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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

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).