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BrendanEich

Re:Web Search API on Monday October 05, 2026 @05:55PM (#49971399)
Subtweeting feels low, and I was not picking on you only. Here is a direct link: https://x.com/BrendanEich/status/2107224138394095965
Re:I Switched to Brave Browser on Saturday October 03, 2026 @02:38PM (#49946615)
I knew Christie and David and worked with both while at Mozilla.
If not for JS, VBScript: VBSConf.us, vQuery.vbs, React.vbs if conceivable.
Re:Things I want in a modern relational query language on Tuesday August 25, 2026 @12:13AM (#49428988)
I never did Scheme in the browser, there was no "redo".

https://x.com/BrendanEich/status/1997032329689346359

Re:Your ePub Is Fine. Kobo Disagrees. Blame Adobe on Friday June 19, 2026 @02:11AM (#48595374)
Don't trust Wikipedia.

I've used the "glue language" phrase myself, but when I did Mocha in May 1995 for Netscape 2, it was to make an HTML-embedded scripting language that could be useful by itself. LiveConnect, by which JS could call Java and vice versa, came in 1996 for Netscape 3.

The "Java" hype dictated the marketing-sought JavaScript name, but JS was useful by itself with the DOM level 0, which I hacked in extreme conditions in the summer of 1995, well before any "merely acting as glue" role for Java applets or components. That "just glue" option came late, and ultimately failed. JS survived and in the end took over from Java and other plugins.

Re:Leaving Mozilla on Friday June 19, 2026 @01:34AM (#48595122)
Were you? I have no idea who you are, but the only "other C-level position" was an unspecified throwaway line from Reid Hoffman, who didn't have authority to create any such "Chief of Special Projects" position anyway. The CEO makes the C-level org chart; the new CEO after me was waiting in the wings but in no position to make promises.

You seem awfully eager to assert something false, possibly out of bad conscience. No one involved in my departure had a good solution for my staying at Mozilla, including me.

Re:Leaving Mozilla on Friday June 19, 2026 @01:29AM (#48595092)
I was a real founder (not retconned fake founder). My contributions were almost entirely before taking the CEO job, of course.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44544226

"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."

That was when I thought the attribute was added only when the user searched, but it was added even to a FQDN which should not have been done.

We didn't make anything from this bug, fixed it quickly, it's a black mark on our shield still but it wasn't some mustache-twirling grand plan, believe me. It was a blunder.

Who "he"? I :set et (expand tabs) in vim :-P.
Re:Brave Origin on Tuesday April 21, 2026 @11:38PM (#47858632)
https://x.com/BrendanEich/status/1981097992477364231

There's no need for a "Sorry". On the other hand, Brave dying on the wrong hill does not help anyone. This isn't a "wreck other parts of the world so our slice of the smaller resulting pie is a bigger fraction" exercise of the sort seemingly playing out in the world right now. Gecko is not going to make a comeback by holding down a Chromium-based browser.

I'm a supporter of Ladybird.

Re:Zero-day CSS: CVE-2026-2441 exists in the wild on Thursday February 26, 2026 @12:14AM (#47162159)
A mundane reason for why donations to the 501c3 parent Mozilla Foundation can't go to Firefox or Gecko engineers is U.S. tax law. We found out the hard way after the IRS San Jose office said we could run only as a foundation and take "sponsorship income" tax-free. They reneged and litigated; this led to the creation of the arms-length Mozilla Corporation that's wholly owned by the Foundation. Per IRS regulations, it cannot be funded by grants from the parent Mozilla Foundation.

The corporation could let users pay for Firefox, and pay tax on that revenue. While I was there, no one thought this would help enough to be worth the effort, compared to just working on other things while taking Google search revshare.

With Brave, I've pushed for user-pays as an option. We let a user buy Premium Search (no ads, but this is possible for free) to support us. It's a small but non-negligible amount of revenue per year, and growing slowly, but we did it on principle. Same will go for buy-once zero-telemetry Brave Origin, stripped down Brave coming in a month or two.

Re:Firefox Getting New Controls to Turn Off AI Features on Wednesday February 11, 2026 @11:01PM (#46984765)
Rewards has always been opt in, so you don't need to get past it to use Brave. We would not be here without it, but use Chrome or Firefox if you prefer. IMHO "really gross" applies to the Google spyware embedded in Chrome, and Firefox has had its share of "gross mistakes" since I left.

For those who don't want to free ride, we will offer Brave Origin soon. One time payment for stripped down Brave, no opt-in UX of any kind.

Re:Firefox Getting New Controls to Turn Off AI Features on Monday February 09, 2026 @07:27PM (#46953668)
> ... things like "Come home, white man" and other dog-whistles on image-boards

Wow, that's a new lie.

Do you have any evidence? This isn't something Brave ever did, but it's easy to make unfalsifiable "There's probably archives" b.s. claims on HN.

Re:Firefox Getting New Controls to Turn Off AI Features on Monday February 09, 2026 @07:25PM (#46953653)
We never, as in not ever, offered crypto mining in the browser.
The grants came from our token fund, not users' tokens (no way to buy BAT then).

The issue which I found out about late, and fixed right away, was infringing on right to publicity, nothing to do with donations from users' own tokens.

That blog post is about a partnership (which ended), but you probably saw some sponsored images at the time, in new tab pages (1 of 4 then, I think; the rest are just art images).

These are non-tracking, carefully designed (including vetting by Brave), brand advertising images. They are not ads (we never did this) inserted into publisher pages, or (opt-in only) push notifications.

Brave has been working to find ways to sustain ourselves, and these sponsored images are still a good revenue line, although lesser now vs other lines. If you want, turn them off.

Free riding is always an user right, we don't try to stop it on principle, as if we ever could with open source. But there's no free lunch: if you use Firefox, you are Google's product. If you use a Firefox fork, you're free riding on Gecko which costs a lot to maintain. HTH

Re:Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo on Tuesday December 30, 2025 @02:39PM (#46437082)
That's all b.s. of the ripest kind.
No. I wrote Mocha in C.

Where did you hear this CL fish story?

Re:CSS now has an if() conditional function on Wednesday December 10, 2025 @12:21PM (#46220523)
I don't know what "semantic HTML enrichment" means, but there wasn't time. The alternative was VBScript and DHTML. DHTML and Netscape's DOM forked Web content based on `if (document.all) /* IE code here */; else /* netscape code here */`, and only with Firefox, Opera, and Safari founding whatwg.org and start HTML5 did we unify everything.
I didn't pick LiveScript, Netscape Marketing did.

The original codename Mocha was Marc Andreessen's.

This is all in the HOPL IV paper and my Lex Fridman interview.

Re:30 years ago today "Netscape and Sun announce JavaScript" on Monday December 08, 2025 @12:00AM (#46188550)
One book covers the DOM and browser APIs, one does not.
It's opt in. The UX can be disabled, and Leo as a whole can be removed via group policy. https://search.brave.com/ask?q=how+to+disable+leo+ux+in+brav...
Re:Firefox is the best mobile browser on Monday October 20, 2025 @06:17PM (#45650131)
"Mozilla reluctantly hired" me? False, a foolish lie if you knew better, and if you didn't, why not? Search engines and even censored Wikipedia exist.

I was a founder of Mozilla in 1998 (1997 planning inside Netscape).

Re:The <output> Tag on Monday October 20, 2025 @06:15PM (#45650107)
(There was no DOCTYPE for DHTML. The one for HTML 4.01 was not equivalent to a DOCTYPE for DHTML.)
Re:The <output> Tag on Monday October 20, 2025 @06:14PM (#45650101)
JS was ubiquitous when DHTML was pushed by Microsoft, because DHTML required JScript aka JS.

CSS was not there in the '90s because Netscape didn't implement, and MS did its own subset.

JS and CSS both suffered from wildly inconsistent support between Netscape and IE, but JS at root had interop enough to support hotmail, later OddPost, much more. CSS had no extension mechanism based on JS then, so it suffered browser-specific support that was IMHO worse than JS suffered. No way to polyfill.

Re:Helium Browser on Sunday September 28, 2025 @08:27PM (#45409293)
Does no one use search engines any longer? Or AI chatbots, the new front end to search engines? Anyway, 2014.
Re:Firefox is fine. The people running it are not on Thursday July 24, 2025 @03:46PM (#44675182)
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.

Re:Firefox is fine. The people running it are not on Friday July 18, 2025 @12:28AM (#44601207)
From the statcounter links I gave:

>>> (31.82-14.34)x100/31.82

54

>>> (14.34-2.37)x100/14.35

83

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

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