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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Where did you hear this CL fish story?

The original codename Mocha was Marc Andreessen's.

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

https://x.com/BrendanEich/status/1004425861410402304

https://x.com/BrendanEich/status/1922360598995534074

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

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.

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.

>>> (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".