It was a really weird and messy situation, and unpleasant to live through.

I agree that Brendan's Prop 8 donation was bad. But he did it privately, and never (AFAIK) made anti-LGBT comments in public. People who had worked with him for many years were surprised to find he had these views. It was only found out because of political donation public disclosure laws.

Some Mozilla employees publicly criticized Brendan for the Prop 8 donation, but some defended him, because of the aforementioned privateness of it. A number of the defenses came from LGBT employees.

The pile-on at the time was intense. It lasted more than a week. It reached the front page of my local paper. Crazy stuff.

Brendan chose to stand down as CEO and also quit Mozilla. He wasn't fired, and Mozilla leadership asked him to stay.

All this nuance was lost. Lots of left-leaning people concluded that Mozilla had knowingly promoted a proudly anti-LGBT guy to CEO. Lots of right-leaning people concluded that Mozilla had fired their CEO for his political views. Both conclusions were greatly over-simplified. Almost everyone found a reason to hate Mozilla. Bad times!

For the sake of good discussion about moats from different angles:

The moats in the article seem to be for a public personal brand tied to a niche skill that could make you a go-to expert for a while (a tool for others to use). That may work if you want to be the next Jason, Tim Ferris, Naval, etc to attract people, jobs, deal-flow, or funding, but what if you don’t want to give up your privacy or be subject to constant barrage of demands from strangers (making you likely unable to trust or open up to almost anyone)?

Here are some other valuable angles worth considering:

In the corporate world rise in the ranks is credited to: PIE (Perspiration + Intelligence + Exposure) where exposure gives you 80% of the gains. (Source: executives mentoring at a large corporation)

Also in the corporate world another saying claims: “Don’t ever become irreplaceable, because when you can’t be replaced, you can’t be prompted.” So owning a niche can easily backfire on you.

From the founder side, you almost want the opposite - you want to know all the trusted, best people to talk to and for them to trust and know you in a non-threatening way. That means ears for the ground and attention to the needs of your network, not flags in the air. I would much much rather consult, trust, and listen to 30 minutes of feedback by Jessica Livingston than 3 hrs of Gary V.

As a software architect I can maybe see ahead 2-4 years on what is possible. As a founder, thanks to my network, I can also see maybe 5 years ahead based on unmet needs on the radar of early adopters in whichever target market I dig into. That trust network grows over time and eventually rises all boats. Instead of a moat, you build a volcanic process that raises your mountain and the others around you. That signal can turn largely into noise if you become a public figure.

This is actually quite apparent on HN. There's a train you can follow. At the head of the train, going choo choo, is "I would pay $5 for this". The rest of the cars go like this:

- Oh, but not if I have to use Paypal

- Oh, but not if I have to use a credit card

- Oh, but not if I have to use a trackable payment system

- Bitcoin is trackable, Monero or never

- So I have to go through KYC just to pay Mozilla? No fucking way

- 100% of the money should go to tech writers

- Money is fungible, so how do I know they aren't just taking out other money to send this there

- Ever since Pocket, I've changed my mind

- Ever since Brendan Eich, I've changed my mind

- How is it fair that both the tech writer who wrote 20% of the content and the new guy get the same amount from donations?

- If DevTools isn't included there's no point

- If DevTools is included there's no point

And then, in the end, one guy gives like $5/month because he wants to prove to himself that he was honest.

In fact, I'll tell you what: if 50 people reply to this comment pledging $60/yr ($5/month), I'll have someone set up a GoFundMe with a goal of $120k/year to fund one technical writer full time (and his associated payroll taxes etc.). I'll match that with $5k of my own money and I'll handle full comms with Mozilla to try to get them to hire someone. So validation is 2.5% of the final sum. Show me.

EDIT: By the way if it hits 50 many days after (when I won't be notified), my email is in my profile if you want to prod.

Unfortunately, this would have meant no Firefox Quantum.

As a Firefox dev (I'm still working at Mozilla, although not much on Firefox atm), I have seen many, many occurrences in which I couldn't optimize codepaths, or even in some case fix bugs, because the old extension mechanism made it impossible.

Consider the necessary steps:

1. realize that an internal API is broken;

2. come up with a new non-broken API;

3. port all the internal code using the non-broken API;

4. add a compatibility layer between the broken API and the non-broken API;

5. check all the existing add-ons to find out which ones use the broken API;

6. hope you didn't forget any add-on;

7. attempt to get in touch with all the add-on developers;

8. repeat 7. many, many times, until you are sure that the add-on developers that do not respond have simply abandoned their add-on;

9. negotiate a transition plan with the add-on developer with whom you have managed to get in touch;

10. land the patch that you have written now 3-4 months ago;

11. maintain both the broken API and the non-broken API (and their tests) for ~1 year, until you are reasonably sure that all add-on developers who intend to migrate have done so;

12. maintain (and test) a downgrade path for people who switch between versions of Firefox;

13. finally land your code;

14. realize that you still have accidentally broken some add-ons and people are (rightfully) unhappy because "Firefox broke my add-on";

15. it's 18 months since you wrote your 2-lines patch, you can finally get rid of the dead code and tests and move to something else.

This was one of the reasons for which the Chrome teams managed to be faster and more efficient than the Firefox teams (well, that and a bazillion dollars to hire way more people). The add-on architecture is the main reason for which projects such as multi-processes only landed ~8 years after we had working prototypes and some other performance projects never landed at all.

So, yes, removing the add-on architecture is definitely painful for a number of Firefox users, but I believe that we could not postpone it any further, even if it meant that some useful addons could not be ported immediately. Also, for what it's worth, we have postponed it by something like 7 years already :)