Reflections on One Year as the CEO of Mozilla

Deary me. There is literally not one mention of any concrete product development or launch that I can see in that post.<p>This reinforces my view that Mozilla doesn&#x27;t really see itself as an actual product company. It seems to see itself as some sort of quasi NGO focussed on the internet. Which is sort of fine, but I feel they would influence much more of the web with better more popular products rather than policy discussions.<p>Firefox is so unpopular these days it seems that I am genuinely surprised when I see someone using it. it&#x27;s sort of like when Firefox first came out and you&#x27;d spot someone else using it, but in reverse.

Firefox market share down 85%, during the same period the executives get a 400% raise. Then 250 employees are fired.<p>It feels like it&#x27;s just the top brass getting as much money they can before the ship sinks at this point.

&gt;<i>Above all, this year has reinforced for me that sometimes a deeply held mission requires massive wrenching change in order to be realized.</i><p>Yeah, like firing your researchers. What good was that Servo thing anyways? Don&#x27;t need no PhDs when you can write endless self-aggrandizing blog posts while increasing your own pay.

Oof, not even a perfunctory nod to a &quot;very difficult decision to layoff some extremely talented individuals, in order to keep mozilla sustainable in the long term&quot; or something to that effect?<p>Anyway, I get the sense that they&#x27;re focusing on UX related to browser privacy. Any reason they shouldn&#x27;t just switch to Chromium and provide a compelling application around it (a la Brave and all those browsers) at this point?<p>Rust and Servo were a kind of &quot;swing for the fences&quot; attempt at meaningful technological innovation in the browser, but these days post layoff I can&#x27;t see their rendering engine doing anything but falling behind.

This is what you get when you sell your soul to Google and rely on your competitors funding for years on end.<p>And what does Mozilla of today have to show for it?<p>A self aggrandising, navel-gazing, tone deaf, hollow templated puff piece which will cause the unfortunate inevitable sad downfall of Mozilla.<p>There is almost nothing left of this once innovative company, resorting to present a facade as a cover while ignoring the real issue:<p>Not focusing on making a revenue generating product for over 10 years.<p>Also, repeat <i>extremely tone deaf</i> in Mozilla laying off their top engineers on Rust, Servo and Firefox and not a single mention of it in this post.<p>Looks like all those free years of Google money caught up with them.

&gt; And perhaps the most rewarding.<p>Not surprising, given she got a pay raise after sacking much of Mozilla&#x27;s engineers amid continued declining relevance.

I was prepared to take a somewhat neutral stance on the post despite the negativity in other comments. It&#x27;s a CEO reflection post, what should you expect?<p>But this is indeed completely empty PR fluff.<p>Vague rambling about data.<p>Lot&#x27;s of justification for how awesome she is.<p>No mention of of an event that shook the company to it&#x27;s core - laying off a quarter of employees.<p>Not even a hint of any vision, prospects for a future direction or how to save Mozilla from impending doom.<p>Why even write a post like this if you have nothing to say?<p>I do believe Mozilla will be fine for while. Google will keep paying well as a hedge against further anti trust concerns.<p>To be fair, Mozilla is in a tough position that can&#x27;t be easily fixed. But this doesn&#x27;t inspire confidence that they have the right leadership to get there.

This post is more notable for what it doesn&#x27;t say than what it says. I see a lot of words that don&#x27;t amount to much besides PR fluff. I don&#x27;t see much about how to maintain the viability of the only independent browser engine left in today&#x27;s web market, how to be more financially independent, or the fate of that engine after the substantial layoffs they made.

Not even an acknowledgement or mention of the over 250 people laid off at Mozilla over the last year? Yikes.

If I were an employee at Mozilla who had any ambition, I would leave and go somewhere else after reading this. This lady has no vision or specific market understanding that can lead to any progress.

Don’t understand the negative comments about Firefox. I use it everyday and even though I share some of the criticism, compared to other browsers for me it’s the best compromise so far.<p>Can’t use chrome or edge as Google and Microsoft showed again and again that they don’t value the end users.<p>Safari (especially mobile safari) is holding back the web technology adaption.<p>Firefox (since they incorporated some rust code) is fast and awesome and Mozilla is the least evil of the bunch. The accessibility and privacy features are the best out there …<p>Also: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=26755252" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=26755252</a><p>If you have other browser recommendations. Happy to hear them. Currently I use Firefox for most of my browsing, sometimes brave, opera in case I need to check social media websites (as a container). Huge fan of qutebrowser and nyxt (keyboardbased).<p>Thanks to Mozilla folks for keeping up the great work.

Yeah, she fired the security threat team, the servo team, the rust team, the mdn team and more but more than doubled her own salary, all while Firefox usage is declining.<p>This is what happens when lawyers are in charge of tech.

I literally in my most honest sense of what is good and real in this world, don’t believe you could be the CEO of Mozilla in 2021 and have a decent and genuine, moral and ethical soul.<p>Unless you’re busy day to day removing people from the company in order to synchronize it’s supposed purpose with reality.

Some organization or group of people has to fork Firefox or start another browser from scratch that has ethical leaders.

He did not say anything about mass layoffs and the end of the research department. Who did he profit from the purchase of the pocket? Who made money out? And the tall salaries of it? This CEO is a shame. She is destroying Mozilla.

I would have trusted this more if she had discussed the layoffs that happened recently. From what I understand, it was an event that shook the engineers that worked there and there was some controversy over how it was handled. Surely it was something that she had to deal with last year. (If I’m wrong about the assessment of the importance of that situation, please comment&#x2F;downvote away)

It&#x27;s unfortunate that Mozilla&#x27;s slow collapse under the weight of being hooked on Google ad money is being used as proof for people who are perpetually mad about diversity and accountability.<p>The fault is with management that&#x27;s afraid to disrupt the cash firehose. Not a mishandled CEO hire 7 years ago or the move from the increasingly untenable XUL.

I truly hope Mozilla survives the next decade. They need leadership with opinionated direction, and I don&#x27;t think this is it. Right now they&#x27;re looking to <i>be</i> lead without a good funding avenue.

Can&#x27;t we just get together and build an opensource browser? Considering how we are building very complex things without these executives, middle managers and all the corporate bs. It could be our gift to the next generation of engineers like we inherited Linux and give them a fighting chance.

Many people always discuss how the CEO is over paid for multimillion dollars.<p>Do we have benchmark on the CEO benefit from the same scale of company?<p>I&#x27;m just thinking whether it&#x27;s a norm to pay that much to get good talent to lead the corp. (I&#x27;m not saying she is good or not)

If that was my reflection on anything I’d consider myself a vampire

It fired people with high technical capacity who worked for the well-being of the web. People who worked at Rust and Servo. And he still has the courage to celebrate.

Well, he&#x27;s only CEO because the previous one decided to donate some of his own money in private to a mainstream political campaign. I guess the most important thing is how woke this CEO is.

I thought there was going to be some hint on their plan for independence from Google&#x27;s annual $400mm injection. Alas not today.

Has Mozilla ever made any serious attempt at technical contributions to crypto?

Really wish the CEO was concentrating on making a technically excellent browser, instead of writing esoteric and vague virtue signalling posts.<p>But Firefox stopped caring about that once they threw out their addon ecosystem a few years back. Obviously they&#x27;ve been in decline even before then, but it surely didn&#x27;t help.<p>It&#x27;s a real shame that the browser that once spearheaded the fight against IE&#x27;s monopoly position has now almost faded into irrelevance.