj — Sat, 10 Feb 2024 03:54:09 +0000

...just gonna leave this here...

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/webserial-...

A new CEO for Mozilla

rschroev — Sat, 10 Feb 2024 01:46:36 +0000

> It's in the Corporation.

Ok, good.

> (Form 990 says the Foundation by itself has about $85M of cash and investments. The financial statement says the Foundation plus subsidiaries (Mozilla Corporation, MZLA Technologies (for Thunderbird), Mozilla Ventures, etc) has about $1145M of cash and investments, so almost all of that must be in the subsidiaries.)

I would like to see it split up though.

A new CEO for Mozilla

rschroev — Sat, 10 Feb 2024 01:40:47 +0000

From https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/what-we-fund/

"
What we fund

Mozilla finds, supports, and connects movement partners building a more open, inclusive internet and more trustworthy AI. Through fellowships and awards, we bolster people and bold ideas that can shape a more human-centered internet.

These leaders build new technology, develop toolkits and curricula, run campaigns, prototype solutions, and influence policy around the globe to:

- Reimagine new norms, policies, infrastructure, and technologies that protect and empower individuals and communities online.
- Reconstitute more — and more diverse — groups in the development, deployment, and management of the technologies that make up the web.
- Rebalance power online, shifting it back to individuals and communities.

[...]

Who we’ve funded

Mozilla Fellows and Awardees represent a range of disciplines and geographies: They are policymakers in Kenya, journalists in Brazil, engineers in Germany, privacy activists in the United States, and data scientists in the Netherlands. We seek fellows and awardees who are mission-driven, are masters of their trade, and have bold, new ideas that can catalyze lasting change.
"

That kind of stuff. Could be interesting, could maybe even be something I could consider donating to if it all didn't sound so vague, but definitely completely different from Firefox development.

(Note that not a single cent of the Foundation's money is used for Firefox development. The Corporation, which actually pays for Firefox development, is funded by payments from Google for Firefox using Google as the default search engine, and things like that. Part of that money is used for Firefox development, part is donated to the Foundation. And if you want to donate to help support Firefox development, via https://donate.mozilla.org, your money goes to the Foundation, not the corporation, so you're *not* supporting Firefox development.)

Anyway it's not very relevant as apparently (see excors' sibling post to yours) the large majority of the money is in the subsidiaries rather than the Foundation.

A new CEO for Mozilla

excors — Fri, 09 Feb 2024 22:03:24 +0000

It's in the Corporation.

(Form 990 says the Foundation by itself has about $85M of cash and investments. The financial statement says the Foundation plus subsidiaries (Mozilla Corporation, MZLA Technologies (for Thunderbird), Mozilla Ventures, etc) has about $1145M of cash and investments, so almost all of that must be in the subsidiaries.)

A new CEO for Mozilla

mpr22 — Fri, 09 Feb 2024 21:28:29 +0000

Microsoft have displayed reasonable competence as a hardware manufacturer.

A new CEO for Mozilla

ballombe — Fri, 09 Feb 2024 21:24:46 +0000

Then, for what can it be used for ?

A new CEO for Mozilla

dilinger — Fri, 09 Feb 2024 17:42:49 +0000

> There aren't even any new user-facing features that come out of all of this. What can websites do today they couldn't do 10 years ago?

Here's an example. I have a few Bafang mid-drive motors on my cargo bikes. There are a bunch of useful settings that you can change, and much like a customizable linux desktop, I usually don't like the stock settings that the vendor programmed. It used to be that you needed some (free as in beer) windows program to update the settings, but someone reverse-engineered the protocol and people have written various (free as in freedom) programs to update settings (eg, https://github.com/horga83/bdac). That's all fine and good, but I really didn't want to have to build/install random software that I'll only use once every 5-10 years when I get a new motor. Turns out someone wrote *a website* that can update the motor settings. Which is amazing. As simple as just plugging my laptop into the bike, going to a website, turning on the motor, and punching in the new settings that I want. I don't have to mess around with containers and host permission to ttyS*, or pulling down 50 python dependencies and realizing that something was written in python2 but never updated for python3 and debian no longer supports python3, and and and.. I just go to https://devnotes.kymatica.com/BafangWebConfig/BafangWebCf... and do the thing.

But that website works in chromium but not firefox, because it "requires a browser with support for Web Serial API, and should work on any recent version of Chrome, Opera or Edge." https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Web_Seri... says that it was added with chrome 89, which would've been mid-2021.

A new CEO for Mozilla

amacater — Fri, 09 Feb 2024 14:31:07 +0000

The only MS products that would *definitely* not suck would be if they made vacuum cleaners ... :)

A new CEO for Mozilla

eru — Fri, 09 Feb 2024 12:51:02 +0000

Microsoft failed in mobile because their products suck.

Windows phone did not suck when it got to version 8. I still think it had better usability than Android, and I still have a WP8 spare phone. Unfortunately WP10 sucked again because they tried to unify it with the desktop Windows version at some level. WP8 never crashed. WP10 did.

What really killed WP is the app makers did not want to support 3 very different platforms, each sufficiently different that portability is very hard, or actually impossible if you want to ensure your app does not suck on each platform.

In tech, always there are two, the third has no changes.

A new CEO for Mozilla

Wol — Fri, 09 Feb 2024 11:08:04 +0000

> It's just a free market! It's as simple as that.

Except it's not. It's a rigged market.

Okay there are checks and balances that are SUPPOSED to prevent it, but your salary is normally set - in large part - by the people above you. That's how they're kept down.

For the CxO level, there ISN'T anyone above you, so you all set each other's salaries on a "you scratch my back (aka increase my salary) and I'll scratch yours".

Having worked in HR, it's also standard practice to "attract talent" by saying "we want to be in the top 50% of payers". Guess what. That means, mathematically, you are going to have a wage spiral. It's inevitable.

Never mind that all the stats and studies say that CxOs appointed from outside, on super-size salaries, aren't worth the money. Your typical outside CxO, for about FIVE years, will underperform the market before they find their feet.

Cheers,
Wol

A new CEO for Mozilla

Wol — Fri, 09 Feb 2024 11:00:39 +0000

> I don't think that's true. Microsoft competed fine with other browsers, and even had the most dominant browser for a very long time.

> They weren't incapable of competing with Chrome because the "web browser business" is a "dead end" but because Google unlawfully poured hundreds of millions of dollars into a product that they gave away for free in order to kill all competing products, to create an advantage for their other paid offers.

Isn't this last sentence a pretty accurate description of Internet Explorer in its heyday, too? (s/Microsoft/Google/)

Cheers,
Wol

A new CEO for Mozilla

roc — Fri, 09 Feb 2024 10:50:30 +0000

Yes, you don't know. The only management-type person who worked at Netscape who is still at Mozilla is Mitchell Baker.

A new CEO for Mozilla

chris_se — Fri, 09 Feb 2024 09:52:30 +0000

> The only Microsoft products that have ever not sucked are MS Office products.

While I agree with respect to Excel and PowerPoint (in that they are decent products - though many people misuse them, but that's a different story), when it comes to Word and Outlook the cries of all students that ever lost their work due to Word, and the cries of all sysadmins that have to deal with Outlook on a daily basis would like to disagree. ;-)

A new CEO for Mozilla

josh — Fri, 09 Feb 2024 09:34:51 +0000

> But I said *a* browser engine. A browser engine doesn't need to be as complex as they have made them.

It does if you want users. If you want users, you need to support 99.99% of websites.

And even with a simpler browser engine, you're still going to get bug reports and support requests. The only way you're going to support a browser engine with three developers is by not handling much of the web *and* not having many users.

> The things they add to the browser engine aren't being used by users. They're being used by developers.

Who develop things used by users; that's always how it works when providing a platform. Some of those features *are* quite user-visible. And while some of them are primarily for developers, they help replace developer hacks with better solutions, or put the user more in control, or otherwise do things that developers are seeking a way to do.

It used to be much hackier to produce certain types of page layouts; now it's easy, in any modern browser. There are a lot of features that used to require JavaScript that can now be done with pure CSS or HTML. Web developers don't tend to say "I can't do that", they say "it's going to be harder to do that", and then they make it happen, whatever that takes; browsers can make hard things easier and simpler. Browsers can reduce the size that webpages need to be, or improve page compression and load time, or improve security...

By way of an example: I'm not a fan of webpage-specified fonts, but the world *before* they existed often had sites render key text as *images*, making it harder to scale, worse quality, larger, less accessible, and unselectable. Now, in a modern site, you don't see people put text in an image just so they can use a particular font, and that's a good thing. It'd be an even *better* world if websites didn't do *either* and just used browser fonts, but 1) nobody has succeeded or is likely to succeed in telling web developers what they *shouldn't* do, and 2) you can configure your browser to ignore webpage-specified fonts, which is one way browsers keep you in control, and they can't do that with the text in an image.

> Users just want websites and basic web apps.

You may want to examine substantially more broadly than the bubble of users you are in. Users want games (both casual and fancy), high-quality videoconferencing with screen sharing, sites that load quickly and securely, sites that work on mobile devices with limited/unreliable bandwidth while providing nice features, sites that include real-time communication with other users, and many many many other things. Pretty much any functionality you could want a computer to do, users want to be able to do on the web.

> Much of the new things that get added to these browsers are actually bad for users for god's sake, like tracking features.

Tracking features are absolutely a bad thing that have no place on the web. The vast majority of new features are not inherently bad in the way that tracking is.

In fact, some of the new functionality being added to web browsers is to *improve* privacy, such as locking down third-party cookies and similar tracking mechanisms, and otherwise locking down bits of the web platform to put users more in control.

One of the oldest features on the web is showing visited links in a different color than unvisited links. There's a huge amount of infrastructure that has gone into preserving that functionality in browsers while not allowing that to let pages track whether you've visited a page or not. Firefox has a whole mechanism to limit what sites can change between visited/unvisited links, so that there's no way for a site to *infer* that you've visited or not visited any given link.

A new CEO for Mozilla

patrick_g — Fri, 09 Feb 2024 09:07:36 +0000

>>>Their expenses were $220M for software development

That's good.

>>>plus another $200M for administration and marketing

That's crazy. It should urgently be reduced to the bare minimum, beginning with Mitchell Baker's insane salary.

A new CEO for Mozilla

milesrout — Fri, 09 Feb 2024 07:46:39 +0000

> They really, really can't. Forget adding new features, three programmers could barely keep the lights on, or respond to bug reports, or fix issues as they arise.

With the current complexity? Sure. But I said *a* browser engine. A browser engine doesn't need to be as complex as they have made them. Plus you're forgetting that most of the work is done by a few highly productive individuals.

>As for the rest of your argument, this is the same refrain commonly heard in retrocomputing everywhere: "We don't need all those new features from systemd/wayland/Linux/etc, if you stopped adding those new features software wouldn't depend on them and we could keep using sysvinit/x11/OpenBSD/etc forever!"

Not at all. They aren't even adding new features in the traditional sense. The things they add to the browser engine aren't being used by users. They're being used by developers. Users just want websites and basic web apps. No user ever asks "please make this website use CSS relative colours" or "hey mister webmaster your site should really be using this new Javascript API to do date manipulation instead of the old one". Much of the new things that get added to these browsers are actually bad for users for god's sake, like tracking features.

There aren't even any new user-facing features that come out of all of this. What can websites do today they couldn't do 10 years ago? 10 years ago we had responsive web map applications, we had websites (~30 years ago we had those, even, but modern ones we had 10 years ago). Nothing about the way we use the web is actually any different today than it was 10 years ago. What has the last 10 year of browser engine development actually done for users? Basically NOTHING. The user experience hasn't changed for the better at all. Websites have just become more bloated. And for what? The typography still sucks, the layouts still don't scale properly down to phones or up to bigger screens. It all still sucks. It's just sucks while using gigabytes of RAM instead of megabytes.

>And it's also not the case that web browsers *as a group* could stop adding new features if they all agreed to do so, either. The net effect of *that* would be that native applications have features browsers can't match, more sites throw features into their native app and not into their web version, and all the people saying "stop telling me to download your app, I just want to use your website!" lose out. The better the web gets, the less weight the mobile app ecosystem has, and the more it's possible for users to remain in control of their experience.

Native applications will always have features websites can't match, because browsers are native applications. It's the same reason manual optimisation always beats a compiler: I can use a compiler, and the compiler can't use me. So at the very worst, I can match a compiler by just using one. Similarly, you can always match what a browser does with a native application, by just doing the same thing.

> Now, it's *absolutely* valid that not all things should be in web standards. But Mozilla *does* have a voice in web standards too, as does Apple, as do others. Things do not get *unilaterally* added because one vendor wants them. And frankly, in order for Mozilla to have a larger voice in web standards, they need to have more market share. If they have 50% of the market and say they're not going to implement something, it doesn't become a standard; if they have 3% of the market they don't have that power.

The standard is whatever Chrome does in practice, realistically. Go to HN and read any thread about browsers: they basically all admit they only test on Chrome and only care whether it works on Chrome.

A new CEO for Mozilla

oldtomas — Fri, 09 Feb 2024 07:33:54 +0000

Wouldn't surprise me. Google has a stellar track record of exerting control without being seen. They dominate "search" -- meaning that if you set up a front on the Internets and Google doesn't see you, nobody will see you. So much so that a whole cottage industry has sprung up reading the flight of birds and the entrails of slaughtered animals to find out how to get the client at the top position.

Heck, they even provide the tool for web devels (lighthouse) to tell them what to do.

But not only that -- they dominate the clients as well. The only relevant browser engines left are Google's and Mozilla's, and they can choke the second as they please.

The other client too -- Android. Yes, of course, you can take the free bits and bobs, but if you aren't prepared to outprogram them, you'll be forced to follow wherever they lead. Samsung tried (and they are scarily big).

A new CEO for Mozilla

milesrout — Fri, 09 Feb 2024 07:32:21 +0000

I addressed this in the comment you replied to.

>The problem with paying someone $7m is if someone else will do the same job, just as well, for $6m. Or $200k

Why would they pay you $7m when someone else will do it for about what they're paying you now? But maybe you can negotiate for more than what you're paid now, sure. Just probably not $7m. Remember you also have a permanent full-time position that you can expect to keep approximately forever, and if the company shuts up shop you can go find another job immediately. A CEO has high expectations, very high levels of stress (responsible for many people's jobs), they're hard to replace, etc.

It's just a free market! It's as simple as that.

A new CEO for Mozilla

josh — Fri, 09 Feb 2024 07:31:21 +0000

If you can prove that, you should *absolutely* ask for a raise, or ask for greater inclusion in some kind of profit sharing program. If they say no, then the details of the story (with confidential information excluded) will also make a good story for future hiring interviews.

A new CEO for Mozilla

josh — Fri, 09 Feb 2024 07:29:11 +0000

> A team of three good programmers could maintain a browser engine.

They really, really can't. Forget adding new features, three programmers could barely keep the lights on, or respond to bug reports, or fix issues as they arise.

As for the rest of your argument, this is the same refrain commonly heard in retrocomputing everywhere: "We don't need all those new features from systemd/wayland/Linux/etc, if you stopped adding those new features software wouldn't depend on them and we could keep using sysvinit/x11/OpenBSD/etc forever!" The world moves on, and users and web developers *want* new features for the web platform. The net effect of digging in your heels and choosing to not add support for new web standards is a dead browser in which websites slowly stop working and people switch away to a working browser.

And it's also not the case that web browsers *as a group* could stop adding new features if they all agreed to do so, either. The net effect of *that* would be that native applications have features browsers can't match, more sites throw features into their native app and not into their web version, and all the people saying "stop telling me to download your app, I just want to use your website!" lose out. The better the web gets, the less weight the mobile app ecosystem has, and the more it's possible for users to remain in control of their experience.

Now, it's *absolutely* valid that not all things should be in web standards. But Mozilla *does* have a voice in web standards too, as does Apple, as do others. Things do not get *unilaterally* added because one vendor wants them. And frankly, in order for Mozilla to have a larger voice in web standards, they need to have more market share. If they have 50% of the market and say they're not going to implement something, it doesn't become a standard; if they have 3% of the market they don't have that power.

A new CEO for Mozilla

mb — Fri, 09 Feb 2024 07:13:58 +0000

>Paying someone $7m/year is totally worth it if that person makes decisions that make a big difference to investment

I, as a small software developer, frequently find and fix mistakes in the software, that would have cost the company dozens of millions of dollars if they had gone into production.
Should I also ask for a pay check upgrade to $7m/a?

A new CEO for Mozilla

makendo — Fri, 09 Feb 2024 03:16:59 +0000

Google's funding of Mozilla is likely because they have to. The only other option is to face California and US in an antitrust lawsuit (likely causing Google to lose control of Chrome), as without Mozilla they no longer just might have a monopoly, they _definitely_ are monopolizing the browser market.

A new CEO for Mozilla

Cyberax — Fri, 09 Feb 2024 03:02:41 +0000

> That's absurd. $200M/year represents at least a thousand full time software developers on American salaries.

Far less than a thousand, and yes, you need a lot of developers. Google definitely has more than a thousand.

Keep in mind, that a browser also needs a JavaScript engine (with JIT), needs to support multiple OSes, and it needs to stay on top of security issues.