5 ms·

It's hard to know what would have happened had I stayed. Mozilla had a number of late layoffs, some cut good people, none helped. Cutting earlier could have hel

It's hard to know what would have happened had I stayed. Mozilla had a number of late layoffs, some cut good people, none helped. Cutting earlier could have helped more. The "NGO" die was cast in 2003 when we spun out of AOL as a 501c3. I didn't get a say in that decision. It went poorly after the big Google default search revenue share turned on and the IRS reneged on their promise that we could take the $$$ tax-free as "sponsorship income". This led to a battle where we ended up paying some back taxes, but contrary to the San Jose IRS agent's position, we did not have to go "be like Opera" and drop the 501c3. We rather used the typical (hospitals, universities, sports teams do it) non-profit parent of taxable for-profit subsidiary structure, with a trademark license fee kicked up to the parent. The IRS rules governing nonprofits still required the Mozilla Foundation to beg big to go big: the parent had to go find big grants from Soros, Ford, Knight, MacArthur, and give smaller grants to many. This put it in the lefties-only-no-righty-Irish-need-apply revolving-door personnel sector of NGOs and nonprofits (too many glowies there for me, too). Which meant I had a hostile MoFo over my head the minute I got CEO appointment from the MoCo board. I think looking back that the nonprofit spinout from AOL was a mistake. It didn't focus on either technical excellence or pure do-gooding. It was an uneasy mix of both, neither fish nor fowl. Of course I can't comment on anything about my exit, for reasons that only the most loopy HN h8ers still can't figure out.

quesera 2y ago
Thanks for the really interesting background! If I may impose further: Can you opine on (or link to something intelligent which you agree with) the health of the browser engine ecosystem? Obviously you've chosen Chromium/Blink, which I assume was for practical reasons in a fledgling startup. I.e. the relative simplicity of embedding vs Gecko, the at-the-time performance superiority, confidence in upstream maintenance, etc. I was surprised initially, because obviously you knew Gecko better than anyone. You also know the arguments against a browser engine monoculture. I'm coming around to the idea that (Blink has won, and) that's not so bad. Because there are so many browsers embedding Blink now (and V8, but no one complains about that!) ... some of which have serious development teams behind them. I remain concerned about a single steward of web standards, but I think that Blink is really good and I hope that there are enough other browsers that rely on it, so if Google were to push Blink in a direction that didn't match the broader goals of the web, that the individual browser teams could fork and maintain it cooperatively. Is this a pipe dream? Am I bargaining with the reaper? I've been a Firefox user since before Firefox was Firefox, and Mozilla and Netscape before that. I think I'm abandoning my opinion on the importance of browser engine diversity. Gecko-Quantum has some advantages still, but they're becoming less important -- and more relevantly, they might not matter if Firefox grows increasingly obscure. (FWIW, every time I try Brave, I bounce off because of the way sidebar/vertical tabs are handled. I need layout density and memory-efficiency. It's been a while though, so I will try again.)
- BrendanEich 2y ago
  Blink is a fork (April 2013) of WebKit, and Apple keeps Google from monopolizing the engine market. "If there's no solution, there's no problem." - James Burnham, IIRC (sounds cruel but it's a brutally pragmatic, no-moralizing, epigram about where to focus strategic attention) https://cacm.acm.org/opinion/future-internet-architecture-clean-slate-versus-evolutionary-research/ https://cacm.acm.org/opinion/future-internet-architecture-cl... New architectures will come. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39534595 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39534595
hexfish 2y ago
What do you mean by glowies? In this context.
- BrendanEich 2y ago
  I mean both active NOCs and also those who (they cop to it later) "worked for the CIA" at some point.

quesera 2y ago

Thanks for the really interesting background! If I may impose further: Can you opine on (or link to something intelligent which you agree with) the health of the browser engine ecosystem? Obviously you've chosen Chromium/Blink, which I assume was for practical reasons in a fledgling startup. I.e. the relative simplicity of embedding vs Gecko, the at-the-time performance superiority, confidence in upstream maintenance, etc. I was surprised initially, because obviously you knew Gecko better than anyone. You also know the arguments against a browser engine monoculture. I'm coming around to the idea that (Blink has won, and) that's not so bad. Because there are so many browsers embedding Blink now (and V8, but no one complains about that!) ... some of which have serious development teams behind them. I remain concerned about a single steward of web standards, but I think that Blink is really good and I hope that there are enough other browsers that rely on it, so if Google were to push Blink in a direction that didn't match the broader goals of the web, that the individual browser teams could fork and maintain it cooperatively. Is this a pipe dream? Am I bargaining with the reaper? I've been a Firefox user since before Firefox was Firefox, and Mozilla and Netscape before that. I think I'm abandoning my opinion on the importance of browser engine diversity. Gecko-Quantum has some advantages still, but they're becoming less important -- and more relevantly, they might not matter if Firefox grows increasingly obscure. (FWIW, every time I try Brave, I bounce off because of the way sidebar/vertical tabs are handled. I need layout density and memory-efficiency. It's been a while though, so I will try again.)

BrendanEich 2y ago
Blink is a fork (April 2013) of WebKit, and Apple keeps Google from monopolizing the engine market. "If there's no solution, there's no problem." - James Burnham, IIRC (sounds cruel but it's a brutally pragmatic, no-moralizing, epigram about where to focus strategic attention) https://cacm.acm.org/opinion/future-internet-architecture-clean-slate-versus-evolutionary-research/ https://cacm.acm.org/opinion/future-internet-architecture-cl... New architectures will come. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39534595 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39534595

hexfish 2y ago

What do you mean by glowies? In this context.

BrendanEich 2y ago
I mean both active NOCs and also those who (they cop to it later) "worked for the CIA" at some point.