Laura Chambers will step in as interim CEO to run operations until a permanent replacement is found.
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.
They're legit companies, but they do not operate with the goal of profit. Profit is something they may make, and in many cases it's good so they can survive losses of funding or the like.
It also means they get certain tax advantages because they are not solely focused on profit
Ironically, all of these things except Abrowser are based on Konqueror’s original engine, KHTML, so Konqueror was actually the OG engine. KHTML was forked to WebKit, which was forked to Blink, which became the underpinnings of Qt WebEngine, which Konqueror now uses.
This is also why KHTML still appears in the user agent strings for all of these engines, but back in the day the Gecko engine used in Mozilla products was already a thing and KHTML was the alternative to that, hence “KHTML, like Gecko”.
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.