Mozilla Corp., which manages the open-source Firefox browser, announced today that Mitchell Baker is stepping down as CEO to focus on AI and internet safety as chair of the nonprofit foundation. Laura Chambers, a Mozilla board member and entrepreneur with experience at Airbnb, PayPal, and eBay, will step in as interim CEO to run operations until a permanent replacement is found.
Official Blog Post: A New Chapter for Mozilla: Focused Execution and an Expanded Role in Charting the Internet’s Future
Reading this new CEOs job history on linkedin is kinda infuriating. She goes from intern to head of consumer products at Skype in less than a year. Just… Frustrating to read that while I am and manage really good people who struggle for decades in the trenches to get even paltry job opportunities.
But she got her MBA from Stanford so nepotism ahoy I guess.
Yeah. “Airbnb, Paypal, and ebay” doesn’t inspire confidance either
How is getting an MBA from Stanford nepotism? She probably worked her ass off not only to earn the degree but to be accepted to the university in the first place. Without knowing anything about her, I’m going to assume she’s a total rockstar until there’s a good reason to believe otherwise.
working hard and nepotism aren’t mutually exclusive
Biggest predictor of future success is the zip code you’re born into.
To your specific point, the preponderance of PERCEIVED hard work in the nepotism community is definitely worth mentioning. Hard work, as an objective measure, would be the exception in this camp.
okay but still where is the nepotism? You’ve commented on the general hypothetical possibility of nepotism not having been dis-proven.
Being at Stanford in and of itself is not nepotism so it’s a pretty fair question to those of us who want words to mean things.
Idk anything about this person in specific but my guess is that @ferralcat is referring to “legacy students”. If you search for that term alone or in combination with “Standford” you can read all about what those words mean. The words have very well-understood meanings. For example:
Nearly 18% of Class of 2023 are legacy students or relatives of donors, report reveals
Where is the evidence of nepotism? The person I replied to mentioned the Stanford degree and immediately jumped to the conclusion that it all comes down to nepotism. Frankly, it sounds like jealousy and taking cheap shots at someone who is doing well. I don’t understand it. Why knock someone else down? She’s successful so good for her. My own success will only come from me. What someone else did or did not achieve or how they did it is irrelevant to what I achieve.
Buddy, if you told me you had an MBA from Stanford, I would give you a box of crayons and take bets on how long you could go without eating them.
The MBA would immediately toss 5 crayons from the box and announce they’re only going to color with the remaining 10, collect a bonus, and then take a vacation after a hard days work.
AGILE
Without knowing anything about her you shouldn’t assume anything about her.
That…can’t be accurate, surely? I’ve never known someone go from an internship to a senior IC role in less than a year, let alone leadership - unless the Skype head roles are glorified management roles?
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That’s why we are ruled by woman everywhere, right?
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Inb4 you get called out for not being able to speak to women.
pivots to data privacy
Should have not named Laura then, just to highlight the point. 😛
Why?
For Laura’s Privacy!
Sorry, it’s a dumb recurring joke among Privacy nerds.
Yeah it was just a silly joke based on how specifically the title was worded. 😅
To protect her privacy, of course
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They should focus more on their mobile browser. At this point the desktop browser is on par with Chrome. People who use Chrome does it because they don’t care enough about privacy, but on mobile there is a noticeable difference between their performances.
Apple needs to allow 3rd party browser engines.
They will in the EU. Hopefully it’s easy to game the system and sideload a non-safari browser in the future.
This would still force Mozilla to support two browsers on iOS, one for Europe and another for the rest of the world.
Mozilla has 0 browsers for iOS except a skin over Safari.
So really it would just be a browser for the EU and nothing for everyone else.
Honestly I think its the opposite. The UI on desktop look awful and is clunky. The mobile version is nice and pleasant.
I use FF and the desktop and don’t care about the look of the UI. I’m happy FF is fast and doesn’t have memory leaks.
Making the mobile experience better will go further with helping Mozilla in general than making the desktop UI look pretty.
There is no tablet UI (yet, they seem to be finally working on it after years of users waiting). Firefox for Android is clearly languishing, and being lapped by various Chromium-based browsers.
Google and Mozilla in unison, reminded that some crazy people buy tablets: “oh yeah, huh”
Though mobile FF is miles ahead imo, since you can’t have extensions on mobile chrome, it’s not even in the running. FF just launched a few hundred more add-ons for mobile like two months ago, but there have been a dozen+ ones for a few years now. uBO > no uBO, full stop, no question. And Privacy Possum, and Dark Reader, and CleanURLs, and…
E: oh and forks of FF having about:config access is just chefs kiss
Google has actually been putting a lot more energy into tablets lately. And that’s not counting foldables
I’ve never used it on a tablet. On my phone it is a way better experience for me compared to something like Cromite. It just is much simpler in terms of UI. (I actually use Mull but it is the same in most regards)
Yes, I use it on a phone, where it is the best browser available despite its flaws
Check out Lepton on GitHub - it’s amazing. Very easy to install, open source and makes Firefox look fucking gorgeous.
https://github.com/hackjutsu/Lepton ? I do not follow how this is relevant?
Sorry - for some reason the project is named Lepton, but the repo isn’t? Here it is: https://github.com/black7375/Firefox-UI-Fix
Gotta remember that next time I bring it up!
I am a big fan of Firefox+Thunderbird and subscribe to Pocket, Mozilla VPN and Firefox Relay. I don’t think she was the right CEO for the job, coming into the job because she was needed after the Eich debacle, not because she was the best choice. When I listened or read interviews with her I sensed a lack of focus, which I think came through with the lack of focus and commitment I sense in Firefox’s products. She seems like a better fit for chair of the foundation, pursuing pie in the sky ideas rather than in the trenches trying to rebuild Mozilla’s presence and diversify their revenues. Pocket has stagnated under their care, and actually grown less useful to the point I am considering switching. The Android browser is stuck in time. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Thunderbird has flourished after pursuing a semi-independent structure: they finally had people who actually cared about the product calling the shots.
The Corporation dropped Thunderbird before Eich left, before he made the infamous donation in fact. It floundered until the right people found it, and to be fair the foundation didn’t exactly prioritize that either.
It’s not independent though, it is a fully owned commercial subsidiary of the foundation just like the Corporation is.
Stuck in time after the addon thing? It’s an amazing change.
In terms of UI, yes. The addons are years delayed. I am not criticizing the browser in itself, which I enjoy and use daily. But it is lacking in investment, meaning they can’t add features at a competitive rate
I had to stop using Pocket and moved to Raindrop.io because the search on pocket has been soooooo bad.
+1 for Raindrop. Not sure why it gets a low-ish rating cos I find it A* best ever bookmarkign plugin and I’ve been using various ones since early Delicious and Diigo.
Honestly, I have everything organized in there and the search is top tier. I collect a lot of resources I need to reference later and find. My other favourite extension is Unlimited History. It’s so useful when I need to find something.
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Congratulations to Mozilla Corp on escaping its CEO. Another one will inevitably move in, but perhaps it will be someone easier to bear.
New CEO is from a smart breast pump company…
And?
Smart devices and privacy don’t really go together
She’s the interim CEO though
That’s honestly a good move. They are a sinking ship and they need to start to swim
That’s silly, ships can’t swim, they’re inanimate objects!
My thoughts exactly. They’ve been making bad decisions for years.
(That said, I happily use Firefox)
Mozilla is a for-proifit company!?!
Mozilla Corporation is a corporation, and subsidiary to the Mozilla Foundation.
waif can a non-profit run a for a profit??
Yes. People got to eat.
They’re legit companies, but they do not operate with the goal of profit. Profit is something they may make, and in many cases it’s good so they can survive losses of funding or the like.
It also means they get certain tax advantages because they are not solely focused on profit
Yesm It is weird, but it would be impossible for a foundation to develop complex software like a Web browser. Engineers cost.
i don’t think konqueror, gnome’s web browser, or abrowser are tied to for-profit entities, though i could be mistaken
They are skins over someone else’s browser.
KDE’s Konqueror uses Qt WebEngine, which is developed by the Qt Company and is based on Google:s Chromium.
GNOME’s Epiphany uses WebKit, developed by Apple.
Trisquel’s Abrowser is a rebranded Mozilla Firefox.
Ironically, all of these things except Abrowser are based on Konqueror’s original engine, KHTML, so Konqueror was actually the OG engine. KHTML was forked to WebKit, which was forked to Blink, which became the underpinnings of Qt WebEngine, which Konqueror now uses.
This is also why KHTML still appears in the user agent strings for all of these engines, but back in the day the Gecko engine used in Mozilla products was already a thing and KHTML was the alternative to that, hence “KHTML, like Gecko”.
KHTML was truly a milestone in Free Software history. Immense respect to KDE developers.
webkit is not developed by apple, they’re just using it for safari and contributing surprisingly little to the actual project
If you look on the Github page of the project, most of the recent commits are submitted by Apple employees.
Yup, you can run a non-profit foundation with a for-profit corporation as a subsidiary, because capitalism I guess.
The idea was to try to diversify funding in an attempt to deal with the 500 million dollar existential crisis that is the Google deal, which provides the majority of their funding. What that means is that they want to be a self sustaining tech company with annual revenue of $500 million. What that means is inevitably, fuck the mission, the browser, and the users; make money.
Firefox as it stands now is on its last legs, never to return. The only way it could possibly have a real future as a browser with a market share of over 3% is if somebody without a half a billion dollar boat anchor tied to their waste forked it, and that fork managed to amass a sizeable enough team of contributors to actually maintain and iterate on a modern, secure, feature complete web browser that could keep up with Chromium and friends.
I really wish that didn’t seem nearly as unlikely to me as it does.
(imho but I’m just some guy on the internet)
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But what do they do?
Mainly develop software, like the Firefox browser.
They have a for-profit subsidiary, for tax purposes.
Pivots to data privacy? What was their focus before?
Burning foxes
That’s so messed up. Going to donate all of my money to Opera GX now
In recent years they had focused toward providing features to sync between Mozilla services. I don’t know if that was a primary focus or not, but their branding has been “we’re privacy focused” for a while anyway…
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Mozilla is pivoting to privacy or the old CEO is?
The new CEO of the corporation.
Chambers says she plans to focus on building out new products that address growing privacy concerns while actively looking for a full-time CEO.
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Mozilla. They just launched a “delete me” service, and apparently they want to do more of that.
For others who are curious: https://monitor.mozilla.org/
Wow mozilla is getting into euthanasia business?
hi new CEO, any plans to update Thunderbird to look like it was made within the last decade?
thunderbird branched off from mozilla a while ago but they are doing that with thunderbird 102
I honestly wish there was a native port of AOSP Email and Calendar apps for Linux and Windows, they do what I need
“Mozilla now makes most of its almost $600 million in annual revenue from promoting Chrome as the default search engine on its home page.”
Proofreading FTW.
