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
Yup, you can run a non-profit foundation with a for-profit corporation as a subsidiary, because capitalism I guess.
The idea was to try to diversify funding in an attempt to deal with the 500 million dollar existential crisis that is the Google deal, which provides the majority of their funding. What that means is that they want to be a self sustaining tech company with annual revenue of $500 million. What that means is inevitably, fuck the mission, the browser, and the users; make money.
Firefox as it stands now is on its last legs, never to return. The only way it could possibly have a real future as a browser with a market share of over 3% is if somebody without a half a billion dollar boat anchor tied to their waste forked it, and that fork managed to amass a sizeable enough team of contributors to actually maintain and iterate on a modern, secure, feature complete web browser that could keep up with Chromium and friends.
I really wish that didn’t seem nearly as unlikely to me as it does.
(imho but I’m just some guy on the internet)