Business Longtime Mozilla leader Mitchell Baker is now CEO

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Longtime Mozilla leader Mitchell Baker is now CEO
Baker has been the interim CEO of the Firefox browser maker since December 2019.
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Alison DeNisco Rayome
http://www.twitter.com/alisondenisco
April 8, 2020 9:48 a.m. PT
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- 01:17



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Meet Mitchell Baker, Mozilla's permanent CEO.
James Martin/CNET
On Wednesday, Mozilla chair and longtime leader Mitchell Baker was named permanent CEO of the company that makes the Firefox web browser.
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."
Mozilla has been prioritizing issues like privacy protection and fighting surveillance online, and has been expanding into areas like password management, file sharing and private network connections. In January, the company laid off 70 employees as part of the effort to move to those priorities.
In February, Firefox enabled new privacy features in the US to make it more difficult for ISPs or others to track users online. In April, it made an update to its search bar to improve productivity.
 
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I dont know, the steps look promising, maybe the will build in an ad blocker.
 
Oh, forgot this browser even existed. Actually I still have it installed for some reason, I should fix that.

Edit: fixed
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Mozilla is still installed for the sole purpose of occasional website debugging, to see if a user's problem is a Chrome/Edge issue. Other than that, it hasn't been relevant since they kicked out the dude that helped found Brave.

The increasing vertical integration of internet experience remains a deep challenge... Mozilla has a special, if not unique role to play here.
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Changing the verticality of the web stack requires forcing standards through and deploying ubiquitous feature sets. Your browser has 4.4% overall market share. You aren't in a unique position to do anything.

I understand this is generic gung-ho executive speak, but nothing Mozilla has done recently makes them seem worthy of leading any kind of internet-changing crusade. The best they could try is develop a webkit level alternative to Chrome that leapfrogs its current evolution, and they don't seem capable of that anymore.
 
FlappyBat said:
You're still dependent on Google then.
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Considering Mozilla is just a toddler version of Google, Firefox isn't much better than Chrome. Your only real bet is using a fork of either, and Chrome forks are actually nice whereas Firefox forks just look like some hellspawn straight out of 2002. And Brave is a really nice fork, honestly I like it even more for the fact that it's taking a shitty product and making it good as opposed to just doing it from scratch.
 
Your Weird Fetish said:
Explain.
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It's based off of Chromium (Google) and is dependent on them to stay up to date. All the heavy lifting browser shit is done by Google and they slap some paint on Chromium and call it Brave.

I'm not even saying that's bad. Just they do depend on Google and it's possible for Google to start pushing shit into Chromium that Brave reasonable couldn't take out.
 
FlappyBat said:
It's based off of Chromium (Google) and is dependent on them to stay up to date. All the heavy lifting browser shit is done by Google and they slap some paint on Chromium and call it Brave.

I'm not even saying that's bad. Just they do depend on Google and it's possible for Google to start pushing shit into Chromium that Brave reasonable couldn't take out.
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Fugg what do I do now? Waterfox is shit.
 
Your Weird Fetish said:
Fugg what do I do now? Waterfox is shit.
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I use brave as my main browser. I think the tradeoff is worth it. It's a good browser and it makes it easy to support the farms.

I just don't want people to think they are making a clean break from Google when Brave is downstream from Chromium.
 
FlappyBat said:
It's based off of Chromium (Google) and is dependent on them to stay up to date. All the heavy lifting browser shit is done by Google and they slap some paint on Chromium and call it Brave.

I'm not even saying that's bad. Just they do depend on Google and it's possible for Google to start pushing shit into Chromium that Brave reasonable couldn't take out.
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For better or worse, Chromium has become the Linux of browsers. Google may be a major authority, but it's far from the central one anymore. You've got tons of corporations, most notably Microsoft, who have direct investment in it. It's not just a matter of what they say goes anymore, now it's more like a software nation. It's the central browser backing the entire web now. Google can do whatever they want to Chrome proper, but Chromium is now kind of sacred.
 
FlappyBat said:
It's based off of Chromium (Google) and is dependent on them to stay up to date. All the heavy lifting browser shit is done by Google and they slap some paint on Chromium and call it Brave.

I'm not even saying that's bad. Just they do depend on Google and it's possible for Google to start pushing shit into Chromium that Brave reasonable couldn't take out.
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Isn't Chromium an open source project, though? What kind of vectors could Google force down Brave's throat?
 
The Fool said:
For better or worse, Chromium has become the Linux of browsers. Google may be a major authority, but it's far from the central one anymore. You've got tons of corporations, most notably Microsoft, who have direct investment in it. It's not just a matter of what they say goes anymore, now it's more like a software nation. It's the central browser backing the entire web now. Google can do whatever they want to Chrome proper, but Chromium is now kind of sacred.
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I dont exactly trust Microsoft to act as a counter balance to Google. I also think if there's a fork, the one Google picks will win almost regardless of who is on the other side.

Pissmaster said:
Isn't Chromium an open source project, though? What kind of vectors could Google force down Brave's throat?
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So is Android. Have you seen the state of android open source outside of Google?

It is open source, but they can start pushing through changes and make it such a mess to pull out what you dont want that you are left having to fork heavily up stream and miss out on all the later development (security, optimizations, etc) that it just isn't reasonable possible.
 
Pissmaster said:
Isn't Chromium an open source project, though? What kind of vectors could Google force down Brave's throat?
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They can try to force new standards that deprecate old ones, like how they tried to break adblockers with a new plugin API. It doesn't work. And even then, there would be people supporting the older stuff anyway.

P.S. I like how Firefox is so irrelevant that a thread about Mozilla just turned into a Chromium/Brave thread.
 
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