BrendanEich

7 ms·

61.
by BrendanEich 2y ago
This is a nice story but it's untrue. We had no volunteers who actually worked on Mozilla code and who "rebelled" (Hampton Catlin et al. did not contribute as part of "The volunteers"). The entire late March to earl
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by BrendanEich 2y ago
I was SVP Engineering as well as CTO from 2013 January till 2014 April. Your use of "mostly abandoned" is a false statement, knowingly told. You don't say it if you don't have evidence, but the evidence in terms of headc
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by BrendanEich 2y ago
None of the donations to the parent Mozilla Foundation pay for Firefox development. This is a common misconception, Mozilla's own fund-raising makes it more common than it would be if they were explicit in stating where donations go an
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by BrendanEich 2y ago
Per https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/200... Mitchell's pay fell to $6.26M in 2023. We'll have to wait till late this year to see the 2024 IRS Form 990. From the 990s, it seems Mit
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by BrendanEich 2y ago
My understanding (direct from Graydon, some 18 years ago) was that Linus admired Monotone except for its slowness. Graydon liked making things correct then fast, but was on a break in Köln when Linus (provoked by loss of BitKeeper) emailed
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by BrendanEich 2y ago
Yes, of course -- Hyatt and Blake both worked for Netscape. What misled you into thinking Firefox started as some outside-Netscape project? All the code was MPL'ed.
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by BrendanEich 2y ago
1. Yes, CatB was waved around (not sure that the most ardent wavers actually read it) inside Netscape in late 1997 as a gesture to support the argument for doing mozilla dot org. It helped get some execs on the bandwagon, but Eric Hahn was
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by BrendanEich 2y ago
The Mocha prototype was better than what I did after the ten days. The biggest wart, == implicitly converting operand types, came after the ten days and was me being an idiot by agreeing with early inside-Netscape adopter requests for slop.
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by BrendanEich 2y ago
Right, wasm is the low energy path. IMO you should think about this problem-space of the Web as an evolutionary system, with costs weighting all the paths through a graph from current state to future state. MS throwing money at C# native VM
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by BrendanEich 2y ago
Friend shared https://maxima-on-wasm.pages.dev/ , very cool to see old Lisps live again thanks to Wasm. "Dedicated to the memory of William Schelter."
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by BrendanEich 2y ago
Thanks for the kind words. JS is not the hammer for all nails, but ubiquity means it will be used to pound in screws and bolts more than it ought to be. I fire up Node but also Python from command line; Wolfram Alpha in browser. Wasm was th
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by BrendanEich 2y ago
James (my source was an insider in the Java team at Sun, pre-Marimba) wrote java.util.Date, which I had my one assistant (Ken Smith of Netscape) translate from Java to C for JS's first Date object, regrets all around but it "made
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by BrendanEich 2y ago
See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42838110 (downthread). Polyglot VMs are hard to pull off and always have a _primum inter pares_ (C# for .NET, Java for the JVM, JS for the JS+wasm "Web VM").
74.
by BrendanEich 2y ago
See https://x.com/BrendanEich/status/1260733952160985089 . Google, especially with the antitrust trouble they are in, is not going to try for an "ActiveX redux" act here. They definitively renounced tryin
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by BrendanEich 2y ago
That's right -- Sun refused to donate the JavaScript tm to ECMA (now Ecma), MS jumped in and offered "JScript" which no one wanted, so the standard ended up with the ECMAScript name (still five first letters all capitalized),
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by BrendanEich 2y ago
We make crypto opt-in, so I'm curious what was a nuisance. Was it something in the UX you couldn't turn off? Or sponsored images in new tab pages? Both possible, genuine q.
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by BrendanEich 2y ago
Maybe you have inside info, but last we knew, Google needs internals for webRequest for its enterprise Chrome customers. I think this is not the dire situation your words convey.
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by BrendanEich 2y ago
Hi Kragen, hope you are well. Yes, the Sun/Netscape Java deal included MILLJ orders from on high, and thereby wrecked any Scheme, HyperTalk, Logo, or Self syntax for what became JS. Lua differed a lot (so did Python) back in 1995. Any
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by BrendanEich 2y ago
Oh come on yourself. Companies including Bloomberg and Microsoft (neither in or a part of Silicon Valley), also big to small companies all over the world, built on JS once Moore’s Law and browser tech combined to make Oddpost, and then gmai
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by BrendanEich 2y ago
"Silicon Valley" is not an actor (human or organization of humans) that decided any such thing. This is like saying a virus decides to infect a host. JS got on first, and that meant it stuck. After getting on first, switching cost
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by BrendanEich 2y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1905155 If you don't know what Lua was like then, don't wish that I'd "just used Lua". Other issues include Netscape target system support, "make it look li
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by BrendanEich 2y ago
On "disreputable", see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42380899 . On Firefox doing ads, you must have missed https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/mozilla-anonym-raising-t... (Brave po
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by BrendanEich 2y ago
We have never and will never "replace third party ads". At this point, repeating this easily disproven story just calls your reliability into question. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42380899 We talked to To
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by BrendanEich 2y ago
> Is there a page https://bravebat.info/
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by BrendanEich 2y ago
Everything we did was observable: 1. People couldn't buy BAT to send at the time (Dec. 2018) of the Tom Scott affair, all the tokens were virtual from our user growth pool, subject to our terms. No user funds. This does not excuse the
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by BrendanEich 2y ago
At that time we had no way for users to buy BAT they sent — it was all from our grant pool. In any event, a creator might not sign or could fail to collect, so those grants came back to us after a 90 day timeout if I recall correctly.
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by BrendanEich 2y ago
* binance.com I hate soellcorrkt
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by BrendanEich 2y ago
How many falsehoods carelessly repeated from you before people consider you a liar? We never collected others’ money for creators, the grants were from our user growth pool. My product people learned a lesson on “right to publicity”, howeve
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by BrendanEich 2y ago
No referral codes ever injected into links, which mean those blue or purple text things you click on pages. The bug affected typed-in binance.us and finance.com only, we made nothing off it, and we fixed it right away: https://br
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by BrendanEich 2y ago
"As I understand it" is not true, but I'm curious whether you heard it from a Lobste.rs principal, or just some echo chamber spinning stories against us. All the tokens in that late 2018 came from our user growth pool — we ne

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