I just want Firefox to be faster. I'm donating to Floorp (a Firefox fork), at least they seem focused on making the browser better.
Like, in general, I find that any HN thread where most of the comments are just agreeing, one-upping and yes-anding while invoking the same talking points and terminology (CEO ghouls, etc.) is probably a topic we might need to chill out on.
Mozilla makes mistakes just like any organization but they’ve done and continue to do more for an open Internet than most.
The CEO’s salary is enough to fund >30 extra devs. Imagine how many of those issues could have been ironed out over the years.
I keep seeing this line as if people think CEOs shouldn't exist or aren't worth their compensation. That is incredibly incorrect thinking. Good CEOs and bad CEOs are two different creatures and lead companies to very different places. Just like you want to pay more for highly skilled developers, you want executive pay to be competitive to hire someone capable of the job.
Put it this way, you could pay me $1m in annual compensation to be Mozilla's CEO (sounds like a good deal?), but I am sure I will be the most terrible CEO in the history of the company and cannot even run the company properly at a daily basis.
If the “bad” CEOs don’t take pay cuts or subsequently struggle to find work, then that thinking is obviously not as “incredibly” incorrect as you claim.
Does mean that CEOs are wildly more effective? Or just wildly better at diverting profit to themselves? I'd argue the latter.
Further, CEOs and wannabes have a strong incentive to structure organizations such that they depend ever more on the CEO, justifying massive compensation and of course feeding their egos. But I would argue that beyond a certain size, having to route everything important through one guy is an organizational antipattern. So yes, I'm very willing to argue most CEOs shouldn't exist. Or at least most CEO positions.
However it shouldn't be a 268 to 1 ratio with the median worker like the SP500 average. There is no way the CEO is worth that much money to the company.
I know Mozilla does worse on benchmarks, but I never complain about performance. Recently I tried some sites from one of the spammiest sectors on the web and found I couldn’t move the mouse without my Chrome lighting up like a Christmas tree and navigating me to crap sites, but the Firefox experience was that I had to click on something for all hell break loose.
We have an internal app that has screen with a JavaScript table thingie with 40,000 rows loaded locally. Crazy? Yeah. It performs great on Chrome and lags pretty bad on the fox. That’s the only bad screen, and we have a lot of screens.
Personally I don’t like it that they have an office in San Francisco. Emotionally I think, “the only thing anybody should be building in San Francisco is a homeless shelter.” Practically though, I think a browser company can’t “think different” if is steeped in the Bay Area culture, not least if they can get in a car and go visit people at Google and Facebook. If they were someplace else they might have a little more empathy for users.
Investors (and the boards they hire) pay CEOs for results. That range of results is very wide for large companies.
However, most ceos aren’t genius superstars. And I don’t think CEO pay really makes sense given supply and demand. I think there’s plenty of people who could do at least as good a job as many CEOs do, and would happily do so for a lot less money.
I suspect a lot of CEO pay is an arse-covering exercise by the board. If the board hires a super expensive CEO, and that person turns out to be terrible, the board can say they did everything they could do to get the best ceo. But if the board hires someone for much less money who turns out to be a turkey, they might be blamed for cheaping out on the ceo - and thus the company’s downfall is their fault.
Is the Mozilla CEO really so amazing at their job that they deserve such insane compensation? I doubt it. I bet there’s dozens of people at Mozilla today who are probably smart enough to do a great job as CEO. They just won’t be considered for the role for stupid reasons.
Zen Browser has been producing the features people have been asking for from Firefox with $0. I can't imagine what motivated devs like those could produce with just 1% of the money Mozilla burns.
It's not that they haven't done great things for the web. It's just that we expect more from their most popular product considering the money that they're rolling in.
Unfortunately, in our current "Greed is God" late-stage capitalist world, it's virtually impossible to find a competent tech CEO who is willing to work for mere honest wages. And (evidently) too difficult to even find one who's willing to work for 30X.
Chrome hasn't been the best browser for most of its market share lead.
Internet Explorer 6 was never the best browser despite leading market share more than any browser in history.
By objective measure I’d agree with you but you can’t deny the reality of the job market.
If someone is a truly effective CEO they’d be able to get many, many times more than 2-3x staff engineer salary at pretty much any other company out there.
https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1j07hrt/heres_how_...
That alone is enough to disqualify all of them. Now look at mobile - the biggest market ever. Firefox does not exist on mobile. That is a reason to remove the leadership and the board with it.
Yes. This is absolutely true. Most CEO’s are not worth this kind of money. In fact, most CEO’s could disappear overnight and cause zero disruption to the operation of the company.
I think the complexity of the job is _far_ overrated, and the main reason people think they’d suck at it is because they have no/less confidence.
People that become CEO’s are purely better at faking that confidence. If you are lucky, the confidence is built on skill instead of bluster, but they both get paid the same regardless.
It's unclear to me that you need to pay more than $150K total compensation for a good SW engineer.
Yet many over here are getting paid double that.
Salaries are rarely based on value created. They are based on what others pay.
In reality they don't do all that much. And most of the decisions are driven by data and advice from Gartner that just recommend the highest bidder, not some magical insights.
After all the CEO works for the board which is made up of shareholder representatives. They have very little industry knowledge and they just want the company to jump on the latest hype and "industry practices". They're usually very risk-averse.
So the CEO is kinda tied by what's happening in the industry anyway. The only CEOs that are capable of breaking that are the ultra confident ones like Jobs or Musk.
Nobody else got that kind of raise at Mozilla and they probably were much better at their jobs.
But hundreds of millions it was not.
2-3x staff engineer salary is a lot of money. But no matter how much I believed in a mission if I could make 10-20x that and set myself up for life financially I’d have a very hard time turning it down.
From that, I’d conclude that CEO capability and effectiveness really matters and paying up for a good one is worth it.
I've been running into both pretty much daily. As a long time Firefox users (since 2.0 almost exclusively), it didn't used to be like that, it's a recent phenomenon.
Much can also be said about them removing features and not implementing things people keep asking for for decades; for example, the vertical tab feature request was there for more then 20 years, I think?
It's not a criticism of developers, they're doing what they can, it's obvious set by managers.
I still use it because it's the least bad option. They have a long history of ignoring the community in favour of the mainstream, ironically a user group they have lost a long time ago. So now they're just alienating their remaining supporters in order to cater to users that don't even remember they exist.
The latest crap is that it now requires me to sign in every single day on Firefox. And often after I sign in it immediately goes to "hang on while we're signing you out". Meanwhile they're pushing edge heavily as a vehicle of copilot promotion. So I'm pretty sure this is just intentional breakage..
There has been one debugging niche where I've found Chromium preferable: Chrome sometimes gives better WebRTC signaling error messages than Firefox.
I get what you're saying, but I really can't agree. The mission is important in a non-profit. It's part of what makes them work.
Laura Chambers is just an interim CEO. I am not sure how Mozill Foundation/Corporation is exactly linked in the decision making. But the key people are still Mark Surman and Mitchell Baker who is the Chairwomen of Mozilla Corporation.
If Laura is getting paid lots like Mitchell Baker, it is still an issue. But, wouldn't she be just a scapegoat? I am pretty sure as Chairwomen, Mitchell Baker still has more power than Laura the CEO when it comes to Mozilla Corporation. I have felt this is just to chill the uproar against Mitchell Baker. Now everyone will blame the next CEO. But I wonder how much power she has. I could be wrong of course.
Apart from a few years between IE 7 and Chrome, the past few years is the only time where I would rate Firefox as the best browser, especially for Multi Tab usage. Chrome back on top since 2024 after spending years working on memory efficiency as well as multi tab ( meaning tens to hundreds ) optimisation.
So while Mozilla in terms of management and their strategy ( or lack of ) has been the same, they get much of the hate because people now dislike Google and Chrome and needs a competitor. It is as if they dislike Google so they also dislike the Google sponsored Mozilla Firefox.
For all the site I visit, I have never had problem with Chrome, mostly because I guess everyone tested their website with it, much like old IE days. Where I used to have problems with Safari pre version 18, Firefox has always worked. I remember I have only encounter rendering issues once or twice in the past 3-4 years on Firefox.
There are lots of Webkit fixes landing in Safari 26. So 2025 may finally be the year where browser rendering difference is now at an acceptable minimum. Partly thanks to Interop. At least for the past 6 months I have yet to ran into issues on any of the three major browser. And this is progress.
That's sort of the point. Firefox is an excellent, even amazing browser. But because of the way Mozilla has handled it, it's become largely an also-ran, and its continued existence seems highly dependent on its primary competitor in the browser space. That's just incompetent given the quality of Firefox.
I was offered a job at a big tech but I'd have had to move to the US to their campus because they hate remote work. And they offered only 120k (they probably figured that sounded like a ton of money to a European). But I started looking at the cost of living there and it was insane. I'd have had to share a flat and it would have to be far away, not a few km from the office like I'm used to. No way.
Of course then Trump started happening and I was so glad I didn't move there. I'm kinda LGBTQ too so I'd be royally screwed if I'd been there now
Also possible is that the CEOs grossly overcentralized the companies such that they increased the apparent importance of CEO decisions and then just took some big gambles. Heads they get paid a lot of money; tails their bets pay off and they get hailed as geniuses who get paid even more money.
The issue I have is a lot of CEOs appear to be wholly unqualified for their positions and their salaries are completely unjustifiable. So many of them don't even have a glancing understanding of the product or company that they are in charge of. Their primary role is getting a higher stock valuation so the board can be happy.
A good example of this is how many tech CEOs have dumped ungodly amounts of money on "AI" because that's what the market demands. Or how many CEOs hire and fire based on what other companies are doing, not what their company needs.
The fact is, "qualified" is often at odds with "competent". Most of the 30x CEOs are only qualified in chasing stock prices, not competently running a company for the long term.
Imagine if at any point in the last 2 decades leadership in Mozilla had started an endowment[0] instead of them spending many billions of dollars on ineffective programs, harebrained acquisitions, and executive salaries. They could have had a sustainable, long-lasting model that would have kept Mozilla relevant and strong for decades to come.
Instead, Mozilla sold itself out to become a shield for Google while being grossly mismanaged to the point that it is entirely reliant on a deal that at any point could be rugged from them. At no point in the last two decades has resolving this ever been a meaningful focus beyond panhandling for donations that barely cover executive compensation.
I still try to use Firefox and I desperately want to be proven wrong in my opinion that Mozilla's leadership is incompetent, or malicious, or both, but I've been hoping for this since Chrome was released.
I want them to succeed and be who they were before, but Mozilla leadership does not.
[0] Wikimedia did this nearly a decade ago and it's been a huge success and makes Wikimedia more resilient! There's a model for this!
How does that make them "worth it"?
> but I am sure I will be the most terrible CEO in the history of the company
Look, I've interacted with CEOs and frankly the job isn't nearly as hard as you are making it out to be. The most important aspect of the job is socializing, not managing the company like you might assume. It's putting on a good show and making potential clients like you. It's every bit just being a good salesperson.
There's a reason, for example, my CEO currently lives in California even though his company is halfway across the country and has no offices in CA.
Now, that isn't to say the Job of a founder CEO isn't a lot more difficult, it is. However, once a company is established the CEO job is a cakewalk. There's a reason companies like FedEx had a CEO literally in his 80s that gave up the reigns right before he died.
If you have the ability to schmooze, sit through meetings, and read power-points. Congratulations, you have what it takes to be a CEO.
Depends on the specific job, company (big tech vs not), and city. Seattle, NYC and a handful of others may pay on par with bay area.
For a senior at random faang or equivalent, that might mean $300k-$500k / yr. More for some NYC positions in the finance industry.
For example, Chrome had process in tabs when it was released in 2008. Firefox had a ticket in bugzilla open by the community that had been ignored by Mozilla for years, before Chrome was released. Even when it was released, Mozilla's first reaction was "meh, we don't need that".
Read over the various web platform blogs out there, and keep a tally of how many times you'll see "Firefox gains support for XYZ in 139, bringing it to widespread availability. Chrome has supported this since 32 and Safari since version 16"
And many of these are fantastically useful features. Sure, they're not ground breaking building blocks like in the old days when IE didn't even support certain types of box model, but they're echos of the past
The one thing I do notice is that on some very poorly built websites there will be a bug and it's because they haven't checked in Firefox or because I am blocking things that are no longer blockable on Chrome, but this is rare.
Take KDE for example. It's easy to argue they've accomplished MORE than Mozilla has in the last decade.
Their desktop ships with every Steam Deck (along with some niche laptop manufacturers) and they have a vast ecosystem of applications. Albeit some more rapidly developed than others.
Their structure is entirely different than Mozilla so it's hardly a direct comparison. But the main point is that Mozilla's traditional corporate structure seems to be a millstone.
They could have stashed most of their Google funding and kept a solid team of passionate maintainers paid in perpetuity. Goodwill could have volunteers contributing directly to Firefox, instead of forking it.
I hate that Firefox is so irrelevant that most web devs don't test on it. For many sites that's fine, because web standards are web standards, and Firefox supports them quite well. But whenever I run across a broken site, or even one that mostly works, but gives me papercuts, and then fire up Chrome and see that it works fine there, a little bit of me cries inside.
Mozilla should be focusing a lot more on user acquisition, and on figuring out why so many of their users have left.
If you already have a platform in use by the entire world, that matter of scale makes it much easier to find value adds more than a sole proprietor could ever dream of.
It's for these reasons I'm wary of talking about "value add" only being from the developers directly implementing a feature. Without support, IT, security, Product, HR, etc, I could not deliver that value add.
There's no reason to believe that. But it's still better than someone whose heart isn't in the right place and can't execute.
In that case, for every CEO there's literally a dozen other people at that company alone who could do their job. Why do we keep repeating that good CEOs are in short supply?
Moreover study after study has shown little correlation between CEO pay and quality of decision-making. Case in point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marissa_Mayer#Yahoo!_(2012%E2%...
And finally, rich people eventually look for other ways to feel valued. Status is a big one. Having the top job at the company is a big perk in and of itself. If they don't feel privileged to be the CEO, why the hell even take the job?
It used to be incredibly common in the UK - half the decent devs in London were contractors making 2-3x what permanent employees made. It’s now uncommon because the government nerfed it with IR35 rules.
They invested BILLIONS of dollars on things like:
* Firefox OS * Mozilla Persona * Mozilla VPN * Firefox for TV (e.g. Amazon Fire) * Lockwise * Mozilla Hubs
Did anyone ask for those things? What a huge waste for all of that to be built and abandoned.
Obviously Apple wouldn’t be Apple without Jobs, Tesla without Musk, and Amazon without Bezos.
Moving on from founders, we saw the cardinal difference between Balmer and Nadella for Microsoft.
So there’s some merit to their role. One could argue that from a shareholders perspective it’s the only role that matters. Every other role is an opaque “implementation detail”.
I have yet to hear anyone on HN present an argument for how Mozilla could effectively counter that onslaught. Certainly not without using methods that they would also have complained about. (Though nobody seems to hold Chrome's bloatware tactics against them for some reason).
Most developers make less than $150k in their local currency. A lot of the ones claiming to make more than that are inflating their numbers.
And this was before the mass layoffs that have been pushing down dev salaries.
Crazy, no; a loop over 40,000 items should take a fraction of a second, and at 1KB per row it’s less than 1% of a 4GB memory stick.
The 1 billion row challenge leader parsed a billion rows of CSV - 10 GB of data, through a Java/graal VM - in 0.33 seconds!
Also, as others have already mentioned, salaried with is much more stable.
At least these are my primary reasons, and those of some others I've spoken to on the matter.
That's the excuse given to make you accept those higher salaries. The truth is that there are not infinitely many positions for a CEO. There are certainly more people who can be competent CEOs than CEO positions.
If you give an indecent salary to your CEO, you will get a CEO who looks for a crazy salary. That doesn't mean it's the most competent CEO you could get. Try offering a decent salary and you'll see that people still apply. You may not get the typical narcissistic profile, but it's probably not a loss.
Right, that explains why Tim Apple got 100 million dollars in 2022, he was just that good at channelling the spirit of Jobs.
At least, that's probably how Google determined value added when deciding if it's worth the return when they funded (read: paid for development at) the Mozilla Corporation.
It's illegal in most of EU but several countries do not check. So I know PWC in italy hires external contractors but tells them to be in the office at 9 and so on… just a scam to not pay sick leave, parental leave, vacations and pension basically.
Yes indeed. There is no CEO in existence worth 30 of the employees that work under them. It's certainly true that good and bad CEOs exist, and that a good CEO can be a force multiplier that deserves higher compensation. But 30x (and often more!!) is an insane overinflated view of CEOs' worth to the company. The only reason they get away with it is that they are hired by the board of directors, which is.. other CEOs. So a good old boys' club is keeping salaries high completely divorced from any actual value provided.
You have to spend large amounts of time finding clients and being a salesman as you sell yourself and your services to them.
Once you do that, you have to prove that you're the person you promised. Unfortunately, most clients reaching out to freelancers are very....difficult.
After you've done the job, you have to be your own accountant and billing department. I should mention here that collecting from a lot of clients is often a frustrating endeavor and you will almost certainly be scammed at least once (at which point you have to do the math on handing most of your profits over to a lawyer and risking getting a bad reputation as a legal risk).
Because you're contracting, you are on the hook for higher taxes than normal to cover stuff like social security. Unless you are getting bottom-dollar insurance (the stuff with a $10,000+ deductible where you still get bankrupted if your medical bills are bad), you are probably paying tens of thousands in health insurance.
Want holidays, vacation, or just a day off? That means you are missing a paycheck (at least missing a bunch of billable hours) and may have upset clients. If you need to make $100,000 at a corporate job, then you'll need to charge at least $150,000. If you want to work a normal 2,000hr/yr, then you are going to have to sell your client on $75/hr while they're seeing $25/hr or less from some overseas "talent".
Also don't forget that lots of the highest-paying jobs aren't open to freelancers. Even if you contract, you'll be going through an agency charging big money then giving you a tiny fraction of what they take in.
After I got married and had kids, I was busy enough without running a business. I want to spend time with my kids while they are still kids. I may make less as a FTE, but I work a lot fewer hours and have way less work stress.
I am on Linux though. Perhaps Firefox on Windows or Mac fares better. But these problems are from the last year or two and don't happen in chromium also on Linux.
Completely agree, Mozilla and Chrom is a lot like a president election, they both suck hard, you're kinda stuck choosing the lesser of two evils. I mean Kamala isn't great, but me, as a dainty woman who happens to have a penis and does not happen to have documentation surrounding my residency in the US, Kamala isn't so bad in comparison! Kamala is firefox.
CompSci graduates have a noticeably high unemployment rate at the moment.
I agree that it’s not like everybody is losing their jobs, but the layoffs aren’t because of some cataclysmic economic event like in 00 or 08. Tech companies are choosing to lay off software engineers. Either these companies genuinely don’t need those engineers at all, which would drive down comp because it strengthens management’s negotiating position, or they do need them but have enough money to get by with skeleton crews until the cost of software engineers goes does, which also itself drives down compensation because it strengthens management’s negotiating position.
Either way there is downward pressure on SWE comp, and it’s being exercised by folks that can outlast every last one that insists that they wouldn’t even look at 150k. If your bosses decide you’re worth 70k max and nobody in your industry is unionized you will be looking at 40k being competitive
Component level CSS is simple enough that I didn't really have to go out of my way to do anything above and beyond, and if I had to I could just use a loader that uses sass or postcss or something similar, but it was a bit surprising.
That said, I have really enjoyed Lit. I wrote the original components for this project in 2023, and haven't really touched them till earlier this week. Bumped all package dependencies, and did the usual things you'd do for an upgrade, and they have had a stable API over the two years they've existed.
Regarding Dialog, a few years ago, when it was brand new, I was working on a project that used LiveView and SurfaceUI. We had a few modals that were used throughout the app, and I was in the process of migrating them to use Dialog before getting laid off. The tricky part, at the time, was that a Dialog invoked through pure HTML, no JS, lacked certain features that were available to the JS APIs. The HTML side has caught up, and the JS APIs have improved, but I've not touched frontend professionally in that time.
In a startup, the CEO also convinces VCs to invest. And again it's interesting: VCs have no clue about the technology, so you would think they try to invest for CEOs who set a good company culture. But instead they get convinced by the CEOs who bullshit them the best. Which makes sense: not only VCs don't have a clue about the technology, but somehow they think they actually do understand. I have heard a few discussions between CEO and VCs in startups (talking about the technology I was actually working on), and it was hilarious.
> If people work less as a result they don't really care.
They just don't know. Even if they genuinely try to ask feedback from the employees, it's biased. Employees generally don't give honest feedback because it's a risk for them (especially if the company culture is bad, which is where the feedbacks would matter the most).
If US programmers were to organize into a union and add some level of credentialism to keep out the fake programmers with no skills, I'm fairly convinced that you would see salaries increase dramatically.
Instead, because there's no unified representation, you get Microsoft laying off 9,000 people then (allegedly) trying to apply for over 14,000 H1B visas to suppress wages even further knowing there's nobody able to speak out against it.
* no spatial browsing, not even as an extension. This feature alone I would use literally thousands of times a week. * no fit to width * no cycle display images enable/disable/cached * cannot edit menus or icons as simple configuration file * no tab thumbnails * reader mode that actually always works every single time, not just when the browser feels like it * no editable key bindings * no shortcuts for highlighting next/prev URL, next/prev heading, next/prev element * no presentation mode * no panelise web page * no navigation bar
You feel that Firefox doesn't have a bunch of features that you would use - but those are not bugs. I recognize this is HN - where there will definitely be a higher percentage of power users, but an open source project not having the features you want doesn't make it a second-rate browser, it just means it would take more work for you to customize. Listing cred of having used FF in the Mozilla days is the same as saying Linux is second rate because you installed Caldera back when people were still scared of Y2K.
As a daily FF user - Firefox is great. And more users should give it a whirl, especially ones that haven't used it in a decade.