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A Growing Consensus That Mitchell Baker's Objective is to Make Firefox Fail or Passively Let It Perish (Google Pays Most of Her 7+ Million Dollars Per Year Salary)

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jan 03, 2024

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We only know her 2022 (and prior) salary. It must have increased with inflation (in her salary's case, it's about 20% per annum). And no, Mitchell, chatbots are not "AI" and they're not a viable future, just pure hype. Even the Wall Street media openly admits this today.

Mitchell Baker

MOZILLA is basically a failed company (yes, company!) if it fails to do what it was supposed to do or what its 'customers' (not Firefox users) expect it to do. Mozilla's real client is Google, to name the main one, never mind who runs it and what the real objective are (monopoly, binary blobs, mass surveillance and so on).

From an interesting new discussion that also brings up Gemini Protocol:

My take on this is very simple. If you read that blog, he gushes about Mozilla's struggle against the IE monopoly, but then completely side steps the new chromium / blink monopoly - and goes on to waffle about "AI" projects and the people involved (in other words, Mozilla wants to pour money into these and see what comes of it, while still maintaining funding). Opera, Edge, Vivaldi, Brave, etc, etc - and most of the numerous "apps" used on smartphones for multiple purposes are all just "reskinned chromium" as someone put it. It's a monopoly only Mozilla were ever in the position to challenge and they have long since capitulated.

Mozilla are not challenging that monopoly because its main source of funding comes from the "big tech" corporation behind that same monopoly.

I blame the project and foundation as a whole and the CEO (read the Lunduke article linked in a previous post). Mozilla have taken corporate donations to essentially develop anything but their browser - i.e. the one viable threat to the chromium/blink monopoly.

Mozilla laid off a lot of developers including the Rust and Servo teams a few years back. The ultimate result of which was to effectively place Rust under the supervision of yet another big tech cartel, including google and Microsoft and to pass Servo onto the Linux Foundation (one of the largest big tech cartels). So rather than continuing down the route of developing a memory safe language and browser engine - Mozilla is now plunging ahead on the route to total obscurity and irrelevance.

This is also discussed in Slashdot at the moment. The top comment:

AI is neato but I don't need it in my browser.

What I need in my Browser is for it to work well and provide me functionality.

Bring back the functionality lost in the switch from the old extensions interface (not the interface, just the functionality) and we can talk about supporting your AI bullshit.

One response to that:

They can stuff all the AI they want into it, as long as this doesn't weigh down the browser and consumes more resources (not bloody likely) and keeps ads at bay (not much more likely either)...

In other words, maybe try to concentrate on something the user of your browser actually wants, like keeping tracking at bay, kicking social media trackers out and scrubbing ads, and you might see your browser pick up users.

It's reassuring to see that more people nowadays understand how Mozilla really works and why. Will that cause changes at Mozilla? Not likely. Recall who Mozilla adds to the Board.

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