Overall, I don’t think Mozilla is wrong. Without the Google Search deal, Firefox will have less resources to build a competent browser.
But Mozilla has also done a poor job at becoming financially stable without this search deal. It also doesn’t help that Mozilla’s CEO’s salary keeps going up in spite of the declining market share.
It would have been nice is Mozilla was able to fill a niche like Proton: building a suite of secure and private services. But instead they’re moving towards advertising.
FWIW, the Mozilla CEO salary actually went down in the last year we have records. From about $6.9 million to $6.2. (The base salary is still around $600,000, and the rest is a bonus.)
I agree, but I’ve seen so many arguments that “you need to pay the CEO millions, otherwise you’ll lose a CEO that’s definitely worth millions.” Not a great argument, but I think it’s somewhat laid bare by breaking down their actual salary versus their bonus, which is… Over nine times their salary.
Without the Google Search deal, Firefox will have less resources to build a competent browser.
Firefox has neglected their browser for years, pursuing vanity features like pocket instead of implementing web standards.
From Mozilla’s founder, jwz:
| Date | Post |
|---|---|
| 2020-09-23 | This is a pretty dire assessment of Mozilla |
| 2022-01-06 | Mozilla blinked |
| 2023-12-29 | Remember when Mozilla made a web browser? |
| 2024-01-05 | My dinosaur just threw up in its mouth a little |
| 2024-06-20 | Mozilla is an advertising company now |
| 2024-06-22 | Mozilla’s Original Sin |
| 2024-10-03 | Mozilla’s CEO doubles down on them being an advertising company now |
It’s almost unfair that JWZ has to be grouped in with the same historical figures around Firefox as Netscape ghoul Marc Andreessen and JavaScript ghoul Brendan Eich. Firefox (and predecessors) aren’t managed by the best people.
Mozilla really needs the corporate ear. That’s what really did them in, google integrated into Active Directory group policy effectively making it a pretty good choice for corporate deployments. This would give leverage to have bigger donors. Outside of that is just to diversify but the vpn/privacy market is pretty saturated right now.
There’s still a lot of room IMO for Mozilla to innovate in a privacy-respecting way.
For example, partner with/acquire Axate (or DIY), and do a big marketing push to get websites on board with “casual payments” in lieu of ads. I think Firefox users would love this, and they can work with uBlock Origin to expose an API so users can disable ad blockers on conforming websites.
But they’re not going to do that, which sucks.
They keep jumping on some random buzz word and then abandoning it all together. They’ve dome everything from password managers to VR.
And nothing of that was done in a great way. The only Mozilla product that does not is Thunderbird - and Thunderbird is independently developed by the community.
(I am aware of the community theme, but I still stand my point here: Firefox is the only non-Chromium browser that does not completely suck, absolutely. But seen as a standalone product, Firefox is not a good browser.)
The CEO salary being around 7 millions, plus the newly added executives… Yeah.
It that uncommon? I think it is normal for the top brass to make big bucks.
In a struggling company that’s trying to seem like a good nonprofit? Not usually, no. Or at least it’s ill advised. When the Google money stops or goes down, and they’re looking for donations… It’ll be hard to get people on board with financing that salary.
Overall, I don’t think Mozilla is wrong. Without the Google Search deal, Firefox will have less resources to build a competent browser.
The vast majority of the corporations income does not go to Firefox anyways. Their financial reports are publicly available, everyone can read them.
I have zero sympathy for the corporation and I hope they go bankrupt and that the devs forking the browser and develop it as a standalone product independent of the Mozilla-owned Firefox.
