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Mozilla 2023 Annual Report: CEO pay skyrockets, while Firefox Marketshare nosedives
(lunduke.locals.com)
Fuck noted racist Bryan Lunduke.
this post was submitted on 28 Dec 2023
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I'm so out of the loop here. Never heard of him before. A quick web search yielded little. But his seemingly-abandoned Twitter profile is...something. https://nitter.net/bryanlunduke
I used to say controversial things that I don't really believe to try and get attention. Now I've changed. Black Lives Matter. He / Him
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What's his deal?
Oh he's very active: conservativenerds.locals.com
He was one of the founding members of Jupiter Broadcasting. Was heavily involved in openSUSE for a long time (maybe even on the board?) and did a lot of Linux journalism. If you've ever seen the annual tongue in cheek "Linux sucks" video, that is him.
It's a huge shame. He's very charismatic and likeable otherwise, I just wish he also wasn't carrying around awful opinions about so many other people.
Yup, I used to like watching his stuff, but he's kind of become controversial, so screw that.
Good catch.
What an shitty article. It is looking on the revenue, ceo income and market share of only 2 years and trys to make a point.
It's this fucking lunduke again, he is a right-wing that tries to call Mozilla for whatever reason from time to time.
Lunduke is such a contrarian. He cannot help himself from trying to argue that he understands better than common opinion, whether or not his position makes sense.
This is the man who disabled HTTPS on his site because he felt that the fact certificates can expire and domains can change hands made it not secure enough... and that using plain HTTP was somehow a more pragmatic security approach.
I stopped at Lunduke. No thanks.
I think I recognize the name from distant past, but not up to date. He's problematic?
Seems to be a Qanon guy. Or he was for a time. I've not paid attention to him in years.
He also always came off as a grifter in search of a con, so the Qanon shit might have been part of that, but who can ever tell with those people.
Ah I see, well that makes the post double disappointment
You should also take the post with a grain of salt, In addition to his shitty politics, Lunduke doesn't have the best reputation for truthfulness in his tech reporting.
He's fudged numbers before, and often makes clickbait titles that just are not supported by his blog posts or videos.
The shitty politics were not the only reason I started ignoring his dumb ass.
Yeah, noted.
I did go and read the report myself. The blog combines lot of stuff and makes its own narrative, but it's not wildly inaccurate as far as I can see and I can't say it changed my overall level of disappointment.
The strategy letters from the Chair and the President are full of AI mumbo-jumbo and they've expanded the board from six to ten people, taking on four new members who are supposed to be able to guide them towards this new, fantastic AI-filled future. Quite large percentage of the board is now meant to be there for "building better future with AI".
Their income is still largely (81%) tied to one customer and the rest are scraps from VPN and Pocket subscriptions. Basically the whole corp sits well and truly in Google's pocket.
The Foundation President gets $300k year, the Corp CEO gets $600k year, but somehow also qualified for $6.3M bonus totaling $6.9M. That's a nice raise from $5.4M last year. Sure, the CEO compensation packages are globally totally fucked up and I guess it's easy to point to "competitive roles elsewhere" and motivate the need for year on year extra millions, but they have been firing people due to shrinking revenues, so not sure what her performance bonuses are tied to.
As to them abandoning Firefox. That's perhaps a claim taken too far. Gotta do some creative between the lines reading. They say they're building this fantastic, bright AI future on the base of their core products (so Firefox and Thunderbird). I think they'll stick around and I think it makes sense for Google to keep it going in some marginal market-share capacity order to avoid anti-trust watchdogs.
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What methods are being used to measure browser market share? Are those methods inclusive of Firefox users utilizing privacy-forward tools and ad blockers? If not, then Firefox market share may not necessarily be dwindling.
Then again, if Mozilla's revenue stream is aligned with the world of advertising, Firefox users who strive to make themselves invisible to advertisers are being written-off outright by Mozilla. The population of browser market share is only counting those who advertisers can influence - nobody else matters.
I'm not an expert, but I was curious so I did 15 minutes of digging and this is what I found. Take it in context.
Wikipedia's Usage share of web browsers page references two sources for stats: StatCounter and NetMarketShare.
StatCounter is an analytics tool for web site operators. They cover their methodology here: https://gs.statcounter.com/faq#methodology . To quote:
Our tracking code is installed on more than 1.5 million sites globally.
Their installation guide explains that they use a small JavaScript snippet embedded into the site's HTML.
Firefox blocks this if enhanced tracking protection is set to strict. Discussion on Hacker News: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34502986 . Some commenters there also said that uBlock origin blocks it. I have not confirmed.
NetMarketShare also refers to collecting data from user browsers and requiring JavaScript. https://netmarketshare.com/methodology
I would be interested to see server-side statistics based on HTTP user-agent from major global sites like Wikipedia, but I was not able to find that. I imagine spoofing user-agents is less common than ad blocking and tracker blocking
Edit: Found Wikimedia's browser stats:
Linked from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Statistics#Analytics
I see suggestions to spoof that too for sites that require chrome for example
We, the community, really need to make a separate browser project. It's clear that Mozilla doesn't care about competing with chrome/chromium. They just want to be in the market to get that sweet google money so that google can't be sued for being a monopoly by funding a "competitor".
They spun off the Servo browser project if you want to work on that.
That said browsers are as complex as kernels now a days, it's crazy how much work is involved in it.
If I were a programmer, maybe. They got my financial support on The Linux Foundation. Feel free to donate :)
Well this is, shall we say, not surprising, but nevertheless disappointing.
Do note that is not for the foundation which runs and develops Firefox, but for the company. Still shit, but separate from the browser.
Yeah, well it's the corp that pays that CEO bonus salary, not the foundation.
Firefox slides into irrelevance either. I didnβt realize it has less than 4% market share. I remember when it had around 20% not too long ago
Dammit, and Firefox is the only browser not jumping on the embedding drm bandwagon...
This article is chudposting, remember that
I think Mozilla the company needs to be rethought
Yeah, that's been the case for like 10 years now.
The focus should be on securing independent funding. This means paid services or increased independent donations. Some ideas:
- Mozilla VPN - essentially a wrapper over Mullvad, but the landing page doesn't give a good reason to choose it over Mullvad (e.g. container tabs); choosing a server per site should be front and center
- email - I know they tried at some point, but they really should integrate with something like ProtonMail (e.g. FF-specific TLD with service through ProtonMail)
- password manager - they have their own solution, but it's FF-only; perhaps have a cobranded Bitwarden that integrates with other Mozilla products cleanly
- ad blocker - Mozilla should work with major websites to drop ads and let the user choose between privacy-respecting ads (served by Mozilla based on local browsing history) or anonymous payment (Mozilla would host something like GNU Taler, which you'd load through a method of your choosing)
The last I think could be truly disruptive.
Honestly Mozilla could be a hugely profitable company. There is clearly a market for privacy and freedom tech.
Yup, and they have both a for profit and nonprofit part of the org, so it's totally doable. They just need competent leadership who legitimately care about being independent of search money.