
Funding the Web with Brendan Eich [audio] - dkarapetyan
https://changelog.com/rfc/11
======
BrendanEich
I regret I named Giorgios Kontaxis when I meant Constantine Dovrolis
([http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~dovrolis/Papers/evoarch-
extended.p...](http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~dovrolis/Papers/evoarch-
extended.pdf)) at one point. I usually keep Greek names as well memorized as
any others!

~~~
natch
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which has been revoked.

~~~
ctz
Are you suffering from this?

[https://www.globalsign.com/en/customer-revocation-
error/](https://www.globalsign.com/en/customer-revocation-error/)

~~~
natch
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.

------
wyclif
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.

------
alexnewman
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.

------
erlend_sh
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.

------
alexnewman
If you think brave is cool now just wait for 1.0 . Some of the features are
going to be mind boggling.

~~~
biocomputation
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.

~~~
hackuser
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?

~~~
davidgerard
> 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.)

~~~
BrendanEich
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.

~~~
ekiru
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".

[0]: [http://www-archive.mozilla.org/start/1.5/credits.html](http://www-
archive.mozilla.org/start/1.5/credits.html) [1]: [http://marc.info/?l=mozilla-
ui&m=100168107415632&q=raw](http://marc.info/?l=mozilla-
ui&m=100168107415632&q=raw)

~~~
davidgerard
I was working on the documentation for 1.0 [http://www-
archive.mozilla.org/start/1.0/](http://www-archive.mozilla.org/start/1.0/)

Specifically I co-wrote the 1.0 FAQ [http://www-
archive.mozilla.org/start/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](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.

~~~
BrendanEich
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.

~~~
davidgerard
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.

------
pcprincipal
This is an absolutely terrific podcast. Two other great ones from the
Changelog guys:

\- Andrew Godwin on Django / Django Channels / Python -
[https://changelog.com/podcast/229](https://changelog.com/podcast/229)

\- Eli Bixby on Tensorflow / Deep Learning
-[https://changelog.com/podcast/219](https://changelog.com/podcast/219)

Would love to hear other podcasts people enjoy.

~~~
pmoriarty
_" Wrath of the Khans"_ series from Hardcore History.

[http://www.dancarlin.com/product/hardcore-
history-43-wrath-o...](http://www.dancarlin.com/product/hardcore-
history-43-wrath-of-the-khans-i/)

~~~
douche
Blueprint for Armageddon was also fantastic. Still recent enough that you can
download it for free, by the way.

[http://www.dancarlin.com/product/hardcore-
history-50-bluepri...](http://www.dancarlin.com/product/hardcore-
history-50-blueprint-for-armageddon-i/)

------
turingbook
Is there any good tool to turn Audio into transcript? It took longer for me to
listen than read.

~~~
grzm
I'd be interested as well. Youtube apparently has some thing, but I don't know
of anything standalone.

~~~
skoocda
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.

~~~
grzm
Cheers!

------
dredmorbius
Transcript / summary?

~~~
dkarapetyan
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.

~~~
kartickv
Anything concrete I can do today as a (web) app developer?

~~~
dkarapetyan
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.

------
Vera527
I love how you used the "[audio]" tag in your title.

~~~
dkarapetyan
I didn't. It was done on my behalf by the moderators.

