Since I see that a notable VC-famous jerk is now telling us that he wish he'd "stood by" Eich way back, I'd like to tell you a true fact: Eich didn't lose the CEO's job for his (reprehensible) Prop-8 donation.
Everyone wants to believe that's true, because fits nicely into useful narratives a number of invested camps want to champion, whether it's somebody being ousted for reprehensible views or the woke SJW mob somehow pulling down a great leader (tm) but that's not what happened.
After what I'm told was a few days of very difficult negotiation under extraordinary pressure, both internal and external, a deal was struck. The plan was that Eich make an announcement, apologizing for his "mistake" and making some public-benefit commitment about inclusivity, importance of diversity, etc.
Half the board resigned.
But he takes his public drubbing, apologizes and gets his company. The structure of the organization survives, the mission lives.
At the last minute, he reneged.
But the real reason wasn't that he made a donation to some reprehensible cause.
The real reason he lost his job was because he showed everyone who mattered that when the chips were down - and I mean, 100%, the whole table is all the way in, down - that he'd put his own pride or vanity or who gives a fuck what ahead of the continued existence of the company and the mission.
He lost his job because he made a bet that he was more important than the possible end of Mozilla and he lost that bet.
Anyway, after getting laughed off the internet for that goofy manifesto of his I'm sure Marca is airing this out now because he'd like to imagine himself also part of some great-man-pulled-down narrative; it's a common affliction among people with so much money they can't feel anything but petulantly-underworshipped anymore and zero useful ideas to speak of.
But that story is bullshit.
@mrcompletely @mhoye the also called Nobelitis.
@mhoye @fivetonsflax They noticed I only said it in the situation where we had *exactly* the thing I was lamenting not having.
"If only we had some sort of system to track...X" was a regular one in ITIL X-management meetings for X in issue, problem, service, change...etc. it seemed to correlate with cargo-cult X-management.
@mhoye Do you have a copy of that email? I don't remember receiving it, but what I'm sure is that the first versions of Brave were actually Gecko-based (using browser.html as the frontend), then Electron then Chromium, but never WebKit.
About Firefox becoming competitive only with Quantum... man, it was so cringe at the time to see the desktop team rediscovering what we learned from the work on b2g (both UI and platform) and that the desktop team fought so much against at the time.
@mhoye The main factor he cited was web compatibility, which is largely a function of market share rather than technical.
That's not to say there weren't some major technical mistakes. Maybe some of the biggest were:
- not investing more in embedding APIs in 2006-2008
- not understanding and fixing the performance and memory use implications of extensions in 2006-2010 (and fixing widely divergent eng vs mktg opinions of them)
But hard to say if doing better would have changed the result.
@mhoye I also noted in that post:
https://groups.google.com/g/mozilla.governance/c/dba6C45D9vs/m/eFee27PpFgAJ
that for Brave, as a new browser, we chose to prioritize "web compatibility and in particular Chrome compatibility".
No one, neither me nor successor C-levels at Mozilla, could do the same for Firefox, because Firefox faces much higher engine switching costs due to its installed base and features than Brave did in late 2015 when we had not even released yet!
How you could miss this is hard to figure. Rage blinding you to fundamentals?
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