Interesting that only 1 out of 17 people in the senior management group is a technologist, and she's a senior director. No VPE, no CTO. Says a lot about the organization's priorities.

> Sarah Allen, Senior Director, MozFest > Juan Barani, Senior Director, Gift Planning

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

"gift planning" here means "getting rich people to give us large checks".

The "planning" term should be read the same way as "estate planning" or "financial planning." They're a charity, so they have employees dedicated to ensuring a continuous stream of donations. For example, someone might pledge to give $X over the next 10 years, or to give a percentage of their estate to the foundation when they die.

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.

Motherfuck! Mozilla's board and their funding projects almost makes me want to abandon Firefox and go to Chrome.

After Microsoft giving up on their rendering engine and joining the Chromium train I think the internet is in a perilous place. We're down to Blink, Gecko, and WebKit. Apple's monopoly on iOS browsers (soon to be undone) is unfortunately one of the last things keeping us from recreating the dark ages of IE's near monopoly on the market. I'd recommend at least supporting a non-Blink based browser like:

  * 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

See also: Floorp, IceCat, and SeaMonkey

Despite all this nonsense about the board, Firefox remains the best browser in my experience. It isn’t cramming an AI chatbot and coupon codes during checkout into my browser experience or working to eliminate ad blocking.

They also don't ban and lie about anti-tracking extensions like AdNausium (a data poisoning adblocker[0]). Chrome banned it from their store. As well as other extensions like Bypass Paywalls Clean. Ultimately the Firefox addon ecosystem is simply freer

[0] https://adnauseam.io/

AdNauseum situation was funny, you had Firefox endorsing it as a high quality ad blocker in a Mozilla press release, then Google bans it because they consider it malware.

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.

This sounds very much like cutting off your nose to spite your face.

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.

I would be that all of them use iPhones and neither of them uses FF mobile.

I know nothing about these people on the board but you clearly do since you think they are a joke so please go on.

What is so bad about the board? Besides not reigning in the CEO compensation.

I'll just add.

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

The board of any startupy tech company focused on "innovation and changing the world" seem to be carbon copies of the fictional boards on the Silicon Valley satire show.

Suddenly things make more sense about Firefox...

Did you get triggered by the diversity or do you have a real thing to say about the board?

I suspect they think that the board was selected for DEIness rather than understanding of the browser market.

No. Instead of being a board with a critical interest in Firefox, and who will continually challenge management to do what's best for FF, you've got a rubber stamp board who, let's be real, couldn't care less about FF.

Do you actually have a reason to think they’re a “joke,” or is it just that there are women and minorities on it?

It's either that or they are referring to the board being useless against the CEO. Usually the board is the only group keeping a CEO in check. Honestly don't know from the tone of the comment though

That's just recursive as the main problem with the CEO seems to be that she's a woman.

Surely the declining numbers and increasing compensation are the main problem?