Via Lunduke:
The Mozilla Foundation has released their latest annual report — covering the time up through December of 2022 (Mozilla’s reporting always lags by one year) — and something peculiar leaps out of the data:
* The compensation of the Mozilla CEO has skyrocketed (by millions)
* While the Mozilla revenue drops
* And the Firefox Marketshare takes a nosedive
As a child of the internet, I have been following Mozilla since day 1 (even before that, as I was a user of Netscape 1.1, but that lineage is complicated!) Talk about an organization that has just completely lost its way. Mozilla is like a non-profit that is also trying to operate like a start-up beholden to its VCs. They started chasing growth at all costs while largely ignoring (or de-emphasizing) the product that got them there: Firefox.
The non-profit org, which oversees the corporation that develops the Firefox web browser, insists it will continue its advocacy mission…
Except they laid off the entire advocacy team!
I get that there was some fear, inevitably, the Google money firehose would be shut off. But at no point have I gotten the sense that the non-profit portion of Mozilla was ever doing anything to secure a future beyond that. If the browser is the mission, and the funding of that mission is cloudy, what does your endowment look like?
I love the web. The web has been the single greatest democratization of information and communication that the world has ever seen. Technologically speaking, the web is strongest when there is a diverse ecosystem of web browsers competing and bringing innovations to a 30-year old platform. We saw what happened when Internet Explorer had a 95% marketshare: stagnation and terrible user experiences. If you suffered through the IE days, you know what will happen in a future that is only Chrome. We need Firefox (and Safari!)