Comment by Animats
It's been all downhill for Mozilla since Brendan Eich was fired.
It's been all downhill for Mozilla since Brendan Eich was fired.
No, that isn't correct.
Brendan was in charge of a company built on LGBT people. For him to turn around and donate to anti-LGBT political causes was not appropriate. The company fairly lost faith in him. How can you work somewhere your boss hates you so badly he campaigns against your basic human rights?
However, Brendan also did not increase his own pay by hundreds of percent while laying off over a quarter of the staff, which is what the executive teams since Brendan have done.
The bad stuff in Firefox started when the C-suite, now lead by an ex-McKinsey CEO, started lining their own pockets instead of running a technology company.
Crypto: https://x.com/mozilla/status/1476951030638260225
LLM integration: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/ai-chatbot
Would it though?
I've always wondered why he didn't use Firefox as the base for Brave.
They did use Gecko as the base originally:
"In 2015, before we released to users, the Brave browser actually was built on the Gecko engine. However, early on our engineering team realized that Gecko lacked important product features, led to more Web compatibility (webcompat) issues, and overall had poorer performance." (1)
This.
Brendan Eich was the Director of Mozilla. This is the guy who invented Javascript in 10 days, at Netscape, and then co-founded Mozilla, and became the technical lead. He was Chief Architect of Mozilla, then CTO of Mozilla Corporation, then CEO. He made Firefox great. This was when Mozilla was in its heyday, and passed IE in marketshare.
Then he was fired in 2014 because a bunch of people went crazy that he made a $1,000 political donation for a California ballot proposition that had nothing to do with computers.
This sent a signal that Mozilla doesn't reward technical improvements to its software — it rewards following political trends.
All of the bad stuff in Firefox started then.