Growing Mozilla – and evolving our leadership
blog.mozilla.org> 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
Not focusing on Firefox is what brought it to its state today, so what should Mozilla do? Focus even less on Firefox and instead on ads, AI and begging. Insane.
EDIT: As an aside, it looks like Mozilla's VC fund invested in the funding round[0] of one of the former board members[1] of mozilla.ai which is kinda weird.
[0] https://www.crunchbase.com/funding_round/credo-ai-series-b--...
[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/introducing-mozilla-ai-i...
Mozilla really is in a bad spot if advertising, AI, and fundraising are the only innovative ideas their leadership could come up with. I will begrudgingly still use Firefox as my daily driver, but the mismanagement being shown is really appalling and I worry about the future of a free and open Internet.
Suffice to say that we all deserve better.
The internet and browsers are a public good, no society functions without. As the US has transitioned into a kleptocracy, it would be even more logical for the EU to financially support teams developing important open source projects. Same thing for Linux and Libre Office perhaps.
The idea of EU funding Mozilla is naive, and if this is the best people can come up with, I'm not blaming Mozilla going for ads.
For one, Mozilla is still a US entity. As an EU citizen, I'd rather have my taxes go towards funding EU entities, especially in this climate. And I'd rather have that EU entity fork Chromium, starting to contribute to its development, as that would be a wiser bet.
And also, governments funding projects such as Firefox is a bad idea because the citizens of those governments come first. As one example, many online BBC shows are geo-blocked in my country. The EU is meant to serve its citizens, not the world, and you don't want the open Internet to depend on whom people vote for in the following election cycle.
The only way to fund a project that has global reach is via a sustainable business model, not taxes.
I do not mean to sponsor an external entity.
You have to analyze a project, and that might mean you need to fork it. It all depends on how much you need to steer and help. If a community is happy to welcome some formal stewardship, then that might work too. There is a company that contributes a lot to Libre Office. The same with Blender, where there can be cooperative development.
A hard fork is always possible, and nothing bad if the vision and needs differ from teams. Some might fork the EU stuff in turn. The free software model is designed to support that.
Mozilla got billions from Google and squandered it. If the EU were to fund a browser, I would prefer it to be Ladybird rather than throwing even more money into Mozilla’s bottomless pit.
Agreed, even if I am quite vocal about the state of Linux Desktop, as ex-believer, european distributions of FOSS OSes are the only viable way from US tech stacks.
Yes, I am quite aware of the contributions they also make to those platforms, but at lease those can be forked from, that ain't happening with what Google/Apple/Microsoft are selling as mainstream OSes.
what does that even mean?
"focussing on Firefox" isolates you from the vast majority of people who don't use it, and provides €0 of revenue per year to work on Firefox at all.
On the other hand, advertising doesn't do much to help Mozilla if it removes the main differentiator Firefox has from vastly more popular competitors. Firefox with "privacy respecting advertising" sounds an awful lot like Chrome with compatibility issues.
Yes. There is no such thing as privacy-respecting advertising. If they mess with extensions like Chrome did, they're going to lose their user base. A much higher proportion of us are only using Firefox because it's not connected to AdTech.
> There is no such thing as privacy-respecting advertising.
Sure there is; print ads are fine, and nothing prevents that style being used on the web (in fact, I'm aware of a local paper that does do that). It's just that advertisers really want to spy on users, so they pretty much always do.
One good example I like to show for this kind of web advertising is https://theweekinchess.com/
Basic image/hyperlinked banner ads, located to the side and non-disruptive, and relative to the topic of the website you are currently visiting.
I don't want the advertisers who are spying on us to get a second chance to reconsider a more ethical way of doing business. I want their industry driven into the ground and destroyed for the crimes they've already committed. Only after that happens can we can talk about privacy-respecting advertising being possible.
Firefox has been literally funded by Google's Ads, that Search deal having kept Mozilla alive. With all due respect, Firefox not being connected to AdTech is a hallucination.
Actually, all 3 major browser engines are directly funded by Google's Ads. And while you may have noticed that Mozilla and Apple have been singing the privacy tune, you should've also noticed that they never did anything to upset their cash cow.
Mozilla diversifying their revenue would be an improvement IMO. But whatever they did in the past, people got mad, because many imagine that such a complex piece of software could be developed for free or from the donations of individuals that ad-block YouTube instead of paying for Premium.
The salient difference is that Chrome kneecapped extensions, while Firefox has not. The more they get involved with ads, the more likely they become to mess with that. It will not go well.
I'm not sure what "isolating" means in "isolating you from the vast majority of people who don't use it".
I'm assuming you're saying that, since FF has a low browser share today, Mozilla focusing their effort to improve it would be wasteful, because that would be putting more resources behind a product that isn't popular.
If so, I wonder how that's different from any other company that wants to grow their market share. They probably face many of the same choices, e.g.: keep your core users satisfied, or try to bring in a new market. It's pretty intuitive to me that putting ads in Firefox would alienate their current core users, but how would putting ads in FF bring in new users? Wouldn't the result just be fewer people using Firefox?
If what they care about is the mission, then that seems like a bad idea. If what they care about is revenue, then I wonder how the non-profit Mozilla Foundation, which oversees the Mozilla Corporation, squares that tradeoff with the mission they exist to serve.
~80% of their revenue comes from Google paying them for search deals on Firefox.
Focusing on anything other than Firefox (but ads and AI? really?) not only cheapens the brand, but also devalues and risks their Google deal.
This isn't really "growing" Mozilla (they laid off 30% of their people a few months ago[0]); this is adding three people to their board of directors.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42054867 ("Mozilla Foundation lays off 30% staff, drops advocacy division (techcrunch.com)")
That’s 30% of Foundation, not Corporation.
The absolute last thing I want from Mozilla is advertising. Blocking ads with uBlock Origin is the entire reason I use Firefox today.
I don’t know how you can be this out of touch with your users.
many posts on Usenet from 35 years ago speak in lengthy detail about "how the Internet will be ruined by ads" and then lots of chatter about who would do that, and why..
source: one of the authors of those emails
I'm guessing the "evolution" of their leadership isn't going to involve their CEO taking a cut to her seven million dollars salary?
Per https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/200... Mitchell's pay fell to $6.26M in 2023. We'll have to wait till late this year to see the 2024 IRS Form 990.
From the 990s, it seems Mitchell took out $32,683,642 over the eight years from 2016 to 2023. With 2024 included, she could well top $38M -- not too shabby!
See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43112590. 2024 will be the last big comp year for Mitchell.
Of course not, why should the CEO be forced to use last year's model of yacht? Frankly I don't know how anyone lives with less than ten million these days.
If the CEO made $0, what would the impact on Mozilla’s balance sheet be? Hint: not significant
If the store clerk took home some of the supplies, what would the impact on the company's balance sheet be? Not significant but she'd be setting the wrong example by doing so. If the CEO of a non-profit insists on "pay equity" with her for-profit equivalents she should look for a job in a for-profit, not leach dry the non-profit. Enough of the bullshit with overpaid and underperforming Mozilla CEOs, time for a real change there. I propose Mozilla creates a DOME department - Dept. of Mozilla Efficiency - which goes through the organisation, top to bottom. Make Mozilla concentrate on its core tasks again, i.e. creating and maintaining browsers to serve as bulwark against the Blink-Webkit duopoly. More developers, fewer executives, more releases, fewer distractions, Make Mozilla Great Again!
I broadly agree, though then the argument would be "well the best CEOs would go to for-profit places", and we might get worse CEOs leading the non-profits; if we had the non-profit pay for-profit wages, then they might be more appealing to more talented people.
I'm not sure I actually agree with this argument, to be clear. I don't even know that I think the CEO does all that much; Elon Musk is the CEO of like three or four companies while also leading a government agency, indicating to me that "CEO" is not a difficult job, so I don't know that we necessarily need "the best" CEO anyway.
We would probably be better off with non-profits run by non-profit oriented CEOs.
People like Musk, Jobs, Edison and others are valuable because they see future possibilities - not pipe dreams but real possibilities - and turn their attention towards realising those goals by putting together teams of people who stand a chance to get there. Some of them - Musk and Edison in this list - do some of the work themselves, others - Jobs - are more 'visionary leaders' who somehow manage to inspire or scare others towards achieving the goal. Once the company is up and running these types of leaders tend to look elsewhere to break new ground because the day-to-day grind of running those companies is not their thing.
Mozilla does not need to find future possibilities, it got its goals handed to it by Marc Andreessen via Netscape: create and maintain a browser. The task of a non-profit CEO is to make sure the company remains funded. This takes a different type of person, someone who has or manages to create contacts within places where money is to be found. The last series of Mozilla CEOs saw this differently, these women convinced themselves that they were there to 'change the world' by means of pushing ideologically loaded programs and propaganda onto it. They considered the true reason for being of their organisation - create and maintain a browser which competes against the duopoly by giving control back to the user - no more than a means to get the funding for their ideological crusade. They also increased their own piece of the pie markedly in the process in some strange realisation of Orwell's All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than the others quote.
Elon Musk personifies the CEO who doesn't develop things (he infamously did not found Tesla, but purchased the right to say he did). Musk has used his power to push his personal and political ideologies on the world. I've never seen any other human receive more attention than the president of the United States during the president's first interview. Musk owns, runs and censors the "de facto public town square" as he sees fit.
You can criticize Mozilla's "women" for being political, but Elon Musk is the most politically active and powerful CEO in the world, possibly of all time.
From what I understand Musk sees/saw Tesla as a vehicle (no pun intended) to fund his real purpose, that being "working towards becoming a multi-planetary species". Whether you consider this to be a sensible or achievable goal is not really relevant but it does seem to be his driving goal. From what I gather in older interviews with him and people around him he was involved in the design of the Tesla Roadster and model S as well as in the design of the Falcon 1. It is difficult to find, let alone put any trust in objective material concerning Musk since he's been designated undesirable #2 (and more recently #1) by those who see him as the one who opened up what they considered to be their playground - Twitter - to the 'deplorables' and 'bitter clingers'. This, by the way, is another reason to compare him to Edison who also had and has a polarising effect with some people seeing him as a true innovator while others see him as an egotistical businessman who was intent on stealing others' credit for personal profit and who wielded patents as weapons to keep out superior competition in the form of (Nikolai Tesla's) AC power networks.
The CEO receiving a salary that was agreed upon through negotiation is very different from shoplifting and I hope that you can see that and come up with a better analogy.
It's different, I don't think they're claiming that it's directly equivalent, but they were responding to the claim that "7 million isn't significant in the grand scheme of things", and they're arguing that "just because it might not be a significant number doesn't necessarily mean we just let it slide".
I don't think anyone is accusing the Mozilla CEO of "stealing" the money.
Any company looking to hire a CEO will have to pay market rates. Those market rates are not make-or-break expenses for the vast majority of companies
Now there's another sector of society ripe for a shake-up by DoBE - Dept. of Business Efficiency - which has as a stated mission to rid the business world of the parasites is has picked up in the last century. From overpaid CEOs to overpaid corporate lawyers, scrape 'm off just like you'd scrape the barnacles off your vessel's hull after having been at sea for an extended period. While a business needs leadership and legal support it does not need to lend itself to supporting the bloated class of parasites which has grown to be the norm for some of those functions.
The way to go at this without breaking incentives for people to start new businesses won't be easy and it won't be by way of redistribution like socialists (etc.) are so fond of. The best way is most likely to change societal norms so that it will no longer be seen as acceptable for a company to have a CEO (or CFO or COO or CxO) hauling in more than, say, 24 times the average pay in his or her company. That '24' number just fell out of my sleeve and probably needs some more thought but the gist is clear. In 2023 the average pay ratio for CEO to average was somewhere around 270 to 1 and that ratio has been going up for decades. By now you'd think that CEOs would have priced themselves out of the market but that does not happen. I suspect this has a lot to do with the makeup of the boards of directors which decide over CEO pay being manned by other (aspiring) CEOs who as a group have an interest in keeping up CxO pay.
Yes, this is a difficult problem to really solve but also yes, I think it is a problem and I think it is worth solving it.
I think you will find that CEOs either have a significant share of the company, or are the lackeys of someone who does. In other words the only "negotiation" they did was negotiating with themselves.
Probably not very significant, though it's always frustrating when you read about mass layoffs at these corporations, only to see that the executives are all still getting raises and bonuses.
Emotional frustration yes totally understandable
But from a strictly business standpoint, it’s a bit of an absurd position
Business used to consider it equally important that employees, customers and shareholders were all happy. Frankly, it is easy to see that on the level of an entire economy, unless all 3 are happy, disasters are unavoidable.
But now every company thinks they can force everything on customers (idiotic ideas like "self-care"), the government, or even just the environment, usually doing enormous damage for 1/100th of that damage in gains.
At least we can rest assured of one thing: this trend WILL end. Through rational thinking? Through tears? Through violence? Through total catastrophe? That's the question. But end it will. Guaranteed.
If that had an impact on the CEO's behavior, the resulting 2nd order change might be significant.
We should probably up it another 7 million then.
"With these changes, Mitchell Baker ends her tenure as Chair and a member of MoFo and MoCo boards."
I think that if Mozilla is not interested in further developing Firefox, they should split off Firefox to its own entity.
Then the people who wants to work on/support Firefox can solely work on Firefox, and other people who wants to pursue whatever tech-of-the-day is (eg. crypto, VPN, AI) can push whatever agenda they want in their own org.
Instead of the current state where the other-agendas people are riding on Firefox's brand name recognition while starving Firefox into oblivion.
> I think that if Mozilla is not interested in further developing Firefox, they should split off Firefox to its own entity.
They won’t do this because then they can’t redirect any of the donations and funding that people give to Firefox to <insert non-browser project here>.
None of the donations to the parent Mozilla Foundation pay for Firefox development. This is a common misconception, Mozilla's own fund-raising makes it more common than it would be if they were explicit in stating where donations go and what they fund and do not fund.
That’s good to know. Thanks for clearing that up for me. Is it possible to donate directly to Firefox?
No, not as far as I know. And definitely no tax-deductible way to do it.
I've noticed Mozilla bringing a lot more behind closed doors, from BugZilla to their restricted Jira.
Guess it is just a matter of time until Firefox is behind a walls too?
That tendency began after Gamergate made aggregate vitriol an acceptable persuasion technique and has been accelerating since, in parallel to the predictable decline of open source contributions as the first generation of mobile-first desktop-never people that don’t understand file folder storage hierarchies. When there’s no one left who wants to contribute code, there’s no point in investing further in community-accessible ticketing systems, and the vitriol outweighs diffs by a factor of ten thousand to one or more.
If you're reading this and having the standard rage reaction to Baker's salary and the squandering of Firefox, instead consider donating directly to Ladybird. The community can solve for this.
What exactly would one get as return on that investment, given <https://ladybird.org/#faq>:
- We are targeting Summer 2026 for a first Alpha version on Linux and macOS
- We don't have anyone actively working on Windows support, and there are considerable changes required to make it work well outside a Unix-like environment
- We don't have anyone actively working on an Android or iOS port
- now we have almost half a million lines of modern C++ to maintain
I wish them luck, but yikes what a very, very deep hole they are trying to dig themselves out of just to reach alpha that thumbs its nose at Windows and the entire mobile market
The hubris of writing a web browser in C++ after looking at Chromium and thinking, "pffft, those morons clearly don't know how to avoid UAF bugs"
Donating to Mozilla is the same as burning money to keep warm. old orgs lose the people that made them and they become aimless inefficient monsters propped up by nepotism rather than competition.
Mozilla has constantly ignored the market and their users. Time for other orgs to take it up and time for Mozilla to not renew.
I wish Mozilla would get into revenue generating, web-maximalist products like an office suite alternative to Google Workspace and Microsoft. I think there are a fair number of people who want a significant brand behind these, but also an alternative to the mega-corp offerings.
ie, instead of Thunderbird (which I know isn't developed by Mozilla anymore), create a hosted email platform with a PWA that can run and store data locally.
These types of products would have a virtuous relationship with Firefox.
It would be interesting to see Mozilla diversify itself from its Google stipend, but there seems to be an inherent conflict of interest at play when a non-profit like Mozilla starts to expand its offerings beyond the core product; the tendency is for leadership to use these projects for empire-building. Wikipedia suffers from a similar problem where the core product is great, but the parent foundation uses the product to finance other projects that are only tangentially related to the product itself.
This is why I think that web-centric, open source, hosted core apps would be nice to see.
If you want to use the web as your primary application runtime, you're currently stuck with closed-source apps, or pretty bad open source apps that are difficult to integrate.
Sandstorm did (and still is as a community project) try to integrate some existing apps into a cohesive-ish platform with nice security guarantees, but it wasn't really made accessible to every day users.
Something similar to Google Workspace, but open source and hosted by a foundation could be a nice default starting point and/or a principled platform to use, for a lot of users.
Mozilla faces a very similar set of challenges as other "umbrella" open source organizations like Apache, MediaWiki, and the Linux Foundation that have notably low overlap with the current boardmembers.
I really hope the Ladybird browser project succeeds in the next few years, because it seems that Mozilla is digging Firefox' grave deeper with every step they take.
"While Firefox remains the core of what we do"
Um excuse me? Mozilla has been asleep at the wheel for years, letting Firefox languish while Mozilla plays squirrel with a dozen other things nobody knows or cares about. In fact, I guarantee you that outside of nerd culture, nobody has any idea what Mozilla is. But maybe they have heard of Firefox.
You should be shouting *Firefox Firefox Firefox!* from the rooftops with a massive new ad campaign aimed at growing marketshare rapidly. Then find creative ways to respectfully monetize your enthusiastic fanbase.
This seems like Software Business 101 to me, which is why I am continually mystified you seem unable to grasp these basics.
The fanbase has no money to offer Firefox. As with all free products in today’s wage-inequality world, no one can afford to pay for a browser, so no one will voluntarily — and if they try to charge money, users will just switch to Chrome. So either the mission of “free open web” goes out the door or they end up sacrifice their Necko/Gecko clusterfuck in order to cut the hundreds of jobs it takes to maintain creaky old C++ browser engine. Ten bucks says they announce their intentions to migrate to WebKit or Servo in the next year.
The CEO pay rises will continue until morale improves.
The CEO and their "strong cadre of 16 directors" because it’s obviously required to write a HTML parser.
Let. Me. Pay. For. Firefox. I pay for other services online. I pay for VPN, for ElementaryOS, for Fastmail. Paying is fine. I pay, you give me a service that does not spy on me. It is not that hard.
Have you ever donated? What services do you want that shouldn't be available to non-paying users.
Donating does not fund firefox. They "embezzle" it into funding all their other shit like internet censorship ("We need more than deplatforming" https://archive.li/U6aXc) Yes I did donate in the distant past.
> Have you ever donated?
To Mozilla? No. Donations are not the same as paying for a specific product or service. I do not want to support their other adventures.
> What services do you want that shouldn't be available to non-paying users.
Librewolf, but by Mozilla.
There is no way to donate to Firefox.
And now I just learned about NextDNS. I'm going to pay for that. Back in the day, people were unwilling to pay for Netscape, and Mozilla was born. Today, the world has shifted again, and there are more than enough people with enough money willing to pay for software. And again, Netscape^WMozilla is late to grok this.
> people were unwilling to pay for Netscape
To be fair, that was largely because Netscape was awful.
Well. yeah - okay - granted. But still. People would not pay for Opera either. I'd pay for (the old) opera today. Times have changed.
I guess I am going to miss Firefox, at least it gave birth to Rust.
Genuinely disgusted to read any of that. All they can think of is ads, AI, and "fundraising campaigns" (which I presume will be more popup garbage)? This has pushed me to move to librewolf
Posting from librewolf. Easier than I thought. Anyone else on the fence come join me.