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Mozilla Businesses Firefox

Longtime Mozilla Leader Mitchell Baker is Now CEO (cnet.com) 34

Posted by msmash from the in-some-other-news dept.
On Wednesday, Mozilla chair and longtime leader Mitchell Baker was named permanent CEO of the company that makes the Firefox web browser. From a report: Mitchell became interim CEO of Mozilla in December 2019, after former CEO Chris Beard resigned. The company conducted an external candidate search over the last eight months, and concluded the Mitchell is the right leader for Mozilla at this time, according to a company blog post published Wednesday. "Increasingly, numbers of people recognize that the internet needs attention," Baker said in another Mozilla blog post Wednesday. "Mozilla has a special, if not unique role to play here. It's time to tune our existing assets to meet the challenge. It's time to make use of Mozilla's ingenuity and unbelievable technical depth and understanding of the "web" platform to make new products and experiences. It's time to gather with others who want these things and work together to make them real."
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Longtime Mozilla Leader Mitchell Baker is Now CEO More

Longtime Mozilla Leader Mitchell Baker is Now CEO

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  • Mozilla needs a "user's CEO" (Score:5, Insightful)

    by xack ( 5304745 ) on Wednesday April 08, 2020 @03:36PM (#59922488)
    See the fall out from addressbargate in Firefox 75. The advanced users are the ones that develop websites, install Firefox on friends and family computers and deploy it in organizations but they have had their needs ignored as Mozilla drinks the Chrome aid and Flanderized their browser into a Chrome knock off. I have complained about Firefox for years but Mozilla dosen't listen to the users that supported them the most. I hope the new CEO listens to it's users and fix some of the serious problems in Firefox, otherwise we are going to get 100% Chromium market share.

    • Re: (Score:2, Troll)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      The problem is that a lot of what these vocal users want is "don't change things". That has big issues. Sometimes it's necessary for technical reasons they don't understand, e.g. the add-on system overhaul. Sometimes it just diverts limited resources to maintaining code that few people use.

      I'm not saying it's a terrible idea but don't expect it to fix everything.

      Obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1172/ [xkcd.com]

    • I just went with their *old* CEO, by switching to Brave. :)
    • They should have stuck to copying the Opera interface.
  • as long as he never made a donation to a conservative cause or misgendered someone then he's hired no matter how competent or incompetent he is.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by rgmoore ( 133276 )
      FYI, Mitchell Baker [wikipedia.org] is woman. Also, FWIW, she's been actively involved with Mozilla since back when it was called Netscape, so it's not as if she's some newbie who got hired because she's politically correct.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by whh3 ( 450031 )

        Thank you, thank you, thank you for pointing out what should be obvious to anyone who thinks that they are appropriately informed to write a comment on this topic. And, moreover, thank you for pointing out that she has been involved with the mission and the company for a long time. While that does not necessarily make her the right choice at this time, it certainly means that she is not just a "newcomer" who was hired to "shake things up", though I think that she does have good ideas for revitalizing the or

      • Not that it takes away from her knowledge of the company/industry, just clarifying it was not a technical position (programmer/developer).

  • Mitchell Baker. Why do I need six instances of Firefox running and why does it take so long to shut down?

  • Google's beard (Score:3)

    by gumpish ( 682245 ) on Wednesday April 08, 2020 @04:41PM (#59922748) Journal

    It's pretty obvious that the only thing keeping Mozilla afloat is Google's money, which Google is happy to pay. Propping up something resembling "competition" helps Google deflect some amount of anti-trust attention. It's even better when the competition Google is funding is on a trajectory to alienate ALL of its users (though if Firefox actually dips under 2% of market share that might be so low that they no longer provide Google with meaningful cover).

    What a shitshow.

  • Baker and co. are nothing but corporate sellouts.

  • ...I transitioned from Firefox to Edge (Chromium) on all my devices. The gap in performance and battery life way to large for way too many years to make Firefox worth it anymore. And mobile Firefox is a joke compared to Blink/Chromium based browsers.

    Why they won't make their browser better, I will never understand. I tried to suggest to some of them to fork and make a Blink/Chromium version, with all the privacy-infringing codes and services from Google/MS ripped out. Now that will give them feature and per

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Pale Moon isn't a great example. It forked, and the developers found it was too much work to even back port the improvements in Firefox.

      I don't find any serious compatibly issues with Firefox. Running uBlock and a few other privacy enhancements breaks far more anyway.

      They really just need to fix the mobile version.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by ftobin ( 48814 )

      It's unclear if you're referring to Firefox on the desktop or mobile devices. The fact you mentioned battery suggests mobile. On mobile, Firefox Preview is the future and is snappier, not plain "Firefox", which uses an older rendering system.

      I tried to suggest to some of them to fork and make a Blink/Chromium version, with all the privacy-infringing codes and services from Google/MS ripped out. Now that will give them feature and performance parity instantly with Chromium. They will also not suffer with t

      • Competiton does not die if you make a hard fork. Firefox is competing on 2 levels here. One is the battle of the browsers.. how a browser handles features, privacy etc. The other is a battle of the engines - Blink versus Gecko. Gecko has clearly lost.

        I am suggesting Mozilla build a Firefox which has feature parity on the engine level with Chrome. This is what Microsoft has done. It is a clever move.

        MS had their own engine too with Edge. But they understood they had lost to Chrome. So they took the engine fr

        • Isn't all of it beat pretty hard by servo (which admittedly is still unfinished)? Also from my experience both on windows and Linux current firefox beats chrome without being trash when it comes to customisability. The difference becomes more apparent when a lot of tabs are open.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by nashv ( 1479253 )

            Isn't all of it beat pretty hard by servo (which admittedly is still unfinished)?

            I have never seen any numbers. Servo is to the web what nuclear fusion is to energy.

  • I've really really given FF the benefit of the doubt, where every version strips functionality or control. What broke me, was that during the earlier outbreaks of COVID-19, we had some volunteers set up local assitance websites and information. Firefox was the ONLY browser not displaying the pages because of some weird issue with SSL certificates. This was not overridable and I was left out of advising everyone to install Palemoon. Insane to the max. How much I like to love Firefox, every time it lets me
  • Mitchel Baker is a lawyer. It's bad enough when bean counters take over from technologists. A lawyer? Kiss Firefox goodbye.

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