The 2023 annual report recently released by the Mozilla Foundation has attracted widespread attention. The report shows that while Mozilla CEO salary has increased significantly, the market share of its flagship Firefox browser has continued to decline. This phenomenon not only reflects Mozilla's good financial situation, but also reveals that its business focus may be changing, but it also makes people worried about the future of Firefox.
Screenshot of The State of Mozilla website
Specifically, the annual salary of Mozilla CEO in 2022 will be as high as US$6.9 million, an increase of US$1.3 million from last year, reaching a record high. In contrast, Mozilla's overall revenue declined slightly, from US$600 million in 2021 to US$593 million in 2022. This shows that while total financial assets continue to grow, reaching a whopping $1.3 billion, revenue growth has stalled.
What is more noteworthy is that while Mozilla's financial data remains optimistic, the market performance of its core product Firefox cannot hide its decline. According to statistics, Firefox's global browser market share has dropped to 3.04% from 3.79% at the end of 2021 in 2022, a drop of 20%. Considering the rapid development of mobile Internet in recent years, this data further shows that Firefox’s performance on the mobile terminal is poor.
Faced with the decline in Firefox's market share, industry analysts generally believe that it reflects a change in Mozilla's business focus. As can be seen in the financial report, Mozilla's "royalty revenue" has declined, while "subscription and advertising revenue" has increased, which seems to show that it is accelerating the diversification of its business and reducing its dependence on Firefox. Earlier this year, Mozilla CEO made it clear that the company would shift its focus to emerging areas such as artificial intelligence.
Therefore, some analysts pointed out that Mozilla may be at a critical node in its transformation from browsers to new businesses such as artificial intelligence. This may also explain why the salary levels of corporate executives can be significantly increased despite the weak performance of Firefox. It's clear that Mozilla leadership is adjusting to its new development strategy.
But there are also concerns in the industry. After all, Firefox was once a banner of the open source movement and one of the few browsers that could compete with Chrome. Once Mozilla continues to reduce its investment in Firefox, it may have a certain impact on the browser market structure and network openness.
Recently, the Mozilla Foundation report has also triggered heated discussions in the Hacker News community. Many community members expressed confusion and even disappointment at the shift in Mozilla's business strategy reflected in the report. They generally believe that Mozilla should not reduce its investment in Firefox excessively, but should focus more on maintaining its core products.
Some users also said that due to Firefox's privacy protection features, its actual user number may be higher than the statistics. They hope that Mozilla can continue to work on improving Firefox's core functions, such as password management, ad blocking, etc., which are crucial to maintaining the user base. In addition, some community users also called on Mozilla to take action to consolidate Firefox's market position and ensure that the browser market is open and diverse.
Taken together, Mozilla's current market performance does reflect the dilemma of a company in change. The substantial increase in CEO compensation seems to indicate that companies are making market adjustments based on new development strategies, which may be understandable from a business perspective. But as the leading product in the open source industry, Firefox's continued decline is undoubtedly worrying. The balance between maintaining core products and developing new businesses may be the main problem Mozilla currently faces.
Regardless of the prospects, Firefox's status and role in the open source browser market will continue to attract industry attention. Mozilla also faces the challenge of finding the best path between financial growth and maintaining the expectations of the open source community. We look forward to Mozilla's continued commitment to openness and innovation while maintaining its community support. After all, the open source spirit can only continue to flourish with the active participation of the community.
Note: Mozilla’s reports are always lagged by one year, so a lot of information is mentioned in the article for 2022