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1. In hindsight, I firmly believe that Persona's emphasis on browser integration was a red herring, and directly resulted in an architecture that was intractabl

1. In hindsight, I firmly believe that Persona's emphasis on browser integration was a red herring, and directly resulted in an architecture that was intractably centralized. 2. We committed massively to Firefox OS relative to our size and revenue.

sroussey 10y ago
And reaped some good memory efficiency in the process.
WhatOn1 10y ago
3. Can you give us more insight into how the Eich ordeal is looked at in retrospect at Mozilla? Would it happen again in a Peter Thiel kind of situation?
- callahad 10y ago
  Respectfully, I'd rather not wade into that on HN. It's in the past, and there's a great deal of nuance that would be hard to convey here. I'm confident that Mozilla is in a good place today.
WorldMaker 10y ago
With respect to your first point, is this a catch-22 that might ever be solved? The place that is best capable of providing the right UX for something like SSO/identity management/authentication does seem to be the browser, yet even if it isn't a red herring (as you seem to think) it certainly doesn't seem at this point to be a path that can lead to success (just off the top of my head: Persona, Microsoft's first "Passport" attempt in the Windows 9x era, Microsoft's CardSpace in the Vista era) because it's obviously not enough for a browser to support it if websites don't support it...
- callahad 10y ago
  It's possible that the FIDO Alliance, with enough support from large enterprises, will be able to compel browsers into implementing something native. Otherwise, it feels like anything in this space will need to bootstrap itself by, first and foremost, working on the Web without special consideration by browsers.
BrendanEich 10y ago
Hi Dan, I recall well all the meetings and arguments from the early days. The commitment to Firefox OS (née B2G) was late. It came after two years from B2G launch in late July 2011, until after Ben Adida left in July 2013. Mike Hanson took over for Ben on the identity team side; Fernando Jiménez Moreno from Telefónica (https://github.com/ferjm https://github.com/ferjm) did the B2G-side work. Maybe that was right on time. I don't think so: Facebook Connect was even more entrenched, and Android installed base was climbing out of the Gingerbread 2.3 swamp. The commitment may have been massively massive once started, from your point of view. However, it was almost two years late precisely because we had to argue endlessly, from executive level down, against Ben's preferred non-Firefox/non-OS browserid adoption strategy: the JS shim library.

sroussey 10y ago

And reaped some good memory efficiency in the process.

WhatOn1 10y ago

3. Can you give us more insight into how the Eich ordeal is looked at in retrospect at Mozilla? Would it happen again in a Peter Thiel kind of situation?

callahad 10y ago
Respectfully, I'd rather not wade into that on HN. It's in the past, and there's a great deal of nuance that would be hard to convey here. I'm confident that Mozilla is in a good place today.

WorldMaker 10y ago

With respect to your first point, is this a catch-22 that might ever be solved? The place that is best capable of providing the right UX for something like SSO/identity management/authentication does seem to be the browser, yet even if it isn't a red herring (as you seem to think) it certainly doesn't seem at this point to be a path that can lead to success (just off the top of my head: Persona, Microsoft's first "Passport" attempt in the Windows 9x era, Microsoft's CardSpace in the Vista era) because it's obviously not enough for a browser to support it if websites don't support it...

callahad 10y ago
It's possible that the FIDO Alliance, with enough support from large enterprises, will be able to compel browsers into implementing something native. Otherwise, it feels like anything in this space will need to bootstrap itself by, first and foremost, working on the Web without special consideration by browsers.

BrendanEich 10y ago

Hi Dan, I recall well all the meetings and arguments from the early days. The commitment to Firefox OS (née B2G) was late. It came after two years from B2G launch in late July 2011, until after Ben Adida left in July 2013. Mike Hanson took over for Ben on the identity team side; Fernando Jiménez Moreno from Telefónica (https://github.com/ferjm https://github.com/ferjm) did the B2G-side work. Maybe that was right on time. I don't think so: Facebook Connect was even more entrenched, and Android installed base was climbing out of the Gingerbread 2.3 swamp. The commitment may have been massively massive once started, from your point of view. However, it was almost two years late precisely because we had to argue endlessly, from executive level down, against Ben's preferred non-Firefox/non-OS browserid adoption strategy: the JS shim library.