>Doubling down on our core products, like Firefox...

The fact that they acknowledged Firefox at all gives me some hope.

It seems mostly to focus on "Vision", "Strategy", "Outstanding Execution" and other corporate-speak stuff.

Anyone who worked with Laura Chambers (new, interim CEO) in the past want to share what kind of changes one could expect from them? More business/marketing stuff or back to engineering focus?

> Baker, a Silicon Valley pioneer who co-founded the Mozilla Project, says it was her decision to step down as CEO, adding that the move is motivated by a sense of urgency over the current state of the internet and public trust.

Mitchell is not leaving and stepped down on her own. I hope that this still means a good change for Mozilla.

> Enter Laura Chambers, a dynamic board member who will step into the CEO role for the remainder of this year.

"Laura Chambers" is a link to her LinkedIn profile. Nothing you can do but shake your head if it didn't occur to anyone that putting that link in the post announcing her appointment was a bad idea.

She not only responded in a very gracious way, but also followed up months later to check if my feelings had changed. While they had not, she didn't owe me anything and I really appreciated her attentiveness. Mitchell really cares about Mozilla and its community.

Mitchell was a great community leader. That doesn't always translate to being a good CEO or leader of a business, however Mitchell is a huge reason (if not THE reason) why we have Firefox today – and, even if you don't currently use Firefox, a huge reason why we have the web we have today.

So, while I haven't been the biggest fan of Mozilla's decisions the past few years, I do want to give credit to Mitchell for everything she did for the open web and open source. She was a supporter before anyone really cared, and played a huge part in getting is to where we are now over the past 20+ years.

(I am glad this is the direction they have chosen! Here's a 2015 post where I write about how I think Mozilla should focus on data privacy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10698997)

Also everyone: oh, this rust thing is nice.

Hm. Not every toy you make is a winner, but I think it’s fair to say that while maybe it wasn’t a commercial success, we all ought to say thank you for supporting rust and servo while it was growing up.

Yes, Brave subtly pushes some crypto nonsense, but it also delivers on privacy, it focuses where it matters. (It also bundles IPFS and Tor in the base install, I believe.)

And you can say "oh it's still Chrome!" but - Chromium is FOSS, and to me, it shows that Brave focus on what matters (data privacy) and not on what doesn't (writing their own HTML, CSS, JS engine).

I don't agree with the opinion that browser needs to have its own rendering engine to be able to be focused on privacy. I think it's the opposite - using Chrome engine helps Brave to focus on what matters.

But it's just me. It's fun to build own browser engine, I get it, I just don't know if it's time and money well spent.

There's now almost no programmers on the board or in senior leadership positions. The interim CEO they picked is an MBA who ran a business line at AirBnB.

It seems like another case of MBAs taking over.

Chambers is stepping in temporarily, and Fortune offers some details: "Chambers says she won’t be seeking a permanent CEO role because she plans to move back to Australia later this year for family reasons. 'I think this is an example of Mozilla doing the right role modelling in how to manage a succession,' says Chambers."

If it's only going to take a matter of months to find a new CEO, and Baker has been doing it since 2020, and before that from 05-08, what difference does it make if she keeps running things a few/several more months? Why have a third person running things temporarily?

& from her own blogpost on this announcement[0]:

> I will return to supporting the CEO and leadership team as I have done previously as Exec Chair. In addition, I will expand my work [... to ...] more consistently representing Mozilla in the public [...] through speaking and direct engagement with the community.

I cannot believe Baker doesn't read at least some notes on community sentiment around her various decisions at Mozilla; it must take an astounding level of cognitive dissonance for her to see herself as a suitable candidate for "direct engagement with the community".

[0] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/a-new-chapter-for-mozill...

This isn't that related to the topic but isn't that supposed to be Google, not Chrome?

What happens to an org with a goal when it hits the goal? It has to find a new goal or dissolve. It's tempting to say that dissolution is the right thing. But if you have accumulated resources, I imagine it's hard not to direct that at something else you care about.

The standards-compliant web was a big deal. I cared about that a lot. Many of my friends were Firefox ambassadors or whatever. Kids were installing Firefox on computer lab machines and hiding the IE icon. It was a different time.

I don't really care about data privacy like that, but maybe there are others who care about it like I cared about being able to view the web on a Linux browser with as much fidelity as IE on Windows. I find it unlikely since I think techno-optimism is a galvanizing goal and techno-pessimism is a limiting one. But that's just my opinion.

Overall, I'm quite happy with what Mozilla did. It makes sense they have to cycle CEOs till someone finds out what sticks.

It fits with the goal of an open internet, is easy to sell to users, and it's unlikely that Chrome will add the feature, since Google owns YouTube. And there's an obvious route for monetization: sell cloud storage for archived pages.

https://archive.ph/rmMEb

She needed to go. I wish it would’ve been sooner.

https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/we-need-more-than-deplat...

> Chambers says she won’t be seeking a permanent CEO role because she plans to move back to Australia later this year for family reasons.

Here's my optimistic educated guess: The board finally caught on to the fact that Mitchell is an overpaid failed CEO for a "company" (e.g. weird for-profit entity that runs a "non-profit") propped up by its largest competitor to avoid anti-trust accusations. Its only real product has dwindling, barely mattering, marketshare (<5%)^. Chambers, being from the board and not the executive structure, is obviously a caretaker "for cover" while the new CEO search goes on.

^If you're curious about an expansion on this, my opinions on it based on their financial statements are in our podcast episode "How Does Mozilla Make Money?" from a year ago: https://pnc.st/s/kopec-explains-software/bdecab32/how-does-m...

If they can't find a way to bring in outside money that isn't from Google they're gonna have a bad time if Google ever stops feeling threatened by US regulators, and making bets on new products is the only real thing you can do. Edge has proven in an embarrassingly public way that being a better browser under the hood doesn't get you more users.

I'm no fan of Baker, but the least we can do is wish her best wishes and hope for a great future for all parties involved. I didn't like her when she was CEO at Mozilla, I don't like her anymore now that she isn't CEO at Mozilla but that doesn't mean I have to resort to shallow attacks on her character. I expect more from HN.

Edit: Corrected mistake about Baker no longer being at Mozilla. Thanks to @M2Ys4U.

In what way?

(Footnote: OP’s reply is in another thread.) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39303697

https://mourner.github.io/bullshit.js/

Can you please elaborate more on this and ideally provide some examples ?

Nothing to add.

Anybody without a personal ten years old website using some hand-made HTML should probably not be CEO of Firefox.

Mozilla in recent memory has reminded me more than anything of the dogs in Pixar's Up ("squirrel!"), constantly chasing after the latest shiny tech fad while neglecting the fundamentals. They've been a follower on everything and have failed to lead on anything. Mitchell's justification for stepping down as CEO seems to me to follow this same pattern: she's stepping down in order to focus on AI and internet safety.

It's good to know that she's a decent person and was good to Mozilla employees, but it's hard to square the picture you paint with the complete lack of direction I've seen during her tenure. Maybe Mozilla was in a much worse situation than I thought at the time she took the position?

Ask them if they have tried this fantastic alternative called Firefox and you'll get silence.

IMHO, this is far too stretched. Give me a single project or initiative she pushed successfully that became a part of "the web we have today".

but avoiding a browser monoculture does matter. having all browsers built on chromium is a serious problem given the way google treats chrome. see the latest decisions regarding extension support and adblocking all of which will end up in chromium. do you think brave will have the resources to fork chromium to avoid those changes?

It's not about fun, it's about denying Google the right to exercise complete control over the way that the web evolves. Having independent browser engines with substantial market share is the only path to a web that isn't just an extension of Google, and we shouldn't be relying on Apple alone to bear that weight.

That said, the success of this strategy for containing Google depends on having market share, which Mozilla's recent strategies have completely failed to do, but that has less to do with their independence than it does with Mozilla's focusing on just about anything other than Firefox.

I like that it's not something like FirefoxOS where they need to invest years of R&D playing catch-up. Relatively simple to set-up. And free advertising for the Brand™ whenever someone sends an email, such marketing value, very viral.

She also wrote this incredibly rude and grotesque obituary for Gervase Markham after he died of cancer (working for Mozilla until the end). You are welcome to disagree, but Gerv contributed just as much to Mozilla as Mitchell did.

https://blog.lizardwrangler.com/2018/08/07/in-memoriam-gerva...

And a well written reaction here

https://lwn.net/Articles/762345/

I too lost interest in Firefox a long time ago, about the time they evicted Brendan Eich revealing internal politics.

To me that speaks volumes about the quality of management, and much as I'm sympathetic to your feelings I wonder what FF would have been like today if Mozilla had not been eternally distracted. I suspect that without FF Mozilla funding would dry up overnight and that alone is something they should respect.

People often say you need to pay the big bucks to get a good funding-raiser, but bringing in money isn't the only job of the CEO there.