[utku_karatas2]

Mozilla the foundation did deserve this.

This is what you get when you force a perfectly technical CEO out and let the MBA types steer the ship. A browser is a forever bleeding edge tech; you need engineers all the way to the top. They chose political correctness over technical prowess and the product has lost the edge.

[acdha]

You're letting your personal politics cloud the facts. Firefox was struggling well before that point, not because it was bad but because Google was pouring enormous amounts of money into Chrome and the only way you don't lose in that situation is if the competition screws up.

Firefox had a big decade because Microsoft put IE on a starvation diet after Netscape folded but Google shows no sign of making a similar level of error. Firefox has never been better technically but at the end of the day they're fighting on the wrong side of a war which will be decided by budgets.

[yuhong]

I remember this debacle: https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/497ebm/rewe_dont_w...

[467568985476]

I don't buy it. Eich was hardly a wunderkind capable of carrying a browser on his shoulders alone. And in a market for engineers that currently favors labor, do you really want to be on the wrong side of the social issues that your staff generally care about? Maybe they would have left to work on Chrome if Eich had stayed. That doesn't even speak to the myriad technical and resource issues that Mozilla faced prior to that particular incident.

[reedlaw]

> Eich was hardly a wunderkind capable of carrying a browser on his shoulders alone.

How about Brave [1]?

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_(web_browser)

[detaro]

Has most of the engineering done by Google, since it is based on chromium?

[ubernostrum]

Unlike the post linked below, I am not anonymous (it's very easy to figure out who I am) and I am verifiably a former employee of the Mozilla Corporation.

And if you think it's as simple as "political correctness"... I don't even know how to begin talking to you.

Remember: we're not talking about someone "just expressing an opinion" here (as many discussions tried to claim at the time). Brendan didn't just say something, or write something: he actively worked to have his personal opinion -- of whose lifestyle was acceptable and whose lifestyle wasn't -- written into the fundamental law of the state where Mozilla is headquartered. And that opinion, once it became law, hurt employees of the company he was trying to lead, and told them they were effectively second-class citizens.

Such a complete and utter lack of regard for one's fellow humans is disqualifying no matter how much "technical prowess" someone might have. His only choices at that point were to come back in line with the bare-minimum requirements of a free society (such as equality of all people before the law), or be shown the door. And any attempt to dismiss that as "political correctness" reveals a lot about the nature of the person attempting to dismiss it.

[lern_too_spel]

Don't kid yourself. Firefox was losing long before Eich left and was even more technically inferior relative to its competitors at the time of his departure.

[DonHopkins]

Stop spreading misinformation. Brendan Eich left Mozilla of his own free will. You're lying when you claim he was "forced out". Quite the contrary. They begged him to stay.

"Since then, there has been a great deal of misinformation. Two facts have been most commonly misreported: 1. Brendan was not fired and was not asked by the Board to resign. Brendan voluntarily submitted his resignation. The Board acted in response by inviting him to remain at Mozilla in another C-level position. Brendan declined that offer. The Board respects his decision." [1]

The only people who were "forced out" against their will were the Californian citizens who were forced out of their existing legal same-sex marriages, thanks to the anti-gay propaganda than Brendan Eich willingly and unapologetically paid for.

You're the one who is choosing to propagate the political correctness of homophobic politicians fighting against marriage equality, by misstating the facts and parroting lies to make a politically motivated point in the defense of bigotry, then projecting your own political correctness onto other people.

And you're also wrong to believe that he could have steered the ship away from where it was inextricably headed. Or do you honestly believe that homophobes are the growth market for web browsers, so as a high profile anti-gay-marriage pro-Prop-8 poster child, his bigotry-inclusive outreach to countries like Indonesia, which he claims have many oppressed gay-marriage opponents who support him but don't "have quite the megaphone", could have turned the ship around? [2]

"Now, in his first interview on the subject, Eich is responding with a message that Mozilla is at its core inclusive -- not just of gay-marriage supporters but also of people like him or gay-marriage opponents in Indonesia who also are part of the Mozilla cause."

"For Mozilla, it's problematic because of our principles of inclusiveness, because the Indonesian community supports me but doesn't have quite the megaphone."

Eich also stressed that Firefox worked globally, including in countries like Indonesia with "different opinions," and LGBT marriage was "not considered universal human rights yet, and maybe they will be, but that's in the future, right now we're in a world where we have to be global to have effect." [3]

"Actually, Mr. Eich, right now we’re in a world where you have to not be a bigot if you want to be an effective leader of an organization like Mozilla. And it’s about time."

[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2014/04/05/faq-on-ceo-resignat...

[2] https://www.cnet.com/au/news/mozilla-ceo-gay-marriage-firest...

[3] http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2014/04/03/brendan_e...