[glenstein]

>Mozilla did fire an executive with a track record of good decisions for political pressure

Sidebar for this one. Seems like you are referring to Brandon Eich who was CEO for all of 11 days. He was significant to Mozilla in other ways before that, but interestingly, it's his career at Mozilla that most intersects with the period of major collapse in market share.

>while they barely fought on the marketing side of things

Mozilla has long had a rather huge marketing budget that, depending on the person, is something for which they're criticized. I foget the exact numbers, but after software and development, "operations", and legal, marketing is the biggest chunk of spending and it's comparable to those other departments. If you wanted to argue that they are spending too much that actually would, imo, be one of the stronger charges to make against Mozilla, depending on what you think their priorities should be.

[BrendanEich]

> Brandon Eich

To be an elite HN hater, you need to spell my name correctly.

> it's his career at Mozilla that most intersects with the period of major collapse in market share.

This is completely wrong, since I was a founder of Mozilla from 1998 on, so I was there for growth from 0 for Mozilla Suite, then from 0 for Firefox, to the peak after Chrome was out. Did you think I just joined Mozilla in 2010?

Some links:

https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share#monthly-2009...

Note the orange line for Firefox. Statcounter doesn't go back earlier, but we started from 0 with mozilla/browser, grew to a million or two with Phoenix/Firebird, then on to millions from launch on Nov 9, 2004 of Firefox 1.0.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38998243

Lots of decline after I left, but I'll take some blame for decline before I quit, if you credit me for all the growth from inception. Deal?

[glenstein]

I apologize for getting your name wrong.

>This is completely wrong, since I was a founder of Mozilla from 1998 on, so I was there for growth from 0 for Mozilla Suite, then from 0 for Firefox, to the peak after Chrome was out. Did you think I just joined Mozilla in 2010?

This marks the first time I've ever heard someone argue that time period B didn't happen because it was preceded by time period A. I think claiming they both did indeed happen is a more coherent interpretation of historical events.

>Lots of decline after I left, but I'll take some blame for decline before I quit, if you credit me for all the growth from inception. Deal?

I actually love Mozilla and everything it's been able to achieve which is why I'm here pushing back against haters in the comment section. There's currently a mass hallucination happening at HN, where commenters are claiming that Mozilla's various side bets from 2020-2025 retroactively caused the market share losses of 2010-2015. Someone motivated to point to your tenure as capable of reversing those losses would have to reconcile that with the fact that your tenure coincided with the biggest collapse in market share. My hope is not that they would endorse that interpretation, but that it would reveal the motivated reasoning of treating market share decline as reversible if only you had stayed.

I would argue the real largest single driver of market share loss was the emergence of Chromium, and Google's flexing of unparalleled leverage to push Chromium out to everyone combined with Embrace-Extend-Extinguish battle plan on web standards. Excluding that from the story, and trying to framing it entirely in terms of Mozilla missteps is unfair to Mozilla, and is what I'm pushing back against.

[BrendanEich]

From the statcounter links I gave:

>>> (31.82-14.34)x100/31.82

54

>>> (14.34-2.37)x100/14.35

83

54% drop from peak to when I left, 83% drop after. No one said "didn't happen".

[glenstein]

Time period B shows a clear net drop in market share in absolute percentage terms. You reframed it as a percentage drop from peak and combined it with time period A. That’s a shift in metric and scope, not a basis for calling the reference "completely wrong." It would only be wrong if that period didn’t happen which obviously isn’t the case.

[BrendanEich]

If you insist on percentage points not ratios, then how do you apportion blame to me vs the CEOs before me? I was CEO for ten days. I stood up for it to avoid Mozilla going headless longer (Gary Kovacs stepped down by April 2013: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/gearing-up-for-the-next-...).

If it’s all my fault, kindly say how. You will have to come up with reasons why Firefox continued to fall after I left and to date.

[0xy]

He's CEO of Brave which now has a third the amount of market share of Firefox and rapidly rising, while Firefox continues to crater.

[glenstein]

I'll happily credit Eich for his successes if he ever again applies his talents to a non Chromium browser. But right now that's Firefox, and hopefully soon, Ladybird.

[BrendanEich]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43336441 (ladybird)

You go build a web engine. I've done it enough and the fight for user rights is a level up now. Brave would have died on the Gecko or Servo hill, and quickly, if we'd been foolish enough to charge up it.

[sfink]

Not that it matters to anyone, but I feel a responsibility to say it: Brendan, you were right and I was wrong about the CEO pay. It still doesn't bother me as a thing in itself, but it now seems like a critical trigger in the cascade of events leading to the MBA types taking over.

I still disagree with a lot of the HN crowd's complaints about Mozilla, and think we're still serving an important function for now. The bulk of the complaints are applying hindsight to decisions that were difficult at the time, and suggesting alternate paths that are ludicrously unrealistic or optimistic. Other complaints are on target, but way overblown. But the complaint that management has been taken over by the industry-standard hype-chasing short term value extraction mindset? I can't point to any evidence that says they haven't. (Admittedly, it's hard to find a company these days that hasn't...)

[BrendanEich]

Brave rejects that extractive mindset.

People see crypto in Brave and shout "hype", but this is false: we started with the premise that blocking ads by default would require a way for users and creators to get paid or pay, especially for users to get paid. This rules out credit cards, and ACH is way too onerous. We started therefore with a two-sided Bitcoin based user-pays-voluntarily prototype, Brave Payments. Brave Rewards using BAT for a three sided (advertisers pay users who may then pay creators) followed.

More generally, we are Web3 builders, we want decentralization including of payments and finance.

People now see "AI" and shout "hype". We've had ML in the browser and of course in Brave Search for years. LLMs are not going to reach human intelligence, they still need work, but they're a useful front end to search. Not hype, better than ten blue links or the SEO-degraded, Google-cross-promo-infested SERP that doesn't even show blue links above the fold on my phone. Being able to post followup prompts with large context is especially useful.

I agree with you on CEO pay. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43156176 for estimated grand total. Around when the Yahoo! deal failed, it seems Mitchell and the MoCo board made a pact for big pay (rumored $250K/yr to board members for doing little). If merited by results, defensible. As things turned out (not merited), red meat laid out as bait to second-rate MBA/McKinsey types who can be successor-looters while the Google deal pays.