He's been a part of Mozilla for a long time. He was CMO among many other roles. He's a smart guy and good at handling difficult situations. I think it's a solid choice. It does sound like it's definitely planned to be an interim choice, though.
Fun story: my one personal interaction with Chris was a few years ago. I had learnt that the McAfee Site Advisor add-on was causing Firefox to leak the JavaScript contents of every single page you visited! This was bad.
I was incensed, and I wrote a blog post entitled "McAfee is killing us" (https://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/2012/02/16/mcafee-is-ki...). Chris was CMO and got rather upset with me for my undiplomatic choice of wording. And understandably so; he didn't want a loud-mouthed engineer triggering some kind of Mozilla vs. McAfee story in the tech press.
Fortunately nothing much came of it, publicity-wise. It's worth noting that I offered to take the post down, and he said not to, which is why you can still read it today.
Fun story: my one personal interaction with Chris was a few years ago. I had learnt that the McAfee Site Advisor add-on was causing Firefox to leak the JavaScript contents of every single page you visited! This was bad.
I was incensed, and I wrote a blog post entitled "McAfee is killing us" (https://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/2012/02/16/mcafee-is-ki...). Chris was CMO and got rather upset with me for my undiplomatic choice of wording. And understandably so; he didn't want a loud-mouthed engineer triggering some kind of Mozilla vs. McAfee story in the tech press.
Fortunately nothing much came of it, publicity-wise. It's worth noting that I offered to take the post down, and he said not to, which is why you can still read it today.
Best of all, we did find a way to prevent that leak -- one which many add-ons triggered variations of -- and it shipped in Firefox 15 (https://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/2012/07/19/firefox-15-p...).