Certainly losing his technical talent is likely to have contributed to the problems, but I suspect it's 100x more of Chrome's dominance and Mozilla's reliance on Google's search engine contracts for revenue.
Maybe he's just not a great guy all around.
https://nulltx.com/brave-browser-draws-criticism-over-lack-o...
> Publishers must verify ownership of their properties with Brave in order to receive contributions from Brave users. If a publisher has not verified ownership, then a user’s contributions will be held in reserve inside the browser for 90 days. The browser routinely updates an internal list of all verified publishers to determine whether a property can receive contributions. At the end of the 90 day period, any contributions marked for unverified publishers will be released back to the wallet. No funds leave the browser except to go to verified creators.
I know a few people who have been victims of identity theft. After hearing their stories, it was clear to me that it would not have happened if companies weren't tracking them and selling their personal data left and right.
But it's hard to make that connection. People seem to accept identity theft as "something that just happens sometimes", even though it makes them very angry, frustrated, anxious, and eats up a lot of time and sometimes money. I think they do this because it's hard to point to one culprit as the cause, and so it feels like an intractable problem.
If people could actually understand that their lack of privacy protections on the internet (and elsewhere) is one of the main factors in enabling things like identity theft, there would be more people who would affirmatively care about privacy.
I'm not sure how to get people to make that intuitive leap on a large enough scale for it to matter, though. You're very right that people mainly care about browser performance (I'd even argue they don't care about security that much, though certainly more than they care about privacy); I know several people who definitely know better and understand privacy issues on the internet, but still use Chrome because "Firefox is slow on macOS" or something.
A little like the way people talk about "cyber warfare".
In real warfare, the enemy can attack your forces no matter what you do.
In cyber warfare, you can build impenetrable defences. The only way the enemy can attack you successfully is if you make a mistake.
This kind of thinking IMO is perpetuated by absurd tv shows where e.g McGee can hack into any computer system by tapping on his keyboard for a few seconds.
It's harmless on TV, but in the real world it leads to complacency about security. People saying"poor Equifax, they were attacked" instead of "Equifax's security was a joke, and they left their system wide open for anyone to plunder".
Now we just need to find a piece of software that doesn't have any mistakes in it.
> Nobody except tech geeks care about Servo.
This is a good point unless there actually non tech people that care about Servo.
https://madaidans-insecurities.github.io/firefox-chromium.ht...
Do. Not. Use. Chromium.
Chrome has done multiple huge projects that changed how things work at a fundamental level like Oilpan (using a C++ garbage collector), LayoutNG (a full rewrite of the layout part of the engine from the ground up), Slimming Paint (a full rewrite of the compositing and painting system), and Site Isolation.
Blink and WebKit are pretty different engines with very different behavior, bugs, and performance characteristics.
Nobody except geeks and politically minded people care about privacy that much (if they didn't they'd already use Firefox with DDG, or Brave or at least Safari).
People do care for faster, more conventient browser -- that's why we switched from Netscape to IE (when Mozilla bloated and a for a little while IE6 was faster/better), then to Firefox, and then to Chrome.
Well, lots but still insignifcant to make a browser market share raise. Which is not "lots" in the sense that matters. Most People value speed, convenience, features, and security over privacy.
>People really don’t like it if they search for and buy a bicycle and keep getting ads for bicycles for weeks.
Most (as in over 80% of the people) don't even use an ad blocker and could not care less. Even if they are annoyed but keeping getting those ads, they don't care enough to do anything about it, much less switch broswers.
Edit, to summarize: it's not that performance doesn't matter, it's just that currently it's hard enough to compete with Blink & V8. And, of course, Blink becomes better precisely because there is a competition they have to fight. (It will probably become worse when Gecko/Servo/Firefox dies.) But to be that competition without having shitload of money Google has is not fun right now. It's hardly a fight you can win. Easier just to ride on Google's back and to use Blink yourself.