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Comment by prepend | Hacker News Reader

I think that’s when their values changes from being a technically excellent product to being a friendly company that values harmony over function.

So it did stick to their values, but their values seem superficial rather than functional.

As a user, I would rather have a better browser than a company full of people who think that being against gay marriage 10 years ago means they are dangerous to coworkers or whatnot.

I think it’s great for companies to choose their own values and make their own way. And I can prefer companies that focus on other things.

I don’t necessarily think firing Eich causes Mozilla to suck, but I think Brave is a much better browser and they have far fewer employees with less funding.

I don’t donate to Mozilla and one of the reasons is because their mission is so vague.

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Brave is just (yet another) wrapper for Chromium. The scope of the project is nothing like the scope of Firefox, let alone Mozilla.

As for being a better browser, built in adblocking is great (especially on mobile). But the whole Brave rewards thing is kind of weird and never made sense to me.

It’s a very different browser, but I used it as an example because I think it’s much better than Firefox and Chrome.

Mozilla could have made Brave, they didn’t. Brave is simpler, but better, I think, and even more so shows off how Mozilla’s values aren’t in making awesome software, but in something else.

I largely ignore the weird Brave blockchain thing and just use it as a nice, simple browser.

Are you suggesting that Mozilla should have made a chromium skin instead of an actual browser? So far as I can see the only thing meaningful brave offers over chromium is adblocking on mobile which is indeed huge but also available on mobile Firefox. Meanwhile Mozilla has given us rust, servo, and and an addon ecosystem that is still more powerful and flexible than chrome even post giving old school addons the ax.

I don’t think Mozilla should have Brave per se, but it shows some of the work they could have done.

If they had to literally skin chrome to do then I guess they could. But they should be capable of so much more.

Specially Brave is faster to launch and uses less resources than Firefox and had privacy and ad blocking features turned on by default. I particularly like the little bug that shows you how much bloat it’s blocked.

Adblocking out of the box would be hard given that most of mozillas ad money comes from search partners which are at root ad companies. They still advertise adblockers like ublock origin among their recommended addons and enabling adblocking is 30 seconds work and with sync it will be automatically added to firefox as soon as you sign into sync.

Ultimately this money is what has enabled Mozilla to exist at all. Brave is living on borrowed money from presumed future revenue from its cryptocurrency scheme which may or may not come to fruition.

Then they are putting themselves against their customers.

They could still just get search placement and make tons and tons of money, enough to develop their browser.

Brave was a good browser. Now it's... what, a Chromium extension? I liked pre-rewrite Brave much more than post-rewrite. The tab contexts (or whatever they were called, it's been so long that I've forgotten) were great - pre-rewrite Brave had ten separate containers for cookies and so on, so if you kept Facebook in context 8, you'd only be logged into Facebook in context 8, and you could do all your other browsing in the nine other contexts.

This was also good for multiple accounts; most social media doesn't support clients anymore, or doesn't have good clients, and in order to keep separate topics separate, you need multiple accounts. So now I keep three different browsers open, because there's just no good way to do this otherwise.

I still mostly use Brave, but IMO it's much less differentiated from other browsers than pre-rewrite.

Firefox containers does this, and pretty well at that.

> I think that’s when their values changes from being a technically excellent product to being a friendly company that values harmony over function.

What part of this announcement is valuing "harmony over function"? How does laying off 250 people compute with that?

You too: Eich was not fired. Get your facts straight, and stop spreading misinformation.

https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2014/04/05/faq-on-ceo-resignat...

Q: Was Brendan Eich fired?

A: No, Brendan Eich resigned. Brendan himself said:

“I have decided to resign as CEO effective April 3rd, and leave Mozilla. Our mission is bigger than any one of us, and under the present circumstances, I cannot be an effective leader. I will be taking time before I decide what to do next.”

Brendan Eich also blogged on this topic.

Q: Was Brendan Eich asked to resign by the Board?

A: No. It was Brendan’s idea to resign, and in fact, once he submitted his resignation, Board members tried to get Brendan to stay at Mozilla in another C-level role.

I think it’s disingenuous to split hairs like this. Eich didn’t exhibit any plans t resign until the episode and pressure that resulted in his resignation. I think that’s the same thing and I would also use this term any time a CEO “resigns to spend more time with her family” instead of being fired.

How is quoting the official Mozilla FAQ "splitting hairs"? It doesn't claim he's leaving to spend more time with his family, it literally asks if he was fired, and answers no, then asks if he was asked to resign, and answers no. How more explicit can you get? Do you have reason to believe the FAQ is lying?

> How is quoting the official Mozilla FAQ "splitting hairs"?

This just sounds like willful ignorance to be honest. It was obvious that Eich did not have the backing to remain as CEO.

The whole situation was an embarrassment and a disgrace for everyone involved to be honest. No one came out of it looking good.

So you're calling Eich willfully ignorant to claim he was not fired or forced out, when he actually was? Has he said that himself, or are you putting words into his mouth?

If you're a CEO of a company why would you resign? Just for fun? The idea of a resignation does not come randomly and the closest reason why Eich decided to resign appears to be extremely petty.

If you're a CEO of a company why would you be against gay marriage? Just for fun? The idea of a destroying someone else's marriage does not come randomly and the closest reason why Eich decided to destroy other people's marriages appears to be extremely petty.

It's obvious that he was urged to resign. Aka fired but with a face saving facade.

If he was forced to resign, then that makes him a liar, because he explicitly stated that he was not forced to resign. And if he's a liar, then he certainly shouldn't be the CEO of Mozilla.

He was forced to do it voluntarily. "I'm gonna make him an offer he can't refuse". Or bullying till resignment.

Applies to the current CEO then too. Baker shouldn't be CEO.

> He was forced to do it voluntarily.

There is something very wrong about that sentence of yours.

No. Like I said, resigning to safe face for him and/or Mozilla. But not by "choice". It's obvious really.

Sorry, but no. You can't 'force' someone to do something 'voluntarily'.

The obvious reality is that Eich realized he fucked up and could no longer effectively lead Mozilla, given that they are as much about their self reinforced myth of being the internet good guys as they are about tech.

And so he stepped down.

The kind of scene that you are envisioning occurs in Maffia movies but not IRL. Eich was under a lot of pressure, but most of that as a direct consequence of the inherent conflict between Mozilla's stated external position and Eich's personal actions. When you are CEO of such a large company you know that you can't combine the two unless you mean it.

Props to Eich for doing what was right instead of further harming Mozilla.

So it was forced uppon him. Like you said "pressure". How can a choice under pressure be "voluntary"?

That's outside pressure. Not inside pressure. Mozilla board + employees actually wanted Eich to stay.

Anyway you seem to be quite stuck on your interpretation, all of the people involved have a single consistent story and instead you want to believe your own. You are of course welcome to your opinion.

It's flabbergasting what intellectually dishonest mental gymnastics and strained misinterpretations and denials of proven facts that homophobes will resort to in order to bravely stand up for each other and proudly justify their bigotry.

Puzzles the crap out of me. Logic doesn't seem to enter into it.

I don't care what Eich thinks about homosexuality.

Pressure nontheless. Seeing that he went to another browser company I don't think he would have gone voluntarily.

Which isn't Mozilla. Anyway, I'm out of here. Good luck with your reality.

Technicality. Eich was a victim of cancel culture and he was effectively fired. Anything else is revisionist bs.

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