Microsoft dropped IExplorer because they were far behind in their implementation and by embracing Chromium they short-circuited the development needed to produce a credible alternative. They had nothing to gain from Firefox and everything to lose, actually.
I was really amazed with this post I found here the other day:
https://lunduke.locals.com/post/4387539/firefox-money-invest...
maybe they should think better where they put their money!!!
If servo ever gets into a decent independent browser I will let go of Firefox the second its released!!!
I do not support a donation-based tech company spending money in other places not related to tech!
FWIW I think a few of these likely have perfectly reasonable innocent explanations like consultants having a company they don't bother branding rather taking payments personally (hence hard to find specifics on them - they brand themselves rather than their company) and I find it hard to believe that Lunduke didn't consider this possibility, but he asks nothing that doesn't deserve an answer.
What's specifically wrong with this post besides the author?
He bags on "Mozilla" for claiming that they relied on donations to function on a Foundation donation page, using the total revenue from both orgs as proof that wasn't true, but didn't bother to drill down into the Foundation's income specifically to see if the statement was true in the actual context that it was being made.
Which is a common theme in a lot of his work. If he has an axe to grind (and he clearly does if you're familiar with his comments about Mozilla going back like 5+ years), his journalistic diligence slips significantly.
Charitably I'd assume the quoted reason in the article is the reason:
> In fact, the “not-for-profit” and “for-profit” aspects of Mozilla are so tightly intertwined that the auditors report makes a point of calling the collective group of three organizations simply “Mozilla”… and reports on their finances as a single entity.
After their alarming treatment of security researchers documented here [0], I've been doubting whether to continue using Firefox at all. For what it's worth I still do, because I think not using Chrome is a fight worth fighting and that alarming behaviour was just from the VPN team, but if any similar behaviour happens with the Firefox team I'm just going to drop it altogether.
I want Mozilla and Firefox to succeed. I want diversity in browser engines. I want to see the culture change happen. It still can! But the debt created with each passing year and each percentage point of market share lost makes it harder and harder.
[0]: https://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2023/08/03/1
I remember these old-days of Linux with other browsers pre-installed. Like Konqueror (I see it's still in development), or others even more niche ones. Cannot even remember their names.
I don't use any Google products/services except when I need to at work. Firefox is perfectly fine for now; I agree that Mozilla's future is concerning but there is absolutely no downside to sticking with Firefox for now.
It's too bad that Mozilla doesn't push for more adoption; the vast majority of users would never know the difference between Firefox and Chrome once they're browsing. It's not like it's an inferior product.
There are a few government website where I live that block Firefox, although those are just checking the user-agent so easy to work around.
And yes I complain all the time about it.
The underlying WebKit engine is the interesting part and is portable, with multiple other browsers using it.
- The only non-Chrome browser available across 3 operating systems I use.
- The only mobile browser that supports extensions.
These two alone make it an objectively a better solution for me than Chrome or Safari, regardless of how I feel about any of them. If I was on iOS and didn't run Linux on my personal computer, then Safari might've been a worthy alternative. Since I'm not, Firefox is really the only one that satisfies both of those criteria, no "ideological" reasons necessary.
It's not a great state of affairs. This is speaking as someone who's used Firefox as primary browser for many, many years.
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/search/?promoted=re...
Open a website in Firefox, click on three dots, click on "install", and you have an ad-free version of the app you'd otherwise find in the Play Store.
Just that one extension alone makes Firefox objectively better than Chrome or any of its Android forks. It is a slam dunk. Having all extensions available is a nice cherry on top, but no other desktop extension is as important as uBO.
I tend to use Firefox elsewhere too, primarily because of my disdain/distrust for/of Google and Microsoft. I know the WebKit/Konqueror relationship soured after a few years of Apple giving them massive, untenable patch sets, but haven’t kept up with their development. In the early 2000s it was really impressive what they were doing compared to the Mozilla bohemoth of the day.
I also find it sad that Opera and other implementations are out of the running. I’m sure one day some Blink challenger will arrive, just like some Gecko challenger arrived, just like some IE challenger arrived, but table stakes are so much higher than they were 15 years ago.
Safari in WSL
Edge Linux :P
I just run Degoogled Chromium forks (Cromite/Thorium) these days. Maybe its still Chrome underneath, but if I'm blocking Google Ads and their native browser tracking, at least its still a middle finger to Google's business model.
How? There is no Safari for Linux and never has been, AFAIK.
There was Safari for Windows until 5.x and it was good -- I liked it and used a Windows XP VM just to run it on Linux. Dead and gone now.
You can run Epiphany on WSL and get a Webkit browser that way, but that is not at all what you said.
1. It's irrelevant, as I pointed out.
2. It's a false premise. We talk about bad CEOs all the time, especially egregiously bad ones. I saw only just the other day comments on the Yahoo CEO.
I would like to see a source on that.
Even if it were actually worse of from a technical standpoint, do you not see the huge value of an independent implementation of the most crucial platform of humanity? Should it really be controlled by a single giga-corp?
The performance on Android is garbage though :(.
The feature set is worse in some parts, better in others. Better UI customization, container tabs is cool, and some extended APIs for extensions. Meanwhile, Chrome has support for more exotic web APIs (e.g. WebUSB, filesystem access). So it's your choice.
I don't know a thing about Mozilla's current CEO, and I don't give a shit about them either.
I still use Firefox and haven't used Chrome in many years.
I've known quite a lot of CEOs, of small and big for-profits and charities too, and anecdotally they've all been some of the hardest working people I know. There's many complaints to make against many CEOs (including some of the ones I've known), often including taking obscene salaries while under-paying workers, or other problematic management decisions, but in my experience laziness just doesn't seem common - in exec levels generally as well as chief ones.
If you want to be lazy and paid well, there are easier jobs with less constant security than being a CEO!
If she's getting that salary she must be able to defend it as reasonable based on comparable salaries in the industry, the income she's able to secure for the company, etc. So if her pay seems like a lot, it's probably because the tech sector overall is paid too much in your opinion.
It’s niche.
On the other hand what is Mozilla offering? A (now) obscure web browser that has run an Google charity for decades. It's painfully obvious that Mozilla isn't playing in the same category.
Mozilla makes and manages many other software titles besides Firefox. Rust, NSS, etc. Just think about all the current software built on Rust. That alone is a huge contribution to the tech industry and to society, more indirectly.
How long do you imagine someone in such a position at a FAANG company would last if they were getting Baker's market share numbers?
I'm absolutely disgusted every time i'm reminded of just how obscene the yearly pay for that class of people, and how often they are just straight up psychopaths.
They rely on nepotistic networks of power, scamming, and straight up financial crime.
Unless you yourself built the company, or pulled some rare actually great scheme to elevate it, everything above 1MM a year is stealing from other peoples wages, especially in orgs like this.
I wonder why people haven't pulled a french revolution when there's countless examples of this type of siphoning everywhere these days.
These people don't give a fuck, they are twofaced, they lie all day long while they take your money and use it to buy wine cellars, yachts and propaganda to keep everyone down - all disguised by buzzwords like "open", "green", "patriotic" or whatever while they tank the great work done non psychopaths.
This instance shows a few _general_ problems:
1. Compensation is a function of power, not merit.
Merit is a secondary, indirect factor that _can_ have an effect on power, but it's not a necessary condition.
Power often comes from social currency, negotiation, manipulation, wealth and ownership.
2. Power and responsibility are at best loosely correlated.
Often those in power try excuse their obscene privileges by pointing to responsibility. According to this idea, their decisions are force multipliers and they carry a huge risk.
But reality shows time and time again, that this isn't true outside of the most extreme cases. They accumulate power and wealth to an irresponsible degree and make irresponsible decisions all the time without being held accountable. In fact, many get _rewarded_ instead.
---
I want a Mozilla that is the steward of the fastest, most advanced, secure and user respecting browser. I want the best in class dev tools.
I would gladly pay good money for that and I 100% bet that there would be enough people who would too.
Find some existing pain point that people don't like about Firefox, fix it, make sure people know the better version is available. People switch to it, you get more search revenue and donations, you hire more developers. It's the same way Mozilla operates, but this time you hire competent management so your market share goes up instead of down.
I feel like you could have said the same thing about IE 4.0. It's more like, the incumbents don't care outside of what they need for their own purposes and Mozilla is the one supposed to be doing it but they're not.
> Unlikely you'll gain traction among regular users who are bagged to use their OS or search vendor's own.
Chrome has 64% market share on desktop despite the proprietors of Edge and Safari having a combined ~90% desktop market share.
> Perhaps one could gain Mozilla users, though hard to compete against millions of dollars of development (regardless of whether CEO is taking a chunk or not).
The problem is more than the CEO taking too much. They're not actually spending most of the money on making Firefox better.
They should also be spending more of it on marketing, because their funding is directly tied to how many users they have, which keeps going down.
1) it costs money, so those doing ot for philosophical reasons may find it daunting
2) Those who'd do it to make money (less ideologically aligned with Mozilla) would rather fork Chromium instead as it has momentum
I've suspected that their mix of people includes (but not limited to):
* many very capable true-believers in their ostensible mission, like we'd expect of Mozilla (though they can't all have perfect morale right now);
* some people who've gone through, or are going through, a rough time, and are trying to use Mozilla to solve problems that they see elsewhere in the world (even if off-mission, but other people are sympathetic and want to help, so it's complicated);
* maybe some true-believers who have to make hard compromises to keep Mozilla alive, somewhat quietly (and maybe it's hard to know which compromises to make, and to not lose the way at some point); and
* people who'd actually much rather have their counterpart roles at a FAANG or other prestitious tech company (and so aren't true-believers in the mission, and will tend to think and act with their true thinking, with impact to vision and decisions, and to leadership of the true-believers).
Maybe some key people span multiple categories.
This isn't a satisfying grand unified theory of all of Mozilla's behavior, and I'm sure there's insiders with better insights.
In 2020, she got paid $3MM.
In 2021, after an incredible year which saw Firefox's market share fall even further, she of course got a raise to $5MM for her brave decision to lay off 250 people in Aug 2020.
I hope she gets a massive bonus for 2023, given that her leadership has allowed Microsoft Edge to flip Firefox most days according to the stats, and she still has a quarter to let Safari consistently flip Firefox too!
It is obscene. She wants to be paid according to what she alleges her market value is, but she does not have the accountability of a publicly traded company's CEO.
Firefox needs a radical culture change and it needs to happen 8 years ago. I have no hope it will happen, as it exists to siphon money from suckers who pay donations that barely pay Mitchell's salary (total annual donations barely cover this expense![1]) and the board does not give a shit about what Firefox's core audience cares about.
The grift will continue until Mitchell and co decide enough is enough and flee the sinking ship. Whoever inherits it and the massively bloated outgoing expenses will probably be fucked, regardless of who they are or how good their intentions are. Firefox is massively behind, web devs are not incentivised to accommodate for the single-digit percent of Firefox users, and things are only going to continue to get worse.
[1] Yes Mitchell is paid by the corporation as opposed to the non-profit and donations go to the non-profit, but ultimately money that could have gone to the non-profit went to Mitchell's bank account
Stats from https://analytics.wikimedia.org/dashboards/browsers/#desktop...