1mo ago

Mozilla chairman's salary vs Firefox market share (as of 2023)

From https://reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1hokr0c/mozilla_chair_pay_vs_firefox_market_share_2023/m4aca4j/:

Total 2022 pay: $6,903,089
Total 2023 pay: $6,260,072 - a $643,017 decrease
Base chair pay: $600,000
2023 chair bonuses and other incentives: $5,622,600

Sources:

For comparison, here are other executive salaries ($0 bonuses for each)

Executive name	Title	Total Pay (2023)
MARK SURMAN	PRESIDENT & EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR	715,143
J. BOB ALOTTA	SVP, GLOBAL PROGRAMS	508,138
ANGELA PLOHMAN	COO, SECRETARY & TREASURER	452,234
ASHLEY BOYD	SVP, GLOBAL ADVOCACY	427,701
ZHILUN PANG	DIRECTOR OF FINANCE	273,069
DAVID WALKER	SENIOR COUNSEL	268,565
LAINIE DECOURSY	DIRECTOR, ORG EFFECTIVENESS	267,028
JUAN BARANI	SENIOR DIRECTOR, GIFT PLANNING	262,879
STEPHANIE WRIGHT	SR PROGRAM MANAGER, MOZFEST	236,785

Firefox @fedia.io

TheTwelveYearOld @lemmy.world

1mo ago

Mozilla chairman's salary vs Firefox market share (as of 2023)

46 9

Firefox @lemmy.world

TheTwelveYearOld @lemmy.world

1mo ago

Mozilla chairman's salary vs Firefox market share (as of 2023)

228 17

136 comments

til my favorite browser has been losing a lot of ground over the years, i guess i've been living in my foxy bubble
- The fact you're on lemmy puts you in good company I believe. I, too, am fighting the chromium curse.
- Fox hole
  
  owo
- You can gain users while losing market share. This graph includes the rise of smartphones (+chrome preinstalled)
  
  It almost perfectly correlates with chrome coming to android circa 2012.
- I suspect the graph is missing a recent rise in usage of Firefox. I feel like Firefox became popular again in late 2024 which isn't on that graph
- One can keep using good software even if others don't.

It’s just a play on the charity CEO scam.
Start a charity
Get a CEO (usually the person who starts the charity)
Pay the CEO what other CEOs make because if we don’t pay at that rate we won’t get the best CEO
Fuck who ever the charity is for they’re just PR to afford the CEO salary
- This is just hyperventilation. There's no scam, there's no conspiracy, it's just the (sad) way the system works.
  
  I think you mean hyperbole
- Do you have examples for this claim?
  
  https://www.charitywatch.org/nonprofit-compensation-packages-of-1-million-or-more

Usually I find these kinds of "non profit CEOs shouldn't make money" things kind of annoying but honestly I don't see any argument for a CEO to make more than a couple million regardless of context.
- Remember people, 12M a year is over 32.000 a day. Every day.
  People live on 32k a year.
  
  Yeah that's fucking insane. 2 million is over the top even
- Yeah I'm not against the CEO earning similar amounts to those of organisations doing similar things and bringing in similar amounts of money... But those CEOs, too, are compensated disproportionately.
  
  Yeah I'm not against the CEO earning similar amounts to those of organisations doing similar things and bringing in similar amounts of money
  This is the exact argument boards of directors (which are made of other CEOs) use to excuse continually ratcheting up CEO pay, which their own boards in turn use to excuse ratcheting up their pay. It's the huge grift of the CEO good ol' boys club.
- Yeah, you need a good and competent CEO and that's especially important for a non profit. But most of those salaries are just extreme. Is it really impossible to find good people without paying them multi million salaries?
- yeah, for profit ceos shouldn't make money either. most ceos are useless at best.

What a poor soul, started out only making half a million dollars a year?? 😑

A better graph would compare salary to revenue and inflation
You can gain users while losing market share
- 2009, that's about the time that smartphones were really taking off.
  Chrome on Android and Safari on Apple now make up almost 90% of all internet browsing.

You know what else coincides with 2009? Google Chrome's release- a browser by a company with far more resources. I'm absolutely not a supporter of CEO pay going up in general- this post is just incredibly lazy
- I dont feel the post is saying the two are correlated, more so simply that despite Firefox doing worse year over year, the CEOs compensation continues to rise.
  
  As much as I’m opposed to Mozilla CEOs paying out absurd amounts, we still have to acknowledge that Mozilla has way more revenue streams nowadays than they had a few years ago.
  So a sinking market share of one of their (free and open source) products doesn’t mean that the company is making less money overall.
  Especially because a sinking market share doesn’t mean there are less users. This graph doesn’t reflect the exponential adoption of smartphones and tablets on which most users just use the preinstalled browser (eg Chrome and Safari).
  So the user base is probably still similiar in size or even bigger, but the number of devices just exploded due to smartphones beeing adopted by a broad audience in markets like Asia and Africa.
  
  This is precisely how I read it.
  
  In other words, the marketshare isn't tied to the ceo? I don't see the point in putting that out there without any context, like is lowering the ceo's compensation supposed to magically give Mozilla more market? Do they want a new ceo? How much is Mozilla making? What's the end goal? Right now they're competing with Microsoft and Google- it's not exactly fair competition.
- Does it make sense for a CEO to be paid more while the business they manage dwindles?
  
  In a vacuum, no- but we all know life is more complicated than this chart. For example, how do they compare to the market rate of other CEOs? Are they increasing profitability (something marketshare alone doesn't say)? I'm not just gonna say "lower ceo pay = problem solved"- we have to do better. CEO pay is a systemic problem and needs a systemic solution- imo it should be capped across the spectrum or based on lowest employee pay but I'm sure I'm in the minority
- The decline started much earlier than the increase of salary
  It couldnt be connected even if there was no other reason

This graph shows a disingenuous relationship between revenue and the market share of a free and open source project within the walls of a not-for-profit organization. Firefox is not a revenue stream in the traditional sense. In fact, most of Mozilla 's money comes from grants and donations for projects and research they do.
I get that CEO=EVIL is a viral topic these days but if all you know about Mozilla is that they make the Not Chrome browser, then you should really educate yourself on what it is that Mozilla actually does for the internet. Then you might feel a little better with this pay scale graph.
That all aside, this graph shows the market share of Mozilla when there were 5 browsers available to the vast majority of users, Internet Explorer, Firefox, chrome, Opera, and safari. It's also before chrome took over the market share from IE at the same time that it pushed out Firefox as the leading browser because chrome was available on the iPhone and was the default browser on Android devices. Hardly a surprise to see that when the internet exploded in users and literally every human being started to carry around a chrome device in their pockets that Mozilla Firefox's market share went down.
- The Mozilla foundation's largest source of revenue is Google, who is also their largest source of competition. To simply keep increasing the pay of their chief executive officer, to keep them kissing the ass of Google, seems like a strategy that doesn't align with what many would consider metrics of a successful project, like active users........
  Looks like you missed the point of the graph.
  
  Graph doesn't even show active users. It shows market share which is totally different. Market share is percentage of total users regardless of how many users are out there. Active users can go up while market share goes down. That's why this graph is disingenuous.
- You are misinformed too.
  This is only about the Mozilla Corporation. Hence, "the ones that make Firefox".
  The ones fighting for an open Internet are the Mozilla Foundation.
  
  The Mozilla corporation are whole owned by the Mozilla Foundation... They are the same company. And both are not-for-profit.
- How much money do they actually spend on the development of Firefox? That's a figure I haven't been able to find. However, in 2023, they had $1.5 billion in assets.
  The only justification for a high-paying CEO is if they need to coordinate some large scale fundraising effort - schmoozing with other rich fucks to gain further donations, and plotting elaborate strategies to get more donations.
  They have $1.5 billion in assets. How much more do they really need? Need someone to manage Mozilla's assets? Make me the CEO. I'll do it for you. In fact, I'll do it for free. That will be my contribution to the Firefox project. I'll stick that $1.5 billion in simple bond and index funds and withdraw at a very conservative 2% rate. And that will provide $30 million a year to spend on developers to improve Firefox and other projects. And we can just keep doing that forever. I'll purposefully withdraw funds at a rate lower than the market averages, so the real value of the endowment grows over time. And that will allow us to slowly expand the scope of operations and start new projects. And while I won't spend any time or effort to schmooze and jet set across the country to kiss the ass of some billionaire, if one wants to throw some money in the pot, we'll have a donation button on the website.
  
  What a self serving wank fest
- Even if he made the air suck everyone's dick and chocolate pudding rain from the sky, he shouldn't have seven million US dollars every year
  
  700k is high for us but low for CEO pay... I don't see why CEOs should get as much money when they never have any liability but that's another question. (Or... what are they really good for, and couldn't they simply be replaced by the decision matrix their team builds for them anyways)
  
  CEO of a major company? Sounds like reasonable pay to me... The problem is that most workers are not getting paid what they deserve (assume this is correct pay for a top level CEO and adjust your thinking on what fair pay actually is accordingly) It's not the CEOs (or doctors, lawyers, actors, etc) who are the root problem... It's the kids born with a billion shares of fortune 500 stock who either grow up to be Trump/Elon or just do fuck all their whole life, but still get to rake in 90% of all "profits". The people who inherited owning the whole world, they are the problem. The CEOs are just assholes willing to work for the people born into wealth... They still suck, and they uphold the shit system for their own benefit, but I don't think they are hoarding the wealth, and I think the wealth being hoarded is the ultimate problem.
- iphone/android etc
  reasonable point but firefox is hardly better off if you look at only desktop share
  https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/desktop/worldwide/#monthly-200901-202411

Seems very suspicious that the CEO is getting paid millions while Firefox's market share is dropping like an anvill.
I think that money would be better spent on improving the browser and making sure there are more privacy protections, maybe even set an example for other browsers to follow. Make average people actually want to use Firefox instead of Chrome.

Firefox isn't their only product, but it's clearly their most popular one so this is very questionable.
Would be even better with info about their other product market share as well, and adjustment for inflation. Wouldn't change the overall message, but would give less stuff for jerks like me to nitpick.
- 1.) Market share is a different number from daily active users. You can have increasing daily active users while losing market share if the market balloons like it did in 2012.
  2.) Mozilla is a nonprofit to begin with. The goal is not to make money on Firefox or any other projects for that matter. The goal is to make the internet better for everyone. Firefox's profitability will never have any real impact on Chairman pay.
  
  Firefox has recorded a drop in active users too.
  Ex-CPO Steve Teixeira stood up to Mozilla laying off people in his department, even though it was turning a profit. Ex-CPO.
  I agree that Mozilla should act like a non-profit, which is in contrast to people in this thread who say Mozilla should be ranked alongside for profit corporations. But I don't see Mozilla practicing what they preach

What is a senior director of gift planning and how does that justify a salary of $260k?
- They're probably responsible for spending the nonprofit's funds in meaningful ways by donating it to smaller projects. There needs to be someone who oversees it and ensures it's not being wasted.
  
  The irony
- The "t" is a typo.
  Dude is in charge of animated memes.

Firefox user here, fuck chrome!
- You can see where chrome and Firefox 3.x coexisted.

Is it adjusted for an inflation?
I smell some spurious correlation.
- 22% inflation vs 700% increase for the CEO between 2016 and 2022?
  
  But inflation for the wealthy was a lot more than inflation for everybody else. If you earn over a million a year, your income MUST increase by at least 2x PER YEAR in order to stay competitive against the rest of the ruling class! Won’t somebody think of the billionaires!!!
  
  Minimum wage went up to $35 an hour, so nothing to see here. /$
- Nobody said this was causal... But also 14x increase is not inflation.
  Its just that its a window into whats wrong with mozilla. Ofcourse many other things led to their downfall aswell.
  
  The CEOs salary has almost zero affect on Firefox's market share.
  That decline can be explained relatively simply by two things.
  One, people are increasing using mobile devices and very very rarely do they install another browser so they are using Chrome on Android and Safari on Apple devices.
  Two, Google was/is using Google dot com to promote chrome. That is not something Mozilla could ever replicate.
  Then there is the other bit where Mozilla tries to diversify their revenue sources and the faithful skewer them for it and tell them "just work on Firefox" when it is clear the market is unwilling to pay for a browser at all.
- sfgsdgdsgdsgdsgdfs
  
  I also wonder how much the shift toward mobile devices in browser market share (>60% today from nearly non-existent 20 years ago) played into declining Firefox market share.
  Not only was Chrome lean, clean and fast at the time, it was also the default option on mobile for Android. Same for Safari on iPhone. Since (most?) people use the default option, especially if it worked well during early adoption on mobile, it seems pretty understandable why we see chrome / safari where they are in browser market share.
  Anyway, I'm glad we still have options like Firefox, and hope we don't see decreasing support for the Gecko browser engine associated with the lower market share.
  
  "barely functional" and it was fantastic

too much money but, mozilla does a lot more that firefox… (see also: rust
- they started it, but it's not been their project for a long time
- Not even, they laid off most of their Rust people already.
- they started it, but it's not been their project for a long time

The thing I resent the most with mozilla is them dropping servo development. It was bringing great changes to firefox.

It's sad to see Firefox continue to lose popularity I thought there might be some kind of comeback but no.
- Part of the problem is both Chrome and Edge come installed by default on the company's own products, and they have massive campaigns to keep you from switching, since user data is so profitable for them to sell.
  It is up to us, the "person who does IT for the whole family" to beat back the other browsers.
  
  Firefox is the default on Linux. ¯(ツ)_/¯
- Ugh I use Firefox because fuck chrome, but they do have some really annoying ass bugs that should have been dealt with long ago before they kept adding features.
  
  Haven't come across any bugs that i know of, but im really annoyed that they still haven't added HDR support. Has been requested for literal years.
  
  Like what?

i switched to firefox because it had tabs and ie didn't. ie7 had tabbed browsing in 2006? i later switched to chrome because firefox stopped working well and i got sick of troubleshooting. i switched to brave a few years ago and started using firefox again this year, but i'm regularly switching browsers still trying to find one i like.
the loss of market share was because of chrome, right? Google had a good reputation back then, and their browser worked easily and you could customize it. I wish there were more options that weren't modified firefox or chrome, but i get why it's tough.
- If I had to guess, this chart lines up pretty well with the adoption of smartphones, so I'd say the drop is due to people using the default Android and iOS browsers on their phones. I've installed Firefox and use it on my phone but I don't know many people who bother changing from the defaults.
  
  That makes a lot of sense! I have trouble remembering exactly when this or that tech was introduced.
- Just the other day, I've been forced to watch at least 10 ads for Chrome on Youtube. Falls upon deaf ears with me, but others, I can imagine, will just mindlessly click and download that shit.

Is the same thing all management does in companies, fill pockets, if possible keep this the same or just let them die, run away.
- Use resume to acquire new CEO job citing experience.

The market share plot looks suspiciously clean, where are those numbers from?
Edit: looks like they're from page view data. I know I spoof my browser to show chrome for better compatibility, I wonder how common that is among Firefox users.
- Do you use this extension? it allows you to do that on a site-by-site basis. Maybe only do it for sites with compatibility issues? You can report them right from the extension.
- I spoof my browser (Librewolf) as Firefox for privacy and I don't encounter issues from not reporting my user agent as Chrome/Chromium. I think it's pretty uncommon for a website to not work on Firefox, so I don't see how this is necessary. The Chrome Mask extension is meant to be used on a per-site basis.
- Also, I was curious if users were going down or if chrome was growing faster. Looks like it is going down, but not as much as the market share would suggest.
  
  https://www.draketo.de/software/firefox-usercount.html

What happened in 2010?
- Google released the stable version of Chrome, and funneled significant resources into marketing it. This was the first stage of their strategy - they focused on firstly making a good product, and the squeeze on users only came later (and is probably only just starting in the scheme of things).

The recently former CEO, Mitchell Baker, made almost 7 million! It had increased exponentially in recent years

Probably not a coincidence that the share plummets around the same time as the smartphone explosion.
I’d be curious to see just desktop browsers, to see how much there’s really an exodus of Firefox users vs. new devices being added that restrict third-party browsers.
Also salary should be inflation-adjusted.
Neither probably changes the graph too much though.
- Right, Firefox has the same situation with Chrome on mobile, as it had with Internet Explorer in Desktop.
- I mean the graph starts in 09, and Chrome launched in 08. I assume that did more to them, but both were probably notable.
  
  Oh wow. Yeah, I always think of Chrome as having been around much longer, but you’re right.

Can we get these graphs for duckduckgo superimposed on this one?

I now recommended https://apps.gnome.org/Epiphany/
Or ladybird browser when it is released.
- That's not a browser I would recommend to most people as it's still in early development and breaks websites all the time. Librewolf/Firefox are better.
  
  Gnome Web is well developed. Works really well on Linux

He is obviously way too highly paid by an insane amount, but where are these people going? There's no way they're all going to Chrome, right?
- Chrome, Safari, Edge (which is chromium anyways).
  According to this 3x as many people use Opera over Firefox when it comes to phone usage worldwide. https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/mobile/worldwide

If this inclusive to all the forks? Alot of folks run forks cus they don't like both ff and chrome. Just sayin.
- Doesn't matter, all the forks combined make up a fraction of FF.
  Plus people moving to forks still hurts Mozilla
  
  Well they can suck the doodoo out my butthole cus that's what they get if they keep going the wannabe big tech company route.

Lowest position pays 2M roubles a month?! Are they selling cocaine?!
- ad-free cocaine, yeah.

I don't like that your graph key indicates the pay line is in $US millions then the axis is in millions not units. Indicating that the values are in millions of millions which seems unlikely

How much is the Duck Duck Go CEO earning?
- DDG is a private company. Mozilla is nominally a nonprofit but clearly is not running itself like one
  
  Mozilla is a company with a non profit branch

The argument is if you don't pay a CEO enough, they will go elsewhere where they are paid more. I don't know whether that is a good argument or not, but (at least some) CEOs have a skill set critical to the success of an organization. It would be interesting to know how the pay of CEOs in general has changed over time. That would tell you if this is shitty or not. My expectation is that it is somewhere in the middle leaning toward acceptable

Honestly I could care less about CEO salaries or company politics. I care about the service they provide. In this case the service is bad.

Graphs like these have been going on for years.
It is possible that the CEO came in and cleaned out the bloat of workers that just come in and hang out basically (common in the tech field and has been done to Twitter (X)). -That would make the salary increase correlate to savings. Showing a correlation between development and available funds would be pertinent. Just off the top of my head, I remember significant improvements since first seeing graphs like this.
Also take into account the competition was dismal until Chrome came along. Much like the game console market when Sony entered it, the browser market was hurting with a hole to fill for a strong leader.
Mozillas politics don't help. Choosing a side can alienate about half your user base. Flip-flopping sides and you're killing off your whole user base. Declaring dishonestly that 'we can't do this without your donations' while making bank from Google (long time ago) doesn't help either. Politics would need to come into play here and how much those are on the CEO.
They mostly appeal to Linux users (people more likely to switch out things), and almost every Linux YouTuber promotes Brave (which is shady af). Brave also has or had an undeniable corporate presence in the browsers sub on Reddit with weekly Brave vs *** for a particular category Brave would win at by low karma accounts. Firefox lacked that marketing, not for being a bad browser. Prior to, they had the FOSS fanbase influencing for them.
Statistics and graphs are tools of propagandists. There might be something there, but there's often a bigger picture to be seen. Firefox isn't a bad browser, and I'm hoping they can turn it around to gain marketshare again. (and drop all politics).

136 comments