YouSaid · the spoken record

Brendan Eich

lines on the record: 237
first: 2021-02-12
most recent: 2021-02-12
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“And three sevenths. Well, that's easier said than done. And Page Fair and others source point, many others tried to either smuggle ads through or cajole the user into letting ads appear. And it didn't really work. And meanwhile, the ad blocking adoptions just continued intelligent tracking prevention in Safari in 2017. Brave from 2016 on with very strong cookie blocking and other protections. This is not going away. The publishers used to rage against it. We would try to say, we can help you. You're dealing with users who are already blocking all your ads. We can try to put back some economics that help the user and you that led to the basic attention token that we started with Bitcoin. We can be your friend. Don't just fingerprint us as an ad blocker and treat us as an enemy. But in 2015 or 16, it was like, no, you're an ad blocker. Get out of here. I hate you. And by 2017 or 18, it's like something's happening. The ad blocking's not stopping.”
2021-02-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #160 – Brendan Eich: JavaScript, Firefox, Mozilla, and Brave · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right. And it's been. And they measured ad blocking adoption and they tried to say, hey, publishers, you're 30% of the visitors to pitchfork or wire to conduct NAS properties are using ad blockers. If we can somehow convince them to lower their ad blocking for your site, that could be like a 43% lift, right?”
2021-02-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #160 – Brendan Eich: JavaScript, Firefox, Mozilla, and Brave · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And they're not in favor of privacy first. They want to do privacy their way only under, I would say, market pressure. But with Brave leading the way, we block third-party cookies almost without exception. So we just block them. And that gives us a very strong privacy benefit, but it also means some sites just don't work right. Embedded YouTube videos might not work right. So we're adapting in a similar way to Apple's done with ITP to make third-party cookies blocked, but to sort of simulate what looks like a working third-party cookie for the site. Essentially tries to partition each site and its third parties into its own sort of cookie jar.”
2021-02-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #160 – Brendan Eich: JavaScript, Firefox, Mozilla, and Brave · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Fingerprinting, right? Anytime you have a little bit of storage in the browser associated with a website. If the bad guy can get 32 websites, each one has a bit of storage, that's 32 bits. You can turn the bit on or off, you can make 4 billion numbers, you can make an identifier. It's called a super cookie sometimes. There are weaker ways that are statistical. They're called fingerprinting. You have to block all of them. And you have to not only automate, you want to work in the web standards body to put privacy in by default, by design, from the get-go, not add it as an afterthought or go hogwile with new web APIs that add a bunch more local storage or fingerprint surface area. And that's been a struggle too because guess who's the new Microsoft in the standards body? It's Google.”
2021-02-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #160 – Brendan Eich: JavaScript, Firefox, Mozilla, and Brave · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So Appnexus did something very naughty. They took their ad partners, put the actual ad you click on, and they said, hey, add a little script so that when somebody clicks on the ad, before it goes to your landing page, redirect to app Nexus and we'll redirect to the landing page. And by doing that, they set a first party cookie and they got whitelisted. So it was a loophole they exploited. Intelligent tracking prevention in Safari was sophisticated enough to counteract this, and it did other things, and it's evolved since they did it. And we've evolved Brave, too. And so when I say machine and human learning, there's a real set of techniques here.”
2021-02-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #160 – Brendan Eich: JavaScript, Firefox, Mozilla, and Brave · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've never been there, but I guarantee you 10 years ago you probably had, if you were using Firefox, you had a cookie, third party cookie, because you were being tracked by them. And they were using that cookie to build up a profile of you. In Safari, as long as the user never went to App Nexus, that cookie would not be set. And that was a real move for privacy early on when Jobs was still around in Safari. But it had this loophole that if you do go to AppNexis, then why it's okay to be a third-party cookie?”
2021-02-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #160 – Brendan Eich: JavaScript, Firefox, Mozilla, and Brave · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And at Brave, we did that from the start and built a research team to help drive it an automate it. We realized that protecting people needed machine learning. And around 2017 spring, I talked to my friends at Apple about this too, and they were also doing what they call intelligent tracking prevention, which uses local machine learning in the browser. And the funny thing is great minds think alike. They were taking their third-party cookie blocker that was in Safari from the old days and making it not have a big loophole. Because what they did was in 2003 when Safari came out, they said, we're going to block cookies that are from those third-party embedded elements where you've never visited that site before. So I'm going to pick an ad company that got sold to AT&T, so I'm not picking on anybody unfairly. Appnexus.com. If you've ever been to Appnexus.com. Nope.”
2021-02-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #160 – Brendan Eich: JavaScript, Firefox, Mozilla, and Brave · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But obviously you go to Gmail, there's a bunch of script there to make that amazing web client, that's okay. That's first party JavaScript. So how do you tell the first from the third party? And it's not easy. It's not a matter of just what's embedded from a different server because a lot of publishers use benign scripts from unrelated domains or apparently unrelated domains. So you end up having to develop a sort of human and machine learning practice around blocking”
2021-02-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #160 – Brendan Eich: JavaScript, Firefox, Mozilla, and Brave · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, when I realized that these accidents, like the third party cookie, the image or script that's tracking you, or this JavaScript that can do it invisibly now, that all this stuff wasn't intended and that Firefox had supported extensions that block some of these things. I thought probably we should have browsers just block some of these things by default. These were not intended and they're now unsafe. They're tracking you. There could be data breaches, the malware distribution, bullying and psyops and other attacks on people. Block that stuff, block that JavaScript. I'm Dr. Frankenstein.”
2021-02-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #160 – Brendan Eich: JavaScript, Firefox, Mozilla, and Brave · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then because JavaScript can be like images, they're embedded in the page by the time Netscape 3, I made that work. You can get a request with the last cookie value and the response updates it. That's a tracking mechanism. And that's why you don't even need images to track now. You just use scripts. So, this whole tracking economy evolved and it depended on these accidents of the 90s, these unintended consequences.”
2021-02-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #160 – Brendan Eich: JavaScript, Firefox, Mozilla, and Brave · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then you hit ESPN, same thing, and the database gets updated, and the number User 1234 indexes in the database to a profile of you. You've been tracked. This was not intended, and it was too late to undo by the time I got to Netscape. I think Lou wanted to do Twinkies, he called them, and he was trying to solve several problems. He wanted them to be bigger because initially cookies had a short size limit. I think he wanted to solve the third-party problem, but Tom Paquin, the engineering managed it. Nope. No Twinkies, just cookies. We're done. You done, son. That's how a lot of that stuff was. That's how JavaScript got frozen like a fly in amber in some ways with that sloppy equality operator that I made because of the early adopters. And the cookie got stuck with this tracking hazard.”
2021-02-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #160 – Brendan Eich: JavaScript, Firefox, Mozilla, and Brave · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that was the great thing about cookies. Lumon Tui did it in a hurry. Even then, there was the image element embedded in the page, and the image gets fetched possibly from a different server, and that request carries the last cookie, which could be empty at first, and the response carries the updated cookie. So just by having images and cookies, you had tracking because that image server can be serving a little one-by-one pixel, and they still use the word pixel in ad tech. And that pixel can be served from the same server, embedded differently with different URL spellings in the New York Times and ESPN. And as you go from one to the other, The image server can say, I haven't got a cookie for you. It's empty initially. I'm going to assign you user number 1234. I'm going to put a database entry in. And I see, by the way, I always fetched the name of the path part of the URL that I was in the New York Times. So you're a New York Times reader.”
2021-02-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #160 – Brendan Eich: JavaScript, Firefox, Mozilla, and Brave · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Every site can store some information in a cookie every time it's contacted by the browser, the previous version is sent back. And in the response from the server, the cookie's updated. So it's this little bit of storage in the browser that the site can keep updating and it can store an encrypted version of your login credentials with a timestamp so you can stay logged in without having to retype your password every time you navigate, which is how it would be if you didn't have cookies. Web protocols, especially in the 90s, are so called stateless protocols. So you go to your bank, you log in, you go from your login confirmed page to your account view. If you didn't have a cookie, you'd be logging in again.”
2021-02-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #160 – Brendan Eich: JavaScript, Firefox, Mozilla, and Brave · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Network tracking network privacy is not guaranteed at all because you're using the same internet and ISP as a public window, a non-private window. But Sorry I had that early on. They also had a cookie blocking policy that might take a little explaining. If you know what a cookie is, it's a little bit of storage in the browser indexed by the name of the site. And it's really only the main name of the site, like B of A.com or something like npr.org.”
2021-02-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #160 – Brendan Eich: JavaScript, Firefox, Mozilla, and Brave · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But privacy is not a unitary good. It's complex, and people are understanding it only over time. And as they get burned, but there's a genie that's not going back in the bottle there. People are fed up. Apple has responded to this. Apple was always making safari, I think, more of a privacy-branded browser from the very beginning. I think this is probably Steve Jobs. Safari had private windows, private tabs before Firefox did. And these are only private in the sense that they don't leave local traces, if you don't want them to. Turns out Safari does keep them around between shutdown. But the canonical model is no local traces after you close the private window, no leftover traces that you went to some site that you were embarrassed by or bought a gift for somebody you wanted to keep secret.”
2021-02-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #160 – Brendan Eich: JavaScript, Firefox, Mozilla, and Brave · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Evolution again, especially on tracking protections. So privacy. Is this sort of global wave that's rising? I like to call it a wave because it's a large, somewhat chaotic structure. It's not a unitary good. You can't say I'm buying privacy for, you know, $3. I'm paying $3 for privacy. Some people think a VPN does this and are disappointed when it fails them, but often people use VPNs for reasons unlocking video or getting the US Netflix.”
2021-02-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #160 – Brendan Eich: JavaScript, Firefox, Mozilla, and Brave · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Staying because users were resetting their default. And this shows how defaults are important, but they have to be good enough that the user doesn't override them. And a lot of the commercial value in popular apps is what are the default settings? What is the default search?”
2021-02-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #160 – Brendan Eich: JavaScript, Firefox, Mozilla, and Brave · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Tried Yahoo. That was unfortunate because I think even though Marissa Mayer talked about it, she never pulled it off. It never restored the search team that had been laid off. I believe Carol Bartz was running Yahoo when Carol said, I've got to get rid of one of the three expensive things. I'm going to get rid of search. And those researchers went to Google and Microsoft. And there was no way to put Yahoo search back together. So when Firefox tried switching all their users who'd stuck with a default from Google to Yahoo like mid-December 2014, a bunch of users said, what just happened to my Firefox? And others didn't notice right away, but over time they did. And so over the next year, the traffic just went away for Yahoo, and yet they were obliged, I understand it. I don't have inside knowledge, but this is leaked out and Danny Sullivan's written about it, search engine. I think the deal was like fixed payments to Mozilla. So Mozilla was getting a bunch of money for traffic that wasn't.”
2021-02-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #160 – Brendan Eich: JavaScript, Firefox, Mozilla, and Brave · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All died. And there were some features that we still missed that didn't make it into Chrome But Sundar got OEMs to bundle those. And then he got enough of those deals that by 2007 or 8, Google felt, well, if Bing, Microsoft does the worst and tries to force Bing, we can reach in and reset it with that point of presence. So that was good for Sundara's career, and it was good for Google, but it never came to pass that they had to. Defend Microsoft was still slow. And by the time they saw Chrome come out, then they did what would have been IE9. And then they said, we're going to have a fast JavaScript engine to core. And they did okay. They were another process isolated fast JavaScript browser tab browser.”
2021-02-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #160 – Brendan Eich: JavaScript, Firefox, Mozilla, and Brave · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To being from Google. Microsoft wasn't, I think, ready to dare the antitrust cops that way, even though they'd gone to sleep. And I don't think Bing was ready either. But just in case it happened, Sundar Pichai, who rose very well based on this work, was sort of in charge of getting distribution deals. And he got Google Toolbar and Google desktop search distribution. And if you remember those pieces of software, those were like desktop extensions, toolbars or operating system extensions for doing desktop search in your local files kind of like that.”
2021-02-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #160 – Brendan Eich: JavaScript, Firefox, Mozilla, and Brave · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we knew Chrome was coming, but it took two more years to come out. And we were still getting the Google search revenue. We were still making Google the default engine. And Firefox was still growing. Firefox grew, I think, until 2011. That was when it peaked. And as it started falling, it was because of Chrome. Chrome came out in 2008 and it was a comic book that leaked accidentally that showed some of the people who worked on it. Larsbach was in there and so on. It was kind of soft launch because they didn't market it heavily. They didn't push distribution. But Google had reason to worry about distribution because Microsoft was doing a search engine bing since 2007. In fact, when they came out with Bing, Google was worried that Microsoft would just brute force, switch the default browser in everyone's Internet Explorer or even Firefox on Windows.”
2021-02-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #160 – Brendan Eich: JavaScript, Firefox, Mozilla, and Brave · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And they had done some exotic security stuff, but they ended up simplifying it to this process isolation. And it was good. And Firefox didn't have it at the time. So we were still struggling with security bugs.”
2021-02-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #160 – Brendan Eich: JavaScript, Firefox, Mozilla, and Brave · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“JavaScript, yeah, that was still often Denmark on the farm. It had tabs because all browsers had tabs at this point, and it had this software fault isolation I mentioned. It was through process isolation. So in theory, each tab has its own operating system process. And so what's going to take your tab down? Well, WebKit has bugs that can crash it, but Flash was still big then. All the restaurant sites remember, and Flash crashed a lot. So the demo that I heard about my friend's Netscape, as a lot of people did inside Google was the sad tab. They showed an early version of Chrome, which is just this bare bones tab browser. They loaded a site with a known flash vault. And then suddenly flash crashes. And everyone expected the whole browser to go down. But instead, you got this little sad face in the tab, and you could reload it. And there it is again. So this was an improvement. It was a real move for security. It was based on a company that acquired called Green Border that had some really big brains like Olfar Ehrlingson, I think, was in.”
2021-02-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #160 – Brendan Eich: JavaScript, Firefox, Mozilla, and Brave · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Engine from Linux, the KDE side of Linux, that was used in the conqueror browser also with Ks, that Apple had forked. And in 2005 was when Apple's principles, including Dave Hyatt, Machia Stecovac, some of my friends here. So there said, we must stop patch bombing this poor KHML project. We should make a proper Mozilla-like organization, webkit.org. Now, it wasn't a separate nonprofit or anything. It was still Apple. It was Apple controlled. They made their fork first class and they made it be something that they all worked in and lived in. And that was before Chrome. And then Chrome, Larry Page, said, what about Webcam? I said, yeah, it's nice. I have friends who work on it. You might use that if you do your own browser. Why don't you do your own browser? Don't worry about Firefox. You should do your own browser. You can have your own opinion of how it should work. And sure enough, they did. So by 2006, we knew they'd been working on it. Some of my friends who'd been at Netscape did the original demo. And the demo wasn't what you thought. It didn't have the fast.”
2021-02-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #160 – Brendan Eich: JavaScript, Firefox, Mozilla, and Brave · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But they didn't. They were slow IE7 wasn't that great and really got them started, I think, was Chrome. And I talked to Larry Page in 2005. I think I said, you know, we're talking about the Firefox relationship, but he was also saying, what about WebKit? This was Apple's version of the old KHTML.”
2021-02-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #160 – Brendan Eich: JavaScript, Firefox, Mozilla, and Brave · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, Firefox didn't quite cause Microsoft to reconvene iEE. They did do IE7. And I remember being on a plane back from standards meeting, JavaScript Standards meeting from Seattle from Redmond. And there was some Microsoft guy in front of me. It turns out my wife knew him from her past life before he married. And he was just this bearded big guy and he was like, we should have just killed Firefox in the cradle. All we needed to do was add pop-up blocking in and tabs and we could have made an internet kill Firefox. And it's like, shoulda, could have, would have, pal. And I was right behind him during this.”
2021-02-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #160 – Brendan Eich: JavaScript, Firefox, Mozilla, and Brave · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it leads to this capture or kill effect where you have the search engine own its own browser and other browsers may struggle to get distribution we talked about earlier.”
2021-02-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #160 – Brendan Eich: JavaScript, Firefox, Mozilla, and Brave · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I could actually start it quite early. It might have been 2002 or three, but by the time we started dealing with Google and Firefox to get the search deal, which was the main revenue source for Mozilla and still is 2004, early Sergei Brin's one of his trusted engineer guys, Fritz Schneider, made contact with me at Mozilla. And we started talking and we realized search and browser need each other. And this is deeply true, right? This is still true. This is why a lot of the search engines have their own browsers.”
2021-02-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #160 – Brendan Eich: JavaScript, Firefox, Mozilla, and Brave · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Gmail was already done, and it was an impressive webmail. There were others before it like hotmail, but Gmail is really impressive from Google. And Google Maps, people started seeing. What could be done? They thought, how can you drag the map around? And how's that work? And it was all JavaScript and images.”
2021-02-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #160 – Brendan Eich: JavaScript, Firefox, Mozilla, and Brave · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was amazing. Timbo Rally and John Battel did the first Web2 conference, which eventually became huge, and they split it. But that was in 2004, right? When Firefox was out, Craigslist was huge and it was killing classified revenue for newspapers.”
2021-02-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #160 – Brendan Eich: JavaScript, Firefox, Mozilla, and Brave · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And you saw it over time because they kept aging and they were using AOL to get online and they couldn't really use a web browser. And it became sort of a valued cohort because they still have relatively high socioeconomic status and they have grandchildren, but it's going away. It's dying at some point.”
2021-02-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #160 – Brendan Eich: JavaScript, Firefox, Mozilla, and Brave · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“AOL was the right time to do a dial up service that got distribution by basically leaflet bombing compact disks. On the country. And they beat out CompuServe and the other ones, Prodigy. And then the web happened. And so you had almost like this isolated continent, like some of the evolutionary biologists I follow make fun of the funny large mammal marsupial mammals of Australia, how silly they are.”
2021-02-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #160 – Brendan Eich: JavaScript, Firefox, Mozilla, and Brave · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You rather than non-U or they were like, what's Doman's metropolitan film UHB Urban Bourgeoisie? They were funny and they were kind of useless and kind of preppy. And then the next year we went back and I said, where's Reggie? And it's like, oh, Reggie's not here anymore because Time Warner realized that the merger wasn't in their interest either. And then the sort of knives came out. And this was these mergers really work, right? This is very difficult. You get these giant companies and they think there's going to be synergy. That was the 90s, late 90s watchword. And there wasn't synergy with AOL by Netscape. And there wasn't synergy with Time Warner and AOL.”
2021-02-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #160 – Brendan Eich: JavaScript, Firefox, Mozilla, and Brave · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we had to replace people and we had Ben Goodger, New Zealander, we hired at Netscape, and he stepped in to be the Firefox lead. And we also had this weird circumstance where AOL finally did notice that Netscape was kind of an albatross, that they'd bought it for no particular benefit. And even then, the AOL politics were also heinous, sort of East Coast politics. I remember taking two trips there because I was a principal engineer. And so us principal engineers got trotted out to dog and pony shows in Dulles, Virginia. And the AWAL Opper management was very East Coast in flavor. And they were at that time merging with Time Warner, which did not go well. So one of these years we went out there and we were all doing dog and pony shows and there were these characters that were sort of like marketing guys, one of the most wearing a cravat and was named Reggie and they were very...”
2021-02-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #160 – Brendan Eich: JavaScript, Firefox, Mozilla, and Brave · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. But it was because of Hy Hyatt was quite a feather in their cap. Don Melton, who had been the engineering manager for Safari from the beginning, had been at Netscape also. And so there's this diaspora of talent. And yet Hyatt was still kind of writing blog posts about how to do tabs, right? And at some point, Apple said, don't blog about that. That's our proprietary tab technology. It's like, no, it's not. It was an opera. And I've refined it.”
2021-02-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #160 – Brendan Eich: JavaScript, Firefox, Mozilla, and Brave · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so he'd done that with everything you need in a tabbed browser. And this really showed well in Phoenix, what we called Phoenix and had to rename two more times. Dave Hyatt went to Apple in 2001. He was one of the founding Safari team members”
2021-02-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #160 – Brendan Eich: JavaScript, Firefox, Mozilla, and Brave · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Rebecca told me a story about when they were at UIUC, they were also University of Illinois grad students. There was an assignment, it was a programming assignment of the semester. And Dave's friend was this, I'm going to go think and I'm going to design and I'm going to make this platonic perfect form of the program. And then I'm going to write it at the end when it's due. And Hyatt just went in there and started hacking. He wrote one version. He wrote a second version, a third version. End of the semester comes around. The friend's not doing too well. It wasn't perfect and it wasn't written. I'm not sure how that story ended, but for him. But Dave's version was a fifth iteration. It was great.”
2021-02-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #160 – Brendan Eich: JavaScript, Firefox, Mozilla, and Brave · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We had a popular suite, but we thought, why not make it just a browser? Because it'll be simpler. It'll do one job well. And even then, we can strip it down by having extensions. So Dave Hyatt and Blake Ross, the high school-aged intern, did the first version, which was called Mozilla slash browser. The small group of us Ian Hicks and Aza Dotzler, me, Joe Hewitt, and Hyatt. Blake. And Hyatt was really the senior hacker. He'd done all these things like amazing cross-platform menus through the user interface markup language. And he knew how to do tab browsing. He'd implemented it natively on macOS at the time in Camino, originally called Chimera. He'd written multiple implementations, which was a thing programmers should do. It's like the VA team did for those missing years when the rest of the Chrome team's like, where's V8? In fact, Dave's wife.”
2021-02-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #160 – Brendan Eich: JavaScript, Firefox, Mozilla, and Brave · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They had contrived to fire or lay off the leader and we carried on with an open source structure where Mazillo was still, you know, Mitchell was calling sort of management or project level shots and I was calling technical shots.”
2021-02-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #160 – Brendan Eich: JavaScript, Firefox, Mozilla, and Brave · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Flavor to it. We're not calling the shots right. And they were also under ALS thumb a little bit in that they said, well, we should probably put the AL instant messenger chicklet on the toolbar. And we should put the ICQ, the other messaging system that AL had acquired. We should put the ICQ button on the toolbar. And pretty soon Netscape looked like a bit of a NASCAR badged version of Mozilla. And that also made Mozilla more popular. And yet.”
2021-02-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #160 – Brendan Eich: JavaScript, Firefox, Mozilla, and Brave · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's exactly right. And so we had this Mozilla code base that was getting better. In fact, I think at some point in 2002, when we declared Mozilla 1.0, I engineered a roadmap that successively through similar sort of six-week, five-week releases like we all do with browser releases nowadays, Chrome does and Firefox braved us three weeks. We got to a point where we said, you know what? It doesn't suck. This is like the 1.0 that you want to release because if you hold it back any longer to polish it, you're denying others the ability to use it. It's like pro Engineer, the mechanical cad tool embedded the code. They embedded the layout engine. And Mozilla 10 was like a Netscape communication suite. We'd at that point gotten mail people to reintegrate mail and news and we had an editor for HTML. And it felt like a 90s suiteware. And it felt kind of bloated. And the people who were taking that Mozilla open source and then adding Netscape.”
2021-02-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #160 – Brendan Eich: JavaScript, Firefox, Mozilla, and Brave · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so this show you can kind of transcend your boundaries of corporate open source if you get a project that has enough loyalty, even among the paid staff, because we had outside people contributing. We had people at Red Hat and a few other places. But the majority of the hackers were employed by Netscape. But a lot of them at that point had come from the community and others got the community and wanted to work with it. And it was really the weakest engineers at Netscape who didn't like Mozilla and didn't like the Crucible of competing with the better programmers.”
2021-02-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #160 – Brendan Eich: JavaScript, Firefox, Mozilla, and Brave · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People we'd hired through the Missoula community who were top notch. They'd risen, you know, they came in high quality, they knew the code, and they actually were better than the average or median hire of Netscape. And so the funny thing was the executive who thought they'd gotten rid of Mitchell on the layoff on the next week's community call around Mozilla and what to do. There's Mitchell.”
2021-02-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #160 – Brendan Eich: JavaScript, Firefox, Mozilla, and Brave · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And there was a thought you should take the Netscape browser engine and put it in the Windows AOL client, which was the dial-up client that all the increasingly aging users of AOL were using. Never happened. It would have been too big a change. So it wasn't clear why AOL bought Netscape, but as I said, they left it alone. But Netscape didn't leave Mozilla alone. And so in 2001, Mitchell called me up and said, I'm no longer employed. And I was like, what? You quit? No, no, this wasn't my choice. And there was a layoff, which maybe accidentally or on purpose got rid of Mitchell. But the funny thing was we had an open source project. We had a lot of the engineers on staff on our side. And we had.”
2021-02-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #160 – Brendan Eich: JavaScript, Firefox, Mozilla, and Brave · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Talent on the Netscape side delivered that Dave Hyatt, who was instrumental in Zul Chris Waterson, Joe Hewitt, Blake Ross. And Blake was an intern. He was like a high school-aged intern in that case. And at some point, we were innovating rapidly in the Mozilla world, and Netscape was still caught up in this management mess from these acquisitions, and it wasn't delivering. And every year they were wondering if ALL was going to come and start beheading the executive because it didn't do anything useful.”
2021-02-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #160 – Brendan Eich: JavaScript, Firefox, Mozilla, and Brave · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Variants of Netscape 4, which was based on the old code. Mozilla was trying to rearch the code to make greenfield for developers. It was one of my big goals. It wasn't a technical goal so much as, again, a social goal. People wanted a more standard-spaced browser. They wanted less of a hairball that had been hacked on by X-grad students starting four years prior. So we said we're going to make a modular code base. We're going to use a variant or an open source version of Microsoft's component object model has reference counting and standardized vtables, virtual calls and C++. And we're going to use JavaScript. We're going to have a bridge between those two so you can script those components just like Java components. We're going to make a portable front end with a markup language for the user interface, not tables, not HTML, but custom menus and drop downs and toolbars. And that was called Zool XML user interface language.”
2021-02-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #160 – Brendan Eich: JavaScript, Firefox, Mozilla, and Brave · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Me as the acting manager, which is more like method acting in my case. And I did that was my first management stint But then someone who'd written the licenses, Mitchell Baker, she was a lawyer at Netscape. She was involved in the open source license decision making and the actual writing and construction of those licenses. That was Mitchell's job. Netscape Public License and the truly open Mozilla Public License. And there were two because Netscape needed, because of some encumbered code, needed some special rights, but that went away over time. Mitchell was always interested in Mozilla, and she came back from maternity leave, and she said, I'll be the manager if you want. And Jamie and I said, sure. And then Jamie quit. He quit after a year. And he said, this didn't work. I'm sorry. He acted like it was a total failure because Mozilla didn't restart the browser market. But there's no way it could have, right? Netscape was still...”
2021-02-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #160 – Brendan Eich: JavaScript, Firefox, Mozilla, and Brave · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Department of Commerce, and they stuck it into Mozilla's code. And that was perhaps the best hack that was done in the first few months after we opened sourced the browser. We had other problems. The politics inside Netscape were riven by these acquisitions. So the one acquisition that kind of messed up Netscape 4 also wanted to keep doing a proprietary mail and groupware program, not Jamie Zewinski's mail program that was in Netscape 2 and 3. And they held it back from open source. We didn't have a mail program. It was just a browser. We didn't know what ALL will do to us. Turns out they didn't interfere with us for a long time. But Netscape wasn't the best steward of Mozilla. We were operating Mozilla as a pirate ship without a legal entity. So most of us worked for Netscape under a separate organization and initially the first engineering manager, Tom Paiquin of Netscape, was the Mozilla founding manager. But he left pretty quickly.”
2021-02-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #160 – Brendan Eich: JavaScript, Firefox, Mozilla, and Brave · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so we did Mozilla in 1998, and it looked like it was going to initially give the world an open source browser, but it's really hard to get people to work on this sort of hairball that had been hacked up over by that point four years. It also couldn't have the crypto module for secure sockets, so-called, or now transport layer security, that was an electronic munition. We were not allowed to release that in the full 1024-bit key strength. And yet people, one of whom I happened to meet previously at SGI when I went on a sales support engineering trip, Tim Hudson in Brisbane, Australia and Eric A. Young did what became OpenSSL. It was called SSL EAY after Eric's initials. And Tim and Eric took their open SSL outside of the purview of the NSA and the”
2021-02-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #160 – Brendan Eich: JavaScript, Firefox, Mozilla, and Brave · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a long story there, too. So Netscape got acquired by AOL, which, as I say, was a reasonable, happy ending for a lot of people because Netscape otherwise was going to go out of business because Microsoft was just killing its market. There was no way to charge for a browser. Windows came with IE4 was pretty good and Netscape 4 wasn't that good. It took a while to get better. But the Netscape executive said, let's do an open source escape pod. And like in Star Wars and New Hope, the gunner won't shoot it because there's no life forms on board, right? It's not a threat.”
2021-02-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #160 – Brendan Eich: JavaScript, Firefox, Mozilla, and Brave · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source