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Let me pay for Firefox

(discourse.mozilla.org)
802 points csmantle | 3 comments | 13 Jul 25 08:38 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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gr4vityWall ◴[13 Jul 25 10:08 UTC] No.44549048[source]▶
I used to want to donate to Mozilla Foundation, but I've long lost any hope that the corporation would spend that money in a way that makes sense to me. The pessimist on me would expect donated money to be spent on more built-in "campaigns", "studies" or ads. Or maybe a bonus for their executives.

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.

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Uehreka ◴[13 Jul 25 11:35 UTC] No.44549541[source]▶
I get why people are pissed at Mozilla, but I do feel like people on HN also underestimate how much hating Mozilla is becoming a hacker tribal signifier. It almost feel like each commenter is competing to out-hate the others or to add a layer of “in fact its so bad that we should (consequences)”.

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.

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ericpauley ◴[13 Jul 25 11:51 UTC] No.44549647[source]▶
Completely agree. For all the hate Mozilla gets on HN, I’ve been using Firefox every day for a decade and it pretty much just works, supports a rich collection of (vetted!) extensions, and performs exceptionally well with sometimes hundreds of tabs.

Mozilla makes mistakes just like any organization but they’ve done and continue to do more for an open Internet than most.

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WhyNotHugo ◴[13 Jul 25 12:04 UTC] No.44549741[source]▶
Firefox works, but it’s got thousands of annoying issues (many of them just paper cuts, but still).

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.

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sealeck ◴[13 Jul 25 12:11 UTC] No.44549794[source]▶
The issue with the salary is not that it costs the same as 30 developers – good leadership can make a difference worth >30 developers over the same timespan (especially in an organisation with 1000s of staff). The problem is that the Mozilla leadership hasn't been great, which makes the high salary especially difficult to defend. It's unclear to me that you need to pay an extremely high salary to get a good Mozilla CEO - something like 2-3x the average staff engineer would make sense.
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bell-cot ◴[13 Jul 25 13:26 UTC] No.44550302[source]▶
This.

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.

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Aeolun ◴[13 Jul 25 13:36 UTC] No.44550378{3}[source]▶
I think if you are paying 30x engineer salary you are always going to find CEO’s that optimize for money.
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1. bell-cot ◴[13 Jul 25 14:14 UTC] No.44550605{4}[source]▶
Pretty much.

But if you do need to have a CEO, and offering 2-3X gets you zero qualified applicants...then you are forced into strategies which have undesirable side-effects.

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2. cogman10 ◴[13 Jul 25 15:17 UTC] No.44551025[source]▶
What does it mean to be qualified?

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.

3. Aeolun ◴[13 Jul 25 18:10 UTC] No.44552258[source]▶
That’s a problem with your selection process, not the lack of qualified applicants. It’s funny that the qualification that people require often seems to be ‘has done this thing to no great success elsewhere’.