Mozilla lays off 70

Edge or Brave. Different business models than Google's and to some extent Mozilla's.

But still beholden to the same rendering engine, and therefore Google's technical decisions about the future of the web. Which is exactly why I would strongly prefer for Mozilla to stay strong, even aside from the non-profit aspect of it.

Still 100% depending on Google, still supporting a near monopolistic position for the browser. Every Chromium fork is part of the problem, not the solution.

Engine consolidation happened, the fight now is over privacy. When and if Brave is big enough we will chart our own engine course.

There are no good alternatives. The corporations have hijacked the design-by-committee "open standards" by requiring DRM. Hobbyists are shut-out.

Mozilla's FF was once a viable alternative to FAANG privacy monetization, but they're flailing around like their leadership doesn't know what to do but fire engineers and re-organize the deck chairs (org chart) on the Titanic.

You know better than anybody the size of the task of rolling a homemade engine. Is this some vaporware promise or does Brave already started something around this idea?

Not Brendan, but I don't think anyone doubts that Brave would break from the Chromium homogeneity if it were practical to do so.

Production-quality browser engines are not basement projects. Even Google waited until they were the big kid on the block to undertake the project. Per Wired at [0]:

> "The browser matters," CEO Eric Schmidt says. He should know, because he was CTO of Sun Microsystems during the great browser wars of the 1990s. Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin know it, too. "When I joined Google in 2001, Larry and Sergey immediately said, 'We should build our own browser,'" Schmidt says. "And I said no."

> It wasn't the right time, Schmidt told them. "I did not believe that the company was strong enough to withstand a browser war," he says.

Piggy-backing on Google's engine for the time being is effectively turning the Goliath's momentum against itself. If Brave gets a sustainable revenue model and good-enough market penetration, I'd have every expectation that they'd feel liberated to take more direct control over the platform.

[0] https://www.wired.com/2008/09/mf-chrome/

The more influence Google gets over the web standards, the more they will steer it in order to raise the barrier of entry for web engine makers. It will also get them more and more power over what can be commercially viable on the web. Making it easier for them to set the rules for everyone on the web seems directly detrimental to your business. As time passes by for Brave to became "big enough" (supposedly to develop a 2020 state of the art web engine), the complexity of starting a new engine from scratch would continue to grow.

It seems that keeping Gecko up to date with the web standards is the only way to have an concurrent implementation for mid-term. This will get more and more difficult to do the more marketshare Blink gets, since it gets easier for Google to shoehorn whatever they want in the web standards by first making it a "de-facto" standard by implementing it in Blink.

To stay in the martialistic metaphor: In this fight you merely wield the weapons your opponent forges for you. If Google decides to dull your edge in the fight for privacy, you have little influence to sharpen it again.

The only reason you are even able to fight this battle is because of the existance of Firefox. All of the Chrome based browsers are toothless tigers without Mozilla.

May be in the future web will be simpler?

My theory: browser of the future will need to support wasm and webgl (well, not webgl, but something similar, providing fast and safe interface for GPU). Of course along with smaller standards like fetch api, but that's manageable.

Most of the useful websites will utilize those tech to build their UI from scratch without using of HTML, CSS or JS.

And HTML, CSS and JS engines could be just another wasm blob. For example parts of chromium engine adapted and compiled for wasm. So it's like jQuery.

I'm not sure "chart our own engine course" necessarily means "roll our own engine".

I am a for-real founder of Mozilla so spare me. I poured 16 years into it, including a bunch of coding as well as recruiting key talent, managing, and strategic decision making. We restarted the browser market when conventional wisdom said it could not be done. This enabled us to restart web standards (WHATWG => HTML5, ECMA-262 new editions). We did that (not you, unless I know you from old days).

But Google is a monopoly now and has tied its browser to its other products to take over adjacent markets, or buy other companies that pioneered such markets. Mozilla depends on Google for most of its revenue, and on a declining (traffic) basis. Reality requires acknowledging my and others work on Mozilla but not dying on that nostalgic hill. Especially not with such arrant mismanagement as is going on there now.

Your comment shows malice (ascribing motives to us), as that blunder was quickly corrected, and the tokens at stake came from our fund. Try Hanlon’s Razor.

On engine futures, slow forking works, that is how chromium/Blink emerged from from WebKit. New engines taking lots of capital may happen, probably when there is a massive Bell’s Law device class shift. To argue for others without deep pockets dying on the last war’s hill is to wish those others ill (whether you mean it or not). Users deserve better browsers, and the big user value fight is truly a level up from the engine.

This happens already, e.g. AirBnB deploys new content that breaks in Firefox (perhaps not totally; could be cosmetic or a corner case). Webdevs do not test in low share browsers.

That just sounds terrible for both SEO and accessibility.

> Your comment shows malice [...] Try Hanlon’s Razor.

For the sake of internal consistency you should accuse GP of stupidity, not malice.

Do a search on that handle in connection to Brave/me, notice patterns. Also I do not take ascribing motives to be a sign of low intelligence, per se.

Product and design people who were involved in our blunder had the best of intentions, and I'm not saying they were stupid either, but they missed the mark and we corrected within a month.

To say "fraud" is to accuse us of a crime, deceiving for gain, which we did not do. We were the source of funds, we did not take anything due to anyone. But the product design was on edge of infringing rights to publicity, even if by scraping, and the appearance of donation fraud was bad. Sorry again for this error. The team learned from it.

Find "slow forking" elsewhere to see my response to your concern that we would have to make an entirely new engine from scratch this year or next. That's not the threat. We strip out Google tracking already and work in W3C to keep them from jamming premature standards through -- if they try turning any such on without other browsers agreeing, we will disable.

I left Mozilla (brief undistinguished tenure; briefer overlap with you) in part because I felt it simply refused to acknowledge that the Internet of 2005 (dominated by 500M people using web browsers in democracies) was not the Internet of 2015 (3B people, mostly apps on smartphones, tracked by their SIM cards and social networks). I was thrilled to start working on FirefoxOS, then soon experienced it as a kind of doubling-down of denial. Skimming Brave's About page, I don't see anything that addresses the existence of Verizon or Windows OS-level security, let alone WhatsApp. I have no idea the extent to which other people think this way, but to me the silence of Mozilla and Brave on the extent to which browsers on laptops have simply been overwhelmed by the rise of other tools and other layers makes it hard to take their pronouncements seriously.

PS, thanks for saving the Web when you did. It seems genuinely heroic to me.

Brave isn’t making an OS or network (yet), but the browser is still critical, to the degree that bigs spend billions on their own, and now privacy law and user blocking demand are reshaping the $330B+ online ad ecosystem. That is a good place to start fighting for the user, imho.

On FirefoxOS, of course gal cjones shaver & I launched it (not quite with all the other execs on board) to address the next billion internet users. I’m glad it worked out but sorry the place and name are KaiOSTech — it was Mozilla’s to see through but they faded.

Both run the Chrome engine! That's not an alternative. You really want all available browsers run the same engine, and one that is developed by Google?? You realize they are at step two of "embrace extend extinguish", right? And you realize that by showing their cards with AMP, they totally aren't above actually doing it too?

What do you suppose will happen when the entire web runs on the Chrome engine? No good things.

Privacy is not using Google's engine.

I would have given Brave a more serious try if it weren't for that.

(although I very much dislike the payment system, presented as an alternative to the tracking privacy nightmare the web has become. I'm not paying for the difference, that's ridiculous. I saw what they did to the web, I'm not paying to keep them away)

Engines do not by themselves raid user privacy, and we strip out front end and middleware tracking from chromium/Blink. See https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/wiki/Deviations-from-....

You have “who pays” exactly backwards about optional Brave Rewards in your closing parenthetical. We pay you, we do not make you pay.

"User" is a perfect encapsulation of the mindset we need to leave behind. For the people who use web browsers, Google's ad tracking is the least of their worries. Here's Schneier:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/20/opinion/facial-recognitio...

Oh come on -- that was a Tron ref and no offense to the clueful (which includes people on HN).

If you want to boil the ocean before helping people in an important segment of the population, good luck. Or were you just being defeatist?