Mozilla is wildly profitable.

They made a profit of roughly 150 Million dollars last year.

They have 1.2 Billion dollars in assets.

They have increased revenue from non-search deals significantly (56M -> 75M, up one third).

Despite all the gnashing of teeth in this comment section about woke Mozilla, they spent only 5 Million on grants last year. The vast majority goes towards developing Firefox and building up assets.

I had always just taken the statements that she is absurdly overpaid at face value and never looked into this myself. But Baker has overseen the rise of revenue and net income from almost zero to current numbers. If that doesn't look like a successfully run NGO, what does?

Not a big fan of CEO compensation in general, but I feel the one-sided focus on market share, which I feel is somewhat out of Mozillas control (can't even compete on the dominant mobile computing platform, anti-competitive Google leveraging its search monopoloy and advertising Chrome extremely aggresively, etc... ), while ignoring the actual financial health of the organisation is really biased.

There are two parts to Mozilla: a for-profit company and a non-profit company. They are separate. You are reading the mission statement of mozilla.org, not mozilla.com. Mitchell Baker is the CEO of the for-profit company, not the non-profit.

Basically all revenue is made through the Mozilla Corporation.

If not, then the goal should be to build up assets and alternative revenue streams.

I'd love to feel optimistic about an increase in non-Google revenue, but 19M when the CEO alone is paying herself 7M of that alongside a 85M increase in expenses... it's still pretty hard to see it as a net positive here.

& of course the headline of this HN post is declining usage - that trumps profit either way imo

It's pure fantasy to insist that the market share of Firefox is primarily driven by technical merit. Otherwise, you couldn't explain why Firefox is still at 20% in Germany, for example.

And I say this as someone who uses Firefox.

Firefox also has containers which (AFAIK) Chrome lacks. The UI for Profiles is probably worse, but Containers dramatically reduced the need for them for many (but by no means all) use cases.

It's definitely not the case that Firefox is behind here. I would say they are slightly ahead overall, but which of the Browsers is ahead depends on your specific use case.

It should be fairly obvious that this has nothing to do with the reason that Chrome has 10 times more users.

I've tried containers, maybe something got better, but I just simple, one window with everything in my work profile, another window, everything in personal, it's so easy to use in chrome. I can close the work window at the end of the day, and open it again the next morning, carry on

but in my opinion that isnt the reason google keeps firefox funded. i just think they do it for goodness sakes and not to cannibalize the only "competition". it really wasnt too long ago when it was chrome and firefox the two sleek awesome browsers saving the internet from nasty slow internet explorer.

This question is why I don't expect Mozilla to last at its current course. I like their work, but the endless increases in CEO salary while their most important money maker is fledgling is not justifiable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitchell_Baker#Negative_salary...

>>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."

So I bet it's something like:

Baker: "If you don't pay me market rates for comparable work, I'll leave and go mess up a different organization."

Google: "No, wait, stop, we'll get you the money!"

Considering all the unforced errors on Mozilla's part, I'm only half joking there (i.e. that Google is influencing the decision, via their search placement deals, to keep Firefox bad).

Unfortunately there will always be things to complain about and no system is perfect. But we have to make choices like this and these are the results. You cannot complain about Google's control/dominance over the web and refuse to turn away from their products to use reasonable alternatives (when they exist). Firefox is by no means a bad browser and it is easy to switch over. You can also still use firefox and complain about Baker's salary but is this really a killer issue?

I use Firefox on every device and I recommend others to do the same. That doesn't mean I agree with Mozilla, though, and their misplacement of funds make me worry about the future of Mozilla and Firefox as a browser. After firing the Rust team working on Servo, you'd expect austerity measures across the board, as Servo was clearly too expensive to continue investing in, yet Mozilla saw fit to continue rising Baker's wages, despite having just laid off 25% of its workforce.

I wonder about how much longer Mozilla will be able to exist. It's oriented around activism first, Firefox second, yet most of its income comes from its browser, and only because Google is scared of being branded a monopoly. If any other platform rises to popularity (and there are a few rising browser engines in the works, mostly as hobbies, but still) and Google switches to funding that project rather than Mozilla, I don't see how Firefox can survive.

Google says 'Don't spend your money on bug fixes and you can get 400M for default search, and you get your 3M bonus.'

Oops, we arent allowed to speculate on HN? I'm just jaded...

Mozilla is an open-source project. When an open-source project somehow loses its way, it's often forked by a new team of contributors who have a better idea. This happened several times: Open Office / Libre Office, MySQL / MariaDB, X86 / X11.org, hell, even GCC / egcs in the 1990s.

But this likely cannot happen to Mozilla, which is basically kept afloat by Google handing it some money for keeping it as a default search engine, about $400M a year currently [1]. There is little chance that an alternative "Better Mozilla" organization would collect as much, or at least half as much, to support a fork. It would e.g. take 33M users who agree to pay $5/mo for a Mozilla "support subscription" to collect $400M a year.

Maybe a web browser can be maintained for less than 400M, but likely not much less. The modern web is fiendishly complex, and you need both a desktop version (three platforms) and a mobile version.

[1]: https://www.pcmag.com/news/mozilla-signs-lucrative-3-year-go...

I doubt that. Mozilla wastes a ton, not only on CEO salaries but tangential projects and other dogoodery.

Maybe I'm reading this wrong, but when I do the math (33M x 5 x 12) I get $1.98B.

Maybe you meant $1/month?

The problem is that micropayments are not interesting for most news outlets: the friction of current solutions is high, the resulting revenue stream, unsteady. Monthly / yearly subscriptions bring a better revenue stream, and cost way less.

If micropayments were indeed zero-friction, and effectively zero-cost, maybe they'd be (reluctantly) integrated.

This is a commitment to support the development, because the development should be oingoing. Not Netflix-style, but Patreon-style.

(Also see how JetBrains handles "subscriptions" to their closed-source software. Once you've paid, the version is forever yours. Updates are bought with some additional sums if desired.)

Maybe we could go back to where people paid once and could pay separately for support?

This simply does not exist for any software that is internet connected.

It's not feasible at all to call a browser "done" and leave it alone, so if you want one that's independent from adtech, a subscription is kind of your only option.

It makes sure that people who continue to use continue to pay. Upfront charges are often either too low with long term users free-riding or too high, in case the project is abandoned. Subscription makes it much more likely to price products correctly.

I could not disagree more. Subscriptions for software are a deeply unfair approach. Great for the companies, of course, but not for users.

A more fair approach is to charge for upgrades and support instead. At least that way, users only pay if/when they choose to obtain additional value.

But the solution to this is to offer both forms, as several companies do.

If users want to stay on an old version, why shouldn't they be allowed to? Sure, there may be additional security considerations or missing functionality, but there's nothing wrong with a user making that choice.

It results in users having a broken experience or sites being very conservative in what features they use.

Perhaps ironically, this was also the genesis of Firefox

That's not entirely accurate (or at least, while accurate, is missing a lot of significant context) Mozilla was creating within Netscape, not in opposition to it, as a steward org for the open-sourcing of Navigator & Communicator. Even when Netscape was acquired by AOL, AOL continued to fund[0] Mozilla for years after the acquisition.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20050324025052/http://www.wired....

https://website-archive.mozilla.org/www.mozilla.org/firefox_...

Mozilla was created in 1998 to open-source Netscape Communicator suite. Mozilla released its own suite, also called "Mozilla" (e.g. "Mozilla 1.0" [0])

Independently of that effort, Dave Hyatt and Blake Ross made an experimenal, cut-down version of just the browser part of the suite, which they called "Phoenix", as in a Phoenix rising from the ashes. That's a fork. That's a fork by any metric.

They later rebranded Phoenix as Firefox, and eventually the Mozilla suite was abandoned. Mozilla changed tack in 2003 and switched to developing Firefox and Thunderbird as independent products [1]

[0] https://www-archive.mozilla.org/releases/mozilla1.0

[1] https://www-archive.mozilla.org/roadmap/roadmap-02-apr-2003

If not this time then the next. Just the fact that the commission was allowed to propose such a blatant privacy invading law is enough for me to know that privacy is not a something that the EU is serious about.

Non-profit is better than gov but private is way worse than even gov.

But to think that the EU would be the guarantor of everyone's privacy on the web, is completely ridiculous.

Also your argument is not valid. When Google detects that you break their rules they ban your account. When the government has this kind power, then they have the power to do worse things to you, like imprisonment, fines, putting you on a blacklist and much more...

Those two things are not comparable.

The EU does better than the US for consumer-related privacy issues. But I don't think the same can be said when the government wants to slap a label of "national security" onto something. That puts us into a whole different world of "anything goes".

Article 45 of eIDAS 2.0 will roll back web security by 12 years - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38181114 - Nov 2023 (77 comments)

Joint statement of scientists and NGOs on the EU’s proposed eIDAS reform - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38126997 - Nov 2023 (63 comments)

Last Chance to fix eIDAS: Secret EU law threatens Internet security - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38109494 - Nov 2023 (299 comments)

EFF about EU: EIDAS 2.0 Sets a Dangerous Precedent for Web Security - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33966364 - Dec 2022 (44 comments)

EU legislation eIDAS article 45.2 may force inclusion of insecure QWAC root CAs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32093891 - July 2022 (36 comments)

Mozilla and the EFF publish letter about the danger of Article 45.2 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30549119 - March 2022 (13 comments)

Its decline is also visible in Mozilla's own data [1], 252M users in January 2019 down to 188M in November 2023.

MAU has remained at around 188M since October, I would like to believe this is because of MV3 and the YouTube drama, but that would be naive.

Going forward I think there should be a position on the foundation [2] and corporation board [3] held by a community representative. At least then the community would have some say in the direction Mozilla is taking.

[1]: https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity

[2]: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Board

[3]: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/moco/

What a ridiculous question. Obvious the chief captain on the Titanic is not responsible for the Iceberg jumping at the boat.

Also important to label jokes.

in other words, for some people here it's not sarcasm.

Maybe if you'd referenced Chernobyl I would have picked it up sooner. Or THERAC, that's a classic.

Unfortunately, nowadays, unless you're among a group of people who already know your general opinions on things, it's nearly impossible to state an absurd position on some issue that a nontrivial number of people would actually, unironically, advocate for, until you get into the absolutely batshit stuff like "we should literally sacrifice poor people to the devil, then eat their flesh, to keep the rest of us from getting poor."

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law

Salary has nothing to do with productivity at this level of an org.

That's nonsense. The difference at this level is you're not looking at personal productivity, you should be looking at a much broader interpretation. Except Mozilla doesn't. They've seen flailing commercial performance and have rewarded the CEO and laid off developers. It feels like madness because it is.

I love Firefox but Mozilla deserves to burn to the ground for this mismanagement.

That's one of the arguments made by CEOs who are trying to justify their insane salaries, yes. But it's very unpersuasive.

The question is how much you need to be to get a competent executive relative to the open market.

You can argue whether they’re getting what they’re paying for but this doesn’t seem to be out of line relative to the leaders of other, similarly sized organizations. Also a non profit has to have higher salaries as there’s not a lot of room to offload that to bonuses or equity.

However in this case it doesn't actually seem to be paying off.

No! The real question is what happens without an executive, but some cheaper leadership structure instead?

I mean, maybe a cheaper leadership structure (whatever it may be) would run the company into the ground, but, well, at least they would achieve the same outcome for cheaper.

What would Mitchell make as an SVP at a FAANG company? What could they make as a startup founder?

> Don't be snarky.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I can imagine a similar analogy with M. Baker.

No, the CEO(and board) are completely responsible. That is the point of leadership, to move the boat before it hits the iceburg or at least have a way of dealing with it.

Firefox is buggy but heavily advertised(or astroturfed, I dont know) on social media. Everyone knows about firefox, we don't need the ad. We need firefox not to suck.

The relevant quote is "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."

In other words, there's an assumption every corporation is required to have a CEO/Lawyer from the Technorati class who acts as a drain on the finances of the corporation, why should Mozilla be any different? Since the Mozilla Foundation is not a widely held corporation (and is a 501c3) there are only a few institutional directors ( from https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/leadership/#boards ): Baker (AOL), Chambers (McKinsey), Cooper (Walmart), Lakhani (MIT/Harvard), Lisbonne (Stanford GSB), Molotsi (Intuit) and Lund.

If you think Baker's pay should be cut, Lakhani is probably the person to talk to, he's chair of the compensation committee.

After watching VCs from the 70s to the current time (yes, I'm that old) I have a theory about tech startups. Their primary concern is to pump money from old school monied interests to old school monied interests' children. So if you have cash you want to give to your kids more or less tax free (or tax reduced), you send them to Stanford or MIT, then you arrange a meeting for them w/ your old school chum who's now a VC in San Jose or Palo Alto. You give the VC cash which is treated as an investment by the IRS, and then the VC gives the money to whatever bizarre tech startup is being run by their old school chum's kids. If you're lucky, you get a return on your investment and you pay whatever capital gains tax you need to pay (which is most often taxed at a rate considerably below that for earned income.) Your kids get a decent salary for a few years, and if they're lucky and smart, they git bought out by a big firm that makes them a VP or something. The VC should be lucky enough over time to make enough money on the 10% of deals that make it to acquisition to pay for the 90% that fail completely or get acquired on bad terms.

Mozilla always seemed to me to demonstrate this also works for non-profits.

Also... the story of "using money to transfer generational wealth in the upper class" is clearly not a universal. There are clearly startups that are innovative. They may be helmed by a handsome 20-something from Stanford, but that's just an historical accident. I am sure YOUR startup is in this category. But the "using VC investment as a money laundering scheme to evade generational tax" happens often enough my inner marxian shouts every time I drive down El Camino in Palo Alto.

And this part is purely opinion. I appreciate you probably have a different opinion and absolutely do not think less of you for having a unique perspective:

And besides, the goal of tech money is now just to keep the party going. The web is shit, intended to distribute content from major content producers or to be festooned with ads (twitch and youtube). iProducts are there to look sleek and provide just enough functionality to convince you to buy another iProduct. Though you're probably not in the target demographic anymore since China and India are at the beginning of the growth curve. Protocols and programs we used to use: SMTP/IMAP/eMail, (S)FTP/File Transfer, Veronica/Archie/WAIS/Search, etc. are pretty much dead or owned by Google, Microsoft or Yahoo's corpse.

I think the reason olds are nostalgic for Commodore 64's, Atari 800's and even TI 99/4A's (and that there are a few kids who like leenucks and BSD) is they're systems that could operate without being attached to the dystopian cyberspace Carmen Hermosillo described in Pandora's Vox. The only "infrastructure" I needed for my 99/4 was a power outlet and a factory somewhere cranking out cassette tapes, 5.25" floppies and ribbons for my MX-80.

</opinion>

But I have digressed. If the resolution is that Mozilla has lost it's way, I would argue for the affirmative. Or rather argue it was sort of set up to fail. And heck, I didn't even once mention the management fiasco that was Boot to Gecko.

Nothing, of course. Absolutely nothing.

The same thing that is justifying obscene salaries in general. A circle of greed where obscenely paid people decide what obscenely paid people should be paid.

Offering a low-paying CEO role means you'll attract lower quality CEOs. The best CEOs have personal incentive to take the highest paying jobs. This element of competition does exist.

However, this ignores a few factors.

1. Mozilla don't seem to have a great CEO despite the pay.

2. Self-interest and CEO skills are not necessarily tightly coupled. They could be orthogonal. So a great CEO might be willing to take lower pay, especially a CEO that might be great for a company that is itself forgoing disgusting amounts of (ad) revenue in the interest of ethics.

3. (Not Mozilla specific but it's important to mention when this comes up) Decent regulations capping CEO pay would in fact remove this entire element of competition, freeing up companies from having to decide how much profit to sacrifice on the altar of business gods.

Maybe in the private sector.

> The best CEOs have personal incentive to take the highest paying jobs

It has to be said again: in the private sector.

Non-profit CEOs shouldn't expect to be compensated as well as their private sector counterparts. The feeling of doing good is part of the reward.

Isn’t there a board?

Edit: https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/who-we-are/leadership/ And you thought openai’s board was a joke.

Not to pick on these two people, but it's interesting that they have senior directors for a conference and gift planning.

This branch of the company is often called "development," but R&D organizations sometimes need to come up with different names because that term gets overloaded.

  * Lunascape (actually has all 3 major engines built in. Great for web dev)
  * Pale Moon - uses Goanna, a fork of Gecko
  * Waterfox - focused on speed and privacy and compatible with Firefox addons

[0] https://adnauseam.io/

Folks have raised concerns about Mozilla's funding from Google Search, but it's pretty clear from their past actions that they see supporting ad blocking as non-negotiable. Their diverging implementation of Manifest v3, while still incomplete (it's rapidly improving in 120, most of the remaining issues are related to Fenix support and Chrome parity), is thoughtfully designed to continue to provide familiar APIs for ad blocking.

The Mozilla board might be largely incompetent and/or corrupt, but they aren't actively trying to steal your data to profit from, and Firefox is still genuinely a less user-hostile product than Chrome.

As we are in the holidays and reflecting on things we are grateful for - Thank God for Linus!

Be better

edit: username checks out.

Let Mozilla.org die.

Mozilla has proven to be really bad stewards, and as long as they exist nobody is going to pick up firefox. They've had many years to wake and up correct the course but choose not to, so it may be time to die. If Mozilla disappeared, a new organization could pick it up and run with it. If it weren't so overloaded in tech already, I might even call it "Phoenix" as it arose from the ashes of Firefox.

I have very few complaints about Firefox as software. I only wish more people would use it. (That includes you, dear reader!) It is actually great, and if you've ever complained about AMP, WEI or anything like that, using a non-Google derived browser is one of the few things you can actually do to reduce Google's power here.

Firefox are up against the power of OS defaults and dirty tricks in an age where most people don't really know what a web browser is. But if you have any awareness or concern about the health of the open web, you are absolutely educated enough to use Firefox. Of course there will be the odd minor workflow thing to get used to. But Firefox is great. All you really need is the motivation to choose something other than the default.

If these numbers sound high ... $1M today was $500K in 1996.

Yeah, at successful high performing trillion dolar tech companies like Nvidia or Apple, not broke*ss underperforming companies like Mozilla.

>6M for a CEO doesn't sound unreasonable.

It's unreasonable when you take into account Mozilla's lack of performance over the years. Where is their success, other than being kept on life support by being bankrolled by Google who's doing it solely to avoid anti-trust litigations over their monopoly on the browser market.

In a way, this is actually harming Firefox, knowing that they'll always be funded no matter how their product performs, just so that Alphabet has a legal David to their Goliath, gives them little incentive to try to be competitive.

Huh what? I use Firefox and I'm actually very happy with it.

That's what what success means in this context: Something that makes that expense worthwhile.

I'm a happy user, I consider that a success in my book.

Or they do some batshit insane "polyfill" nonsense that turns the <button> into 56 layers of nested divs behind the hood.

HTML hasn't caught up either, there's no <toggle_switch> that invokes the native toggle switch that every OS already has, devs are forced to mimic the toggle with 85 layers of nested divs.

If anything, the board should have gotten rid of her at this point and hired someone else, even if at this higher salary it would make more sense than sticking with someone who obviously hasn't been leading the company to growth or sustainability (since they are trending downards).

https://www.levels.fyi/companies/amazon/salaries/software-en...

https://www.levels.fyi/companies/google/salaries/software-en...

https://www.levels.fyi/companies/apple/salaries/software-eng...

https://www.levels.fyi/companies/mozilla/salaries/software-e...

Looks arround the $170-200k level....