MARK SURMAN, PRESIDENT, MOZILLA Keeping the internet, and the content that makes it a vital and vibrant part of our global society, free and accessible has
MARK SURMAN, PRESIDENT, MOZILLA Keeping the internet, and the content that makes it a vital and vibrant part of our global society, free and accessible has
Well, how did they do it in 90s-2010s? Genuinely asking. What’s changed that they can no longer do this.
Netscape, which was essentially the predecessor to Mozilla, was a well funded VC-backed startup. That’s how they did it.
and only now the investors are asking for their return? Or the investors aren’t re-investing and that’s the problem?
@tetris11 @GnuLinuxDude
Netscape exited to AOL in 1998. The Netscape founder Marc Andreessen has since then been a successful venture capitalist who loves cryptocurrencies and Donald Trump.
oh dear
Web standards have grown dramatically more complex since then. (To me, this raises a question in and of itself, I think it would be good to try and develop standards intentionally easy to maintain to avoid embrace-extend style dominance from individual companies).
You now have HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript, WebGL, WebAssembly, WebRTC. You have newer and newer layers of security, and you have multiple platforms (Apple, Windows, desktop, phone) to develop for. It’s a mountain that has grown out of what was once just a unique type of slightly marked up text file.
Well, on the standards front, they tried — google just kept shifting the goalposts and forcing everyone to follow.
On the technology front, you could maintain these things with a very small team of developers whose total salary is but a small percentage of the CEO’s current pay.