The CEO is a woman who dares to earn a small fraction of what most other comparable bay area CEOs make, and for a certain segment of HN this is deeply infuriating.

She completely and utterly failed at her duties as the organization's leader. That over inflated compensation package that's seemingly inversely-correlated with firefox's userbase and the number of technical roles at Mozilla is most certainly not "earned".

I'd personally call it embezzlement or misappropriation of funds, but that's just me.

Haven’t heard about that, but even Safari is kicking their ass on desktop market share. I just visited the Firefox download page. It looks like shit. Something’s not going right over there.

Or it's that she's taking Mozilla down paths that lead to Chrome dominance in the future, while getting paid a hefty sum that would be better spent funding Firefox development.

As far as I know, the Mozilla Corporation is owned by the Mozilla Foundation, which is a non-profit with the mission to make the internet a better place, or something along those lines. So shouldn't we look at the boards of things like the Wikimedia Foundation or the Internet Archive instead of bay area CEOs for comparison?

It's also not a particularly good look when your own salary keeps rising while you're laying people off and market share keeps plummeting (in my neck of the woods, Firefox actually used to be domminant at 60%+)...

That said, I haven't looked at this in any kind of detail, and all I know of Baker is what her Wikipedia article tells me, which includes writing the Mozilla Public License, managing mozilla.org on a volunteer basis for a while and being instrumental in the creation of the Mozilla Foundation.

> So shouldn't we look at the boards of things like the Wikimedia Foundation or the Internet Archive instead of bay area CEOs for comparison?

Sure, let's do that. Here's the highest paid employee of all three in 2021 (as that's the last year where there's data on all three):

Internet Archive: $158,777 (https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/943...)

Wikimedia Foundation: $406,339 (https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/200...)

Mozilla Foundation: $337,714 (https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/200...)

I wouldn't classify any of those salaries as exorbitantly large. Hell, I'm fairly certain at least some people shitting on them here earn more than that a for-profit.

To Mitchell's credit, and something that almost never gets talked about, she also managed to extract a lot of money from Yahoo based on the terms of the search deal they signed, but a substantial part of that was self-inflicted by Yahoo—and whether Mozilla should have sold users out to Yahoo to begin with is, of course, another question (to which the answer is "no").

Effectively ensured Mozilla is entirely dependant on Google as a single revenue steam. No other initiatives to earn anything.

Mozilla VPN, Firefox Relay Premium, Pocket Premium, MDN Plus, Hubs Enterprise... I'm sure I'm forgetting a bunch.

Of course, there's also criticism for attempting those.

Mozilla should be independent from Google. No, not like that!

TBH it's a really good point. Any time Mozilla has tried to appeal to users in a way that would actually be profitable their users have lost their minds over it.

The issue is that donating money to Mozilla does nothing for Firefox; Personally I use Firefox on everything (home, work, phone); Firefox is the browser for my family too - much the same (Firefox on everything, phones included).

If I could/had to pay/donate for it - I'd gladly do, but it's virtually impossible.

AFAIK income from particular Mozilla products isn't earmarked for spending on specifically those products, so buying non-Firefox products can provide income that can be used to fund Firefox development.

That said, I think income from Firefox's default search engine pretty much dwarfs any income that could potentially be gained from donations/buy-to-support.

Well, Pocket Premium got a lot of criticism for going completely against user sentiment, and the small matter of a lot of heavily lawyered weasel wording statements to very strongly imply that no money was exchanged when in fact quite a lot of money was exchanged to make it happen.

Some stuff:

1. Under her leadership Mozilla has lost virtually all of its users. It has been reduced to less than 10% of what it had before.

2. At the beginning of Covid, a time when remote work was on the rise and tech valuations were through the roof, she took her largest payout and fired hundreds of employees. She was compensated at over $5M dollars, enough money to pay a team of engineers for years.

3. Firefox has utterly failed to capture Enterprise market, where Chrome has managed to dominate. I doubt most people are even aware that a corp managed Firefox is an option, they have done such a poor job marketing it.

She has failed in every conceivable way as a CEO. She has failed in terms of the mission, she has failed her employees, she has failed her users, she has failed to be an example as a leader.

Mozilla, as it exists today, is a convenient project for Chrome to point to and say "look, there's competition" - perhaps the only reason why Google continues to fund Mozilla.

Microsoft and Apple are at least competently run and have incentives to push to reduce Chrome's power.