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Comment by BrendanEich | Hacker News Reader

> Brandon Eich

To be an elite HN hater, you need to spell my name correctly.

> it's his career at Mozilla that most intersects with the period of major collapse in market share.

This is completely wrong, since I was a founder of Mozilla from 1998 on, so I was there for growth from 0 for Mozilla Suite, then from 0 for Firefox, to the peak after Chrome was out. Did you think I just joined Mozilla in 2010?

Some links:

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

Note the orange line for Firefox. Statcounter doesn't go back earlier, but we started from 0 with mozilla/browser, grew to a million or two with Phoenix/Firebird, then on to millions from launch on Nov 9, 2004 of Firefox 1.0.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38998243

Lots of decline after I left, but I'll take some blame for decline before I quit, if you credit me for all the growth from inception. Deal?

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I apologize for getting your name wrong.

>This is completely wrong, since I was a founder of Mozilla from 1998 on, so I was there for growth from 0 for Mozilla Suite, then from 0 for Firefox, to the peak after Chrome was out. Did you think I just joined Mozilla in 2010?

This marks the first time I've ever heard someone argue that time period B didn't happen because it was preceded by time period A. I think claiming they both did indeed happen is a more coherent interpretation of historical events.

>Lots of decline after I left, but I'll take some blame for decline before I quit, if you credit me for all the growth from inception. Deal?

I actually love Mozilla and everything it's been able to achieve which is why I'm here pushing back against haters in the comment section. There's currently a mass hallucination happening at HN, where commenters are claiming that Mozilla's various side bets from 2020-2025 retroactively caused the market share losses of 2010-2015. Someone motivated to point to your tenure as capable of reversing those losses would have to reconcile that with the fact that your tenure coincided with the biggest collapse in market share. My hope is not that they would endorse that interpretation, but that it would reveal the motivated reasoning of treating market share decline as reversible if only you had stayed.

I would argue the real largest single driver of market share loss was the emergence of Chromium, and Google's flexing of unparalleled leverage to push Chromium out to everyone combined with Embrace-Extend-Extinguish battle plan on web standards. Excluding that from the story, and trying to framing it entirely in terms of Mozilla missteps is unfair to Mozilla, and is what I'm pushing back against.

From the statcounter links I gave:

>>> (31.82-14.34)x100/31.82

>>> (14.34-2.37)x100/14.35

54% drop from peak to when I left, 83% drop after. No one said "didn't happen".

Time period B shows a clear net drop in market share in absolute percentage terms. You reframed it as a percentage drop from peak and combined it with time period A. That’s a shift in metric and scope, not a basis for calling the reference "completely wrong." It would only be wrong if that period didn’t happen which obviously isn’t the case.

If you insist on percentage points not ratios, then how do you apportion blame to me vs the CEOs before me? I was CEO for ten days. I stood up for it to avoid Mozilla going headless longer (Gary Kovacs stepped down by April 2013: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/gearing-up-for-the-next-...).

If it’s all my fault, kindly say how. You will have to come up with reasons why Firefox continued to fall after I left and to date.

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