And it was for political reasons that stood to directly affect an unknown number of his employees, the people whose lives would be directly affected by his donation to the anti-gay marriage thing; if those people raise a stink because he's trying to use government to interfere in their lives, I can't fault them.
"I'm going to use my wealth and power to negatively impact your life -- but don't talk about it, that's political." Nope.
As CEO I had already reorged Mozilla, and CTO was lined up for someone else (Andreas Gal). I was not offered any particular C level position by anyone with authority over such things.
I did not leave because of any of my employees objecting to me. If you are thinking of the handful of Mozilla Foundation employees who tweeted on March 27th against me (https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/03/mozil...), none of them worked for me. The Mozilla Foundation is arms-length from the Mozilla Corporation.
I also did not quit to pursue my own project; Brave was not founded until May 2015. I resigned to avoid Mozilla taking any more damage from mob action kicked off by someone who demanded that I be "completely removed from any day to day activities at Mozilla" (http://web.archive.org/web/20180621041436/http://www.teamrar... -- the blog seems broken but the Web archive has snapshots).
It's clear you just asserted falsehoods that make you comfortable. But you not only did not know what you were asserting to be true, you could not possibly know whether it was true. That's wishful thinking at best, and tantamount to lying at worst.
And FF should focus on the browser because this is their cash cow, and progress is needed. But as the declining usage numbers show, FF employes just do what they want, riding FF to death then jumping ship to raid the next project. As a longtime FF user (25y) you're just left in the dust.
They need an oversight committee (from outside the valley preferably)
Anybody got the breakdown on community commits to FF vs. employee commits?
Last time I saw anyone try to do this, it was vastly predominately employee commits (this isn't that surprising, there are hundreds of people working full-time on Firefox at Mozilla, and very few spending a comparable amount of time per day in the larger community); it's hard to get exact numbers because determining whether a commit is by an employee or not is hard (e.g., there's no requirement for employees to use Mozilla email addresses for their commits).
Current Firefox is better than ever for me.
I'm sorry you weren't around when Firefox (then called Phoenix) was really good, but most FF problems pre-date 2014. They are actually being addressed just about now.
When Eich was ousted it seemed like things took a sea change and we started getting "commercial" stuff shoved in our faces (alright, stuck on our toolbars). Firefox doesn't appear to be a high moral FOSS project trying to release us from the grip of commercial enterprise taking over the web -- as it did to me before. They went from being very user-centric to being a bit more like Microsoft (of old, at least): "we added a non-removable addon to /our/ browser", rather than "would you like to add this addon to your browser".
Now I've no idea if the removal of Eich's influence on "business philosophy" was behind that; could be a coincidence. But, either way FF seems to have changed for the worse IMO.
Mind, I'm still mourning the demise of Opera Unite -- with their browser as a server concept -- which seemed to be on track to change the focus of the web and give us the distributed peering that has always seemed to be the proper focus for the web+internet.
As a browser user I have nothing about political goals or making money, as long as the browser experience comes first.