New Mozilla CEO

Mozilla's executive chairwoman Mitchell Baker announced in a blog posting on Monday that the troubled company had finally picked an old face Chris Beard for its new chief executive.

Beard, who has served as Mozilla's interim CEO since April, had worked as Executive-in-Residence at the venture capital firm Greylock Partners, before returning to Mozilla. In his earlier career Beard had worked at Mozilla since 2004 and the launch of Firefox 1.0.

As Baker noted, "During his many years here, he at various times has had responsibility for almost every part of the business, including product, marketing, innovation, communications, community and user engagement."

Beard's being asked to lead an open-source company from a terrible mis-step with its last CEO, Brendan Eich. Eich's appointment and anti-gay marriage politics lead to serious morale problems. When all was said and done Eich served as CEO for a mere nine days.

In addition, the business faces a hard deadline to find new revenue streams before its Google advertising contract concludes later this year. With approximately 90 percent of its income depending on Google, and little reason to think that Google will renew the contract, Mozilla faces a make-it or break it crisis.