Give me a way to pay for Firefox, please, and use the proceeds to hire a full development team that can hopefully catch up and overtake Chrome? Please?
Mitchell Baker (Mozilla CEO) makes 3 million a year. It's actually very profitable for a nonprofit organization, isn't it?
"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."
This lady then goes on and on talking about "social justice".
"By 2020 her salary had risen to over $3 million, while in the same year the Mozilla Corporation had to lay off approximately 250 employees due to shrinking revenues. Baker blamed this on the Coronavirus pandemic."
i find the role of a "ceo" in mozilla as offensive as anything. for that matter any "management" role because it should be devs earning a buck while building cool software. nothing more, no paper pushing "managers" and ceos. why does mozilla need them anyways? who is forcing them to have one?
Mozilla needs a CEO for the same reason all companies need one. I find it disappointing how people grill open source or charity projects over spending money on management or marketing like it’s a waste. Do you think every other company spends this money just for fun? Or that it actually provides value to the business and helps them succeed?
Where's the value for Mozilla? A >80% reduction in userbase? A staggering loss in their ability to compete and recover their lost userbase due to laying off many of their highly-skilled technical staff?
If this CEO is providing value, I'm not seeing it.
It's possible that the CEO is right and the position is going for 5x less than market rate so only the bottom tier people want to take it. But also that Firefox is doomed no matter what they do. Chrome, Safari, and Edge are now all very good browsers that come by default. No one has a reason to install a different browser. An even cheaper CEO may not even be able to preserve the slow burn Mozilla is at and may just immediately crash it.
Whataboutism or whataboutery (as in "what about…?") is a variant of the tu quoque logical fallacy, which attempts to discredit an opponent's position by charging hypocrisy without directly refuting or disproving the argument.
As someone who works on the digital payments/processing side of the house for a charity, I can tell you that accepting designations is a can of worms that smaller charities would certainly want to avoid.
Their nonprofit is already accepting donations and they are already selling services. I can't be that hard to "sell" a cosmetic Firefox Premium upgrade, although it might not be used enough to be worth it.
Why would you think that funds from firefox premium would only go to development for firefox? Do you think money you spend on Azure is ringfenced for Azure development and isn't ever spent on Microsoft Gaming (for example).
There are several legal precedents that say otherwise. Regardless, when you give money to a charity with a restriction or designation and they accept the money but ignore your request that generally doesn't go over well.
I am waiting for the day it will be (either for Firefox or a replacement). Mozilla Inc. has shown again and again theat they do not have their user's interests in mind.
Could almost just get a patreon together, and then fund a developer from it? Because I think if you put out a job posting, working on firefox independent from Mozilla someone would take you up on it.
I meant not a fork, but just a developer. I would love to work on Firefox full time without actually working for Mozilla. I'm sure you could find much more qualified candidates than me who would also do so.
>"hire a full development team that can hopefully catch up and overtake Chrome?"
In an ideal world the best browser would win but marketshare doesn't work that way.
Microsoft has full time development teams working on Edge and it is just barely chipping away at chrome's dominance. And, in no small part because they pester Windows users to make Edge the default at every opportunity.
Really? So every time you bring in a dependency on a library written by someone else, your software is just a theme or wrapper? I guess that's one way to look at it.
1. It doesn't really matter. Most users don't even know what a browser engine is much less care, so whether it's a fully independent browser or not is irrelevant to their adoption in the marketplace.
2. The story was no different even when they were still using Trident as their engine.
Pocket Premium and Mozilla VPN are about the closest you can get to money that goes into the coffers of Mozilla Corporation (instead of the Foundation).
Mozilla is not the same as Firefox, unfortunately. If I remember correctly Mozilla itself is relatively flush with money (through a deal they have with Google) and doesn't really need the money. Their chair is paid extremely well, in any case [1].
A lot of Mozilla's money seems to be spent on executive pay, overhead, and questionable side projects. Not so much (or not enough) on browser development, it seems. I'd MUCH prefer Firefox to be a product organization with its own budget and perhaps a yearly contribution from Mozilla. I have more faith in Firefox than in Mozilla.
This is on the right track but a bit confused. There are two entities:
1) The nonprofit Mozilla foundation
2) The Mozilla corporation
The foundation owns the corporation.
The corporation develops Firefox and is primarily funded by the Google search deal. It also develops pocket and the VPN and gets some funding from their sales.
The foundation is funded by grants and donations, both from individuals and from other organizations (including from the corporation).
> Contributions go to the Mozilla Foundation, a 501(c)(3) organisation based in San Francisco, California, to be used in its discretion for its charitable purposes.
This goes to the Mozilla Foundation and not to the browser's development. As far as I know there is currently no way to donate to the browser's development.
A browser has long been not a saleable product and buying side products is the closest thing you can do to fund its development. Not that it is satisfactory, but if you aren't doing that already then your complaints sound less credible IMO.
The Enterprise™ spends insane money on security products, lots of which are bordeline snake-oil. There's no reason a browser couldn't be part of that, especially considering it's at the front line when it comes to threats and could actually make a real difference.
Electron is also popular and Mozilla could produce a Firefox-based alternative (whose selling points could be performance/memory usage/battery life) and provide commercial support.
Is it going to sustain extravagant salaries & bonuses for the C-suite? Debatable. But it can absolutely be a suitable business paying reasonable salaries.
Do you mean in market share or the actual product? Because I use Firefox daily and honestly feels less bloated and better to use than Chrome. I do use Chrome daily also, for some work-related apps
I have seen jobs at Mozilla that I'm interested in, but I'm just too afraid that they'll do more eng layoffs that I don't want to go through the hassle of applying.
This. Only paying for a browser aligns the incentives of the browser company and the user. As long as customer of the browser != user of the browser, there is ample opportunity for conflict of interest.
