New Mozilla CEO to double down on Firefox

SOFTWARE

Current CEO Mitchell Baker is stepping down in favour of board member Laura Chambers, who’s taking up the mantle for the rest of this year.

In early February, current Mozilla CEO Mitchell Baker announced she will be returning to her former role as Mozilla Corporation executive chairwoman. For the remainder of 2024, her role will be filled by Laura Chambers, who has been a member of the Mozilla board for the past three years.

Speaking on the Mozilla blog, Baker emphasised Chambers’ “wealth of experience”, which includes senior roles at Airbnb, PayPal and eBay. Baker also outlined Chambers’ goals for the coming year.

One of the main goals is supposedly doubling down on key Mozilla products, such as the Firefox browser. A quick trip to the Mozilla website lists its family of products, including the corporation’s recent announcement of a paid Monitor Plus service, which supposedly can remove subscribers’ personal information from data brokerage sites. This seems to be in line with the stated goals of also bringing new products to market.

Baker has also promised that she will represent Mozilla more consistently in public, “With a focus on policy, open source and community – through speaking and direct engagement with the community.”

This will no doubt come as welcome news to Firefox lovers, given that during Baker’s time at Mozilla, she’s seen the browser’s market share fall from a record high in 2010 of around 34% to a little over 3% in 2024.

The existence of other so-called family products, like Mozilla VPN, Pocket and Relay, also means any new CEO will have to divide their attention between these and Firefox itself.

It’s unlikely Chambers will be able to tip the odds back in Firefox’s favour before she leaves for Australia at the end of 2024. A number of Redditors responding to the announcement also speculated that a CEO whose experience comes mainly from selling commercial products may not have a sufficient grasp of open source projects, particularly with regard to resource allocation for active development.

Still, said commenters may not realise how commercialised Mozilla is these days. While the Mozilla Foundation remains a not-for-profit, it also has two commercial entities: Mozilla Corporation and MZLA Technologies Corporation.

In 2020, after returning to the position of CEO, Mitchell Baker was awarded a salary of over $3 million, even as around 250 employees (including a number of Rust core developers) were laid off due to shrinking revenues. Although the company accepts donations, the vast majority of its revenue (around 85%) comes from Google, the default search engine for Firefox.

With a browser propped up by the developer of rival Chrome, forprofit arms and controversial bonuses, new CEO Chambers is in for a challenging year. Read the full announcement at https://mzl.la/3OzMmTt.

Mozilla’s new CEO will hold the post for the rest of 2024. Her main focus will be on core products.

Chrome’s market dominance is a potential concern, given Mozilla derives most of its revenue from making Google Firefox’s default search engine.

CREDIT: Stat Counter