In early December, Wired magazine published an interesting feature headlined “Mozilla Is Flailing When the Internet Needs It the Most.” It seems that Mozilla, which makes the popular Internet browser Firefox, has seen its share of the market decrease “from 21.3 percent of browser usage in November 2012 to 11.5 percent this month.”
You might recall that Mozilla was embroiled in controversy in 2014 because it had named Brendan Eich (a Mozilla cofounder, as it happens) as its CEO, only to force him to resign shortly afterward, when it emerged he had given money to support California’s 2008 ballot proposition against gay marriage. There was no evidence Eich had ever done anything improper other than hold traditional views about marriage; even gay marriage pioneer Andrew Sullivan said the witch hunt against Eich “should disgust anyone interested in a tolerant and diverse society.”
Nonetheless, Eich was sacrificed on the altar of Silicon Valley progressivism, and now the company he helped to found is foundering. The controversy certainly hurt the company. Indeed, The Scrapbook personally knows many people who stopped using Firefox out of disgust over the treatment of Eich. But while we wish we could say that Firefox’s declining popularity was directly related to Eich’s ouster, what’s happening to Firefox is a saga familiar to many tech companies: Google is eating their lunch.
Google’s Chrome browser now has 31 percent market share, thanks both to the company’s marketing muscle and savvy engineers. Both Microsoft’s Edge browser and Firefox have adopted Google’s platform for browser extensions—little add-on programs that can make your browser do all kinds of useful things, from displaying the weather to copying text without formatting—making Google the industry standard.
Of course, Eich’s place in tech history was secured long before the controversy over his gay marriage views. That’s because Eich invented the JavaScript programming language, which is still one of the most common programming languages used on the web today.
Again, there are many reasons to think that Google would have hurt Mozilla’s market share no matter what happened. But it’s not a stretch to imagine that Mozilla would be much better off under the leadership of the guy who literally invented JavaScript. Mozilla is in many respects a good company; it’s a free software model, supported by a nonprofit foundation. It long served as a healthy counterbalance to the bigger and avaricious tech companies it competed with. Mozilla’s enthusiastic embrace of liberal fascism, however, means we will not be among those lamenting its slow decline.
