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Comment by silisili | Hacker News Reader

I think he could have turned it around, but I'm glad Brave exists.

People hate BAT for reasons, but the idea of controlling the ad stream at the software level is a winning one to me. I can't think of any other platform where ads were given such free reign. Could you imagine watching TV, then a commercial comes on that either a) crashes the tv, or b) changes the channel multiple times so you can't get back, or c) installs malware onto the tv, or d) clones itself 20 times over the content you were watching, or any other fun stuff web ads have been known to do.

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Eich was CTO of the Mozilla Corporation since its founding in 2005 until 2014, during which Firefox market share slid from its peak at 30% to 13%.

What would Eich have done as CEO to turn around Firefox that he wasn’t able to do as CTO for nine years? That said, Brave has innovated and had some VC-fueled success. I just don’t see him as the Firefox savior some people do.

https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share#yearly-2009-...

A lieutenant is not the captain.

As a lieutenant, I don't get to just go do whatever. I advise, I provide options, I make calls that don't to up to the CEO level.

I pick tech stacks, I pick how to do the things we decide to do. But the final call on what we are doing is the captain's. Especially about the fundamental direction like how to acquire users, markets we target, and how to acquire revenue.

Brave is not "VC-fueled". Small seed funding which we transcended long ago. But if we were, you'd be practicing a variation on the Genetic Fallacy. Do better.

I know a few HN haters fixate on me as cause of all problems at Mozilla, but if they were playing fair, they'd give me some credit for growing Brave to ~60M MAU or (better metric) 24.5M DAU. A lot of these users came from Firefox. So I can grow a browser, I've done it three times at least. But elsewhere I've written that Mozilla wouldn't have let me do what was needed, in my speculative opinion.

Brave doesn't advertise itself in the User-Agent: header, so statcounter lumps us in with Chrome.

Also, I was at Mozilla from founding in 1997 (yes, I'm a co-founder -- unlike Mitchell Baker), official news in 1998, and spinout as 501c3 in 2003.

What you cherry-pick as my CTO role from 2005-2014, as if I were some new hire in 2005 who had nothing to do with Mozilla before then or from inception, nevertheless covers a lot of Firefox growth -- we peaked in 2010 or 2011.

So blaming me for decline vs. Chrome is grossly unfair, but I sense an irrational animus on your part.

But Firefox can control the ad stream very well with ublock origin. Don't need bat tokens for that.

The advertising industry will never take that as an option anyway. They're addicted to big data now. They have to sell a hell of a lot of less-annoying non-data-mined BAT ads to compensate, or do with less profit. They're not going to be on board.

And these tokens don't really solve the issue. People hate ads. Trading their ads for slightly less annoying ones when they can do without them altogether is not going to work. How many of those 65M brave users actually opt in to the BAT ads?

It's just a non-starter and will always be that. Sorry. It's just another fairytale spun to dig into VC money pools.

People hate ads but they hate paying for content even more. There are startups that offer a pay per article integration for publishers but it never really caught on. Monthly subscriptions to one publisher work decently but people are tired of that too.

Ad revenue adds so much juice to the profit margins, just look at Netflix/amazon prime/etc. None of them could resist the ad tier.

I think about this a lot because I dislike the ad tech industry and would like to leave it (even though I currently work in it) but I honestly don’t know what the solution is besides ads.

I know, but BAT isn't going to transform the ad industry. It has nothing to offer to them that they don't have now and will only make things harder for them.

The only thing that will do that is a legal framework that forbids tracking so untracked ads are worth more because they no longer have to compete with the tracked ones. After all there will be no retargeting etc. It will have to be purely contextual.

The EU unfortunately stopped short of doing that and created the cookiewall plague in the process. For which they are rightfully blamed.

Ps I don't really hate paying for content but the "sign up for a recurring $20 monthly subscription just to read this one article" like most sites are doing now is complete BS too of course. Of course nobody wants that unless they are already a regular reader.

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