[ksec]

> for misdirecting the company?

As someone who has been using Netscape before even Internet Explorer exists, and followed all of its development through to Firefox till recent few years. I am not surprised.

At first you give them benefits of doubt, because their ideal were good. Then it happened again, again, and again.

>Mozilla Corporation (as opposed to the much smaller Mozilla Foundation) said it had about 1,000 employees worldwide.

Yes, you do need lots of people for making something as complex as browser, But 1000? Out of the 70 employees, they decided to lay off more than a few senior engineers with a decade of experience.

I dont know if this will change HN's perspective on Firefox and Mozilla. Every time I pointed something negative on Mozilla there are someone quick to defend it. As someone who used to religiously defend Netscape and Mozilla when I was much younger. I get it. I could understand the appeal, the ideal. Until you grow older and realise, You didn't have that ideal, the ideal had you.

[MzHN]

>I dont know if this will change HN's perspective on Firefox and Mozilla.

Even if it did, what can we do?

Giving Chrome more market share gives Google more power to shape the future of web technologies, controversial stuff like Manifest v3 and AMP that HN loves to hate.

Personally I'm rooting for Firefox and Mozilla, not out of being a fan of them, but because I'm afraid of the alternative.

[feminintendo]

Completely agree, but do we have to root for Mozilla if we want to root for Firefox?

[tripzilch]

I'm not sure what your question is, there's all sorts of uninteresting complications to the trademarks on the name "Firefox" and how Mozilla deals with it.

[neuronic]

Interestingly this appears like the same misconception and misdirection that lets people be deluded by their idea of "science".

A field that should be an ideal, inherently good space for knowledge and humanity to expand is in fact a cesspool of greedy assholes chasing grants and prestige, reflected in the circumstances around journal publishing.

Egos first, then comes science. If your priorities are the other way around, then sincerely good luck to you.

[pergadad]

What's the alternative? Google? Not really better even if this disappoints about Mozilla.

[qbaqbaqba]

Edge or Brave. Different business models than Google's and to some extent Mozilla's.

[eslaught]

But still beholden to the same rendering engine, and therefore Google's technical decisions about the future of the web. Which is exactly why I would strongly prefer for Mozilla to stay strong, even aside from the non-profit aspect of it.

[m3adow]

Still 100% depending on Google, still supporting a near monopolistic position for the browser. Every Chromium fork is part of the problem, not the solution.

[BrendanEich]

Engine consolidation happened, the fight now is over privacy. When and if Brave is big enough we will chart our own engine course.

[m3adow]

To stay in the martialistic metaphor: In this fight you merely wield the weapons your opponent forges for you. If Google decides to dull your edge in the fight for privacy, you have little influence to sharpen it again.

The only reason you are even able to fight this battle is because of the existance of Firefox. All of the Chrome based browsers are toothless tigers without Mozilla.

[BrendanEich]

I am a for-real founder of Mozilla so spare me. I poured 16 years into it, including a bunch of coding as well as recruiting key talent, managing, and strategic decision making. We restarted the browser market when conventional wisdom said it could not be done. This enabled us to restart web standards (WHATWG => HTML5, ECMA-262 new editions). We did that (not you, unless I know you from old days).

But Google is a monopoly now and has tied its browser to its other products to take over adjacent markets, or buy other companies that pioneered such markets. Mozilla depends on Google for most of its revenue, and on a declining (traffic) basis. Reality requires acknowledging my and others work on Mozilla but not dying on that nostalgic hill. Especially not with such arrant mismanagement as is going on there now.

[BrendanEich]

On engine futures, slow forking works, that is how chromium/Blink emerged from from WebKit. New engines taking lots of capital may happen, probably when there is a massive Bell’s Law device class shift. To argue for others without deep pockets dying on the last war’s hill is to wish those others ill (whether you mean it or not). Users deserve better browsers, and the big user value fight is truly a level up from the engine.

[loulouxiv]

The more influence Google gets over the web standards, the more they will steer it in order to raise the barrier of entry for web engine makers. It will also get them more and more power over what can be commercially viable on the web. Making it easier for them to set the rules for everyone on the web seems directly detrimental to your business. As time passes by for Brave to became "big enough" (supposedly to develop a 2020 state of the art web engine), the complexity of starting a new engine from scratch would continue to grow.

It seems that keeping Gecko up to date with the web standards is the only way to have an concurrent implementation for mid-term. This will get more and more difficult to do the more marketshare Blink gets, since it gets easier for Google to shoehorn whatever they want in the web standards by first making it a "de-facto" standard by implementing it in Blink.

[BrendanEich]

This happens already, e.g. AirBnB deploys new content that breaks in Firefox (perhaps not totally; could be cosmetic or a corner case). Webdevs do not test in low share browsers.

[BrendanEich]

Find "slow forking" elsewhere to see my response to your concern that we would have to make an entirely new engine from scratch this year or next. That's not the threat. We strip out Google tracking already and work in W3C to keep them from jamming premature standards through -- if they try turning any such on without other browsers agreeing, we will disable.

[aloisdg]

You know better than anybody the size of the task of rolling a homemade engine. Is this some vaporware promise or does Brave already started something around this idea?

[cookiecaper]

Not Brendan, but I don't think anyone doubts that Brave would break from the Chromium homogeneity if it were practical to do so.

Production-quality browser engines are not basement projects. Even Google waited until they were the big kid on the block to undertake the project. Per Wired at [0]:

> "The browser matters," CEO Eric Schmidt says. He should know, because he was CTO of Sun Microsystems during the great browser wars of the 1990s. Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin know it, too. "When I joined Google in 2001, Larry and Sergey immediately said, 'We should build our own browser,'" Schmidt says. "And I said no."

> It wasn't the right time, Schmidt told them. "I did not believe that the company was strong enough to withstand a browser war," he says.

Piggy-backing on Google's engine for the time being is effectively turning the Goliath's momentum against itself. If Brave gets a sustainable revenue model and good-enough market penetration, I'd have every expectation that they'd feel liberated to take more direct control over the platform.

[0] https://www.wired.com/2008/09/mf-chrome/

[vbezhenar]

May be in the future web will be simpler?

My theory: browser of the future will need to support wasm and webgl (well, not webgl, but something similar, providing fast and safe interface for GPU). Of course along with smaller standards like fetch api, but that's manageable.

Most of the useful websites will utilize those tech to build their UI from scratch without using of HTML, CSS or JS.

And HTML, CSS and JS engines could be just another wasm blob. For example parts of chromium engine adapted and compiled for wasm. So it's like jQuery.

[jfk13]

I'm not sure "chart our own engine course" necessarily means "roll our own engine".

[tripzilch]

Privacy is not using Google's engine.

I would have given Brave a more serious try if it weren't for that.

(although I very much dislike the payment system, presented as an alternative to the tracking privacy nightmare the web has become. I'm not paying for the difference, that's ridiculous. I saw what they did to the web, I'm not paying to keep them away)

[BrendanEich]

Engines do not by themselves raid user privacy, and we strip out front end and middleware tracking from chromium/Blink. See https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/wiki/Deviations-from-....

You have “who pays” exactly backwards about optional Brave Rewards in your closing parenthetical. We pay you, we do not make you pay.

[tripzilch]

Both run the Chrome engine! That's not an alternative. You really want all available browsers run the same engine, and one that is developed by Google?? You realize they are at step two of "embrace extend extinguish", right? And you realize that by showing their cards with AMP, they totally aren't above actually doing it too?

What do you suppose will happen when the entire web runs on the Chrome engine? No good things.

[anon463637]

There are no good alternatives. The corporations have hijacked the design-by-committee "open standards" by requiring DRM. Hobbyists are shut-out.

Mozilla's FF was once a viable alternative to FAANG privacy monetization, but they're flailing around like their leadership doesn't know what to do but fire engineers and re-organize the deck chairs (org chart) on the Titanic.

[timwaagh]

i don't know what they do for money, but i suppose it's not giving away free internet browsers. so it might have something to do with that.

[BrendanEich]

Search revenue share deals, mainly with Google.

[timwaagh]

Thanks. Although it doesn't really clear up the mystery of what that workforce of theirs is doing.

[BrendanEich]

Look at the majority of the titles under https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/leadership/.