[thesausageking]

I can't think of any important things Mozilla has created since pushing Brendan Eich out 9 years ago. That's almost a decade and billions in revenue they've burned through.

There's now almost no programmers on the board or in senior leadership positions. The interim CEO they picked is an MBA who ran a business line at AirBnB.

It seems like another case of MBAs taking over.

[wolverine876]

Rust, for example. How many organizations the size of Mozilla create two revolutionary products in unrelated fields?

[BrendanEich]

I was executive sponsor of Rust, which Graydon Hoare was doing as a personal project while working with me on ES4. Rob Sayre, JS team manager, agreed Rust should be an official project, so Graydon went full time on Rust at Mozilla. This was in 2008.

Later, others notably Niko Matsakis and Patrick Walton (apologies for leaving yet other folks’ names out) took Rust to 1.0.

Mitchell didn’t know what Rust was until I explained it, wasn’t CEO when we made it an official project, but was CEO for this:

https://www.zdnet.com/article/programming-language-rust-mozi...

[bakchodi]

Holy shit, this is actually Eich. Comment deserves more attention

Huge fan, you were pushed out unfairly - it's wild that you were fired for donating money to a vote that passed. It was a normal and popular opinion at the time.

[COGlory]

Brendan, I'm a big fan of a lot of your work, but I really think it's a poor look commenting in this thread at all. Most folks on HN are well aware of Mitchell's record, and those that aren't...well it's willful ignorance on their part.

[cwaffles]

Why is this a poor look? I was not aware of Brendan's involvement with Rust, nor the effect of the firings on the Rust team.

[COGlory]

I think it comes off as petty to punch down, and wanted to let Mr. Eich know (out of respect) in case he didn't realize it. But if he realizes it and doesn't care, or just disagrees, that's his decision.

[BrendanEich]

Punching down implies I’m up. How do you figure that? I’m not at Mozilla, not paying myself a seven figure salary, not ever engaging with the Davos set.

In any event, my comment laid out salient bits Rust history, which however much you might not like them, do not “punch” anyone.

[wolverine876]

You are only getting Brendan's story, and why is Brendan going out of his way to attack Mitchell Baker? It strongly implies some powerful drive besides sharing information.

[archerx]

Why are you fighting against facts from people that were there and why are you white knighting the person who has destroyed firefox’s marketshare?

[BrendanEich]

I did not attack Mitchell.

[azemetre]

Didn’t the CEO literally fire the entire rust team, not start the team?

I guess that’s a surplus good if you meant for all these highly skilled engineers taking their talents to other companies.

[wolverine876]

Did they? They helped Rust form it's own foundation and spun it off.

[azemetre]

Yes they did:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24143819

[wolverine876]

That doesn't match your prior statement.

[azemetre]

Fair enough, I think a literal decimation is close enough.

[depr]

Didn't Netscape create Firefox?

[wolverine876]

Netscape, on its deathbed (and I think due to Baker's efforts, in part), open-sourced the Netscape code. Mozilla was created by ex-Netscapers, developed that code, and released a few versions of a Mozilla browser, which followed Netscape's idea of integrating browser, mail client, webpage editor, other stuff (maybe IRC client?).

Sometime later, a few Mozillians decided the web and Mozilla needed a simple, sleek, fast browser, and built Firefox.

[toyg]

Mozilla was created by Netscape itself, before its "deathbed". They were possibly the first "open-core" project of significant scale: they wanted to do a Big Rewrite (Netscape 4 code was unmanageable and crusty), and hoped that doing it as opensource would speed things up. The original Mozilla suite was supposed to be the experimental/rough version, which Netscape would then polish and sell as its own. Unfortunately, by the time this happened (and it did happen - Netscape released a few Mozilla-based versions), the browser market was entirely commoditized and there was no path to profitability for Netscape (which had been absorbed by AOL by then). The Big Rewrite took way longer than expected, and the open setup introduced even more development friction.

The Mozilla suite never got anything else beyond browser/mail/editor. I think the AOL version shipped a bunch of extra bookmarks and that's it. They had already built some infrastructure for extensions and themes though, and that's effectively what Firefox took to extreme consequences: a skunkwork group of Mozilla devs stripped the suite down to the lone browser, and forced everything else to be an extension. That was Phoenix (rebirth and all that), which became Firebird (because people can't spell Phoenix, and the other surviving products could be aligned as Thunderbird and Sunbird), which became Firefox (because oops in IT there's a Firebird already, a database with angry lawyers).

[wolverine876]

That sounds more accurate to me. Sorry everyone, I should have made clear that my version might be off in a few details.

[archerx]

You seem to have a very strange bias.

[jacooper]

Compare that to what Eich achieved with brave in that period.

[jononor]

I am a bit unsure how to interpret this... Has he achieved a lot, or nog so much, comparatively?

[warkdarrior]

He managed to do a lot of things with Brave, compared to how much Firefox changed. That's a fact irrespective of one likes Brave or not.

[jacooper]

He achieved a lot. Launched a new browser with full privacy protections by default, an independent search engine, a private LLM service and more while Mozilla just rebranded things from others.

[wolverine876]

It's not a competition. Who are you or I to judge?

[jacooper]

If anything, it shows how Mozilla with it's resources are just wasting money, brave was bootstraped with a much smaller team and capital, yet they defended privacy in a way Firefox never could.

[wolverine876]

> they defended privacy in a way Firefox never could

I have some familiarity with Brave. They use Chromium (or some components of it?) which is probably more secure from attackers. It has some built-in privacy, but how is it better than Firefox's?

[jacooper]

Because it blocks ads and all trackers with no exceptions? The reason is they aren't afraid from Google, in addition to that they launched a fully independent search engine and added new isolation features to chromium, like localhost access and cookie isolation.

[wolverine876]

> Because it blocks ads and all trackers with no exceptions?

Are you asking me?