Meanwhile they have had consistently growing revenues and consistently declining number of developers.
Citation needed? And no, the 2020 layoffs don't count: It's 2023.
What's important is the number of developers they put on the project.
They fired Brendan Eich, who invented JS, led Netscape past IE, and then headed Mozilla. Who, when fired, started Brave and turned it into a bigger system than FF (including the only relatively new free search engine with its own index), from scratch, in a world already dominated by Chrome, and Safari.
I know, I know, Eich donated personal money to some cause that some people on the internet didn't like. But from a business perspective, it was the stupidest thing they could have done, and is the point at which FF went from growth to (fast) loss.
(And the cause itself was not justified, especially considering it was a private donation, it was a legal org (not like KK or whatever), and he apologized afterwards. Even if it was a mistake, that should not have been justification for firing him.)
On what metric is Brave bigger than Firefox?
Mozilla's mistake was not in firing Brendan Eich (and Brendan Eich was not fired).
Mozilla's mistake was in promoting Brendan Eich to CEO.
Mozilla employees said ~"we were not totally comfortable with Brendan as a leader in the Technology role, but we recognized his long history with the Org and his Technical excellence, so we kept mostly quiet. But we strongly object to his promotion to CEO and primary representative of Mozilla to the world, because we do not feel that he represents the Org's values and do not believe he will be an effective leader of us."
Brendan probably could have returned to his CTO role with little fuss. But he may have had larger aspirations, he may have been sick of working under Mitchell Baker, and he may have been personally disappointed by the Org's vote of no confidence in him. All are 100% reasonable! So he resigned. He was not fired. Yes the board probably recommended that he resign, but he would have been crazy to try to stay in the CEO role after that drama.
> and he apologized afterwards
Has he? Not any time contemporaneous with the events at Mozilla, if ever. I don't think he should feel the need to apologize for personally-held beliefs. But I don't think he can simultaneously hold that particular kind of belief, and be a leader of people at Mozilla.
...
We do agree that Brendan's resignation was a net loss for Mozilla. But he might have not been able to succeed in the Mozilla Org anyway. Even as CEO, he'd have the board to contend with. As CTO, he had the CEO and the board to contend with. If there are effective people in that group, they are not making themselves known.
Not from scratch. Brave is modified Chromium.
It's not about the overall company its about browser team. I'd love to see a comparison of the actual sizes of the teams creating browsers, isn't Safari only a handful of (admittedly extremely talented) people?
I just wished they could rebalance their allocation and focus on simple daily usability things. Just a bit more.