A Brief Note on Mozilla and Brave

Software developer Brendan Eich invented JavaScript while working on Netscape, and went on to co-found Mozilla. In 2014 he was promoted to CEO, and within days people pointed out that he had made a large-sum donation to the campaign for California’s anti-marriage-equality Proposition 8 in 2008.

A fierce debate ensued as to whether he should be trusted to handle teams that might include people whose lives had been impacted by that campaign – the proposition had passed (though it would later be overturned by the courts, and in 2024 voters elected to repeal it outright and replace it with a clause affirming marriage rights). He resigned after less than two weeks, and not long after co-founded Brave Software.

Legacy

Now, in 2025, barely a week out from the Firefox ToS debacle and looking back at Mozilla over the past decade, I see this episode as a turning point.

  • They lost the trust of people who were alarmed to see him promoted.
  • They lost the trust of people who were alarmed to see him resign.
  • They lost his technical skills.

It’s easy to imagine an alternate timeline in which they put a little more effort into choosing a new CEO, promoted into leadership someone who hadn’t actively campaigned against civil rights, and kept Eich on in a technical role.

Maybe Mozilla would have held onto more support in 2014. Maybe Firefox would have gotten some of the features Brave experimented with. Maybe they would have spent less on C-suite salaries and more on development. And sure, maybe Eich would still have left at some point to build a “Web3” browser, but without the bad blood from the split as it happened here.

And while Brave in our reality launched as an ad company masquerading as a browser company, and Mozilla has turned itself into one over the last couple of years, it’s also easy to imagine a world in which Mozilla didn’t spend the last decade chasing every last trend that might turn up an alternative revenue stream, and instead focused on making the browser as good as possible.

Or maybe it would have played out largely the same, just at a different speed. It’s impossible to know for sure.