- cross-posted to:
- firefox@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- firefox@lemmy.ml
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
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“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.
Chrome is just the internet, duh. Do you not support the internet? I have two internets on my computer, in case the first goes down or something. But the one internet hasn’t had any issues, I just keep the second as a backup.
– anyone in US govt
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.
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
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.
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.
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
Without knowing anything about her you shouldn’t assume anything about her.
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.
I think they need to integrate better with their paid offerings to build additional revenue streams. For example, Mozilla VPN works with Container Tabs, but I had to look for it; that’s a pretty killer feature IMO. Make it work on mobile too and a lot of people would be interested. Maybe they could white label a password manager (Bitwarden?) as an alternative to their built-in PW manager service, and make the experience really good. Throw in Relay as well.
There’s a lot they could do with opt-in, privacy-centric features that I would be totally interested in.
Maybe they could white label a password manager (Bitwarden?)
not sure starting at which version, but in android you can set bitwarden as a default password manager system wide which integrates pretty seamlessly with firefox and other apps. only place i know bitwarden doesn’t really integrate well with firefox is on Linux but that seems more due to bitwardens lack of interest to implement freedesktop apis.
i agree though with additional revenue streams, they need to break dependence on Google search engine revenue. maybe spend research on alternative monitization to ads and sponsored content that could be implemented at a browser level and split revenue between browser and websites.
split revenue between browser and websites
Yeah, I was super stoked when Brave announced that, but it went nowhere.
I have ideas here as well. Basically, Firefox would integrate some kind of micro-transaction system where you could load up some amount of money, then you pay per view for a given website and it deducts from that balance, and in exchange you get no paywall or ads. Or if you don’t pay, you’ll see privacy-respecting ads served by Mozilla, and Mozilla would make monthly payments to the website with MTX and ad revenue to preserve privacy.
This would be opt-in by website of course, and hopefully they can get enough websites to opt in to matter. I would be happy to spend like $10/month or whatever to not have any more paywalls and not have to make accounts everywhere.
But yeah, there are a ton of privacy-respecting monetization options, so hopefully the new interim CEO has some ideas. A good model here could attract new users while also securing Mozilla’s revenue for the future.
I’m no cryptography expert but I don’t see how they could implement this with true anonymity or without it being spoofed in other browsers. There is currently no way to know with absolute certainty what browser/client web traffic is actually coming from and game anti-cheat devs will probably tell you it’s a nightmare of a problem.
The way I see this working is making it a Mozilla account thing and not a Firefox thing through some sort of stateless cross-origin cookie the sites agree to support. But then, you’re giving up at least some privacy because even if the sites you visit don’t know who you are, you’ll still have to trust that Mozilla is logging anonymized visit counts and that some CEO 5 years from now isn’t going to change that for a quick buck.
Maybe I’m just out of my depth here and someone’s gonna correct me (please do if I’m wrong).
Here’s the way I see it working:
- Mozilla sends sites a key that can be used to verify a signed client token
- You register w/ Mozilla, and Mozilla sends you a signed token with your payment authorization (includes an expiration time and random ID)
- Your web client sends your token as a header to the site in question with your signed payment auth token
- Sites verify your token’s signature and respond w/ an acceptance, and keep their own log of transactions
- Your browser logs the transaction and updates your balance
- Periodically, Mozilla compares their transactions with news sites to catch anyone using tokens incorrectly
Each week (or more often), you get a new signed token with no reference to the old signed token. In the event that you use more than your agreed-on balance, you must pay the difference or you won’t get a new token. So here’s the information each party needs to know:
- Mozilla - some stable id between you and Mozilla w/ links to generated tokens and your balance
- sites - random auth token, signed by Mozilla, with a transaction log for that token
- your browser - payment details, transaction log (includes websites visited), your stable id, etc
The only way Mozilla could know your identity is by sending data from your browser that links id info (i.e. Mozilla account details) with that stable payment id. Mozilla could even move the stable id and token generation to a separate legal entity entirely (say, an extension) with publicly audited data transfers w/ Mozilla, and Mozilla just gets a summary from each client (unrelated to the payment id, signed by the extension) so they know which sites were visited with what frequency. They would get a bill from sites based on usage, which they’d compare with the data collected from individual browsers to sort out payment.
In terms of user experience, you’d just get a prompt from the extension asking whether you’d like to see ads and the cost, and if you choose ads, the header would include that info as well (i.e. process this payment token as ads or cash) and Firefox would serve privacy-respecting ads from Mozilla’s domain.
I haven’t fully ironed out the details, but I think this proves feasibility.
I’m on Linux and have used Bitwarden for years. If it is better on some other os, I don’t know how. I’m certainly not feeling a need for improvement.
main difference is auto fill support and detection based on domain and/or application. mainly saves a few clicks and also prevents passwords from leaking through clipboards.
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.
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
pivots to data privacy
Should have not named Laura then, just to highlight the point. 😛
Why?
To protect her privacy, of course
For Laura’s Privacy!
Sorry, it’s a dumb recurring joke among Privacy nerds.
Mozilla is pivoting to privacy or the old CEO is?
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
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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
Yup, you can run a non-profit foundation with a for-profit corporation as a subsidiary, because capitalism I guess.
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.
They have a for-profit subsidiary, for tax purposes.
