> Brendan Eich, founder of Brave and creator of JavaScript, joined the show to talk about the history of the web, how it has been funded, and the backstory on the early browser wars and emerging monetization models. We also talked about why big problems are hard to solve for the Internet and the tradeoffs between centralization and distribution.
A lot of interesting stuff: search revenue tapering off because of rising mobile usage, ransomware being spread through ad exchanges, owning your own data and privacy, using zero knowledge proofs for distributing revenue to publishers through brave, tiers of privacy and monetization strategies around it, sustainability issues around browser development and open source software in general, shared costs of platform code and how open source fits into that, etc.
You really should listen to it. Brendan Eich is a really smart person.
Respect user privacy. Read up on zero-knowledge proofs and how they can be used to validate client claims without leaking their data. Those are the two that come to mind first. I'm sure there is plenty more to be gleaned from the interview.
I like Changelog when the hosts have familiarity with the tech in question. Ruby ones are good in that respect. There are recent-ish Sandi Metz and Yukihiro Matsumoto episodes.
I have to agree. The Changelog is the best general tech podcast out there. Hosts are good, guests are good, audio quality is good (even when the guests are using Apple earbud mics), and their site is super fast.
I was really sad when I ran out of episodes to listen to——now I have to wait a week.
- 99% Invisible
- The Changelog *
- Dan Carlin's Hardcore History *
- EconPop Podcast
- Engineers & Coffee
- Freakonomics Radio *
- The James Altucher Show
- The Joe Rogan Experience
- The Journal by Kevin Rose
- Planet Money *
- Radiolab
- Reply All *
- Revisionist History *
- This American Life
- The Tim Ferriss Show *
- The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe *
- The Winning Agenda
I will delete episodes with uninteresting starts or guests, most notably on Rogan because it's so long-form. I listen to everything on 2x speed with "SmartSpeed" to also eliminate pauses. Threw an asterisk next to those that are the most significant for me. If I were to pick just one, it would be Tim Ferriss.
I have worked at cloudera, intel and a few other firms in the valley. I now do a bit of work for brave and I will have to say they are the real deal. Total badasses led by the king of the nerds (IMHO) eich themselves.
But what's the point of doing 'mind boggling' features for a browser that's only going to have 0.00000000001% market share?
Even Mozilla is fighting a HUGE uphill battle to stay current and they have enormous funding and mind / market share compared to Brave.
Then there are Edge and Chrome, both of which are supported by multi-national corporations with infinite resources.
It's certainly not impossible for Brave to succeed, but its chances of ever gathering any significant market share are vanishingly small. If for no other reason than Brave will have to get tens / hundreds of millions of people to change their behavior in order for them to gain any significant share.
I feel like it's game over for any new browser that doesn't have some utterly astonishing new value proposition.
That reasoning applies to many startups. You should give motivational speeches in SV.
What were Mozilla's odds when they took on IE and Microsoft? What were Facebook's chances against MySpace, backed by multinational News Corp? Airbnb against the entire hotel industry, which has a few multinationals in it?
> What were Mozilla's odds when they took on IE and Microsoft?
Pretty good given they had the backing of Netscape. (Even if AOL messed them around at the time.) I recall that Mozilla 1.0's value proposition to naive users at the time was "No popups" - even in 2002, adblock-like behaviour was a selling point. (The value proposition to geeks was vastly different and more elaborate, but "Mozilla blocks popups" was radical enough to make it into web comics.)
Where were you in 2002 (when Mozilla 1.0 came out, four years after mozilla.org was founded, two years before Firefox 1.0)? The conventional wisdom then was the same as the comment up two from yours in this thread -- that we had zero chance against IE, which had monopolized the browser market. No one had ever beaten Microsoft then in any market it had taken over.
It would help if you were on the record way back then, as opposed to now, about how good our odds were. Because everyone from VCs to bigcos (IBM, Sun) to many of our own people saw very long odds against us retaking any browser market share, let alone enough to restart browser competition.
Lots of people leave comments years later about how stuff I did was easy. I expect the same will go for Brave's success. I'll do my best to make history repeat.
I think he was working on the start page for Mozilla 1.0 in 2002. The credits page [0] for the 1.5 start page lists him among the contributors to 1.0's.
I couldn't find any remarks from him in 2002 about Mozilla's chances, but in 2001 he said "I think not. In a world of free browsers, the flavour of the month can change like that." [1] in response to a mailing list message saying that Mozilla would not be viable competition on Windows due to bugs, which is somewhat less optimistic than the "pretty good" odds in hindsight, but it's much more so than "very long odds against us retaking any browser market share".
I'd basically been a volunteer tester and bug reporter through 2000 and 2001. Mozilla wasn't a good browser then, it was rubbish and it crashed even more than IE5. But it was important to keep testing it and crashing it and sending in the talkback crash dumps and so on.
Thanks, sorry I didn't remember you or check about:credits.
Now the part you didn't answer: did you lay good odds at the time?
Not putting you down at all if you did not. If you had, my hat would be off to you -- and you should try predicting other stuff, and betting large if you are accurate!
Again, the notion of Mozilla succeeding in any restart-the-browser gambit was considered long odds by all pundits and almost everyone involved in Mozilla at the time. Phoenix (née mozilla/browser) was a pirate ship in 2002.
I must say I didn't quite :-) I figured it was an uphill battle, but I did figure we were in with a chance. That even with a big fat Netscaped Mozilla, it was not hopeless.
Rob Helmer on twitter reminded me to make the separate point that Netscape was a hindrance over time, not a help.
At first, it endowed hundreds employees with CVS commit access, while volunteers -- some of whom were much better hackers -- had to submit patches and beg for reviews to get access.
As time passed and we rewrote the old codebase to do XUL-based apps (a multiyear mission, by definition), Netscape management suffered via a series of misadventures culminating in Netscape 6 in Y2K, a terrible release decision, made against mozilla.org and grass-roots engineer advice. After that, AOL replaced the VP in charge and repeated the process in 2001, with another VP decapitation that fall.
However, we at mozilla.org who were inside Netscape/AOL by then had the evidence from Netscape 6 to show new management that Mozilla was the better way to develop and test code, and (as important) to recruit talent. We leveled the CVS access playing field after Netscape 6, forcing Netscape to put new-hires on the same footing as volunteers and people who came fresh from Red Hat or other companies to hack the code.
I've given some of the history here in other podcasts, as well as in this one. Bottom line is Netscape, while it paid lots of the contributors (all, on day one), was in short order a problem. Money does not equate to success; it has downsides. Too much money, with a crappy agenda and bad hiring legacy (and the code those people wrote, and the design costs they sunk), can and does hurt.
Money from Netscape and then AOL indeed helped pay the top engineers with whom I worked to rebuild the code starting in October 1998, and I'm grateful for that.
Money from Netscape/AOL did not help Mozilla gain market share or build product -- we did that in spite of Netscape, it was a total hindrance on us doing products intended for end users. We created and distributed our own binaries at first for QA builds to testers who did not or could not compile, as I said in this 'cast. Netscape was offended by our success, and this (in part) drove Dave Hyatt to quit and go work for Apple in 2001. I could go on but I'll save it for "the book".
Paying devs was critical up front. For infrastructure, paying the IT costs mattered until after 2003 July when AOL laid everyone off except a few of us, who spun out as Mozilla Foundation by September.
It's really a trade-off curve, between the benefits vs. costs of everything, from the top paid talent such as Dave Hyatt (and others), vs. the middle tier, vs. the counterproductive cohort. Netscape/AOL hiring improved by hiring proven performers from the Mozilla community, to add to the complexity.
My view now (I'm running a startup) is that leaner is better. But it's hard to account for all the costs and benefits. Too many hindsight what-ifs and post-hoc conclusions that could not have been assumed or even hedged at the time.
I doubt something like Mozilla Firefox from the ashes of Netscape will be repeated in this way. Mozilla remains _sui generis_.
For all the drag of Netscape and the consequent costs to the Mozilla project 1998-2003, we -- meaning Firefox the browser -- made it.
I won't linger on the problems, but I will observe that "indie" open source funding seems to yield better core-team governance than Mozilla's centralizing tendencies have produced by now.
These centralizing tendencies go back to pre-git/hg CVS days and so to the inevitable tool/culture co-evolutionary process. I'm in large part to blame for not addressing them while I was involved, so I am not pointing fingers, or else I'm blaming myself first.
But I must say that in certain crucial respects, Mozilla is the new Netscape.
In a few months it'll have been a year since Brave launched and it basically has no users as far as I can see. I don't know a single person who uses it. This thread on HN is the only place I've ever seen anyone talk about Brave.
I feel like my original remarks in this thread are entirely on point.
10 months? What is the official standard timeline for success? And let's say a venture doesn't succeed eventually; does that make it not worth the effort? By that standard, the best venture capitalists waste about 90% of their efforts.
I'm not involved in Brave and I'm certainly not the arbiter of what constitutes success for their company or their browser. My remarks above were made in the context of my original remarks, which discussed the amount of work required to succeed in conventional terms.
If you make a web browser, you need to get tens of millions or hundreds of millions of users to make a dent in the market. My original remark said that it didn't matter if Brave did anything cool if it never gained traction. I think those remarks are on point for the discussion: does it matter of Brave does amazing things if their browser ends up in the dustbin of history? Awesomeness in Brave won't matter if it doesn't get market share because it without market share it won't present a competitive threat to any of the established browsers.
My reply above was just pointing out that commonly available statistics show that Brave has no real market share, but instead of presenting vacuous arguments, I provided some hard data.
I personally think it would be wonderful if Brave was a huge success. I don't believe that any single company ( Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook ) should have so much dominance over search, mobile, browser, social etc. It's not good for consumers and the almost unchallenged dominance of a small group of companies is turning into an utter disaster for the Internet.
> it didn't matter if Brave did anything cool if it never gained traction
With due respect, I don't agree even with that.
Technologies, knowledge, and people live on, even after a particular business or product goes away: Opera has never gained much market share but their ideas have - you probably use them every day in your browser. Brave could change directions and focus on part of its portfolio, maybe a micropayments system independent of a browser. Maybe Google, Mozilla, Apple, or some advertising or payment company will use Brave's ideas, acquire Brave, or hire their employees. Some Brave employees could go on to start another company, taking the knowledge and tech they developed, and the lessons they learned from Brave's successes and failures - just like Netscape employees went on to found Mozilla. Others trying to similar things also will learn from Brave. The failure of one particular product is often only the first step. (And that's only if Brave's browser never gains market share; it's much too soon to tell.)
Big things start small. Take your comments and s/Brave/Phoenix/ in 2002 into 2003. You were right at the time, wrong within another year.
Could Brave fail? Of course. Has it? Not yet, we're pre-1.0 still. We are growing and we've started ramping toward 1.0 since mobile browsers are post-1.0 by store version rules, and growing even faster. We have bugs to fix before 1.0 and the push to take laptop/desktop share.
The way to think about Brave or any early-stage effort against incumbents is not short-term static analysis. Markets leave equilibrium, macro trends as well as errors force out players. Incumbents do fall. Study how they fall, look for their weaknesses -- especially their essential business conflicts of interest.
Those business weaknesses can be attacked more vigorously, and over longer timescales, than any particular technological weakness.
This is a great podcast episode. I recommend listening to it with zero distractions though, because Eich speaks at a pretty brisk clip and assumes listeners know what he's referring to. I like that, because sometimes I have to speed up the audio a bit on other podcasts.
See my adjacent comment. Also, to add some more info here; the site will soon allow you to share the transcripts, so we don't all have to upload a copy for ourselves. We're also building editing / revision tools.
We've been working on this recently- it's not yet a public release, but it is useful (and free). Just make an account and upload the MP3. Allows you to read, listen or both at the same time. Takes about 1/2 the time of the audio file to process.
While you're here... did you that know brave.com has an invalid TLS certificate? The trust chain goes up to a GlobalSign intermediate CA cert (SHA1 fingerprint B4 18 B3 2D B3 B8 CF 9F DF A1 9C C3 12 16 85 2F CC 82 86 E3) which has been revoked.
Nice link but I think it's something beyond what they describe, because they say:
"The problem will correct itself in 4 days as the cached responses expire..."
when in fact it has been way more than 4 days. So possibly my particular client has an issue that this help page doesn't address.
Edit: and now reading more closely this page is clearly aimed at GlobalSign customers, not at end users like me who are trying to access sites of GlobalSign customers.
As always with the RFC podcast I really enjoyed the episode, and Brave sounds intriguIng, so I've downloaded it. That being said, I missed the usual back-and-forth of the podcast. What I like about the show is that the hosts usually add a lot of value to the conversation, but this was mostly Brendan talking about Brave. I had hoped for a broader look at "how to fund the web", taking into account other experiments such as paywalls, the Acceptable Ads initiative, Blendle or whatever is on your collective radar.
56 comments
[ 7.4 ms ] story [ 1435 ms ] thread> Brendan Eich, founder of Brave and creator of JavaScript, joined the show to talk about the history of the web, how it has been funded, and the backstory on the early browser wars and emerging monetization models. We also talked about why big problems are hard to solve for the Internet and the tradeoffs between centralization and distribution.
You really should listen to it. Brendan Eich is a really smart person.
- Andrew Godwin on Django / Django Channels / Python - https://changelog.com/podcast/229
- Eli Bixby on Tensorflow / Deep Learning -https://changelog.com/podcast/219
Would love to hear other podcasts people enjoy.
Malcolm Gladwell's Revisionist History- Hallelujah episode is great, exploration into different types of innovation/genius
Reply all - #50 The Cathedral, father makes a video game about the death of his son. Very difficult episode to listen specially if you have children.
I keep thinking about starting something like Goodreads just for podcasts...
I was really sad when I ran out of episodes to listen to——now I have to wait a week.
https://changelog.com/master
http://exponent.fm
http://www.dancarlin.com/product/hardcore-history-43-wrath-o...
http://www.dancarlin.com/product/hardcore-history-50-bluepri...
- 99% Invisible - The Changelog * - Dan Carlin's Hardcore History * - EconPop Podcast - Engineers & Coffee - Freakonomics Radio * - The James Altucher Show - The Joe Rogan Experience - The Journal by Kevin Rose - Planet Money * - Radiolab - Reply All * - Revisionist History * - This American Life - The Tim Ferriss Show * - The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe * - The Winning Agenda
I will delete episodes with uninteresting starts or guests, most notably on Rogan because it's so long-form. I listen to everything on 2x speed with "SmartSpeed" to also eliminate pauses. Threw an asterisk next to those that are the most significant for me. If I were to pick just one, it would be Tim Ferriss.
Even Mozilla is fighting a HUGE uphill battle to stay current and they have enormous funding and mind / market share compared to Brave.
Then there are Edge and Chrome, both of which are supported by multi-national corporations with infinite resources.
It's certainly not impossible for Brave to succeed, but its chances of ever gathering any significant market share are vanishingly small. If for no other reason than Brave will have to get tens / hundreds of millions of people to change their behavior in order for them to gain any significant share.
I feel like it's game over for any new browser that doesn't have some utterly astonishing new value proposition.
What were Mozilla's odds when they took on IE and Microsoft? What were Facebook's chances against MySpace, backed by multinational News Corp? Airbnb against the entire hotel industry, which has a few multinationals in it?
Pretty good given they had the backing of Netscape. (Even if AOL messed them around at the time.) I recall that Mozilla 1.0's value proposition to naive users at the time was "No popups" - even in 2002, adblock-like behaviour was a selling point. (The value proposition to geeks was vastly different and more elaborate, but "Mozilla blocks popups" was radical enough to make it into web comics.)
It would help if you were on the record way back then, as opposed to now, about how good our odds were. Because everyone from VCs to bigcos (IBM, Sun) to many of our own people saw very long odds against us retaking any browser market share, let alone enough to restart browser competition.
Lots of people leave comments years later about how stuff I did was easy. I expect the same will go for Brave's success. I'll do my best to make history repeat.
I couldn't find any remarks from him in 2002 about Mozilla's chances, but in 2001 he said "I think not. In a world of free browsers, the flavour of the month can change like that." [1] in response to a mailing list message saying that Mozilla would not be viable competition on Windows due to bugs, which is somewhat less optimistic than the "pretty good" odds in hindsight, but it's much more so than "very long odds against us retaking any browser market share".
[0]: http://www-archive.mozilla.org/start/1.5/credits.html [1]: http://marc.info/?l=mozilla-ui&m=100168107415632&q=raw
Specifically I co-wrote the 1.0 FAQ http://www-archive.mozilla.org/start/1.0/faq/
I also wrote (and Gerv hacked right down) the page explaining Open Source/Free Software (while trying to keep both camps happy) http://www-archive.mozilla.org/start/1.0/opensource.html
I'd basically been a volunteer tester and bug reporter through 2000 and 2001. Mozilla wasn't a good browser then, it was rubbish and it crashed even more than IE5. But it was important to keep testing it and crashing it and sending in the talkback crash dumps and so on.
Now the part you didn't answer: did you lay good odds at the time?
Not putting you down at all if you did not. If you had, my hat would be off to you -- and you should try predicting other stuff, and betting large if you are accurate!
Again, the notion of Mozilla succeeding in any restart-the-browser gambit was considered long odds by all pundits and almost everyone involved in Mozilla at the time. Phoenix (née mozilla/browser) was a pirate ship in 2002.
At first, it endowed hundreds employees with CVS commit access, while volunteers -- some of whom were much better hackers -- had to submit patches and beg for reviews to get access.
As time passed and we rewrote the old codebase to do XUL-based apps (a multiyear mission, by definition), Netscape management suffered via a series of misadventures culminating in Netscape 6 in Y2K, a terrible release decision, made against mozilla.org and grass-roots engineer advice. After that, AOL replaced the VP in charge and repeated the process in 2001, with another VP decapitation that fall.
However, we at mozilla.org who were inside Netscape/AOL by then had the evidence from Netscape 6 to show new management that Mozilla was the better way to develop and test code, and (as important) to recruit talent. We leveled the CVS access playing field after Netscape 6, forcing Netscape to put new-hires on the same footing as volunteers and people who came fresh from Red Hat or other companies to hack the code.
I've given some of the history here in other podcasts, as well as in this one. Bottom line is Netscape, while it paid lots of the contributors (all, on day one), was in short order a problem. Money does not equate to success; it has downsides. Too much money, with a crappy agenda and bad hiring legacy (and the code those people wrote, and the design costs they sunk), can and does hurt.
Money from Netscape and then AOL indeed helped pay the top engineers with whom I worked to rebuild the code starting in October 1998, and I'm grateful for that.
Money from Netscape/AOL did not help Mozilla gain market share or build product -- we did that in spite of Netscape, it was a total hindrance on us doing products intended for end users. We created and distributed our own binaries at first for QA builds to testers who did not or could not compile, as I said in this 'cast. Netscape was offended by our success, and this (in part) drove Dave Hyatt to quit and go work for Apple in 2001. I could go on but I'll save it for "the book".
Was the basic fact of paying devs better than not, though?
It's really a trade-off curve, between the benefits vs. costs of everything, from the top paid talent such as Dave Hyatt (and others), vs. the middle tier, vs. the counterproductive cohort. Netscape/AOL hiring improved by hiring proven performers from the Mozilla community, to add to the complexity.
My view now (I'm running a startup) is that leaner is better. But it's hard to account for all the costs and benefits. Too many hindsight what-ifs and post-hoc conclusions that could not have been assumed or even hedged at the time.
I doubt something like Mozilla Firefox from the ashes of Netscape will be repeated in this way. Mozilla remains _sui generis_.
For all the drag of Netscape and the consequent costs to the Mozilla project 1998-2003, we -- meaning Firefox the browser -- made it.
I won't linger on the problems, but I will observe that "indie" open source funding seems to yield better core-team governance than Mozilla's centralizing tendencies have produced by now.
These centralizing tendencies go back to pre-git/hg CVS days and so to the inevitable tool/culture co-evolutionary process. I'm in large part to blame for not addressing them while I was involved, so I am not pointing fingers, or else I'm blaming myself first.
But I must say that in certain crucial respects, Mozilla is the new Netscape.
https://imgur.com/gallery/eMZCONp
/be
> https://imgur.com/gallery/eMZCONp
> /be
But it's been, what, 10 months since Brave launched?
http://venturebeat.com/2016/01/20/brave-browser/
The Wikipedia article on browser market share doesn't even list Brave.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers
According to StatCounter, 'other' browsers constitute 12% of the market.
http://gs.statcounter.com/
Brave isn't listed, and I assume that it would be in 'other'. I wonder how much share it has?
According to Google Play store, Brave has 50-100K installs.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.brave.brow...
Whereas Chrome has 1,000,000 to 5,000,000 installs.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.android.ch...
In a few months it'll have been a year since Brave launched and it basically has no users as far as I can see. I don't know a single person who uses it. This thread on HN is the only place I've ever seen anyone talk about Brave.
I feel like my original remarks in this thread are entirely on point.
If you make a web browser, you need to get tens of millions or hundreds of millions of users to make a dent in the market. My original remark said that it didn't matter if Brave did anything cool if it never gained traction. I think those remarks are on point for the discussion: does it matter of Brave does amazing things if their browser ends up in the dustbin of history? Awesomeness in Brave won't matter if it doesn't get market share because it without market share it won't present a competitive threat to any of the established browsers.
My reply above was just pointing out that commonly available statistics show that Brave has no real market share, but instead of presenting vacuous arguments, I provided some hard data.
I personally think it would be wonderful if Brave was a huge success. I don't believe that any single company ( Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook ) should have so much dominance over search, mobile, browser, social etc. It's not good for consumers and the almost unchallenged dominance of a small group of companies is turning into an utter disaster for the Internet.
With due respect, I don't agree even with that.
Technologies, knowledge, and people live on, even after a particular business or product goes away: Opera has never gained much market share but their ideas have - you probably use them every day in your browser. Brave could change directions and focus on part of its portfolio, maybe a micropayments system independent of a browser. Maybe Google, Mozilla, Apple, or some advertising or payment company will use Brave's ideas, acquire Brave, or hire their employees. Some Brave employees could go on to start another company, taking the knowledge and tech they developed, and the lessons they learned from Brave's successes and failures - just like Netscape employees went on to found Mozilla. Others trying to similar things also will learn from Brave. The failure of one particular product is often only the first step. (And that's only if Brave's browser never gains market share; it's much too soon to tell.)
Could Brave fail? Of course. Has it? Not yet, we're pre-1.0 still. We are growing and we've started ramping toward 1.0 since mobile browsers are post-1.0 by store version rules, and growing even faster. We have bugs to fix before 1.0 and the push to take laptop/desktop share.
The way to think about Brave or any early-stage effort against incumbents is not short-term static analysis. Markets leave equilibrium, macro trends as well as errors force out players. Incumbents do fall. Study how they fall, look for their weaknesses -- especially their essential business conflicts of interest.
Those business weaknesses can be attacked more vigorously, and over longer timescales, than any particular technological weakness.
We've been working on this recently- it's not yet a public release, but it is useful (and free). Just make an account and upload the MP3. Allows you to read, listen or both at the same time. Takes about 1/2 the time of the audio file to process.
https://www.globalsign.com/en/customer-revocation-error/
"The problem will correct itself in 4 days as the cached responses expire..."
when in fact it has been way more than 4 days. So possibly my particular client has an issue that this help page doesn't address.
Edit: and now reading more closely this page is clearly aimed at GlobalSign customers, not at end users like me who are trying to access sites of GlobalSign customers.