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Mozilla lays off 70

(techcrunch.com)
929 points ameshkov | 3 comments | 15 Jan 20 19:48 UTC | HN request time: 0.539s | source
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dman ◴[15 Jan 20 21:11 UTC] No.22058629[source]▶
Brendan Eich has a helpful chart of Compensation of Highest paid executive at Mozilla vs Firefox market share over time.

https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1217512049716035584/p...

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paul7986 ◴[15 Jan 20 22:16 UTC] No.22059384[source]▶
Seems odd in his tweet he noted he was unable to get funding in the valley for Brave. The guy created JavaScript and was a creator of Firefox. Don't get it ..as JS alone has contributed like how much to world economies, as well to almost every HN reader's wallet/bank.
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1. xmprt ◴[15 Jan 20 22:26 UTC] No.22059493[source]▶
Creating a language 20 years ago doesn't mean you're responsible for everything the language produced. If javascript didn't exist something different would have taken it's place and produced just as much value.
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2. Eikon ◴[15 Jan 20 23:11 UTC] No.22059858[source]▶
Not to mention the original Javascript was pretty much only good at making snow animations on your website when winter was coming.
3. BrendanEich ◴[16 Jan 20 08:42 UTC] No.22062710[source]▶
Microsoft tried with VBScript, but JS was fit enough to survive, and no one wanted a second language after it. No point in speculating, we know JS matters. Asserting it could have been Blub means nothing. See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1905155.

Also, I kept working on JS, while doing other things. I worked on JS in both Netscape and Ecma TC39 through late 1997, then co-founded mozilla.org with jwz and others. For mozilla.org I was chief architect, but I still kept working on the Mozilla JS engine, SpiderMonkey, adding features such as getters and setters that became important in 2005 due to use by Microsoft's Live Maps.

Live Maps emulated the IE DOM in Firefox via those same getter and setter extensions that I'd added over the years since 1997. In IE, Live Maps of course used the native DOM. This left Safari and Opera failing unless they reverse engineered the getter and setter extensions from SpiderMonkey in Firefox quickly. It took them about a week, and then Live Maps worked in Safari and Opera too.

This shows how quickly browsers can evolve, based on innovation in just one browser's engine, even in the wake of a monopoly period of stagnation.