> In 2018 she received a total of $2,458,350 in compensation from Mozilla, which represents a 400% payrise since 2008. On the same period, Firefox marketshare was down 85%. When asked about her salary she stated "I learned that my pay was about an 80% discount to market. Meaning that competitive roles elsewhere were paying about 5 times as much. That's too big a discount to ask people and their families to commit to." [0]
I'm a firefox user for over 10 years.
I think I'm now convinced there is no future, I'll have to start to adapt to another browser now. I'll give Vivaldi a try.
That was the layoff where they got rid of all the rust people?
Its going to sound harsh, but they are loosing market share to browsers that didn't have to invent a new language to write a browser in.
So, getting rid of those people was probably a positive impact for firefox since they were mostly just yak shaving instead of actually improving the end product. The users don't care if you wrote it in C++ or fortran as long as it performs well, doesn't eat all their ram, or create giant backdoors.
Letting "the lets rewrite our core product in $COOL_TECH_OF_MONTH" people run a product is a sure sign of something that will fail if its not already. Lets invent our own computer language to do it is even worse.
This feels like a gross mischaracterization of the intent and work that went into Servo. You say this as if nothing else was being done on Firefox concurrently even though this is demonstrably false - and in fact, portions of Servo were integrated into Firefox (see: Quantum).
Firefox keeps losing on technical merit because it is fundamentally impossible to keep up with Webkit and Blink, which are all backed by massive corporations and are throwing money at the engineering and project resources to actually move things forward.
Your take was wrong. The move to rust was great and used to improve security and maintainability of the browser. They cut the wrong people. What they should have done was whack everything other than firefox and coders contributing to that code base and employees supporting that effort directly. They have awful leadership currently that are just milking their exec offices for the cash.
> The users don't care if you wrote it in C++ or fortran as long as it performs well, doesn't eat all their ram, or create giant backdoors.
In the short term, yes. In the long term however, this strategy could have been crucial. And the long term is precisely where open source software usually has the upper hand.
> The users don't care if you wrote it in C++ or fortran
Web site users don't care if a site's written with NodeJS or assembly; but that would make a huge difference to bugginess, development speed, feature set, etc.
Firefox is getting bogged-down in some areas due to its C++ codebase; especially trying to introduce concurrency (in a way which doesn't break everything, or cause unforeseen security implications, which is often the case in C/C++)
Yes, but consider the engineering effort to create a general purpose memory safe language vs just a domain specific one in comparison to the work required to write a browser, which also includes another domain specific language (javascript).
Seat of the pants, I would say getting something like rust on par with g++/clang code generation, and 3rd party tools is probably in the same ballpark engineering wise as actually maintaining the browser.
And if you spend a little time looking at firefox, there is/was a lot of low hanging fruit. I've mentioned elsewhere the difficultly building it, but even more than that, is that pretty much every single version of gcc that came out for a while would break firefox in some fundamental ways. And overwhelmingly these breaks were caused by crappy C++ programming where people were doing things that were known not to be syntactically correct but no one bothered to fix them. Then frequently instead of actually fixing them they did things like switch from building with an old GCC to a newer clang because it threw fewer errors. Then they claimed that the result was "faster" than gcc, despite the fact they were comparing an old version of GCC with a newer version clang. When the work was done to actually get it to build with gcc, it turned out to be even faster. (not that gcc is better than clang, only that ideally a project like firefox would compile cleanly with a wide range of compilers). Said compiler warnings are frequently valid, and analyzing them at least to know if its true is a worthwhile code quality exercise.
Yes, you have to ask yourself why everyone is using V8 as their JavaScript runtime and not Mozilla’s equivalent or why every alternative browser is using Chrome as a foundation.
Or XUL wasn’t packaged as cross platform GUI framework.
And then of course the Firefox mobile fiasco.
My guess is that the engineering and management don’t interact. Two different companies within the same company, no coherent vision.
What FF mobile fiasco are you speaking of? I am using FF mobile happily and have been for years. I haven't noticed any issues with it. Was there a business level fiasco or something?
One objective fiasco is the inability of FF on Android to keep multiple tabs in memory. Older versions were capable of it without issue, ever since the tab unloading feature, Firefox has been reloading tabs at the slightest pretense.
Switch apps? Tabs get reloaded when you're back.
Lock & unlock phone with Firefox in focus? Tabs get reloaded
Switch tabs in Firefox? Tabs get reloaded...
I wish I was just ranting, but all of the above happens with a single active tab loaded...
That is interesting to me because that isn't my experience. I just tried the lock screen for example and I couldn't get any of tabs to reload, foreground or not. I'm on Android 10 running on a Moto G7. Maybe it's affected by vendor settings?
Quite a few devices experience this though. For the record, I use an S9, and used to have 50+ tabs with no issues on older versions of Firefox - now I cannot have one tab remain open without a reload if I lock my phone with Firefox focused and turn unlock it a minute later. And that's with Firefox explicitly exempt from each and every kind of battery/memory etc. "optimization" by Android...
Doesn't happen for me. OnePlus 8 with Oxygen OS 11.
The one thing I really miss in FF mobile is the opposite.. Pull to refresh or another gesture that accomplishes that. The current two tap option is too slow.
The main problem is that they're not making money with their core product so they need to experiment and innovate to find ways to make money.
I agree they probably didn't need to invent rust: that was an happy accident, the kind of things that happen when you have really smart people around. If they had a money making accident we would be talking about something else, but I guess they would need a different type of culture for that to happen.
This is not how you run a company and it shows.
It's impressive Mozilla is still around if you ask me - but I suspect it has to do with Google, M$ needing someone easily controllable to keep the anti monopoly government people away from browsers.
> The main problem is that they're not making money with their core product so they need to experiment and innovate to find ways to make money.
Firefox is owned by the Mozilla foundation, the corp is only there to help develop it since having developers work directly for the foundation is apparently complicated. Non-profit foundations don't need to find ways to make money with their core product and they should not try to - instead they can seek funding elsewhere, for example from donations and government grants.
No the corporation was founded because having a major corporation like Google pay so much to a foundation was difficult for tax reasons.
But it did push them over the edge IMO. They're behaving like a corporation now, with a CEO pulling as much money as they can, too much PR etc. Through the Google deal they have become what they were fighting. But they're not very good at it, hence the low marketshare.
Rust and servo were how they were innovating, and where a lot of the competitive features came from. By firing them, Mozilla made clear that they do not care about these things. The CEO is quite clearly a parasite hell-bent on extracting as much value as she can before bailing for the next victim.
The problem--and I feel the pain here deeply as a security person myself--is that that innovation was primarily along an axis (security) that no users care about (with a small bit of performance from concurrency, but there were clearly other ways to be faster), and was draining resources away from innovation that users cared about... which I'd claim was even going in the opposite direction: for many years now they have been continually tearing out the non-philosophical reasons I used Firefox in the quest to build a clone of Chrome, something the world doesn't have much use for as it already has Chrome.
Remember that the users still using Firefox are mostly technical and privacy fans that do care about security a lot.
Focusing on the mainstream user at this point will not help as they're already so far gone they don't even remember the name Firefox anymore.
They should focus first on making it and excellent browser for the users that still care. Then word of mouth will bring it back to the mainstream as it did the first time.
It's not even that they're building a clone of Chrome - Chromium is actually adding features like tab groups.
It's more that they're removing not-Chromey bits, not adding the Chromey bits, and removing Firefoxy bits like search keywords via bookmarks and the like.
As a Firefox user I disagree. Their work on Servo and Rust resulted in many performance and reliability improvements. WebRender for example came directly from Servo.
It's unfortunate that after those changes, the Mozilla team did not take criticism in public forums very seriously and brushed it off as noise. I personally stopped using Firefox after some of those "architectural" changes started producing "dead" tabs - the tab could not be interacted after load.
In place of "We're listening", users that complained got a "Works fine on my machine" bundled with a few rude words in places like Reddit. Not the core teams fault, of course.
Someone with more time can probably set up a scientific test of the performance claim even today - set up a bunch of Selenium tests to open JS-heavy sites in multiple tabs on older versions of FF upto current version using BrowserStack or SauceLabs.
The question is, would the work have been done sooner, or more effectively if they had just fixed the C++ code rather than spending a lot of time creating rust, only to rewrite said code?
I mean to this day (and i just tossed off a firefox build yesterday to see if most of what I was saying is still true), the firefox maintainers can't even be bothered to fix the tens of thousands of warnings that appear when built certain ways. That is a really low bar to cross with a C++ project, and they haven't even bothered. I've worked on projects where we had a recommended compiler, but we always spent some time assuring that the project appeared to work with the latest gcc/icc/whatever, because at some point those newer compilers would become the defaults, and also because they frequently pointed out issues in the code. Its just a cheap way to fix undefined behavior bugs.
So, I think the only answer to that is yes, that long stretch before they dropped the rust code was wasted time/effort.
Mozilla didn't really invent Rust, and its looking quite likely that Rust is going to be just as significant of a contribution to the world as Firefox was (long term).
I wish Vivaldi wasn't horrible. I gave it a real try on all my devices for about 6 months a couple of years ago, but it is just too unreliable and prone to crashes and random issues. I've been way, way happier on Firefox ever since.
If Firefox goes the rest of the way down the tubes, I'll try Edge before I go Vivaldi again.
Her logic assumes that another company would actually pay her that much. Given how disastrous her tenure has been to Firefox's user base, I'm skeptical that another company would even want her as CEO, let alone pay her this much.
Any replacement CEO is going to be thinking, I'm trying to beat Google, Apple and Microsoft on a tiny budget and if I dont succeed people will blame me personally for it all, complain about me online and claim that no one else should employ me. That's a gamble for anyone coming in who has better options and so attacks on the CEO for being a failure only help to create a moat and increase her bargaining power.
The replacement "CEO" should be someone like Linus Torvalds, someone who is not in it for the money but for the satisfaction of crushing his opponents where it matters: mind share among developers followed by market share. Someone who does not try to go with the flow of fake virtue and bloated CxO remuneration. Someone real. Someone who has the testicular fortitude to say ¨NO" to the social justice crowd.
Maybe Brendan Eich can come back? Do a Steve Jobs, take back the project and make it into what it was meant to be, primus inter pares among browsers.
I'm extremely curious what you think her job is and what her job actually is. I don't know either one. But I must be waaaaaay of base if 2m+ is a reasonable salary for the workload and responsibility.
And if we want to get conspiratorial, If she thinks her main job is getting the most money out of the Google deal, then Google would be more than happy to pretend shes doing great in the negotiations and pay 5m extra.
The sooner Mozilla loses its dev culture and talent the more power Google has.
> By 2020, her salary had risen to over $3 million. In the same year the Mozilla Corporation laid off approximately 250 employees due to shrinking revenues. Baker blamed this on the Coronavirus pandemic.
Yikes, makes me also consider just switching off it again
For me, the crypto wallet built into Brave puts me off. I want my browser to be a browser, nothing more than that. Other than Brave, the option is Vivaldi, but that's not completely open source, and the devs refuse to completely open source it, making me doubt the trustworthiness of it.
That's because you're looking at this with your "professional" hat on. If your look at this with your "philanthropist" hat on, the optics are suddenly very different.
There's a weird type of logic going on where almost everyone who would be willing to do it for almost free is probably not qualified for the job. Would you really stake the future of your foundation on someone who still needs to build their resume?
$2.5 million per year is in the top 0.1% of income in the United States. No matter how you shake it, whether you want people with management experience, tech experience, browser experience, or some combination thereof, you will find a significantly large number who would be able to do the job, do it well, and make more than their current salary.
I bet any mid level tech manager from a large company (who loves open source) would do a much better job and work for 1/4 her salary until he proved he was worth her old salary and raised the tides of success for the company.
You could make this same argument about professional athletes, but all across the world no one seems to follow through on this obvious money-saving hack. So I presume it's more complicated than you're suggesting.
Japanese CEO salaries are famously very low. The Toyota CEO makes about USD 3.5m. There are other C levels that make 3 times what the Toyota CEO earns in direct compensation.
Japanese CEO salaries in general seem to be below USD1m on average.
Toyota is a huge company though. It's nothing like Mozilla. I would imagine there's a lot of responsibility riding on it. And I'd imagine that in Japanese culture badly performing CEOs actually face consequences.
I disagree, if you're a company raking in $270B a year in revenue, you want the absolute best running it. The Toyota CEO is like 0.001% of the revenue, an extremely small price to pay for the right management.
I don't believe that for a second. Unless you just mean it in the sense of "90% of people that apply to a job aren't good at it". You can get many many qualified people for $250k.
Paying more doesn't get rid of the risk, so yes do the version that has risk but without the bonfire of cash.
If I cared badly enough about the mission and it wasn't a for-profit enterprise, I'd take the pay cut. The non-monetary part of my compensation (the feel-good factor and the actual good done in the world that I can't get in a for-profit enterprise) would more than make up for it, at least for a couple of years.
Market rates don't matter all that much if the person setting them has a significant influence on what they are. It's like a child determining their allowance based on which one of their friends was able to grab the most money from their mom's purse.
I don't think this has anything to do with arrogance, this is simply the market value speaking. Ginni Rometty did something similar with IBM; while being a terrible CEO ("IBM was the worst-performing large-cap tech stock during Rometty's tenure, dropping 24%" [1]), she got a whopping $20M per year [2] during her first 7 years of being a CEO, and she got $20M golden parachute [3] upon leaving the shell of an IBM.
This is not arrogance. This is simply the pay of a CEO, regardless of their performance.
Mozilla is not IBM. They may compete against the likes of Google, Microsoft, and Apple, yet they are not those companies either. The scope of their business interests are minuscule in comparison. Heck, their share of the markets that they do compete with those companies in pales in comparison. So yes, there is an element of arrogance in her claim.
> This is not arrogance. This is simply the pay of a CEO
You have a social responsibility to take care of the people working below you, which as a CEO is everyone. If you fire them and give yourself a raise, perhaps it is not arrogance but it definitely is gross negligence. No amount of "this is simply the market value" corporate doublespeak is going to change the fact that doing so takes you further and further from being an actual human being. Perhaps this is okay with you, but I think it should be questioned and mocked.
IBM is more than two orders of magnitude bigger than Mozilla in terms of both spending and headcount. On a log scale, Mozilla's scale is about halfway between IBM and your local McDonald's franchise.
CEOs of smaller companies typically don't command that level of compensation, and when they do, it's generally because the company performed well and their pay was heavily perforamnce-based.
> I don't think this has anything to do with arrogance, this is simply the market value speaking.
What market value? Firefox's market share is down 85%. It's hard to believe there's not someone cheaper and more capable available. This sort of extravagant CEO pay might be excusable if the company is actually booming, but in this case, it really looks like it's just plain greed: loot the company while running it into the ground.
Saying "yes" to a powerpoint presentation about why a poor CEO should be given a $20M bonus due to staggering bonuses of other CEOs (such as in Facebook or Google) while underperforming as fuck.
What "CEO"? Does every mom-and-pop shop get a "CEO" with $3M compensation? Does every startup? I don't think Mozilla leadership deserves to be placed among big tech executives with standardized pay.
It might be that they need to pay that amount to attract top CEO talent. But then again, I'm not sure if Mozilla should be large enough to need a top CEO. I mean effectively reducing it to just the Firefox team would be fine with me. And then it's maybe 80 people to manage in total. So that's one regular office building and you're done. It doesn't sound like the CEO will be critical for anything in this company.
> When asked about her salary she stated "I learned that my pay was about an 80% discount to market. Meaning that competitive roles elsewhere were paying about 5 times as much. That's too big a discount to ask people and their families to commit to."
Then go work somewhere else!
If you can make 5 times as much somewhere else, and that's all you care about, quit Mozilla and go work somewhere else. Her attitude and greed are unbelievably infuriating.
I would have zero problems with her salary if firefox wasn't a sinking ship and was actually increasing market share (or at least holding on to it). I continue to use it, as it's a great product, but I wonder how long before google cuts off the spigot of money.
But the CPI is fairly accurate, and those who calculate it are doing their best with a problem that doesn't have one easy to compute answer. Regardless, I know just from personal experience that your numbers are way off. My grocery bills haven't gone up 50 to 100% since 2012; what I spend on clothes and software and veterinary visits hasn't gone up 50 to 100% either. The only thing that I might buy that contradicts this is a GPU, but that's an exception (and other computer hardware hasn't risen in price that much).
Also: as part of my job I can check prices in a major sector of the retail industry as far back as 2015, and I absolutely do not see such major inflation as you're arguing. Inflation is bad right now, but hasn't been that way for several decades.
>But the CPI is fairly accurate, and those who calculate it are doing their best
Completely disagree.
>Also: as part of my job I can check prices in a major sector of the retail industry
That is probably the problem.
>clothes and software
Clothes = imported from countries we export inflation to. Software = ~0 cost to duplicate.
Inflation doesnt hit the whole population equally or at the same time, and it doesnt hit all products uniformly.
The items/services we all want/need, that are scarce, and can't be imported from our foreign "slaves", are where you will find it concentrated. Healthcare, housing, university, etc...
My earlier observation 50%/10y, 50%/5y is closer to reality for the vast majority of the population.
How much did housing go up in price in the last 10-12 years (300%? 400%?)?
Remember when house prices went up 20-30% in a 6 month period of 2021? Not inflation?
How is that a problem? Let's say I work in the grocery industry. Everyone has to buy groceries at some point, whether wealthy or impoverished, and for those on lower incomes groceries are a fairly major share of total consumption. I can check those prices and they haven't gone up nearly as much as you're saying. Ipso facto you're just wrong.
> Remember when house prices went up 20-30% in a 6 month period of 2021? Not inflation?
Inflation is more than just home prices, and just because something is more expensive than it used to be doesn't mean that inflation is the culprit. Supply and demand are still factors. Regardless, rent is accounted for in the CPI (though not assets like home purchases).
Got anything besides home prices? Car prices haven't gone up that much, at least. I can hardly think of anything besides houses and GPUs that (a) impact me and (b) have gone up fairly drastically in price. (Though around here, the suburbs of greater Cincinnati, home prices haven't generally doubled in ten years; my home's valuation is maybe 15% higher than it was when I bought it five years ago.)
>The items/services we all want/need, that are scarce, and can't be imported from our foreign "slaves", are where you will find it concentrated. Healthcare, housing, university, etc...
It seems you didnt read anything I wrote since you avoided my earlier point and are still ignorantly talking about retail goods that are, for the most part, subsidized, imported from countries we export inflation to, or experience heavy shrinkflation.
I also mentioned inflation is not evenly distributed. Different areas/segments of the population experience different rates. The Ohio housing market may not have been hit as hard, probably parts of Michigan fall in that same boat (these are not desirable markets), but most houses did 3-4x in the past 12 years.
I will move on... Everyone will understand the hurdle rate is higher than 7.5% after enough time has elapsed (just like they did with the BS 2.5% CPI number we used to use) and the standard of living decline is significant enough that it cant be ignored anymore. The investor class generally understands the new yearly hurdle rate is 20%-30% (must earn atleast ~120% of last year's return just to break even). Saylor and a few others makes this point often...
I'll leave those that disagree or aren't interested in learning to figure this out the harder way.
> In 2018 she received a total of $2,458,350 in compensation from Mozilla, which represents a 400% payrise since 2008. On the same period, Firefox marketshare was down 85%. When asked about her salary she stated "I learned that my pay was about an 80% discount to market. Meaning that competitive roles elsewhere were paying about 5 times as much. That's too big a discount to ask people and their families to commit to." [0]
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitchell_Baker