Let me pay for Firefox

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

If salaries were based on value added, a lot of software dev salaries would be orders of magnitude higher.

Hmm if this is true why is it so rare that software devs quit their jobs and make more money freelancing or starting their own companies?

It’s uncommon in the US because freelancing means having to source your own - usually both expensive and crappy - healthcare.

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.