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It doesn't seem a coincidence that it started to go down hill after they removed an engineer from CEO (Brendan Eich), and replaced him with a marketing dude, th

It doesn't seem a coincidence that it started to go down hill after they removed an engineer from CEO (Brendan Eich), and replaced him with a marketing dude, then a lawyer lady, and now an MBA bro.

pseudalopex 4mo ago
Firefox's market share peaked in 2009. Eich was CEO for 2 weeks in 2014. He resigned and declined Mozilla's offer to remain in another C level position. The same lawyer lady Mitchell Baker had every top job from 1999 to 2008.
- gdwatson 4mo ago
  "He resigned and declined Mozilla's offer to remain in another C level position." At this point I think it's clear his resignation was not voluntary. Maybe the other offer was sincere, or maybe it wasn't; I'm not sure how we could tell.
  - altairprime 4mo ago
    It was.
    - bigstrat2003 4mo ago
      I don't believe that for one second, and neither should you. Every single CEO who gets fired is made to "voluntarily" resign.
      - altairprime 4mo ago
        You weren’t there.
        BrendanEich 4mo ago
        Were you? I have no idea who you are, but the only "other C-level position" was an unspecified throwaway line from Reid Hoffman, who didn't have authority to create any such "Chief of Special Projects" position anyway. The CEO makes the C-level org chart; the new CEO after me was waiting in the wings but in no position to make promises. You seem awfully eager to assert something false, possibly out of bad conscience. No one involved in my departure had a good solution for my staying at Mozilla, including me.
deng 4mo ago
That engineer went on to create Brave, a browser that pays you Monopoly money for watching ads, injected affiliate links, installed their commercial VPN without asking, and leaked DNS traffic when using Tor in its "privacy" mode. I'd say Mozilla dodged a bullet there.
- jonathansampson 4mo ago
  Brave engineer here. > "Monopoly money for watching ads" What does Firefox pay you for piping your keystrokes off to Google? BAT is a reward for your attention; far better arrangement and exchange than what has existed up to this point. It's not perfect, but what's your solution? > "injected affiliate links" You seem to be a little free and loose with _facts_. Rather than exchange your data for revenue, Brave explores revenue streams which won't keep us up at night. One such consideration was affiliate links. We had a couple (quite literally a couple/few), that would appear when you typed certain crypto-related keywords into the address bar. When suggestions were offered, so too would be our affiliate option. This solution presented a means by which users could support Brave without involving their data. Unfortunately, a UI/UX bug caused the affiliate option to appear even for a fully-qualified domain, which meant a user who quickly typed a URL for which we offered an affiliate link and mashed Enter, could unintentionally have selected the affiliate option. That isn't _injection_. The issue was identified pretty quickly, and a patch was sent out. Guess how much Brave made from the buggy behavior before it was patched? I'll help you: $0. You can read more at https://brave.com/blog/referral-codes-in-suggested-sites/ https://brave.com/blog/referral-codes-in-suggested-sites/, though I must warn you ahead of time that it isn't as exciting or shocking as you might have liked. You know what would be SHOCKING though? Imagine if Mozilla had tried to do something quite similar. Oh, wait… https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/2021/10/firefox-reveals-sponsored-ad-suggestions-in-search-and-address-bar https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/2021/10/firefox-revea.... > "installed their commercial VPN without asking" This one is actually somewhat true. We did indeed ship an inert service for some Windows users. The goal was to have the VPN option be immediately available to users who wished to purchase it, as a means of supporting Brave. Details are in the GitHub issue: https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/issues/33726 https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/issues/33726. > "and leaked DNS traffic when using Tor in its 'privacy' mode." Oh, this is one of my favorites. It's a classic story with depth, misdirection, unexpected side-effects of decisions made years in between, and more! This one is the type of thing I would have expected to read about in _Joel on Software_ many years ago. So, we shipped a browser with a "privacy" mode, much like everybody else. But, we weren't fans of the common approach used by Chrome, Firefox, Edge, and others. Their approach doesn't really make you _incognito_, or _private_; it just creates an ephemeral account locally and basically does some file-system cleanup. We wanted something stronger! As fans of the Tor project, we opted to bake-in support for Tor as an optional enhancement to private tabs. This would give you one extra, super-thick layer of incognito-ness. Tor Private Tabs were shipped back in mid 2018, and the next couple of years were pretty awesome. Brave users who enabled optional Tor support enjoyed a superior experience to that found in other popular browsers. Years later—as the tracker wars waged on—some data-harvesters got the idea that they could evade detection by way of CNAMEs, giving them first-party privileges. So in late 2020, Brave shipped CNAME decloaking, unmasking more trackers than Mystery Inc., and dramatically expanding the privacy moat. But the story wouldn't be all that exciting if it didn't have a twist, right!? Brave's new CNAME-decloaking didn't consider the Tor scenario, and performed DNS lookups outside of an existing proxy! While the combination of these features didn't make Brave as porous as ordinary "incognito mode", it did punch an embarrassing hole in the Tor boundary: page traffic still went through Tor, but CNAME adblocking DNS lookups accidentally went out through the user's normal DNS path. For that narrow slice of activity, Brave drifted uncomfortably close to what Mozilla calls "private browsing": https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/common-myths-about-private-browsing https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/common-myths-about-priv... ("Private browsing [in Firefox] doesn't hide your activity from your ISP, mask your IP address or location, or stop websites from identifying or tracking you…) > "I'd say Mozilla dodged a bullet there." Let's check in again in another 5 years ;)
altairprime 4mo ago
It’s not.
thisislife2 4mo ago
Agreed. For some reasons, the powers to be (Google?) didn't want someone who was independent (not be "guided" by Google), understood the core product technically and from an actual user's perspective, who may have been able to innovate Firefox into a better product and possibly even decouple Firefox from Google with alternative revenue streams (who knows, maybe instead of Brave Search, we may have had Firefox search?).

It doesn't seem a coincidence that it started to go down hill after they removed an engineer from CEO (Brendan Eich), and replaced him with a marketing dude, then a lawyer lady, and now an MBA bro.

pseudalopex 4mo ago

Firefox's market share peaked in 2009. Eich was CEO for 2 weeks in 2014. He resigned and declined Mozilla's offer to remain in another C level position. The same lawyer lady Mitchell Baker had every top job from 1999 to 2008.

gdwatson 4mo ago
"He resigned and declined Mozilla's offer to remain in another C level position." At this point I think it's clear his resignation was not voluntary. Maybe the other offer was sincere, or maybe it wasn't; I'm not sure how we could tell.
- altairprime 4mo ago
  It was.
  - bigstrat2003 4mo ago
    I don't believe that for one second, and neither should you. Every single CEO who gets fired is made to "voluntarily" resign.
    - altairprime 4mo ago
      You weren’t there.
      - BrendanEich 4mo ago
        Were you? I have no idea who you are, but the only "other C-level position" was an unspecified throwaway line from Reid Hoffman, who didn't have authority to create any such "Chief of Special Projects" position anyway. The CEO makes the C-level org chart; the new CEO after me was waiting in the wings but in no position to make promises. You seem awfully eager to assert something false, possibly out of bad conscience. No one involved in my departure had a good solution for my staying at Mozilla, including me.

deng 4mo ago

That engineer went on to create Brave, a browser that pays you Monopoly money for watching ads, injected affiliate links, installed their commercial VPN without asking, and leaked DNS traffic when using Tor in its "privacy" mode. I'd say Mozilla dodged a bullet there.

jonathansampson 4mo ago
Brave engineer here. > "Monopoly money for watching ads" What does Firefox pay you for piping your keystrokes off to Google? BAT is a reward for your attention; far better arrangement and exchange than what has existed up to this point. It's not perfect, but what's your solution? > "injected affiliate links" You seem to be a little free and loose with _facts_. Rather than exchange your data for revenue, Brave explores revenue streams which won't keep us up at night. One such consideration was affiliate links. We had a couple (quite literally a couple/few), that would appear when you typed certain crypto-related keywords into the address bar. When suggestions were offered, so too would be our affiliate option. This solution presented a means by which users could support Brave without involving their data. Unfortunately, a UI/UX bug caused the affiliate option to appear even for a fully-qualified domain, which meant a user who quickly typed a URL for which we offered an affiliate link and mashed Enter, could unintentionally have selected the affiliate option. That isn't _injection_. The issue was identified pretty quickly, and a patch was sent out. Guess how much Brave made from the buggy behavior before it was patched? I'll help you: $0. You can read more at https://brave.com/blog/referral-codes-in-suggested-sites/ https://brave.com/blog/referral-codes-in-suggested-sites/, though I must warn you ahead of time that it isn't as exciting or shocking as you might have liked. You know what would be SHOCKING though? Imagine if Mozilla had tried to do something quite similar. Oh, wait… https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/2021/10/firefox-reveals-sponsored-ad-suggestions-in-search-and-address-bar https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/2021/10/firefox-revea.... > "installed their commercial VPN without asking" This one is actually somewhat true. We did indeed ship an inert service for some Windows users. The goal was to have the VPN option be immediately available to users who wished to purchase it, as a means of supporting Brave. Details are in the GitHub issue: https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/issues/33726 https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/issues/33726. > "and leaked DNS traffic when using Tor in its 'privacy' mode." Oh, this is one of my favorites. It's a classic story with depth, misdirection, unexpected side-effects of decisions made years in between, and more! This one is the type of thing I would have expected to read about in _Joel on Software_ many years ago. So, we shipped a browser with a "privacy" mode, much like everybody else. But, we weren't fans of the common approach used by Chrome, Firefox, Edge, and others. Their approach doesn't really make you _incognito_, or _private_; it just creates an ephemeral account locally and basically does some file-system cleanup. We wanted something stronger! As fans of the Tor project, we opted to bake-in support for Tor as an optional enhancement to private tabs. This would give you one extra, super-thick layer of incognito-ness. Tor Private Tabs were shipped back in mid 2018, and the next couple of years were pretty awesome. Brave users who enabled optional Tor support enjoyed a superior experience to that found in other popular browsers. Years later—as the tracker wars waged on—some data-harvesters got the idea that they could evade detection by way of CNAMEs, giving them first-party privileges. So in late 2020, Brave shipped CNAME decloaking, unmasking more trackers than Mystery Inc., and dramatically expanding the privacy moat. But the story wouldn't be all that exciting if it didn't have a twist, right!? Brave's new CNAME-decloaking didn't consider the Tor scenario, and performed DNS lookups outside of an existing proxy! While the combination of these features didn't make Brave as porous as ordinary "incognito mode", it did punch an embarrassing hole in the Tor boundary: page traffic still went through Tor, but CNAME adblocking DNS lookups accidentally went out through the user's normal DNS path. For that narrow slice of activity, Brave drifted uncomfortably close to what Mozilla calls "private browsing": https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/common-myths-about-private-browsing https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/common-myths-about-priv... ("Private browsing [in Firefox] doesn't hide your activity from your ISP, mask your IP address or location, or stop websites from identifying or tracking you…) > "I'd say Mozilla dodged a bullet there." Let's check in again in another 5 years ;)

altairprime 4mo ago

It’s not.

thisislife2 4mo ago

Agreed. For some reasons, the powers to be (Google?) didn't want someone who was independent (not be "guided" by Google), understood the core product technically and from an actual user's perspective, who may have been able to innovate Firefox into a better product and possibly even decouple Firefox from Google with alternative revenue streams (who knows, maybe instead of Brave Search, we may have had Firefox search?).