The name change to JavaScript, via a trademark license from Sun to Netscape, was on Dec. 4, 1995 -- still within the Netscape 2.0 beta period. There was no stable release of Netscape launched with LiveScript but not JavaScript support.
You may be crushed to learn that, while I did stop working on standard JS in Sept. 1997 when we finished ES1 (started in Nov. 1996), turning to found Mozilla and then Firefox to restart the browser market, which enabled restarting JS standards at Ecma in 2005, I then led the ES4 effort, forged the Harmony peace between ES3.1 and ES4 factions, and continued to work on the standardized language in committee through 2018 March.
BigInt was my last collaboration (with Daniel Ehrenberg). It's in ES2020 and all the engines now. Don't be bitter!
If you mean it's wild to slam USAID, I humbly disagree. Doing so may now seem polarized by U.S. partisan politics, but I gave an example of USAID perfidy (one of many) witnessed by that friend in Europe.
Your attacking me on false grounds as if doing so defends what Mozilla did is the only unbecoming thing I can see here.
I'm a founder of Mozilla (not latecomer or looter). The McKinseyites now running it into the ground deserve criticism from me as well as others who see what is going on. If you don't want to see it, keep using Firefox. Their terms and privacy policy changes still stink, they are integrating Anonym, and they're turning things on by default that we at Brave do not.
Try engaging with the substance of the arguments, not attacking the person making them.
We would not do that on principle, but imagine we're the mustache twirlers you fantasize we are: we'd light our brand on fire doing any such thing, lose all our lead users, stop growing and start shrinking. Think / Type / Post is the Ready / Aim / Fire analogue you seek.
I know that you probably went with Chromium based on the way your relationship with Mozilla ended, but man... I'll never have a Chromium based browser as my daily driver, I simply never trusted the ad company to not do what they ended up doing in the end (killing ad blockers). Brave will always be a no go for me for this reason. And now more than ever, we really need some company with real fire power to take the reins of the Firefox source code and create a real trustable fork.
This is a choice we made. As I wrote in my last reply, I think we would have died trying to get Gecko/Graphene with a Web front end up to competitive scratch vs. Chrome (nm Firefox).
A Firefox fork would have gone over badly with some potentially large number of Mozilla/Firefox fans, and we'd still lack key elements not part of the Mozilla open source (at the time, e.g., Adobe's CDM for HTML5 DRM). On the upside we'd have more UX customizability.
But our choice of Chromium/Blink (via Electron, so we had Web front end upside without Firefox extensions) was not a slam dunk choice. It involved trade-offs, as all engineering does. One downside is we have to audit and network-test for leaks and blunders, which often come from Chromium upstream:
Huh, I was under the impression that you were forking Chromium itself instead of building over Electron. Or are you talking about a past, post-Gecko decision that had to be dropped as well?
No, we started with Gecko (on Graphene, a sandboxing multiprocessor framework from b2g/FirefoxOS). We switched for hard-nosed wins of Chromium (as part of Electron) because out of the box vs. Gecko, most rows in the spreadsheet favored Chromium decisively. This is covered in
Why do you write "probably... based on... relationship ended"? Brave as a startup does not have time for feels not realz, pathos-over-logos nonsense. I recommend you avoid it in your work efforts too.
Thanks for the replies. I did not knew that you started with Gecko. Anyway, Brave is my go to advice when a regular user asks for a mobile browser, it just works out of the box. Not for me, and I still hope to see a Firefox fork becoming the main Chrome competitor in the future.
I get it. I run FF as my primary browser (mostly because I don't want to see the internet devolve into a Blink mono-culture).
But, I always recommend Brave for less-technical folks. It just works! My FF setup includes a number of extensions, some of which need a bit of tuning to be useful. Then you have to deal with issues in websites that just don't properly support FF, etc. My grandmother can install Brave and simply start browsing. Things just work without extra config or tinkering.
Andreas Gal was already CTO after I got the CEO appointment. No "gone back to CTO" and stomp on Andreas in that role. I had been SVP Engineering too, but that was not in the new org chart I set up as CEO. As I've written elsewhere, I left to help Mozilla, not hurt it.
What happened after I left is not in any way on me. I'm not a slave, serf, indentured servant, or lifelong mandatory employee-subject of Mozilla, and I thank God every day for this.
Resigning may have been the only honorable option under those circumstances, to be fair. But I don't think the Org would have spit you out at the CTO or SVP level, even after the controversy.
The boneheaded move was elevating you in the first place. Not that you didn't deserve it or were not capable! Just that it was doomed to create extreme conflict with a large portion of the Mozilla community, which has always had a much broader mission than "simple" excellence.
There's a good argument that this breadth often manifests as a lack of focus, and that anything other than excellence should be secondary at best. But that's not how Mozilla was built or staffed or marketed.
And here we are.
I wish it was otherwise -- and of course I agree that it is absolutely not on you -- but I do sometimes wonder what Mozilla would be like today if not for that Prop 8 donation.
I'm a co-founder (for real, from the start; not someone who did critical legal work creating the MPL and then joined in 1999) of mozilla dot org. We didn't found it or get to Firefox 1.0 by lack of focus or mediocrity.
The breadth or lack of focus you describe is a bug, not a feature.
OK, I apologize for being sloppy there. Strike the "always" from my "broader mission" sentence.
But Mozilla became something else, and staffed itself accordingly, and marketed itself accordingly. The culture evolved to be broad and inclusive.
Some people would argue (as I think you have) that broad inclusivity is, at best, a distraction from technical excellence.
Others would say that inclusivity / diversity is a strength, and Mozilla is an experiment in demonstrating that.
I don't think we can draw any conclusions on that argument from the Mozilla example either way, honestly.
And of course I don't know how you viewed the Org when you left -- did it need a recalibration toward excellence with the accepted risk of alienating 30% of the staff and volunteers? Or did it just need better leadership to get more focused results out of the existing team?
I don't know, and I'm sure you won't want to say! But clearly what has happened in the last ten years has been unproductive.
I'm sure you'd have done a better job at Mozilla than the MOFO BOD has. And I suspect you'd have been able to do a much better job with Mozilla's trust fund disbursement resources, while avoiding the (frankly, obvious) mistakes made at Brave.
No disrespect intended. Seeking revenue is hard, and "obvious" from the outside doesn't map precisely to "not even worth a try" on the inside. I also wonder if the outside view was wrong, and that if you had pushed through the initial negativity, whether people would have acclimated to the novel revenue models, and you could pour more resources into the technology. People put up with worse in other browsers.
Anyway -- I appreciate your conversation here and all of your years at Mozilla. I hope something sustainable and good can come from Brave. I remain a Firefox user, pending further developments. :)
It's hard to know what would have happened had I stayed. Mozilla had a number of late layoffs, some cut good people, none helped. Cutting earlier could have helped more.
The "NGO" die was cast in 2003 when we spun out of AOL as a 501c3. I didn't get a say in that decision. It went poorly after the big Google default search revenue share turned on and the IRS reneged on their promise that we could take the $$$ tax-free as "sponsorship income".
This led to a battle where we ended up paying some back taxes, but contrary to the San Jose IRS agent's position, we did not have to go "be like Opera" and drop the 501c3. We rather used the typical (hospitals, universities, sports teams do it) non-profit parent of taxable for-profit subsidiary structure, with a trademark license fee kicked up to the parent.
The IRS rules governing nonprofits still required the Mozilla Foundation to beg big to go big: the parent had to go find big grants from Soros, Ford, Knight, MacArthur, and give smaller grants to many. This put it in the lefties-only-no-righty-Irish-need-apply revolving-door personnel sector of NGOs and nonprofits (too many glowies there for me, too). Which meant I had a hostile MoFo over my head the minute I got CEO appointment from the MoCo board.
I think looking back that the nonprofit spinout from AOL was a mistake. It didn't focus on either technical excellence or pure do-gooding. It was an uneasy mix of both, neither fish nor fowl.
Of course I can't comment on anything about my exit, for reasons that only the most loopy HN h8ers still can't figure out.
If I may impose further: Can you opine on (or link to something intelligent which you agree with) the health of the browser engine ecosystem?
Obviously you've chosen Chromium/Blink, which I assume was for practical reasons in a fledgling startup. I.e. the relative simplicity of embedding vs Gecko, the at-the-time performance superiority, confidence in upstream maintenance, etc.
I was surprised initially, because obviously you knew Gecko better than anyone. You also know the arguments against a browser engine monoculture.
I'm coming around to the idea that (Blink has won, and) that's not so bad. Because there are so many browsers embedding Blink now (and V8, but no one complains about that!) ... some of which have serious development teams behind them. I remain concerned about a single steward of web standards, but I think that Blink is really good and I hope that there are enough other browsers that rely on it, so if Google were to push Blink in a direction that didn't match the broader goals of the web, that the individual browser teams could fork and maintain it cooperatively.
Is this a pipe dream? Am I bargaining with the reaper?
I've been a Firefox user since before Firefox was Firefox, and Mozilla and Netscape before that. I think I'm abandoning my opinion on the importance of browser engine diversity. Gecko-Quantum has some advantages still, but they're becoming less important -- and more relevantly, they might not matter if Firefox grows increasingly obscure.
(FWIW, every time I try Brave, I bounce off because of the way sidebar/vertical tabs are handled. I need layout density and memory-efficiency. It's been a while though, so I will try again.)
Blink is a fork (April 2013) of WebKit, and Apple keeps Google from monopolizing the engine market.
"If there's no solution, there's no problem." - James Burnham, IIRC (sounds cruel but it's a brutally pragmatic, no-moralizing, epigram about where to focus strategic attention)
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