Brendan Eich: JavaScript, Firefox, Mozilla, and Brave | Lex Fridman Podcast #160
the following is a conversation with brendan ike creator of the javascript programming language co-founder of mozilla which created the firefox browser and now co-founder and ceo of brave software which has created the brave browser each of these are revolutionary technologies javascript is one of the most widely used and impactful programming languages in the world firefox pioneered many browser ideas that we love today or even take for granted today and brave is looking to revolutionize not only the browser but content creation online and the nature of the internet to make it fundamentally about respecting people's control over their data quick mention of our sponsors the jordan harbinger show some basket meal delivery service better help online therapy and eight sleep self cooling mattress click the sponsor links to get a discount and to support this podcast as a side note let me say that there's a tension between theory and engineering that i've been thinking a lot about i tweeted something like good execution is more important than a good idea but one helps the other i think the wording of that sucks but what i mean is a a good idea is a must but in my experience good ideas are in abundance good execution on the other hand is rare i think some mix of good timing good idea and good execution is essential getting that mix right is tough and brendan somehow multiple times in his career did just that i'm starting to believe it's more art than science like most interesting things in life if you enjoy this thing subscribe on youtube review an apple podcast follow on spotify support her on patreon or connect with me on twitter at lex friedman and now here's my conversation with brandon ike when did you first fall in love with programming i didn't program a lot when i was in high school but i had a friend who had a commodore pet and after we saw star wars he said hey let's make a basic uh program that does the death star trench run and it was just you know simple 2d graphics and i didn't know what i was doing so i just helped him out uh on the math and stuff like that i was a math and science kid i was really into uh the hp calculators of the early mid 70s these were the rpn they were really strongly built and as alright goldfinger instead of gold divinely heavy there's probably some gold in them too gold metallization but they were awesome calculators and they had all the scientific functions so i was really into that um so i aimed towards physics um i was a little late for the i think the you know the 20th century golden age and i read a lot of science fiction so i was like yeah it's onto hyperdrives and warp drives and physics was not going to get there quickly and i started hacking on computers while i was studying physics as an undergraduate at santa clara university and you know i dodged the fortran bullet because i was in the science department instead of the engineering department where they still did fortran card decks i think they had an auto collator but we were using pascal and uh i got one of the first portable c compilers uh ports to the deck mini computers were using and i i fell in love with programming just based on um you know procedural abstraction uh pascal just what now would be considered old school like structured programming from the 70s um nikolas vert the creator of pascal was a good writer and a good pedagogue right he always at eth would do these courses where it's like build your own computer build your own compiler build your own operating system from scratch yeah kind of and uh i know some people who are grad students under the study was um he would torture the students with things like this custom email system that had 25 word limit [Laughter] and uh things like that i unfortunately dodged both the pascal and the fortran bullets uh could you uh maybe uh linger on the pascal like what kind of programming language was it what is it reminiscent of of today because it sounds like it may have had uh an impact on your own trajectory yeah it was in the algol family and algol was um you know the big uh successful uh language design and compiler project in the 60s it had a successor called algol 68 which is ambitious but not as successful but pascal was kind of wordy procedures and functions language it distinguished between functions which return of value and procedures which don't which just compute and you could say that whole algol family went into ada pascal had a second life thanks to borland with turbo pascal which was hugely successful uh i think in large part due to anders helzberg who then went to microsoft and did you know c sharp and done that with his team there has done really well doing typescript type javascript so yeah there's there's a lineage here uh but i was also interested in c in unix by the time i was an undergrad because uh people were bringing unix up on all sorts of hardware i had some friends who were doing their own wire wrapped computers 68 20 maybe and i was wire wrapping for my engineering course um 1609 or something simpler building a computer on a board and i wanted to build a more ambitious one and port unix to it but i picked the wrong processor i picked the national semiconductor ns16032 which was this amazing you know cisc complex instructions that computer and not the reduced instructions that computers that were just being contemplated into the mid-80s um and risk ultimately went out risk one in some ways it it dissolved into that you have both now you have these super scalar architectures where like intel has kept probably too much backward compatibility at the instruction level but that's just a there's a front end that parses that into these you know these wide internal instructions so you know the very long instruction word research that um was also interesting at the time kind of became the micro architecture inside the backward compatible intel but i picked a national semi chip and it never got made successfully it was full of bugs and i never could have brought it up but i went on uh out of physics after three years into math computer science and like i said i did it because i saw um i was being sort of childlike and naive about physics and i thought meanwhile the valley is go go for computers the apple ii right the the pc the intel um 8086 uh 8088 based pc the ibm you know gave microsoft the future for in a somewhat fishy deal so it's wide open in the computing space but in physics you you were as optimistic about physics no i mean i was one of three brothers who were all in the same grade i have a twin and a younger brother who um skipped second grade was with us the whole time after that and you know he went on he actually studied under kip thorne at caltech wow but he also didn't he ended up in software physics does it make you sad that uh theoretical physics even with strength theory hasn't really had any foundational breakthroughs in the latter part of the 20th century and uh yeah in fact i'd say the problem is theory over over experiment i would say you know we need more aristotle unless plato you know mathematics it's not all physical there are lots of mathematics that cannot be realized as far as i know in this world so to understand the world you need to do experiments you need to not just dream up uh inductive theories that could have lots of alternative theories competing with them with no way to decide between them except aesthetics which is not a good guide in my opinion i don't know if you uh are friends with have a relationship with elon musk where's the in terms of like what you would love to see our society investing in building up is it closer to elon or is it closer to feynman and einstein and those well those gentlemen are no longer with us and i think that's noticed so like i said the real glory days of physics the famous pictures from germany before the second war were uh just a fantastic assembly of brains um you know schrodinger and einstein and physics i think took a wrong turn that maybe all of um i would say western science took in going for models over reality right you see this in all sorts of fields now we can build models that are very predictive and generative and then we build actual devices or you know semiconductors things like that that's that's good i'm not dismissing that uh we need good models we need to experiment and prove them and and test them but the problem i've seen in physics which you see certainly in economics the dismal science and you see surprisingly in other so-called hard sciences is models that don't really have to be tested against reality they can instead become policy tools or they can become like i said uh one of a large family of alternate theories that could be as predictive but nobody's doing the winnowing out that's such an interesting tension in society you see this in even the software sciences which have a deep love for like psychology you see this in epidemiology not with the virus absolutely it's this tension of you know how much of the world can we understand through just a beautifully fit model and then at the same time my main work is in machine learning where it's like there is no provable thing usually it's just it's kind of you it's all about just getting the right data set and getting tricks and so on and if there's this tension even in my own soul of like i grew up i grew up on theoretical computer science like i loved approximation algorithms like all of that like different complexity classes just those little puzzles i mean i don't know do you to you as somebody who was in math and computer science and then ended up going into places where you engineered some of the most impactful things in this world do you see the p versus np all that whole space is interesting at all yeah uh it's it's not that useful in practice right people are using it uh with sort of crypto analysis or asymptotic arguments about you know can can we have a quantum resistant crypto algorithm things like that which may not be practical right if you if you follow mikhail diakanov or gil collide there are big questions about how health quantum computing will scale up um how practical it will be is that something that you think about quantum computing and not except for spare time like you said i'm not using this kind of computer science in practice because almost everything now is engineering and finding ways to get um computers to be more useful for people which goes from you know design problems which are really kind of an art like you've said anything you can't automate as an art yeah well we can have you know machine learning compose music and it can imitate you can train it it can sound kind of decent but maybe lacking that genus aqua but you know user interface still i think requires uh human art so speaking of things that didn't follow a perfect theory and model uh javascript so there's two things one had an impact on the world a huge scale obviously and it also still is one of probably the most popular programming language in the world so can we go back to the origin story uh can you tell the story of how javascript was created yeah i was at talking graphics after graduate school for seven years and it got to be big and successful and divisionalized and political and i thought um kind of boring and a friend who'd been there went to one of the last of the super companies the super startups in in the early 90s there were several i suppose general magic was a little after that around the same time but micro unity was that company that i went to and it was because my friend uh jeff weinstein had gone there from silicon graphics he recruited me and michael unity was doing everything so this was like the ultimate sort of pretend grad school it was doing a new fab new semiconductor process it was doing new um analog and digital circuits on the same very large but not wafer scale chip originally it was um five centimeters on the side it was really hot too so i needed a water cooler it was a cray killer and then they shrunk it and they tried to do a home sort of media processor that was essentially a barrel processor but you could think of um trying to do all the things that we now see in modern architectures uh with short vector instructions and um sort of wide instructions or multiple issue uh and and doing a lot of the stuff in software because the second iteration the set-top box was really for avoiding the cost to the cable company of rolling the trucks out to replace your garbage general atlantic set-top box with a slightly newer less less uh garbagey one so if you could have software upgradable um set-top boxes the cable companies uh thought they could save a lot of money and add features is this assembly or was it it was which level of design it was like we were writing in um we were using gcc we're writing c plus plus and c uh somebody i i worked with there um really very smart guy hired from a sort of wall street um hotshot programming consultancy did his own hardware design as well as software and we were working on how to make uh not only short vector units but general bit shufflers and permuters so you could do things like um you know crypto algorithms efficiently and you could do uh demodulation of the cable you know complex uh quadrature amplitude modulated signal so you're basically taking a to d converters dumping things in buffers and then doing the rest in software all the framing and the reed solomon and viterbi and all that error correction so that was really great learning experience but it was not going to work it was doing too many risky things at once right if you as jim clark said to me when i hopped to netscape after three years at micro unit he said oh yeah you do 10 things each one in 10 odds it's going to be 1 in 10 billion the multiplication principle so you know netscape was already a rocket and i passed the chance to go there in 1994. i knew the founders because i worked at sgi clark's company could you pause for a second and escape when was the launch of this rocket what uh 94 94 was the launch of the escape and i went there in early 95 in april okay but uh so you said you missed the launch well i missed the the end the first floor employment opportunity but the ipo was was august 1995. so i was there for that how obvious was it the netscape was like world changing uh what was the layout was netsk one of the first big browsers yes so when i was at micro unity still in 93 we saw a browser called mosaic and up till then we'd used email and we'd used usenet the nntv protocol we'd use news readers we used ftp we used all these old internet protocols all relying on the dns and tcpip and udp for that matter when i was at silicon graphics we brought up the whole stack right we had to you know discover how how to find the ethernet addresses on your network and then find ip addresses for them our protocol all that stuff and it was great because nobody knew in the 80s what was going to win all the proprietary stacks like ibm sna and decnet and all these other protocols were saying it's we're going to do it or it's going to be heterogeneous future and instead it was you know berkeley unix and the tcpip stack that dated back to the arpanet that won and i think we knew it we all knew it at sga but the sales people didn't and so they kept trying to get multiple network stacks interoperating but in the end uh it won and so it that was the internet and it was email and texty and it was used very texty and then tim berners-lee did his thing but i don't think i was paying attention and i think the date when he first did it or when he wrote the famous email has been pushed back to 89 but i noticed mosaic in 93 because one of the things that mark andreasen and eric biena did at ncsa was they innovated on on the html early html standard they in particular mark sent this email saying hey everybody we think you should be able to put an image in a page and you know when he sent that eric bean had already written the code and you know i talked to tim berners-lee more recently just a few years ago and he was like oh we had another way of doing it yeah didn't work out because mark shipped his in mosaic and this convinced me of several things one the internet meant there was a huge first mover advantage and being fast getting on first mattered a lot and so you know richard gabriel of scheme and poetry fame has written about this what's poetry uh well he's a poet uh actual poetry he's like he talked about some kind of song no no i mean he's the founder of lucid which is where jamie zawinski worked before netscape and lucid was doing you know compilers and lucid emacs which was a fork of emacs famously jamie fighting against richard stallman stall max and so richard gabriel you know very very brainy computer guy but also a poet but he wrote a nice essay that gets abused all the time in fact jamie's put a kind of warning in front of his version of it on his site jwc.org called worse is better and this is about survival advantage of software in the network world in my opinion it's about unix it started out being framed as unix and lisp good news bad news because all the list people the mit people were like oh you know this is the crown jewel right uh scheme this is faberge egg or common list this giant cathedral of course we're going to win this is civilization and those you know those farmers in new jersey to borrow from the sopranos those those kicks down to bell labs they're just you know there's nothing sound there it's all hacking yeah um well guess what one wow so you're saying this is a fundamental like principle of the internet is moving fast wins you could say in in almost any network system like in biological evolution you see successful alleles sweet populations and they don't always have um you know they are free of flaws the heterozygous advantage right you can get both parents give you the gene variant and you get sickle cell anemia right but but if one of them does you're more resistant to malaria and so this isn't um a beautiful process except at large scale and then you realize that because it moves fast and can adapt it it can win and people still struggle with this i i used to struggle with this because javascript was done in such a hurry and the force of web compatibility meant early mistakes couldn't be fixed and even the standards process injected new mistakes as it will but often standards bodies go back and making compatible changes you can't do that with the web it's more like again like biology you you preserve what still works you don't want to break atp metabolism or whatever so um you have to kind of resign yourself to the reality of um worse is better being enshrined in actual design points you might not like and that happened with javascript and i'm way over it but it also i think was a huge advantage why javascript has kind of swept a lot of programming domains um people will say oh it's not because of merit well you're right but we also improved it over time in the standards body i spent 20 years doing that and you don't get that choice it's like i'm not saying that that was the best language i'm just saying that was the right time to do it and i like to say the alternative was not to do it i could have told netscape i can't do this it's too rushed and it would have been visual basic script it would have been bad uh so that's a good way to present the alternative but so you're it was a netscape and you were you have written in how many days and why was it only that many days and what was the the goal and the underlying principles in your mind so the whole i'm sort of describing worse is better in a frenetic way because it fit the the model of netscape when when um it was known that jim clark and mark andreas were founding netscape and they did the first release in 1994. that browser took over from mosaic in fact that's why mozilla is called that it's the mosaic killer it's like the giant monster that kills mosaic that's awesome and they knew they could you know it wasn't that again it's not like you're doing advanced scientific research that is changing the world you're more like taking down uh the last iteration in the browser mark did which had images and you know other importances before you stopped working on it and you're making netscape the new thing that has images plugins which was the way to do video back in the day it had something that's kind of died now for tiled windows called frames and frame sets html tables that was new eric bina did tables in escape 101 so when i got there they were heading toward ipo clark wanted the ipo early i think his instinct was right and that kicked off the whole dot-com era right there was a recession in the us in 91 you can see old law and order reruns where they talk about the recession how hard it's hitting new yorkers and after that greenspan really goose things at the federal reserve and and technology had been sort of fermenting in a way that came together with the internet and netscape made it you know possible to do pets.com to do ebay to get people to recognize a url on a billboard and then type it in when they get home and that was huge um that that was so fast moving a rocket that uh mark and um the engineering team there thought we we need to make this a programmable browser not just a a document viewer not just a video it's all html with images and tables and also like you said frames really plug-ins there's no dynamic element at all yeah the most dynamism you get was from a plug-in which there were a few of them then flash didn't exist at that point uh it was i think um java applets yet or no well that's the thing we did the deal with sun in fact i was recruited to go do scheme in the browser remember guys stealing gerald sussman's beautiful lisp variant i was going to do it in the browser because my friends from sgi thought hey we like scheme you like scheme and i'm like i hardly ever use scheme it's not really used in industry except in sort of silos but i like it okay i'll come do scheme in the browser i have a slide from my 2017 uh talk where i have bruce wallace crawling through the duct and die hard he's like come out to the coast have a lot of fun come on do scheme in the browser um but when i got there there was no scheme in the browser because they'd started a deal with sun microsystems and my best contact there was bill joy who i admired as a berkeley unix founder and son founder uh and bill got the idea of making the browser programmable too and so the idea main idea was to put the java vm which at that point was not really easy to embed into netscape including the netscape version on windows that was still most popular which was the 16-bit windows 3-1 which was going away microsoft was coming out with windows 95 and everyone was afraid they were going to do you know internet explorer i guess two at that point three the next year they already bought uh or invested in somehow spy glass this other company that shot out from ncsa at the university of illinois and in fact microsoft had tried to buy netscape in late 94 before i got there and i heard about this later i heard they offered way too little money and so you know jim barksdale and jim clark said get out of here pound sand but then they realized oh this is going to hurt us because now they're going to copy us didn't happen right away i'm not sure when gates internet title wave memo was written that's the famous memo he wrote when bill gates realized that microsoft was going down this old copy aol path or copy compuserve path a project called blackbird presumably after the sr-71 i don't know but they were going to make a you know dial-up service with a custom content language stack and custom rendering it wasn't the web um you know they could have content partners uh they have a lot of money but it still wasn't to scale the web it wasn't going to be compelling and gates realized this and he turned the company on a dime and they couldn't buy that escape again i'm not sure the timing so they decided to copy it and once we realized that everybody inside that escape felt even more urgency and more of a frenetic mood and so my chance to do scheme disappeared when the java deal started brewing but there was still a chance to do a companion language to java because java was a compiled is a compiled language it's evolved and improved quite a lot since then too but it was for sort of serious advanced programmers that cost a certain salary or hourly rate and people observed bill bill joy observed and i mark and jason and i observed that in a mature stack like microsoft you really benefit from having a scripting language like visual basic which became visual basic script in ie3 but didn't take on didn't take over uh kill javascript that you need two languages one is for the component writers who are higher priced and more expert and the other is for uh scripters certified public accountants uh designers graphic designers with some programming inclination anybody amateurs doesn't matter there's a much more demotic approach there for programming the components together gluing them together some people say duct tape language which i don't really like but we saw that bill joy and mark and jason and i we saw the need for companion language and the gleaming r i was to call it javascript i didn't like it that was marketing's plan mark called it moca which i liked and netscape marketing i think didn't like that so they said oh there's some trademark and some software somewhere that uses mocha so we can't use that and they tried live script in august and that didn't last and then finally we got the trademark license in december 1995. but the work i did to prove that it could be done was important because i i came in in april and even then netscape was growing so fast that they couldn't find an open hiring requisition in the client team for me so they hired me into the server team and i worked for a month on server team on what became http one one so i was actually i had done protocol work at silicon graphics with greg chesson uh former bell labs intern grad student intern who knew all the unix founders and greg was very interested in taking um protocols to the next level with vlsi because he thought that cpus wouldn't wouldn't scale up he was mistaken in that unfortunately moore's law more than kept up and you have you know gigabit ethernet running with conventional processors but i worked on protocols at sgi as well as unix kernel hacking and nfs and things like that so i i came into netscape to work on the server side for a month but i was i was thinking the whole time what should this language be like should it be easy to use might it syntax even be more like natural language like um hyper talk which is bill atkinson's language in hypercard if you have ever used hypercard on early mac uh and i thought uh well i'd like to do that but my management is saying make it look like java which looks like c from a distance what does that mean is it braces we're talking about visually yeah i mean like what management do they understand what they don't marketing didn't know but but management did like rickshaw vp of engineering knew and we had a plan even that was if you have this companion language you're going to glue things together between java and javascript so you're going to have commerce in memory in the heap with data types so you're going to want some of the data types in java to reflect into javascript you're going to want the primitive types that java unfortunately separated from objects so at least some of them number double let's call it in java's terms from the c term for double precision floating point um or strings or booleans um and objects and so right away there was this constraint looking like java meant kind of the c curly brace syntax but also some of the data types and objects like objects and so on all that kind of stuff comparison operator garbage collection yeah uh even the bitwise operators and the shift operators including the unsigned right shift which java had because it didn't have unsigned integer types it's it said if you want to do unsigned operations use an operator and that turned out to be important much later i'll tell that story five time but javascript inherited a set of operators the expression grammar the statement grammar up to a point from java but i wanted a functional language i wanted scheme a little bit of scheme even though it wasn't as clean as scheme i wanted you to love sergeants and drops you had a love for scheme and lisp but that that that functional language yes i wanted first class functions because i i saw the need for callbacks in the browser where it's a single threaded program all the early browsers were single threaded and it's the right model for users most users weren't ready for mutual exclusion and threading so in a single threaded world you cannot block the user interface so you have to use a callback and run later and the without getting too fancy and trying to capture the continuation like call cc does in scheme i thought i'll just make it easy to have fun arcs first class functions you pass you know downward and they can call back and be called back and java didn't have that at the time it had it took forever to get proper first-class functions uh lambda is now into into java java seven or eight i think it did have concurrency right from the from the very beginning but you were thinking that the javascript in the browser would not have the luxury of being concurrent that's right and the reason was java was going to run into plug-ins so it could fork threads and go go to town but the main action in the browser was in the single threaded program the single unix process on on unix or windows and it was where you had to service the event loop and then go you know do things respond to the network lay out some html render it turn you know widths into heights by filling containers boxes uh the early what became the css box model uh and run scripts to you know make the thing livelier respond to user input uh and all that event driven programming was in part like hypercard because hypercard had this on event name syntax and so that's why you have in javascript on click run together as the name of the event handler and there's some funny ones on mouse over and on mouse out people still complain about those but you know um there are many more events now over the years standardized but it was a mix of event-driven single-threaded programming because it had to run in the main thread of the browser where the action is and java never got there which meant java could not interact easily or quickly or in a nested way with the document with the objects reflected from the html document with the tables and forms and so on and that that is one of the reasons i think javascript survived and java kind of died java was in this plug-in prison it essentially was confined to a rectangle the apple rectangle and while we even built next year nick thompson a friend from sgi who was an intern grad student at cmu at the time built the first version of live connect to glue java and javascript together to deliver on that vision where you do have commerce between the data types and the heap um did it work it worked but you were java was in charge javascript was in charge and java was just these components these helpers you might as well do everything in javascript and what happened over time it's like an evolutionary filter it just kind of who needs the plugin and in fact sun mismanaged java as a plug-in they they thought well netscape is giving us the distribution vehicle and we don't care about the browser it's just about getting java out there and that was a big miscalculation they then tried because microsoft was killing netscape after years they tried getting into microsoft and you may remember there was a sun microsoft deal which famously blew up and and microsoft kicked java out of windows and that's when they really pulled the trigger i think they already evaluated it and liked it on anders helsbergs.net and you know c sharp and decided we're going to just not have java we don't want you know any of that sun stuff we don't want the patent risk we don't want i'm not sure what the fights were about there was some patent angle to it i think and up till then microsoft had been using java components like in outlook web access which had a lot of javascript to be a web mail like hotmail like user interface they had to call the the mail server drew htp and they they used a a java object to do this and when they gave the boot to sun they suddenly other you know the left hand gave the boot and the right hand said we better do something else in outlook web access what are we going to do and they said let's just add an activex component which is their own native way of embedding things in languages and we'll make it it'll be what became xml http request which is now a web standard for calling asynchronously and it's been replaced by the fetch api in html5 or html living document but this whole lineage goes back to java being successfully the loser and getting kicked out and after microsoft kicked it out it was a plug-in and you would find it required for like smart card banking in in the nordic countries where that was mandated by law but really didn't get used much or you know there were pilots who used it for um flight information but flash which netscape could have bought but unfortunately didn't they really definitely did yeah we would have screwed it up i mean what year are we talking about with flash i think after the ipo so it was probably late 95 and flash was wrong was it adobe no it wasn't no it was it was called future splash and it was these brothers jonathan gay i think his name was he he uh came knocking and the marketing guy at netscape who was screening the technology partners or want to be acquisitions was brutal and just everybody wanted to get on the netscape you know stock gravy train and he sent them packing and they they ended up selling the macro media and macromedia was where flash was created and the good thing about macro media was it was a um tool company so it invested in you know the best ideas i think which are still somewhat lost to us of flash the timeline uh animation is sort of an immutable function over time they had the tooling around that too like that dreamweaver there's a flash flash a director there were a bunch of them yeah i mean yeah they that was a flash builder was one of the last ones these tools were used by real artists and you know special effects people and designers all the restaurant websites around 2005 were done in flash which was you know we were trying to do html5 at the same time that was the firefox era we were trying to make the web capable enough you didn't need flash but if you recall you go to a restaurant it's like this is kind of like a game or something it's like a flash all the font looks small you didn't like flash from the beginning you're like this is this doesn't feel right not really i actually admire flash's technology and i'm pretty pragmatic about these things and i i realized that you know it doesn't matter if you're dealt a bad hand like javascript was a rush job or if you have flash as a plug-in and you can invest in the tools and make it pretty good uh you should you should make it better for your users and grow it as best you can and what happened with the browser due to microsoft's monopoly abuse for which they were convicted and you know um even after that until i think firefox and then chrome was people kept saying oh the web can't do x i can't do y we'll have to have a plug-in we'll have to have a new approach we'll we'll clean the slate and have a new web and everyone who said that failed and the reason they failed is because there's too much value in the web this huge network and the worst is better principle means that you can not only start bad which they all sneer at but get on first and get wide distribution get sort of evolutionary advantage in the priority of place but you can also improve it over time yes and so if you're going to improve flash and for some reason flash is now out of favor steve jobs said you can't have flash on the iphone that was probably the death knell put your energy into javascript and that happened right so we we did things at mozilla with adobe to improve which bought my macro media to improve flash and to improve the version of javascript that was in flash we tried to standardize that oh that's right i'm getting ahead of myself yes yeah that's it that's right can we just rewind yeah it's a magical like you know it's a special moment in the history of all of computing it's uh we'll talk about it later but it's arguable it's possible that the entirety of the world will run in javascript at some point so like it's like those are those days it would be it would be interesting if you could just describe actually zooming in on the how the cake was baked uh from the you know the the several days that you were working on it what was in your mind uh how much coffee were you drinking were you nervous why you're freaking out i'll try to remember it i mean you're right there are these pregnant moments you see in hindsight maybe they're overrated but like hegel sees napoleon on horseback right yana and says there's the world spirit uh on on horse and uh i knew that there was a chance to do it mark knew and he was my you know executive sponsor and he was the one you know sort of brainstorming how the javascript should be right there in the page that was important for him to say that because i i thought so too but a lot of people were like well you can't write programming language in the middle of the markup and indeed there are problems if you did it naively you'd see the code laid out as like random gibberish so i had to figure out how to hide that that was a challenge is that is it a breakthrough idea i mean so you mark thinking about this idea that you just inject code in the middle of the market the web page yeah it was considered kind of heretical there was an sgml guru i forget his name but he corresponded with me and at first he was angry he's like you should have used a marked section why didn't you use a marked section and i said well html marked sections are not part of html by the way and they're not supported in the browser and so i did some hack that was equivalent and over time you could do the proper sgml thing but it eventually came around and it was again sort of of evolutionary necessity it was almost like introgression like like you know the idea um which liam arguelles i think helped get across that uh we have to consider mutualism biology that maybe you know mitochondria were ancient uh prokaryotes that got into the cell and became beneficial um somehow uh the same sort of thinking applies uh you have to embed javascript in html it's gonna be a good virus it won't so the code the code becomes data in the sense it just gets carried it's very carried along but is there is there's the side of the so you were focusing on the netscape at that time doesn't the browser have to support interpret correctly this mix of html yeah and whatever code i had to hide it from old browsers including netscape one one which was predominant then so i used an html comment but the inside the container that comment lived in the script tag which is a new element i could make different semantics in netscape 2 where those html comment delimiters instead of being multi-line brackets became one line or essentially one line so you wrote the javascript was written the programming language was written as a comment a comment for all browsers and a set of uh brackets that were ignored with real code for new and it was this two-way comment hiding hack as i called it that was absolutely necessary for us to get off the ground we couldn't have bootstrapped javascript without it we didn't have scripts that were loaded from a separate file the only scripts in netscape 2 were inline in the document what were the challenges here what what like what uh you know typing uh uh what were the choices you were thinking about garbage classified because garbage color i didn't have time to write a garbage collector so i just i didn't at first so the thing was using essentially arenas or what gnu calls obj pools and just would run out of memory eventually and i added reference counting in a hurry after the 10 days in which i hacked so after i was in the server team doing http 101 and thinking about the language i finally got transferred to the client team in early may and that's when i you know i got the go sign from mark and it was like we can't wait because people inside netscape are doubting even people inside sun are definitely doubting bill joy was the champion but he was like alone in that in seeing there was a role for javascript as the as i call it the sidekick language robin the boy hostage frank miller put it in the dark knight returns um that uh there was a silly little language that would be the glue language it could become important over time and you were better off having that complementarity that pairing of languages just like microsoft stacked it with visual c plus and visual basic so what was the big moment of uh i'm done so i had to do a demo i i forget the dates i think i for a history of programming languages paper that alan where's brock did with my health he did a lot of the writing um i think it was the 10 days from like thursday evening through to the following weeks you know whole that week and then into the monday sleep not not enough and i was really uh going fast because i had already used a lot of um c compiler and front-end compiler knowledge that i'd gained from undergraduate school when i started getting into computing as a renegade physics major uh people were formalizing more efficient bottom-up grammars parsers for bottom languages uh really lalr 1 was the big thing and i studied all this and learned how to parse them and in the end uh if you're doing c languages you often do what um what what dennis richie did anyway which is a recursive descent parser you can hand code it and i did that for javascript in a blazing hurry mostly got it right i didn't you know have precedence in version problems or other bugs but i copied a lot from java and c and i tried to keep things simple like the equality operator in those 10 days sprint between two objects of different dynamic type said no they're not equal their types are different and then after that i had internal early adopters and they were using javascript to like match a number against a database field that had been string eyes and they said oh can we just have implicit conversion and like an idiot i agreed i gave them what they wanted i was trying to please them and get adoption and that you know broke what what equivalence relation um nature there was to the double equal you know there are some four edge cases with not a number that break that of two but it really broke it um having implicit conversions in the operator is something that people still roast me over so let's let's talk about two things one it sounds like the comparison operator the equality operator is the thing that you regret so maybe making it sloppy making it sloppy so what is the biggest thing you regret in those 10 days and what is the biggest thing you're proud of so that that making it sloppy came after the 10 days and my lesson there which i've tweeted is when people come to you saying can you please make it sloppier add this cute feature the answer should be no and i should have known that because i think nicolas vere one of my heroes said the essence of design is leaving things out um but during the 10 days i also like i said i was in such a hurry i left out garbage collection came back to haunt me but i got reference counting in in time that people weren't running out of memory right away on on long-lived jobs what happens when you don't have garbage collection you have objects well you just run out of memory and you know i love it at first you write a short script and the page doesn't last long longer it doesn't do a lot and it's okay oh i see yeah yeah but if you're writing a game or something and you're doing event based allocation you run out of memory and this was noticed in the summer of 1995 and people were like what's going on oh yeah i gotta get i better go back and do reference counting and then the problem with reference counting is you're writing the language in the runtime in c an unsafe language and if you're reference counting and you overflow the counter you mismanage it so it goes high it gets stuck high you leak memory again and you run out if you underflow it you pre-memory that's still in use and even then we knew what all the security hackers came to know that you therefore have a potentially a remote code execution vulnerability because this was before things like non-executable heap memory and stack defenses against taking over memory so if you can from the the remote side write some html and javascript that just happens to exploit a bug in memory safety like it causes javascript to underflow a reference counter and the script still has its hands on that object and it's trying to call a method on it and there's some kind of lookup function table in the object but you've managed to stuff the heap with strings that forge their own lookalike for the function table you can call some other code and this was a problem right away so security you know javascript upped the ante java had this problem too but in its own vm and it just was you know a separate headache for sun to worry about we had this problem in netscape right away so netscape 2 came out after my 10 days and after these you know follow-on work to embed javascript better in the browser and to add garbage or collection through reference counting really i'd call it reference counting and get it shipped we had a bunch of dot releases where we fixed security bugs like maniacs but what is the thing you're you know when you sit back on a porch and just look out into the sunset what are you most proud of from those 10 days i think the first class function shines i think especially since java didn't have it and it was somewhat unusual ski made it in somehow uh at the end of the day in spirit i mean people complain because scheme has you know minimalism it has you know six or seven special forms it has hygienic macros it has call cc it has sort of a beautiful uh complete um set of forms to make the land of calculus pleasant to use in in practice um and javascript is you know kind of a multi-paradigm or shambolic just a small tangent you mentioned mark andreessen it sounds like in bill joy but staying on mark it sounds like he had an impact on you in that he sort of believed in what you were doing there can you can you talk about like what role mark had in your life yeah we would meet at the um the peninsula creamery in downtown palo alto and mark was just fresh out of you know grad school or whatever he was doing and he was a big dude and he got fitter later uh he had hair he he would order giant milkshakes and burgers and we would meet there and brainstorm about what to do and it was very direct because we didn't have much time the the sort of we didn't talk about it but the implication was microsoft's coming after us mark was saying things boldly a pre-ipo like netscape plus java kills windows right this is ambitious makeup browser programmable it becomes the new runtime for programs it's the meta os or it's the replacement os um but he still saw value in javascript yes even though he was saying that and java was the big name hence the trademark license uh he saw javascript is important and he even thought what if we got i told this another interview second state he thought what if we had my friend kip hickman who'd been at netscape from the beginning and who was a kernel hacker at sgi when i joined he started writing his own jvm before we consummated the sun deal and got our hands on their code and the java compiler java c which arthur van hoff had written very nice code was all written in java it was self-hosted or so called bootstrap and so we could use that as soon as kip's java vm could run the byte code from the the sun jvm running the self-hosted compiler to emit the bike so once we could bootstrap in the kip's vm we wouldn't need sun and mark was like well maybe we can just you know ditch sun or java vm or if you're a javascript vm we now we need graphics so mark was thinking far ahead because he knew you could do things with html and images but at some point you really want like cinema graphics or yeah three-dimensional like even sgi had already started its downfall because the first four vlsi team there had gone off to do 3dfx and all these other companies that made the graphics card on your pc right doom was was big and quake and so you were we were all playing quake i was old so i was terrible um but why not put that graphics capability on the web and in fact it finally happened uh at mozilla with firefox era with vlad vukichevic taking opengles and reflecting it as webgl but opengles is the mobile version of opengl which is a standard based on sgi gl so this whole lineage of graphics libraries or really graphics languages for what became the gpu and mark was thinking ahead it's like we need graphics too and i thought okay i could try to get somebody i knew at sgi but he's a grad student at mit he was studying under barbara liskoff he laughed when he heard about this later andrew myers he's at cornell a long time i think he's a full professor and mark said great we'll get him i'm not sure he's going to come we'll throw money you know stock options we never did it and they did the sun deal so kip nobly put aside his own jbm and we used the sun jvm so that was an ambitious period and mark was very generative because he was pushing hard he was ambitious and he wanted to have netscape possibly be in control of the ball maybe you could speak to the this dance of uh netscape versus internet explorer you've uh you've thrown some loving words towards microsoft throughout this conversation but that's the theme with uh i mean steve jobs had a similar sort of commentary from a big sort of philosophical principle perspective can you comment on like the approach that microsoft has taken with internet explorer from ie1 to edge today is there something that you see as valuable that they're doing in the in the occasional copying and this kind of stuff or is it um is the world worse off because internet explorer exists so i'm going to segment this into historical eras because i think microsoft is today with quite a different company and what they're doing with edge is different but back then um gates you know aggressive character not really original in my view not an originator steve jobs famously said once he doesn't have any taste and i don't mean this in a small way there's no taste you can see this apple at the time had beautiful typography and ligatures and kerning and the fonts looked great and windows had this sort of ugly system font that was carefully aligned with pixels so it didn't get anything what is it i'm sorry to keep interrupting but why did why was internet explorer winning throughout the history of these competitions distribution distribution matters more than anything and this is why um you know even now we're seeing in the browser wars edge doing better because it's being fostered on people of windows we have windows 10 boxes at home we have some windows 7 boxes we or laptops we keep running too because we we don't connect them to the internet generally but um but but uh once you have that operating system you can you can force you know edge and apple did it with safari too it's not unique to microsoft that's sad but uh distribution matters and that's why uh i think ie was going to win that's why everybody at netscape felt were doomed this was something michael toy and jamie would say were doomed um but for a while there we had a chance and we innovated in netscape too we did a big platform push java and javascript and plugins more plug-ins and um you know more html table features and and really started making a printable stack out of what were pretty static web languages and even in the beta releases in netscape two people were using javascript to build what you would call single page applications like gmail and they were using javascript locally to compute things and to call the server on a hidden frame in the background so it was prefiguring a lot of what came later as ajax or dynamic javascript dynamic html so people saw that i mean even when they saw it that's kind of i don't know from my perspective that seems quite brilliant this it seems like really innovative that you would have code run in the browser it did impress me with something um which i learned later about from eric von hippel of mit which is user innovation networks lead user effects that throwing out javascript even though we weren't doing open source we were doing beta releases early and permissively with netscape getting early developer feedback absolutely critical i loved it i did some of that with sgi with some of the products i worked on but it really came to the foreign netscape and that you know culminated in mozilla where you're dealing with developers all the time and early adopters lead users but the lead users helped improve javascript even in those last few betas where i could hardly change things i was under pretty rigid change control so we're talking about just a small collection of individuals that are just like up front guy named bill dortch you can find his work in the web archive still from 1996. it's a single page application it's an artist's gallery of mountain art javascript doesn't quite work he uses javascript locally uses a local database what you would think of now is json but it's all pure javascript code a bunch of objects being constructed that's so cool so how is uh if you can do sort of a big sweeping progress of javascript how has javascript changed over the years any of you from those early 10 days with a quick addition of garbage collection and fixes around security how is this evolution that now it's taking over the world in this it's been a bumpy ride because the standards body got shut down after microsoft i think um took over the web and then felt punished by the usb microsoft antitrust case can you speak to the santa body like that was a fun ride too because netscape had uh taken the lead with the web and html innovations like um frames and frame sets tables and the w3c was sort of off even then sort of in sgml land heading toward xml la la land i'm going to be a little harsh on it because it's html i'm sorry html was the precursor markup language to html it was sort of the more extensible um standard generalized markup language it was it was a xml like 20 brackets but it had all sorts of elaborate syntax for doing uh different semantics and this is why i think you know tbl and others who wanted to do the semantic web then took xml um forward but they had this uh or some of them anyway had this strange idea they could replace the web with xml or that they would upgrade the web to be xml and it couldn't be done worse is better had concrete meaning the web was very forgiving of html including sort of minor syntax errors that could be error corrected like error correction isn't generally done in programming languages because that's another amazing thing about html is like it's more like biology than programming yeah exactly and so uh xml was in its standard form super strict and could never have admitted you know the kind of users who were committing these errors and the funniest part was microsoft said hey we're doing xml but the way they put it in internet explorer under the default media type put it through the html error corrector oh wow so they kind of bastardized it to make it popular and usable and accessible and so xml as a pure um you know thing was never going to take over and the w3c was kind of not fully functional because netscape wasn't cooperating with them we thought about where to take javascript and we realized our standards guru carl cargill realized there was a european standards body that had already given microsoft fits by standardizing parts of the windows 3-1 api which european governments insist on they said microsoft we can't use your operating system without some standards and microsoft said you know here's our docs and and the government said no we need a european standard so this body called the european computer manufacturers association ecma which eventually became global and became a proper noun instead of an acronym right it's uh it's just one capital e now with a lowercase cma right and as uh one of the early microsoft guys i met when we first convened a working group to talk about javascript said it sounds like a skin disease but it gave i mean maybe you'll speak to that but it gave the name to javascript of ecmascript that was the standard name because java was a trademark of sons they were so aggressive they were sending cease and desist letters to people whose middle european heritage meant their their surname was javonko and they called their website javanco.com and son was sent them a letter saying you're using java at the start of your domain name you must cease and desist i love marketing more than anything else in this world uh so so ecmascript and now is popularly named as es plus version i would say people use js more than anything people still say javascript javascript books sorry i mean when you're referring to it's usually javascript and when you want to refer to a version of javascript you'll say es6 es5 yes or now they've gone to years which is kind of confusing because it's an offset of 2009 es6 is yes 2016. uh yeah it doesn't match the years perfectly yeah yeah so so what uh what what were the choices made and how did javascript evolve here so we took this this this new standards body which had we thought a sort of a proven record of standing up to microsoft but microsoft sent a lot of people they sent some some people who were pretty good and then when they realized that i was there and netscape was not going to you know just bend over and do whatever they wanted they sent somebody really good he was a smart guy he did a lot of the work on the first draft of the spec sean katzenberger he's left microsoft he even did what i sort of did he told his bosses i stopped bugging me to do other things i'm focused on this because it took a lot of focused work to create the first draft of the spec and i was still holding i was spending almost all the plates i had like part-time help in certain areas and on the front end integrations i had the front-end guys but i i couldn't take as much time as sean was to write the draft spec but i had to participate because i was essentially helping write down what the language did in areas where we didn't like what it did and microsoft didn't agree we sometimes got away with slight changes and that's the story of standards you have different implementations and depending on their market power they interoperate where you have agreement and where they don't the dominant one usually sets this de facto standard and then you should probably reflect that into the jury standard and this happened with javascript over time as netscape went down and microsoft went up we did the first edition of the standard codified in 1997 in france we had a trip to nice which was very memorable for any interesting reason or just because it's nice and and ecmas european and ibm and others were you know there uh mike kalashaw an ibm fellow was a britisher and we the the the guy who ran active at the time john vandenbelt was quite a a raconteur and a very fun guy and he had us out for you know the great you know frida mayer the boy bays and was the standardization process beautiful or painful that those early days you as a designer of the world it was painful because it was rushed now guy steel was contributed by sun so even more than sean you had this giant brain guy steel helping bringing some of that scheme magic and he even brought richard gabriel for fun and richard wrote the fourth clause of the standard which is kind of an intro to what javascript's all about so we had some really good people and we didn't fight too much there was some tension where i was fixing bugs and i was late to a meeting and sean katzenberger microsoft was actually mad like where is he we need him and when i got there i saw that only he saw this sort of off by one bug in somewhere in the spec and then i saw it too and i said there's a fence post bug there and then we kind of locked eyes and we realized we were on the same page and we kind of he wasn't mad anymore what were the features that are being like struggled over and debated and thought about and it was mainly writing down what worked and what we thought should work in the edge cases that didn't interoperate or that seemed wrong uh but we were already laying the groundwork for the future editions that i was already implementing i was still trying to lead the standard by using the dominant market power to write the code that actually shipped so the de facto standard would lead the de jure standard and i was putting in the the missing you know function forms that i didn't have time for in the 10 days so this is the engineering mindset versus the theoretician so you didn't want to create the perfect language but one that was the popular and shipped and all that kind of and you could say there was i was standing on the shoulders of giants so there was a staged process where i had to hold back things that were well designed by others in other languages and i could imitate but i couldn't do them all in the 10 days so they came in 1996 in 97 and they came into the third edition of the standard which was finally finalized in 1999 but at that point netscape had been sold to aol and was which was a decent exit considering and uh you know had previously been mercilessly crushed that netscape was selling the browser along with server software that it acquired after its ipo and microsoft was just under pricing it so there was no way to compete with that microsoft was also you know making internet explorer the default browser in windows which is called tying and antitrust law and they were doing even more brutal things there's a famous uh investor he did very well on google so he's a billionaire rahm sri ram and he was sales guy or head of sales at netscape and he got off the phone looking ashen faced after compact called and said microsoft just told us they're going to pull our windows license if we ship netscape as the default browser wow this is so there is some bullying going on there was totally material in the anti-trust case but but javascript escaped into the standard setting where there was fairly good cooperation microsoft had a really good guy on it and you know guy steele was there for a time and and there was some good work but after the anti-trust case and you know netscape kind of dissolving into aol and not really going anywhere quickly mozilla took years to really bring up um the standard froze and by 2003 even though they've been sort of noodling around with advanced versions javascript 2 i'd given the keys to the kingdom to another mit grad baltimore horowat very big brain still google i think he won the putnam in 86 so he's yeah very mathematician um he he designed this successor language javascript too but it it only showed up in mutated form in microsoft's asp.net server side and it didn't last there and it showed up in flash and that's what became action script three with the action script interesting and then and then flash of course declined and so how do we arrive at es6 where it's it's like there's so many where everyone okay there's this history of javascript that people were it was just like cool when you're like having beers to talk crap about javascript everyone loves to hate like people who are married say ah marriage sucks is they just want to get let off some steam even though everyone uses the language yeah but es6 ever it's become this like uh reputable like it fixed major pain points i think it added things to the language and added something that was already es5 strict mode but made it implicit in class bodies and module bodies it was a big jump but it accumulated some of the es4 designs that we've done with adobe for what we hoped would be the fourth edition of ecmascript that were supposed to fold in some of these old javascript two ideas that had come into actions or three so you look at the family tree and you see these forks and the main ones are the the ones that go into adobe flash acquired from macromedia and the one that went into the server side of microsoft's stack which kind of died and then trying to bring them back into the standard and not quite succeeding es4 was was mothballed but all the good parts that everyone liked made it into es6 and so that that was a success and i i said earlier i had the wrong year i think it's 2015 so it's off by four yes yeah it was done finalized in 2015 it took a little longer than we hoped but um because es5 was 2009 and that was a smaller increment from es3 we skipped four again we mothballed it and we had a split in the committee where some people said you know es4 is too big we're going to work on incremental improvements no new syntax in particular they they promised not quite true but uh they they added a bunch of interesting apis alan where sprock my co-author of that hobble paper and he was at microsoft at the time i ended up hiring mozilla he wanted to get to mozilla and keep doing the sort of editoring editor job of the javascript standard ecmascript um and when we got es6 done it was it was a little late 2015 and we switched to year numbers so people still call it es6 i call it es6 yeah but if you remember you know off by nine plus two thousand yeah i mean esx is such a big job i mean like you said there's a thread that connects all of it but es6 is when it's like became this language that it almost feels ready to take over the world completely we're programming in the large features more yeah features you need for larger teams and software engineering microsoft did something smart too they anderson company um luke hoban who's left microsoft also did typescript and they realized uh something i think that gilad brock has also popularized and and uh he was involved in darted google if you don't worry about soundness in the type system you don't try to enforce the type checks at runtime in particular just use it as sort of a warning system a tool time type system you can still have a lot of value for developers especially in large projects so typescript has been a roaring success for microsoft what do you think about type what do you think about typescript is it uh adding confusion or is it ultimately beneficial i think it's beneficial now it's technically a superset of javascript so of course i love it the the shortest javascript program is still a typescript program any javascript program is a typescript program which is brilliant because then you can start incrementally adding type annotations getting warnings yes learning how to use them microsoft's had to kind of look around corners at the standards body and guess how their version of modules or decorators should work and and the standards body then may change things a bit so i think they're obligated with typescript either to carry their own version or to bring it back with incompatible changes towards the standard over time and i think they've played generally fair there there's some sentiment that why don't they standardize typescript well they've been clear they don't want to they have a proprietary investment it's valuable they've controlled the ball and in some ways you can say the same thing to any of the other big companies in the standards body why doesn't google standardize its stuff um so you you think it'll continue being like a kind of a dance partner to javascript to the base javascript there's a hope that at some point if they keep reconverging it and the standard doesn't break them and goes in a good direction we will get at least the annotation syntax and some semantics around them because when you're talking about type annotations they're generally on you know parameters and return values and variable declarations there are cast operators you want that syntax to be reserved and you want it to work the same in all engines and this is where ideas like go odds plugable type systems might might be good though then you could create the same problem you have with lisp and scheme where there's a bunch of macro libraries and they don't agree and you you have conflicts between them but but pluggable type systems could be one way to standardize this what do you think about the giant ecosystem of frameworks uh in javascript it feels like because i mean this is a side effect of how many people use javascript yes a lot of uh entrepreneurial spirit like create their own javascript uh frameworks and they're actually awesome uh in our own different ways and that this is an interesting question about almost like philosophically about biological system and evolution all that kind of stuff do you see that as good or should it like should some of them die out quicker i think that maybe they should now jquery was a very clever uh thing john resigned this library that was sort of query and do and blended sort of css selector syntax with javascript sort of object graph or dom querying and made it very easy for people to do things almost like they were learning jquery as its own language yes domain-specific language and uh that i think reflected in part the difficulty of using the document object model these apis that were originally designed in the 90s for java as well as javascript they're very object-oriented or even procedural they're very kind of verbose and it took like a constructor call on three different you know okey-pokey dances to do something whereas in jquery it's just one line right so that fed back finally into the standards it didn't it didn't mean we standardized jquery it wasn't quite that concise but you find now with the modern standards that we were working on in the html5 sort of um effort that things became simpler the fetch api and the query selector api document.queryselector a lot of things can be done now in raw javascript that you would make more concise in terse in jquery but it's it's not bad it's pretty good whereas in the old dom of 15 years ago it was just too provost so maybe the frameworks were born kind of uh because javascript lacks some of the features of jquery and so like uh now that javascript is swallowing what jquery was then the frameworks will only the ones that truly add value will stick around and the other ones will die out and that highlights this also this division between the core language javascript which can show up in other places like node.js on the server side and the browser-specific apis or the document object model apis which are even managed by the w3c the standards body that was off in xml la la land when we were doing real javascript standards in ecma and you you you have this division of labor division of responsibility and division of style and sort of aesthetics and also speed so the document object model really stagnated after um microsoft kind of de-invested in the web and microsoft did something in their haste in the spirit of netscape doing things quickly and getting on first called dhtml and some of their innovations that were like an alternative document object model didn't really get standardized until html5 when we pragmatists said opera at the time uh ian hickson who went to google apple and mozilla said let's let's xml is not going to replace html html4 is too old let's standardize html5 based on all this good stuff including that dhtml variant dynamic html5 it feels like to me maybe you can correct me like a beautiful piece of design work it was uh it's not often with web stuff i you have this breadth of just like oh whoever did this is did they fix it this just feels good uh is that what what are your thoughts about html is the am i being too romantic a little bit a little bit are there flaws fundamental flaws to it that i'm just not aware of my i'm you know my old friend hicksy did a great job he was a a renegade physics student uh and he was a basically a qa guy at opera but he obviously the trained physics you know student and uh someone who could write a british or he he developed test suites and he started thinking about them more axiomatically now this is this can be good because you can sort of systematize in a way that makes a better html or you can get caught in the pragmatism of saying well we have to handle these edge cases so we're just going to have sort of a test matrix and if the matrix is large it will not be beautiful by many people's lights everyone likes to minimize along their preferred dimensions the seven special forms and scheme or whatever but but reality is html needs uh to be big it's kind of symbolic it's a creative multi-paradigm and hixi did a good job i would say with a bunch of it uh other people came in in the spirit of ian hickson to do html5 work and they've carried on that effort and it's a so it's a mix of pragmatism de facto standards from the past being sort of combined or written down for the first time and then rethought in a way that has a simpler syntax like the fetch api instead of xml http request um video too as well it's ultimately it feels like maybe you can correct me it feels like it was the nail in the coffin a flash steve jobs saying no flash on the iphone in my opinion was the actual stick to the heart but but well and i'm not sure what trope you want to use this flash was a zombie for until just this year right or last year i think last year was the end of flash in main browsers um but jobs really did the death blow and uh yeah you're right we had to make html5 competitive i still don't think we got that beautiful timeline animation the timeline thing yeah you like the time i mean me from uh i you know i used to animate all kinds of stuff inside flash plus there's a programming element yes it was a little bit i don't know if you can comment on that but to me it was a little bit like go-to statement like in a sense that it was a little bit too chaotic like it didn't uh that ocd part of me as a programmer wasn't satisfied by flash it feels like there was bugs that were introduced through the animation process that i couldn't debug easily yes i heard that too i i didn't use it so i'm doing the grass's greener thing here yeah the thing i like i liked about the animation model was that it was this immutable function of time so you could time warp and you could if you dodged these bugs or worked carefully you could really make it sing in ways that i think still a little challenging with the web animation standards but or just using raw canvas and webgl um but there's so many tools now that maybe it doesn't matter and and yet we had to you know do video we had to do uh webgl and then evolve it we had to do web audio um but once we did all these things that helped flash uh die thanks to steve gubs we had something that um people didn't realize we had that vision that mark and jason have this this graphics capable to the metal uh portable runtime and we at mozilla realized this and we we saw javascript was something that you could compile to use adobe had somebody in the adobe labs doing this too he had a project called alchemy we had somebody who's now google alone zakai who did his own llvm-based compiler that would take c or c plus plus and it would emit javascript and you would think this is crazy you're going from this sort of machine types low-level you know controlled memory allocation language to this garbage collected dynamically typed uh high level higher level language but alone sort of just phenomenologically carved nature the joint found the forms that were fast in javascript and then with dave herman who i'd recruited from northeastern university who was a type theorist and um luke wagner was still at mozilla who was the compiler guy and and the jet guy they figured out how to codify what aolong had done into a typed subset of javascript called asm.js and this is a strange thing to think about because it doesn't have new syntax the types are casts that occur in dominator positions in the control flow graph so it's like a hack on javascript and it's a subset and it uses those bitwise operators that i talked about copying from java to basically cast numeric types which are double precision floating point into integers and so inside javascript in the kernel semantics are integers and if you use these operators if a compiler emits them in the right places you can then treat them as typed values typed memory locations and you can type check your program you can not only type check it you can compile it this is all in sort of linear time oh and you can compile it to have deterministic performance it doesn't touch the garbage collector it calls a bunch of functions that come from the c functions or c plus plus code that you're compiling and you can make the epic unreal engine go in 30 frames a second yeah and when we did this in 2013 in the fall you know tim sweeney i met um didn't think it could be done quickly i thought it would take years and the team went to raleigh to epic and in four days they had unreal engine ported by pressing a compile button right they had but they had to have webgl which came from opengl es came to opengl which came from silicon graphics jail they had to have web audio so they could map open al which was another audio library standard to web audio which was kind of a chrome idiosyncratic thing um but they could make it work and they had to have asm.js for fast c plus plus to javascript and uh if you didn't have that fast compiler step the javascript you'd write by hand trying to do an unreal game would be too big and too slow it would touch the garbage collector it would not keep up with 30 frames a second on the hardware 2013 hardware so we demoed that at um uh this was in fall 2012 now to think about it because we demoed it at gdc game developer conference 2013 and people were stunned it's like unreal engine unreal tournament running in my browser window no plugin no flash no java no so where does the early days of because javascript now is able to run basically on par with a lot of the like c plus yeah and even before then you had the fast javascript vms in 2008 when chrome came out just before it came out mozilla my friend andreas gal and i uh and others hacked out trace monkey our trace-based jet the squirrel fish extreme team at apple did their jit and we were all competing on these these crazy performance benchmarks it was a little bit too much tuning in the benchmark but javascript started getting fast and developers started noticing it but it was still kind of this its own high-level language with garbage collection the asm.js step helped us go further because until we really proved the concept people were still saying well javascript's okay it's getting faster thanks to v8 everybody gave google credit especially google but we need something to kill flash let's use the portable native client code that google had acquired native client um which is a separate lineage we're taking basically c code compiling it into a software fault isolated container of some sort using some kind of virtualization technique and maybe it can even be in process and still be memory say that would be awesome but they ended up using process isolation too and that kind of weakened it and in the end it was like portable native client okay you know meet new boss same as zeal boss this is the google flash right yeah but but when we did asm.js and we showed unreal engine working i think it was only a matter of time before google threw in the towel and in fact everybody agreed in spring of 2015 we're going to take what was proven by asthma js and make a new syntax a binary syntax that's efficient that loads into the same javascript vm that javascript loads into so there'll be two source languages one vm very important one garbage collector one memory manager one set of compiler stages uh and that's called web assembly and that's the successor to asm.js and it's important that it have binary syntax because at the end of the day especially on mobile if you're downloading javascript even if you're using lz compression on the wire that's cool but you've got to blow it out into memory and then parse the silly eight character function keyword that i picked when i could have used something shorter i picked it because of awk the unix tool um so anyways i'm not following i want to but i'm not following the awk thread is it surprising to you that uh how damn fast javascript is these days i mean like cause you've been through the whole journey yeah i know every every step of the way but is it like i mean it's it feels incredible it does but i knew so the funny thing is computer science is this big karmic wheel right wheel of fortuna um and uh in the most in 97 i was loaned by netscape to do due diligence for sun in their acquisition of anamorphic which was david unger uh come and and friends people uh craig i'm forgetting his name he went to microsoft these stanford language buffs who'd taken small talk and then david created itself as a simpler sort of small talk language and made really fast just in time compiling vms for them and they you know well ahead of java hotspot or javascript v8 or any of these modern vms figured out how to make dynamic code fast because small talk is a dynamic language right it has classes that has i think more lockdown declarative syntax than javascript but it's fundamentally dynamic you don't declare the types but you could in further types as the program runs and you start to form these ideas about what types are actually flowing through key operations and you form little so-called polymorphic inline caches that are optimized machine code the cache is the machine code that assumes it does a quick check to make sure the type is right and if it's not right it bails to the interpreter if it is right you go pretty fast and that short test is a predicted branch so things are things are pretty quick all that amazing stuff i knew about the 90s and i i didn't have time to do it and anamorphic got bought by sun and they did hotspot and you needed that even in java because at scale java has some dynamic aspects due to invoke interface you can have basically collections of java code where you don't know at the time each each module or package is compiled exactly what's being called what what subclass or what implementation of an interface is being called and so you want to optimize using this sort of dynamic polymorphic caching there too and they did that and hotspot it's amazing amazing beast i've met like 13 people who all claim they created it i think i think one of them may deserve credit more than others but uh i didn't get to do that in javascript and when we knew that that google uh was going to do their own browser which we knew at mozilla around 2006 i also met the team that did v8 and it turns out it was lars bach who was one of the young engineers from anamorphic got acquired by son and so lars is like the one the world's expert on these kinds of virtual machines and he picked my brains about javascript i could tell he didn't like it at the time but he had to do it and oh really interesting yeah in 2006 lunch at google's campus um and and then i had another friend who was deverell at chrome and he said yeah we don't know what they're doing this is getting 2007 to fall getting toward 2008. we're trying to get chrome out and we don't know what's going with the v8 team they're often all who's denmark you know rewriting their engine four times which is good that's the right way to do this kind of development you know they were learning javascript including all its quirks which they came to hate the fire of a thousand suns which is one of the reasons that lars and company did dart their own language but they also made the language fast and meanwhile we knew this was happening so we got our act together with trace monkey our tracing jet at mozilla and apple i think was also aware so they were doing their own so the era of jitted fast javascript in 2008 had this pre-history going back to small talk itself and anamorphic and the again the lineage is interesting because you had lars and anamorphic and then he ends up at google yeah and today we have an incredibly fast language that like you said still you know without hate you can't have love so uh i i think there's both love and hate for this dance uh this rich complex dance of javascript throughout his history there's a dialectic of sure for sure today javascript is the most popular language in the world why by many measures why do you think that is is it is there some fundamental ideas that you've already spoke to a little bit sort of broader that you think it's the most popular language in the world so i think i did you know by doing first class functions and taking the the good parts of the c operator hierarchy and just keeping things um simple enough maybe it could have been simpler but i had had to make it look like java and interoperate with java that there was uh you know inherent goodness and aristotelian quality there and people perceive that even through all the quirks and warts and then over time working on it with the standards body working on it not only in it as a core language but in the context of html5 making the browser better listening to developers thinking about this is something that nick thompson wrote nicely about on hacker news i was very flattered he said java was this thing where the experts were writing the code and it was compiling you had to declare all your types and some didn't really give a damn about you know the average programmer who wanted to build real web apps dynamic things and i was in there meanwhile doing you know a bunch of people's jobs making javascript survive those early years when it was kind of touch and go right javascript was considered mickey mouse language it was for annoyances like the scrolling text at the bottom of the browser in the status bar but i kept listening to developers working with them and trying to make the it run in that single threaded event loop in a useful way and i think that forged something that people have come to love now you don't always love you know the best thing right i talked about shakespeare sonnet about um uh my mr size or nothing like the sun or you know the scene from uh josh whedon's film uh serenity at the end where the actual piece and the score by david newman is called love where uh captain mal is teaching uh river tam about how to pilot the ship and she's a super genius super soldier she knows how to do it already and he's he's basically talking about how you have to love the ship because if you don't it's going to kill you and then the piece falls off the ship it's kind of like javascript yeah i love it yeah they love it because now people say we're stuck with it because it got this priority in place but there's love underpinning that and actually the listening to developers that's kind of beautiful there's uh most successful products in this world with all the messes with all the flaws perhaps the flaws themselves are actual features but that's a whole other that's a discussion about love but underneath it there's something that just connects with people and it has to keep connecting if javascript kind of went off in this people sometimes complain about es6 oh you put classes in javascript i hate classes you know you've ruined it but it's it's not true it's a dynamic language small talk had classes um python has classes um there are lots of lisp variants that have classy systems um comment list um so you know people who don't reject it based on some sort of fashion judgment do use it and do interact with the standards body the standards body is competing browser vendors mainly but also now big companies that use javascript heavily the pay pals and the other such companies uh salesforce and they have to cater to web developers they have to hire developers who know javascript they have to keep their engines up to the latest standard and this creates all this sort of social structure around javascript that is unusual i mean you get c plus plus buffs that follow the inner workings of you know c plus plus what is it now 21 something i don't know i've lost track but it's it's a more rarified group it's more like the old language you know gray hairs whereas javascript is a younger and more you know vibrant large crowd there's a community feel to it there's a echoes perhaps i don't want to draw too many similarities maybe you can comment on it there's a c plus is like wall street and the javascript is like wall street bets from the recent events it's like there's a chaotic community of all and there's some power from that distributed crowd of people it's more demotic it's more of the people uh it lets people in without requiring these credentials i remember in the late 90s into the 90s people were all getting java credentials and i knew people um and friends knew people who became jealous programmers and you knew they really should have been like nature guides or pilots they hated programming but they thought i got to make money i'm going to become a java programmer do you have some uh because it's such a monumental moment in our current history as a quick aside do you have thoughts about this huge distributed crowdsourced financial happenings uh with wall street bets that's like nobody could have well you could have predicted but the scale and the impact of this kind of emergent behavior from independent parties that could happen like i said my own um experience with the dismal science as with physics led me to reject a lot of bad models and you know economics was always compromised by politics political economy um you could also argue that it was it used to be a branch of moral philosophy so it was concerned with the good and it became divorced and became sort of in this quasi-newtonian way just about everything's just running by itself don't worry about it you know this is not least crushing your netscape company but that's just nature and economics couldn't or doesn't really have good models for the wall street bets subreddit you know they they know how to uh squeeze a short right so um the amazing thing is you have robinhood app which was again supposedly for the demos for the people yeah and eliminated the fee through various kinds of um you know straddles or some kind of spread operation that helped them eliminate the fee and or eat the fee and in fact you know as a broker in these days because it takes two days to settle there's counterparty risk as they found out and um so the wall street bets uh people you know the the memes are like the terminator robot with six hundred dollar stemi check and the hedge funds the the anime little girl hiding under the desk um there there is a problem which i talked about in the recent podcast which i'm conscious of from the history of the web and that is you could say it's monopoly which antitrust wasn't enforced after using microsoft for a long time and um a lot of this was due to the money interest spying control of politicians and you know in plato's five regimes that's oligarchy that's that's that's where we are and now we're seeing the fight against the old arcs i don't know if it'll work but you're definitely seeing it and it's also kind of hackerish right it's got a hacker ethos you know hey robin hood no fees oh interesting hey you know um i could buy a fraction of a share in this thing or i can keep buying with my stimulus check so uh i mentioned hegel seeing napoleon on the horse right hegel also talked about the the cunning of reason that you have the sort of you know god sees history in full and if you believe in god or you know we don't know the future but there's always this sort of fly in the ointment this uh unintended consequence uh that confounds the best um plans of the powers that be and we're living through it that's i'm glad it's not you know street warfare or or mechanized warfare because it has been in the past um uh it's it's more like soft power yes and uh people are fighting back do you think it's possible so the javascript used to be uh for the front end of the web it's now increasingly so being used for back end like running stuff that's like behind the scenes and it's also starting to be used uh quite a bit for things like tensorflow.js so starting to actually use like these heavy duty applications that are using neural networks machine learning and so on in the browser is it possible in 10 20 30 years that basically most of the world runs on javascript this is a dystopian a nightmare to some people um when i when we did ask them jason web assembly i would joke and meme people with scenes like neo waking up in his pod in the matrix and he's all skinny and weak and hairless um and you know you realize in the future that you're living in some simulation and it's all running on javascript and you just scream forever um it's possible gary bernhard uh does these funny talks he did wat js and then he did this uh the life and death of javascript i think it's called where he he took some clever ideas that actually have a a thread of uh credibility to them but i mentioned software fault isolation in the old days when we were using computers we we said we're going to use the unix you know monolithic monitor and it's the privilege program this is before you even had hardware rings of protection those some of the early 60s operating systems used hardware protection zones but unix is privileged and the program that runs user code in a process is is hosted it's the guest in the host and and you get to suspend it you get to kill it if it crashes it doesn't take down the whole os it's a wonderful idea but the call into the kernel is expensive the system calls so-called and this has even been optimized now for things like getting the time of day so it doesn't actually enter the kernel and meanwhile hardware architectures and virtualization techniques have gone in a different direction even to the point where you can do software fault isolation very cheaply without entering the operating system kernels you get unicorns and exokernels and very lightweight vms and so gary took this idea and said javascript will take over computing because the system call boundaries too expensive so everything ends up in javascript with these lighter weight isolation enforcement mechanisms it's not totally beyond belief yeah um webassembly too it's nice to ask you sort of for advice to uh there's so many people that are interested in starting to learning about programming getting into this world is there um some number of languages three to five programming languages that you would recommend people learn or maybe uh a broader advice on how to get started in programming well so you asked about machine learning and you know javascript is a general purpose language and it's a language that's not um not that great for doing you know matrix operations or doing parallel programming i would say without using some extensions or some libraries that have some magic in them so if someone wanted to you know learn um of the there are amazing languages in sort of the apl family that are very useful for i would say linear algebra which gets to a lot of the kernels in machine learning and so apl had like j and then k and their k variants because the guy that did k is still going and he's they're proprietary but he's still innovating there um there are you know python is used so people talk about vlog js well it's not that's surprising because python was heavily used for machine learning and python was always you know they didn't have this fast just-in-time compiler tradition there were some projects that tried this and some of them were interesting um pi pi was interesting but um the philosophy with python was oh you need to go faster write a c plug-in and drop into c code so i think people should look at multiple languages because they're different tools in the belt if you're trying to do supervision or rapid prototyping you want a dynamic language you want to throw things together and see what works if you're trying to go down to the metal very fast well i'm an old sea hacker but i was also the sponsor executive sponsor of rust at mozilla and rust has now escaped you know from that sort of nest where it was born to be adopted by a bunch of companies that have a foundation in the works some of the key core team members are working now at amazon and other places so it looks like rust has reached escape velocity and rust is an interesting language because one of our goals there one of the reasons i sponsored it was we were all tired of seeing those remote code execution vulnerabilities due to cnc plus plus and we thought can we have a sort of safety property through a type and effect system or an ownership system and rust has that and that ownership system is interesting because it doesn't just give you memory safety there's a sort of theorem for free a dual that falls out for protection against data races so rust is better for low-level programming you limit your unsafe code where you do have to be unsafe and you can prove certain facts about memory safety and race condition uh avoidance and so i think people should learn these new languages i think go is a great language i admire you know the eunuchs uh people who did that ken still was involved rob pike of course um dave uh what's his name and other people um go is a huge success um really on the server side anywhere you have um you know a lot of networking to do and it's garbage collected but it's also very pragmatic it has that sort of c flavor as an overseas hacker i can't get used to the fact that they swapped the type and declarator in the declaration order i haven't used rust but this is one of the most respected and loved languages currently so it's yes and it's still young you look at these things javascript is now considered old that's gone through so many versions that you can fall in love with it all over again 25 plus years you know it's it's it's an adult uh should be out of the house but um it could be around another 25 years cannot rule it out so rest will be around for a long time the longer you're around the more likely you're lindy and you're around a lot of people ask me like uh i i'm i'm often torn between recommending either python or javascript is the first language to play with because i mean it's difficult because it's so easy to do javascript incorrectly it's much uh it's much easier to do it correctly these days or like well like learn about programming but the the cool thing about javascript is that you can create stuff that will put a smile on your face like as a as a developer you can create stuff and it'll visually look like something and it'll do stuff and it makes you feel good it makes you fall in love with programming with python you could do the same it's a little slower and with c plus it takes five to ten years to write a program that actually does something yeah so like there's that tension between is javascript the right first step or is it python and i've been going back and forth on those two i had my python right it came from a lineage of abc which was a pedagogical language in in the netherlands um and um it uh you know um it it it was a good teaching language too i think it is a good teaching language and it's a little more restrictive in that if you misspell something in a way that javascript might let run let reach runtime it'll get stopped at a syntax check in python that's good for beginners i think the the sloppiness that some people object to like people were just tweeting at me uh having just learned javascript they said i can take a number and i can index into it and get undefined out of it as a property and why is that a number is not an object and i explained why it is because like in java the primitive types which unfortunately are not objects can be automatically boxed or wrapped by an object and i made that implicit in in java it's it's typed and you have to declare things and you'll get type errors um but there are cases in java where you get auto boxing or auto wrapping because you've declared that you want it in javascript it just happens and so once i explain it like oh wow i get it but it also means that you can commit a blunder that right just you don't get punished for you don't detect and there's an undefined value and you don't know where it came from right i've been reading a lot about military history recently and one way to paint the the picture of browsers internet browsers is through the various wars throughout its history i don't know if that's a useful way to look at it but we've already talked a little bit about netscape and internet explorer uh in the early days can you tell the story of the different wars if that's at all an interesting way to look at it of the 90s and to today yeah so i mentioned that microsoft you know which was convicted for it did abuse its monopoly but they had a pretty good team by the time they did ie4 and netscape unfortunately i was like second floor and i was friends with all the first floor people the front end guys who did the javascript event hookup and things like that that that team was fairly burnt out and i think having gone public uh the man upper management wanted to buy a bunch of companies to try to go head-to-head with microsoft it didn't work but buying a bunch of companies usually doesn't work i think the modern sort of approach it roughly is like mark zuckerberg uh took which is to keep them at arm's length and let them do their thing and now that he's pulling whatsapp in and people are fleeing it because it's tied into the ad surveillance but um you know for a while they're keeping it separate really does work because you bought it for its value it's complementary and you're not messing with it with netscape when they bought a bunch of companies they had some of the first four people or the founders burned out they had um newcomers who wanted their turn to do the browser and they hadn't really done browsers or understood them and so netscape 4 was originally supposed to be 3 and it was so late they renumbered it when we did a 3 release jamie and a few others put some extra effort into secure mime was supported in the mail built-in mail program and sk4 was late and it was only on windows at first and microsoft had really started doing better like they do they copy and the first version is trash and the second one you're starting to feel all threatened the third one you can tell what's going to happen and the fourth one's good and plus there's the benefit like you said that it comes as a default browser yes and and yet netscape screwing it up and microsoft really putting some quality people on it ie4 was good on windows it was good and they did the dynamic html innovations they uh scott isaacs my old buddy a former accountant who programmed in basic and became what microsoft calls a program manager which is kind of an elevated position it's um you can be a programmer or an engineer track but you switch to it and you sort of lead a lot of design and standards efforts and so scott isaac put in a lot of those funky dhtml apis that didn't quite have the same flavor as the stuff that i did and neither of them was like the later sort of verbose java like dom w3c standardized but ie4 was pretty darn good we i remember a friend scott fuhrman and i got invited by scott isaacs ii uh gordon bierisch in san jose they were doing a preview of ie4 this must been 1997. and scott said yeah we've got here's the new graphics stuff we're doing we've got something like your netscape layers um we've got vml a vector markup language you know we can do like virtual reality and scott and i looked to each other and said we're doomed right microsoft was starting to fire on all cylinders so i have to give them credit for that even though they abused their market power and maybe you know i shouldn't give them credit for having the resources to hire talented people but they did a credible job on ie4 what really was bad was that phase of the browser wars ended with monopoly and perhaps due to the antitrust case perhaps due to regulation in europe um perhaps just due to microsoft not liking dealing with standardization they they let it rot they just abandoned it i five five five um i6 later but these were not well maintained they had a lot of security bugs and files really closed and outdated too even though it's getting updated it's just weird browsers like in mozilla and then firefox were adding tabs opera had a version of tabs and uh they didn't add tabs and they pop-up blocking something i should have done from the start people realized that you can tell when the user clicks something and it goes in javascript to open a little window that you can sort of inspect the stack and see that the click originated that and it's probably okay whereas if you're just loading a script and it opens a new window that's a spam technique and you should block it tabs were brilliant innovation like you said opera had it but like i remember i fully switched to firefox the moment it was i i remember like the moments of first using tabs in firefox and like not liking it like for the first few minutes and then like wait a minute you get the groove yeah you get the groove and you understand so that timing what year was this uh so because uh also as a aspiring web designer i used table so we didn't mention layout or css much there's also a change in the way like the frames were going away yeah so there's a change in the way websites looked and behaved and all that kind of stuff css finally which microsoft embraced with ie4 and netscape never really did right css became a better standard over time for doing table layout that relieved you of the need to use what are called spacer gifs spacer gifs right images yeah you would throw into space out tables um you know the the typographic power of the web has gotten better but it's still not on the level of pdf and you can't do advanced typography but um it's gotten really better and even then tables were getting better if you were using firefox that would have been 2004 because it was called firebird until earlier that year five no yeah i think uh it wasn't three i don't remember it was a fiber which had tabs uh we had tabs the whole way so yeah mozilla slash browser in 2002 became phoenix there's a bios that has an embedded version of ie and they said we're called phoenix technologies you can't use phoenix and so we said okay we'll call it firebird and then this australian-centered open source database project started really like in the true mad max style just screaming at us saying you can't use firebird and i had to sort of be the ambassador and say okay we're going to rename and like we don't believe you shouldn't use that we hate you and then we renamed it to firefox and they're like ah we love you and then i don't haven't heard of them ever since but firefox was a clever name we had to think of something distinctive we wanted to keep the fire going and it turns out there's a red panda right it's a nickname for so so that's the second set of problems second browser so how did you how was firefox born how's mozilla born is there a there's a long story there too so netscape got acquired by aol which as i say was a reasonable happy ending for a lot of people because netscape otherwise was going to go out of business because microsoft was just killing its market there was no way to charge for a browser windows came with ie ia4 was pretty good and netscape 4 wasn't that good it took a while to get better but the netgame executive said let's do an open source escape pod you know and like in star wars a new hope the gunner won't shoot it because there's no life forms on board right it's not a threat uh and so we did mozilla in 1998 and it looked like it was going to you know initially just give the world of open source browser but it's really hard to get people to work on this sort of hairball that had been hacked up over by that point four years uh it also couldn't have the crypto module for secure sockets so called or now transport layer security that was an electronic munition we're not allowed to release that in the full 1024-bit key strength and yet people one of whom i happened to meet previously at sgi when i went on a sales support engineering trip tim hudson in brisbane australia and um eric a young did what became open ssl it was called ssl ea y after eric's initials and tim and eric took their open ssl outside of the purview of the nsa and the department of commerce and they stuck it into mozilla's code and that was perhaps the best hack that was done in the first few months after we open sourced the browser we had other problems the politics inside netscape were driven by these acquisitions so the one acquisition that kind of messed up netscape 4 also wanted to keep doing a proprietary mail and groupware program not jamie zielinski's mail program that was netscape 2 and 3 and they held it back from open source we didn't have a mail program it was just a browser we didn't know what aol will do to us turns out they didn't interfere with us for a long time but netscape wasn't the best steward of mozilla we were operating mozilla as a pirate ship without a legal entity so most of us worked for netscape under a separate organization and um initially uh the first engineering manager tom paquin of netscape was the mozilla founding manager but he he left pretty quickly and he left me as the acting manager which is more like method acting in my case and i i did that was my first management stint but then um someone who'd written the licenses mitchell baker she was a lawyer in netscape she was involved in the open source license decision making and the actual writing and construction of those licenses that was mitchell's job netscape public license and the truly open mozilla public license and there were two because netscape needed because of some uncovered code needed some special rights but that went away over time mitchell was almost interested in mozilla and she came back from maternity leave and she said i'll be the manager if you want and jamie and i said sure and then jamie quit he quit after a year he said this didn't work i'm sorry you know he acted like it was a total failure because mozilla didn't restart the browser market but there's no way it could have right netscape was still shipping variants of netscape 4 which was based on the old code mozilla was trying to react to the code to make green field for developers so it was one of my big goals it wasn't a technical goal so much as again a social goal people wanted a more standard space browser they wanted a less of a hairball that had been hacked on by ex-grad students starting four years prior so we said we're going to make a modular code base we're going to use a variant or an open source version of microsoft's component object model as reference counting and standardized v tables virtual calls and c plus and we're going to use javascript we're going to have a bridge between those two so you can script those components just like java components we're going to make a portable front end with a markup language for the user user interface not tables not html but custom you know menus and drop downs and toolbars and and that was called zuul xml user interface language and some real talent on an escape site delivered that dave hyatt who was instrumental in zul chris waterson joe hewitt blake ross and blake was an intern he was like a high school-aged intern in that and at some point we were innovating rapidly in the mozilla world and netscape was still caught up in this management mess from these acquisitions and it wasn't delivering and every year they were wondering if aol was going to come and start beheading the executive because it didn't do anything useful and there was a thought you should take the netscape browser engine and put it in the windows aol client which was the dial-up client that all the increasingly aging users of aol were using never happened it would have been too big a change so it wasn't clear why it all bought netscape but as i said they left it alone but netscape didn't leave mozilla alone and so um in 2001 mitchell called me up and said i'm no longer employed and i'm saying what you quit no no this wasn't my choice and there was a layoff which maybe accidentally or on purpose got rid of mitchell but the funny thing was we had an open source project we had a lot of the engineers on staff on our side and we had um people we'd hired for the mosul community were top-notch they'd risen you know they came in high quality they knew the code and they actually were better than the average or median higher of netscape and so the funny thing was the executive who thought they'd gotten rid of mitchell in the layoff on the next week's community call around mozilla and what to do there's mitchell and so this show you can kind of transcend your uh you know boundaries of corporate open source if you get a project that has enough loyalty even among the paid staff because we had outside people contributing with people at red hat and a few other places but the majority of the hackers were employed by netscape but a lot of them at that point had had come from the community and others got the community and wanted to work with it it was really the weakest engineers at netscape who didn't like mozilla and didn't like the the crucible of competing with the the better uh the programmers so if the project is good enough it will rise the phoenix will rise out of the that's exactly right and so we had this this mozilla code base that was getting better in fact i think at some point in 2002 when we declared mozilla 1-0 we i engineered a road map that successively through similar sort of six-week five-week releases like we all do with browser releases nowadays chrome does and firefox um braved us three weeks we we we got to a point where we said you know what it doesn't suck this is like the 1-0 that you want to release because if you hold it back any longer to polish it you're denying others the ability to use it so like pro engineer the mechanical cad tool embedded the code they embedded the layout engine and mozilla 1 0 was like a netscape communication suite we at that point gotten male people to reintegrate mail and news and we had an editor for html and it felt like a 90s suite sweetware and it felt kind of bloated and the people who were taking that mozilla open source and then adding netscape flavor to it were not calling the shots right and they were also under al's thumb a little bit and that they said we should probably put the aol instant messenger chiclet on the toolbar we should put the icq the other messages that aol acquired we should put the icq you know button on the toolbar and pretty soon netscape looked like a bit of a nascar badged version of mozilla and that also made mozilla more popular and and yet um they they had you know contrived to um fire or lay off the leader and and and we carried on with an open source structure where muslim was still you know mitchell was calling sort of management or project level shots and i was calling technical shots and we we had a popular suite but we thought why not make it just a browser because it'll be simpler it'll do one job well and even then we can strip it down by having extensions so dave hyatt and blake ross the high school-aged intern did the first version which was called mozilla slash browser it was very the small group of us ian hicks and asa dotzler me and uh joe hewitt and hyatt and blake and and they and hyatt was really the senior hacker he'd done all these things like amazing uh cross-platform menus through the user interface markup language and he knew how to do tab browsing he implemented it natively on mac os at the time in camino um originally called chimera he he'd written multiple implementations which was i think programmers should do it's like the va team did for those missing years when the rest of the chrome team's like where's v8 um in fact dave's wife rebecca told me a story about when they were at uiuc they were also universal illinois uh grad students there was an assignment it was a programming assignment supposed to do the end of the semester and dave's friend was this i'm going to go think and i'm going to design and i'm going to make this you know platonic perfect form of the program and then i'm going to write it at the end when it's due and hyatt just went there and started hacking you wrote one version you wrote a second version a third version the end of the semester comes around the friend's not doing too well it wasn't perfect and it wasn't written i'm not sure how that story ended but for him but dave's version was the fifth iteration was great and so he done that with everything you need in a tabbed browser and this really showed well in phoenix what we called phoenix and had to rename two more times and you know blake went to stanford he became a stanford student and couldn't work on it um dave hyatt went to apple in 2001 he was one of the founding safari team members um interesting wow but he was still here vlogging about tabbed browsing i think apple at some point said yes sorry already have to have browsing yeah but it was because of hyatt yeah i was quite a feather in their cap don melton at uh who had been the engineering manager at for safari from the beginning uh had been in netscape also and so this is diaspora of talent and and yet hyatt was still kind of writing blog posts about how to do tabs right and at some point apple said don't don't blog about that that's our proprietary tab technology you know it's like no it's not it was an opera and i've refined it um so we had to replace people and we had ben goodyear new zealander we hired at netscape and he stepped in to be the firefox lead and we also had this weird circumstance where aol finally did notice that netscape was kind of a albatross they bought it for no particular benefit and even then the aol politics were also heinous sort of east coast politics i remember taking two trips there because i was a principal engineer and so us principal engineers got trotted out to do dog and pony shows in dulles virginia and the uh the aol upper management was very east coast in flavor and they were at that time merging with time warner which would not go well so one of these years we went out there and we were all doing dog and pony shows and there were these characters that were sort of like marketing guys one of the most wearing a cravat and they were one was named reggie and they were they were they were very um you rather than non-you or they were like what's what stoneman's metropolitan film uhb um urban um they were uh they were um funny and they were kind of useless and kind of preppy and then the next year we went back and i said where's reggie and it's like oh richie's not here anymore because time warner realized that the merger wasn't in their interest either and then the sort of knives came out and this was these mergers really work right this is very difficult you get these giant companies and they think there's going to be synergy that was the 90s late 90s watchword and there wasn't synergy with aol by netscape and there wasn't synergy with time warner but did aol ever really work was it ever really cool like the same kind of fire and excitement that uh firefox eventually created was that ever there in aol aol was the right time to do a dial-up service that got distribution by basically leaflet bombing compact disks right on the country and they beat out compuserve and the other ones prodigy and then the web happened and so you had almost like this um isolated continent like some of the evolutionary biologists i follow make fun of the the funny large mammal you know marsupial mammals of australia how how silly they are and so aol is like australia and you saw it over time because they kept aging and they were using aol to get online and they couldn't really use a web browser and it became sort of a a valued cohort because they're still have relatively high socioeconomic status and they have grandchildren but it's going away it's dying at some point towards the end of the arts that decade and then to the decade 2010 plus that firefox became it's incredible i forget when chrome came out but 2008 september 2008 but firefox was the sexy cool thing that represented a lot of the cutting-edge technologies and all that kind of stuff it was amazing tim o'reilly and john patel did the first web 2 conference which eventually became huge and they split it but that was in 2004 right when firefox was out craigslist was it was huge it was killing classified revenue for newspapers but um there was just this ferment people starting wikipedia along there somewhere gmail was already done and it was an impressive webmail there were others before like hotmail but gmail was really impressive from google and google maps people started seeing what could be done they thought how can you drag the map around and you know how does that work and it was all javascript and images and and um so gmail was 2003 for so yeah it actually started quite early it might have been 2002 or three but by the time we started dealing with google and firefox to get the search deal which was the main revenue source for mozilla and still is um 2004 early sergey brin's one of his trusted engineer guys fred schneider made contact with me at mozilla and we started talking and we realized search and browser need each other and this is deeply true right this is still true this is why a lot of the search engines have their own browsers yeah so in case people don't know the the main revenue source for the browser is the default search engine which is kind of incredible to think about that the that is a revenue source it's a little bit sad yeah it leads to this capture or kill effect where you have the search engine on its own browser and other browsers may struggle to just get this distribution we talked about earlier yeah so where and you said uh you've figured out that uh google is working on its own browser at some point 2006 yeah 2006. so would you say firefox versus was internet explorer part of the war here or was the firefox versus chrome so firefox didn't quite cause microsoft to reconvene i.e they did do ie7 and i remember being on a plane back from the standards meeting javascript standards meeting from seattle from redmond and there was some microsoft guy in front of me it turns out my wife knew him from her past life before we married and he was just this bearded big guy and he was like we should have just killed firefox in the cradle all we needed to do was add pop-up blocking in tabs and we could have made it interesting kill firefox and it's like shoulda coulda woulda pal and i was right behind him hearing this um but they didn't they were slow and they ie7 wasn't that great and what really got them started i think was um chrome and you know i talked to larry page in 2005 i think i said you know we're talking about the firefox relationship but he was also saying what about webkit this was apple's version of the old khtml engine from from linux the kde side of linux that was used in the conqueror browser also with kays that apple had forked and and in 2005 was when apple's principals including dave hyatt matches takovic some of my friends were still there said we must stop patch bombing this poor kd html project we should make a proper mozilla-like organization webkit.org now it wasn't a separate non-profit or anything it was still apple it was apple controlled but they made their fork first class and they made it be something that they all worked in and lived in and that was before chrome and then chrome larry page said what about webcam i said yeah it's nice i have friends who work on it you might use that if you do your own browser why don't you do your own browse don't worry about firefox you should do your own browser you can have your own you know opinion of how it should work and and sure enough they did so by 2006 we knew they'd been working on it some of the some of my friends who'd been at netscape did the original demo and the demo wasn't what you thought it didn't have the fast javascript yet that was still off in denmark in the farm um did i have tabs it had tabs because all browsers had tabs at this point and it had this software fault isolation i mentioned it was through process isolation so in theory each tab has its own operating system process and so what's going to take your tab down well webkit has bugs that can crash it but flash was still big then all the restaurants sites remember and flash crashed a lot so the demo that i heard about my friends x netscape x as all people did inside google was the sad tab they showed an early version of chrome which is just this bare-bones tab browser they loaded a site with a known flash volume and then suddenly flash crashes and everyone expected the whole browser to go down but instead you got this little sad face in the tab and you could reload it and there it is again so this was this was a an improvement it was a real move for security it was based on you know a company that acquired called green border they had some really big brains like olfar erlingston i think was involved and they had done some exotic security stuff but they ended up simplifying it to this process isolation and um it was good and firefox didn't have it at the time so we were still struggling with you know security bugs so we knew chrome was coming but it took two more years to come out and at the time we were still getting you know the google search revenue and we were still um making google the default engine and firefox was still growing firefox grew i think until 2011. that was when it peaked and as it started falling it was because of chrome chrome came out in 2008 and it was a comic book that leaked accidentally that showed some of the people who worked on it lars bach was in there and so on it was kind of soft launch because they didn't market it heavily they didn't push distribution but google had reason to worry about distribution because microsoft was you know doing a search engine bing since 2007. in fact when they came out with bing google was worried that microsoft would just brute force switch the default browser in everyone's internet explorer or even firefox on windows to bing from google and uh microsoft wasn't i think ready to dare the anti-trust cops that way even though they'd gone to sleep and i don't think bing was ready either but just in case it happened sundar pichai who rose very well based on this work was sort of in charge of getting distribution deals and he got google toolbar and google desktop search distribution and remember those pieces of software those were like desktop extensions toolbars or operating system extensions for doing desktops searching your local files kind of like that's right mac os spotlight right sadly died doubted and there were some features that we still missed that didn't make it into chrome but sundar got oems to bundle those and then he got enough of those deals that by 2007 or eight google felt well if bing microsoft does the worst and tries to force bing we can reach in and reset it with that point of presence so that was you know good for sundara's career and it was good for google but it never came to pass that they had to defend microsoft was still you know slow and by the time they saw chrome come out then they did what would have been ie9 and then they said we're going to have a fast javascript engine to chakra chakra core and uh they did okay they were another process isolated fast javascript browser tab browser so it sounds like there's a deep fundamental coupling of search engine and browser that's mixing this whole thing up and obviously firefox doesn't have a a search engine that's like i mean you're you're partnering with one with somebody with a search engine yeah with with yahoo or with uh yeah uh with google or so on they tried yahoo that was unfortunate because i think um even though marissa mayer talked about it she never pulled it off and never restored the search uh team that had been laid off i believe carol bartz was running yahoo when carol said i've got to get rid of one of three expensive things i'm going to get rid of search and those researchers went to google and microsoft and there was no way to put yahoo search back together so when firefox tried switching all their users who'd stuck with a default from google to yahoo like mid-december 2014 a bunch of users said what just happened to my firefox and others didn't notice right away but over time they did and so over the next year the the traffic just went away for yahoo and and yet they were obliged i understand it i i don't have inside knowledge but this is leaked out and danny sullivan's written about it search engine lin i think the deal was like fixed payments to mozilla so mozilla was getting a bunch of money for traffic that wasn't staying because users were resetting their default and this shows how defaults are important but they have to be good enough that the user doesn't override them and you know a lot of the commercial value in popular apps is what are the default settings what is the default search but oftentimes there's something just like you said i mean if there's something compelling that's also can beat out the default like tab browsing and so on yes and that's where i mean we'll talk about brave browser it feels like now we're in this third stage where there's uh chrome firefox edge i guess it's called and brave and these are all seem like really exciting i don't know innovative browsers they're all kind of copying off of each other picking up the good stuff there's evolution again especially on tracking protection so privacy is this sort of global um wave that's rising i like to call it a wave because it's a large somewhat chaotic structure it's not a unitary good you can't say i'm buying privacy for you know three dollars i'm paying three dollars privacy some people think a vpn does this and are disappointed when it fails them but often people use vpns for region unlocking video or getting the us netflix exactly but privacy is is not a unitary good it's complex and people are understanding it only over time and as they get burned but there's a genie that's not going back in the bottle there people are fed up apple has responded to this apple was always making safari i think more of a privacy branded browser from the very beginning i think this was probably steve jobs safari had private windows private tabs before firefox did and these are only private in the sense that they don't leave local traces uh if you don't want them to it turns out safari does keep them around between shut down but the canonical model is no local traces after you close the private window no no leftover traces that you went to you know some site that you were embarrassed by or bought a gift for somebody you wanted to keep secret um but there's still some level of tracking there's network uh tracking there's network privacy is not guaranteed at all because you're using the same internet and isp as a public window a non-private window but sorry had that early on they also had a cookie blocking policy that might take a little explaining when you if you know what a cookie is it's a little bit of storage in the browser indexed by the name of the site and it's really only the main name of the site like bfa.com or you know something like npr.org every site can store some information in a cookie every time it's contacted by the browser the previous version is sent back and in the response from the server the cookie's updated so it's this little bit of storage in the browser that the site can keep updating and it can store an encrypted version of your login credentials with a timestamp so you can stay logged in without having to re-type your password every time you navigate which is how it would be if you didn't have cookies the web protocols especially in the 90s are so-called stateless protocols so you go to your bank you log in you go from your login confirmed page to your account view if you didn't have a cookie you'd be logging in again everything every time you type in so that was a great thing about cookies lumon truly did it in a hurry in 1994 before i joined escape and he did it for really holding that kind of credential but even then there was the image element embedded in the page and the image gets fetched possibly from a different server and that request carries the last cookie which could be empty at first and the response carries the updated cookie so just by having images and cookies you have tracking because that image server can be serving a little one by one pixel and they still use the word pixel on adtech and that pixel can be served from the same server embedded differently with different url spellings in the new york times and espn and as you go from one to the other the image server can say i haven't got a cookie for you it's empty initially i'm gonna assign you user number one two three four i'm gonna put a database entry in and i see by the way i always fetch the name of the path part of the url that i was in the new york times so you're a new york times reader and then you hit espn same thing and the database gets updated and the number user one two three four indexes in the database to a profile of you you've been tracked this was not intended and it was too late to undo by the time i got the netscape um i think lou wanted to do twinkies he called them and he was trying to solve several problems he wanted them to be bigger because initially cookies had a short size limit i think he wanted to solve the third party problem but tom pake when the engineer manager said nope no twinkies just cookies we're done you're done son and um that's how a lot of that stuff was that's how javascript you know um got frozen like a flying amber in some ways with that sloppy equality operator that i made because of the early adopters and the cookie got stuck with this tracking hazard and then because javascripts can be like images they're embedded in the page by the time netscape 3 i made that work you can get a request with the last cookie value and the response updates it that's a tracking mechanism and that's why you don't even need images to track now you just use scripts so this whole tracking economy evolved and it it it depended on these accidents of the 90s these unintended consequences well it created some of the richest companies in the world right i mean it's the social media all i got was t-shirts all i got is this crappy t-shirt yeah i mean uh so that's that's the fundamental problem the world is facing now they're looking at what social media has created and they're looking at and like a world is looking at itself in the mirror and seeing that privacy is actually something supposed to like a nice thing to have it's something that is actually should be fundamental to the way we interact with the world as part of our tooling and that's where the brave browser comes in and i suppose others as well are playing with this idea but brave is at the forefront of that so maybe can you like describe what brave is yes and what are its key principles and uh what's broken and what is it brave trying to fix so when i realized that these accidents like the third party cookie the image or script that's tracking you or the um this javascripts that can do it invisibly now that all this stuff wasn't intended and that firefox had supported extensions that blocked some of these things i thought probably we should have browsers just block some of these things by default these were not intended and they're now unsafe they're tracking you there could be data breaches malware distribution um you know bullying and psyops and other attacks on people um block that stuff block that javascript i've i'm dr frankenstein with the monster here but obviously you go to gmail there's a bunch of script there to make that amazing web client that's okay that's first party javascript so how do you tell the first from the third party and it's not easy it's not a matter of just what's embedded from a different server because a lot of publishers use benign scripts from unrelated domains or apparently unrelated domains so you end up having to develop a sort of human and machine learning practice around blocking and at brave we did that from the start and built a research team to help drive it and automate it we realized that protecting people needed machine learning and around 2017 spring i talked to my friends at apple about this too and they were also doing what they call intelligent tracking prevention which uses local machine learning in the browser and the funny thing is we you know great great minds think like we were they were taking their third-party cookie blocker that was in safari from the old days and making it not have a big loophole because what they did was in 2003 when sorry came out they said we're going to block cookies that are from those third-party embedded elements where you've never visited that site before so i'm going to pick an ad company that got sold to att so i'm not picking on anybody unfairly appnexus.com have you ever been to appnexus.com no i've never been there but i guarantee you 10 years ago you probably had if you were using firefox you had a cookie third-party cookie because you're being tracked by them and they were using that cookie to build up a profile of you in safari as long as the user never went to app nexus that cookie would not be set and that was a real move for privacy early on uh when jobs were still around in safari but it had this loophole that if you do go to app nexus then why it's okay to be a third-party cookie and so app next just did something very naughty they took their ad partners to put the actual ad you click on and they said hey add a little script so that when somebody clicks on the ad before it goes to your landing page redirect to app nexus and will redirect to the landing page and by doing that they set a first party cookie and they got white-listed so as a loophole they exploited intelligent tracking prevention in safari was sophisticated enough to counteract this and it did other things and it's evolved since they did it and we've evolved brave too and so when i say machine and human learning there's a real um set of techniques here they have to fight fascinating problems fingerprinting right anytime you have a little bit of storage in the browser associated with a website if the bad guy can get 32 websites each one has a bit of storage that's 32 bits you can turn the bit on or off you can make 4 billion numbers you can make an identifier it's called a super cookie sometimes it's a there are there are weaker ways that are statistical they're called fingerprinting you have to block all of them and you have to not only automate you want to work in the web standards body to put privacy in by default by design from the get go not add it as an afterthought or you know go hog wild with new web apis add a bunch more local storage or fingerprint surface area and that's been a struggle too because guess who's the new microsoft in the standards body it's google and they're not in favor of privacy first they they want to do privacy their way only under i would say market pressure but with apple uh and with brave leading the way we we block third-party cookies almost without exception so we've just blocked them and that gives us a very strong privacy uh benefit but it also means some sites just don't work right embedded youtube videos might work right so we're adapting in similar way to apple's done with itp to make third-party cookies blocked but to sort of simulate what looks like a working third-party cookie for the site it essentially tries to i partition each site and its third parties into its own sort of cookie jar got it and so and like like you said is this both like a human uh fine-tuning issue and the machine learning problem so humans learn then they train the machine learning but you know uh maybe google side or including google there's millions of dollars if not b billions of dollars to be made from fighting the ways of brave that's right and it's been uh an interesting change from when we started 2015 when we started you know ad blocking extensions abloc plus was one of the big ones that started on firefox in 2006 i believe had gotten to a certain level of use around the world and browsers like uc web uc browser in asia had some amount of ad blocking built in and on by default so a page fair was a startup and they measured ad blocking adoption and they tried to say hey publishers you're you know 30 of the visitors to uh pitchfork or wired to kind of nas properties are using ad blockers if we can somehow convince them to lower their ad blocking for your site that could be like a 43 lift right um and three sevenths well that's easier said than done and page fair and others source point many others tried to either smuggle ads through or cajole the user into letting you know ads appear and it didn't really work and meanwhile the ad blocking adoptions just continued intelligent tracking prevention in safari in 2017 brave from 2016 on with very strong cookie blocking and other productions and this this is not going away the publishers used to rage against it like we would try to say we can help you you're dealing with users who are already blocking all your ads we can try to put back uh some economics that help the user and you that led to the basic attention token that we started with bitcoin we can be your friend don't don't just fingerprint us as an ad blocker and treat us as an enemy but in 2015 or 16 it was like ah you're an ad blocker get out of here i hate you and by 2017 or 18 it's like something's happening the app walking is not stopping and we're all getting sort of pulled onto google's plantation through amp amp or you know we're getting killed by the google ad system we use because it's taking all the revenue or you know it's permitting or some other vendors we use are permitting ad fraud and so a fake new york times is getting paid by the marketer running an ad that a a bot clicks on and the real new york times it's supposed to get that doesn't get it and there's something really broken about that kind of system and that that fraud is mediated through google's ad exchange which is the biggest of them all and google takes a fee there's a flip side of that which is malware distribution advertising where fake advertisers put malware payloads in or look exploit kit loaders in javascript and they smuggle them in ads onto real publisher pages the ad exchange takes the fee now i'm not a lawyer i'm not going to say this is a ricoh predicate but why is the ad exchange facilitating fraud and malware distribution and taking a fee it's not right as opposed to just fighting this is the really interesting thing about brave is as opposed to just fighting in and being treated like an ad blocker you're providing an alternate there's a there's a philosophical idea here that might change the nature of the internet with the basic attention token yes well maybe what is basic attention token bat and how does it work okay i'll tell the story first by saying how i came to it i realized for a long time at firefox we were dependent on this google search deal and i thought you know now that chrome's out maybe that's going to go away and they just at some point google will say you know firefox you know like old yeller you saved me from the rabid beast now you have to shoot you in the head yeah done your job sad but true goodbye and what could we do and i think this mozilla doesn't know what to do this is something that i couldn't solve there and i don't think they can solve but i thought why is the browser the sort of passive servant of these big tech companies why is it a blind run time for ad tech javascripts including from google why doesn't it block some and if it blocks some why can't it reconnect users readers fans with publishers creators websites why can't it help people make direct payments or even possibly get an ad revenue share for private ads that are placed in the browser the ads are all placed in the browser some people have this sort of model that the server is painting the ad into some you know flash uh combined package or into some giant image and then it all gets sent down that's not how it works all the ads you see on the web are placed in your browser by calling out to various ad tech partners and google's among them and and so if you block those scripts you you break the the advertising flow of money from the brands and their agencies to the publishers and if you want to reconnect it directly with the user you have limited choices the user generally isn't going to sign up with a ach bank connection or a credit card the the publisher isn't going to sign up the user except just a subscriber and then they're going to overcharge you because they want you to cross-subsidize all the content and buy more than you read and all that stuff and how many you know people are doing great who are big names like new york times in washington post but how many subscriptions are you as a user going to pay for this is why startups like tony hale's scroll are trying to do a portable subscription system but by the way just a small attention there even the new york times is really annoying how difficult it is to subscribe there's way too many clicks they don't make it easy i had friends a few years ago i think they fixed this who would pay for the paper and then they'd go online and they get up charged for the digital and they there was no break there was no connection between them yeah um but publishers are not that technical and they're they can't all get you to subscribe you can't have a thousand subscriptions so for a long time people talked about micro payments there was glendale and netherlands which came to the us but didn't grow and i thought if you have just a browser and it's protecting you by blocking all this ad tech tracking junk it can provide you an option that uses cryptocurrency to let you support your your favorite sites and even youtube channels and that way prototype with bitcoin and that meant the user had to be of means to contribute and willing to contribute but it could be done on the bitcoin blockchain and it could be fairly efficient even though bitcoin went through a period when we had this prototype running in 2016 into 2017 where bitcoin was very congested and very slow to confirm and the fees got very high um and a lot of users who were not bitcoin maximalist or even experienced we helped them out by embedding a coinbase buy widget and they had the income to buy but it was hard it was like do i buy five dollars a month but the fee is like 450 i better buy in larger batches right then they're like i don't want to own that much bitcoin so it became this this painful thing and the real idea that i had of private ads that pay the user a rev share couldn't be realized alone in that kind of system in these cryptocurrency systems especially with the blockchain we switch to ethereum you can have smart contracts the bitcoin system is not turned complete so what you can do with the script is more limited but you can still do sort of clever things um even with bitcoin script what we wanted to do was sort of a three-sided ecosystem we wanted users creators or publishers and advertisers and we wanted the advertisers to put money in just like they do today but without going through the googles and the app nexuses and all these other ad tech companies because those companies take out a huge cut the guardian in the uk once did an experiment for a month they bought out their own ad space they put in a pound and they were paid 30 pence 70 was coming out to the intermediary vendors they were using wow um and that's like the opposite of what the app store does the app store takes 30 and gives the publisher 70 so pretty broken in the old days of the superstation tbs the media um owner would get 85 so these splits have become really unbalanced and the middle players the the ad tech vendors are taking out way too much money and they're they're doing something worse which has been noticed they're they're letting um not just the malware vendors but also the ad fraud side which fakes the publishers and click bait merchants come in and steal traffic from good sites because once you have a certain audience identified at one site jason calcon has told me this about his experience with i guess it was in gadget uh which site he was running but once he started using an ad partner that was sharing his audience information across multiple sites he saw his competitors stealing all his traffic and then what's worse is the clickbait sites that just have much cheaper rates steal all that traffic and that facilitates you know fraud facilitates um fake news all sorts of problems so brave blocks it and then we give users the ability to give back and because we invented the basic attention token and ethereum we can do this three-way split and we can give users a share of the revenue and if they want to take it out they can now unfortunately for us and for all blockchain the regulators are saying we're going to have to know who you are there's there's the treasury department's uh fincen agency there's the office of foreign asset controls ofac uh there's the um you know other regulators in the federal government that take a very dark look at things like money laundering and sending money to someone named osama bin laden so compliance starts to come in and even now they're threatening for pure bitcoin sending to some address if you're a coinbase you're gonna have to know who who's at that address you're gonna take the actual identities of people involved yeah now with coinbase members you sign up and they know you and they comply with regulations they're a regulated money services business uh and um but if somebody's using their own self-custody so-called self-custodial wallet where they have the hardware private key and they're not named and they want to send to that address our friends in the federal government are talking about requiring at some threshold knowing who that is so some threshold that's unreasonable it's not that big um yeah yeah i don't know how this will play out i think crypto's here to stay i think the beauty of being able to send peer-to-peer without any bank in the middle without any you know huge wire charge and two-day delay and all that nonsense it's beautiful and i've used it i love it but we're pragmatists to brave about crypto and we realized that anything like a revenue split we can't facilitate without being licensed in a certain way and it requires knowing who the user is so our default mode doesn't know who the user is it instead imputes to the user's browser some of the revenue and allows that browser to steer it back to the creators and we do have to identify the creators but as things improve and you know who knows how it'll play out there should become a day when this this full vision can be done more uh fully on a blockchain but regulations and the practicalities of today's blockchains which are not that fast and not anonymous over time you fingerprint yourself over time we do some of this with the browser so one of the ideas of the basic attention token is to make a hybrid system that's stronger than blockchain alone it's the browser and the blockchain and the browser is this trusted endpoint software it's this universal app everyone uses browsers the bigger the screen the more you're in the browser and the less you install you know fat clients for things um i use slack on on mac os and it's it's like a browser it's based on an electron framework we used to use and it's just it's not that great i some people at brave use slack in brave as a in the browser browser yeah i use that often yeah and i noticed on the ipad i use apps less um the smaller the screen you know the browser got handicapped by apple and android both and it also uh you know can be slower or not have the right you know affordances the user interface for the the security uh limited apis but in principle with the right permissioning you can make the web browser just as good as any app you make it be a super app and that's part of our mission at brave so we want to have the economics that got captured by these big tech companies through tracking and through social networks we want to block that for your own safety and then let you opt into a cleaner world where you keep your data defended in your browser and you can actually realize value from it so the way our ad system works i mentioned it being private but how does that work we don't see your data at all all browsers are sort of the mother of all data feeds your history all your searches at all engines each engine sees the queries you send to it but it doesn't see the others but the browser sees them all machine learning in the browser that you can opt into can study all that in a very complete way and do a better job than google this google has you know cookie and scripts across the web from acquiring doubleclick they have youtube they have android they have search which is still their big revenue link but they don't see everything the browser sees everything and if it can do a good job locally and this is not advanced machine learning this is not tensorflow this is like svms now and naive bayes then you can match intense signals intent signals from those data feeds searches the queries the history how much you're scrolling down a page how much you redid a search it's all blind browser algorithm we don't see that data and then pick the best ad from a fixed catalog per day and the catalog is fixed across a large population per day and it only updates the date once a day because new offers come in and old ones expire sometimes every week or every month and that catalog and there can be many such catalogs is sold by our direct sales team and so we're making an anonymous audience available to advertisers without the advertisers tracking them instead each browser is a little machine learning system that's picking the best catalog entry now the catalog is not the ads those are big right it's a video or a web page it's just the link to an edge cache and there are many such edge caches we're not trying to protect them from seeing your ip address it's not really feasible we could use tor but we don't yet um and some keywords about the ad so it's basically like metadata and a link and that's what the catalog consists of and that's what the machine learning picks and the machine learning is learning about you specifically locally in order to choose from the catalog of different ads couldn't this possibly be like a multi-billion dollar is this taking on the google ad so like what i mean one question to ask there seems to be some really profound ideas here that that are different than what the internet has grown up to be if brave or something like brave the ideas the fundamental philosophical ideas underlying brave win out and runs 95 of the internet how does that change uh the what what are the major things these changes about the internet so social networks and then the creatives like youtube creators and all that kind of stuff so let's talk about that first of all if brave gets 95 i'm going to demand a recount because i i won't believe it uh i don't know i i think uh we're trying to put things into web standards that can be standardized across browsers so the main value of brave will be the trust users have in us and our ability to give the best deal to users so 70 of the gross ad revenue we give to the user and if they go through that kyc process i mentioned they can take it out they can also give it back they could take some out give the rest back they can add basic attention tokens to give back some of them turn off the ads because you just don't like ads but they put in twenty dollars a month so i believe zuko of zcashframe does that and that's very generous because the browser is just anonymously based on his browsing sort of keeping score on how much time he spent on this video on that website and if those sites verify in sort of a like getting a domain certificate fashion they can get paid they can get part of his 20 a month so that vision could go big and if it does i hope it's across multiple browsers i don't know that uh they'll all compete well on the quality of the ads the quality of the ad blocking and tracking protection those those are subject to competition it'll take a while to standardize them but i think that would be a better world it would have less counterparty risk fewer fee takers in the middle really just the browser we're taking 30 percent um sort of the app app store split and if we get bigger maybe we can take even less social networks creators if you look at youtubers a lot of them the indies that are getting some size are getting sponsorship deals uh they're using patreon they're encouraging people to subscribe and give them regular money through patreon but that's centralized your patreon so there's censorship hazards there's a five percent fee what if that were web standard what if brave pioneered it first and we took three percent and we did it in a way that was through your browser so we couldn't censor it um yeah that's brilliant yeah do you think it could be standardized across browsers can like uh internet explorer come in again and and uh yeah protocols are easy to copy and that they're meant to be interoperable so it's there's a risk there and the loyal users might be tricked into leaving you or they might because of that distribution power you might end up getting stomped um i don't know i can't predict the future i think antitrust is back on the case finally in the u.s and and certainly in europe gg comp is doing its thing so i'm hopeful that we'll have a period of innovation uh you know people were talking like elizabeth warren was talking about breaking up the tech tech companies very clearly um now she didn't win and i suspect that won't happen but i also suspect that google might be smart enough to see they should do something more than just put privacy perfume on chrome they should maybe get rid of doubleclick or something divest something i don't know it might happen so so brave might inspire google to completely change the way they're doing things they're already doing something you may have read about called the privacy sandbox or um flock which they have this bird metaphor going um turtledove um fledge but these these these systems have been very googly kind of over engineered and yet depending on differential privacy which has weakness over time if you know how that works kind of injecting noise to hide you in a crowd but over time an adversary can pull you out of the crowd that this doesn't look like it's going to become a standard like apple brave mozilla we're not going to just say oh google you saved us you've invented the privacy sandbox so we'll all just adopt it not going to be that easy it's going to be more like pieces of what we do in brave the synonymous ad matching or the blind signature cryptography we use to confirm the ad impressions that's david chum's invention that could get standardized in fact some of that is being standardized even google's in favor of so-called trust tokens which are xiaomi and blind signature certs but they're not using them for ad confirmations because they don't want to blow up their own business and they need to let some of the publishers they serve have other ad tech scripts on the page and so they're kind of caught and this is something i realized doing brave i thought what's you know google's innovator's dilemma apart from just you know getting being mature and having trouble innovating it's that they have come to depend on this ad tech system that has all these these vendors that are publishers rely on because publishers aren't technical enough and i feel for the publishers but i realize the users have to come first and if you give the users a better browser that's faster then you'll get enough users to to give back or support publishers the speed and the battery savings and data plan savings are significant there's so much bad javascript involved in ad tech if you block it and you sort of chop off the what's called the programmatic waterfall which chains a bunch of requests yeah that's one of the incredible things about brave i guess you're saying you should attribute to the fact that the the the messy javascript no offense uh is uh i mean brave just feels faster even then i mean chrome was fast and one of the things that it was like impressive is it it showed that browsers could be really fast and brave is even faster than that which is blocked so much and it saves the network it's it which means data plan it saves battery because the radio consumes your battery when it's running more to do those requests and it's just stunning how many there are like some of my google friends were like oh that's just that bad site they'll fix it and you actually do a survey of web pages mostly like that i know google or google engineers could make everything super efficient but they can't especially an anti-fresh court do it they cannot take over all the publishers and do that they're trying with accelerated mobile profile amp they're trying to pull publishers they're like oh you poor publishers don't know how to make your pages fast put them on our amp system we'll give you extra placement in the search carousel that's an antitrust problem for one but it's also publishers we talk to hate it because it degrades their brand now they look like a gig writer wrote a piece that's got google's framing an amp url on top of it and they're trying to fix that too but it just looks like a google's borgifying all these publishers and they don't want to be plugged into the board cube they want to build their own brand and have loyal readers so you know i'm in favor of giving the users power to help all the publishers and the little platoons and the creators and so we talked about patreon what about social networks well they're inherently like search a global algorithm you're trying to find friends of friends you're doing the transitive closure of a graph induced by this friend of relation but you should own your friend relation you should own your posts they shouldn't be owned by somebody else who can take them down or sense them and your friend relations you should be able to find those friends on other networks and so i've tweeted about this i haven't built it yet what if the browser could keep track of those for you what if the browser could maybe combine facebook and twitter and you could find your friends on both and you could have a so that relationship is not owned by facebook or twitter it's owned by you they they throw their brother they still have terms of use and they'll say they own it but if they zap you on one and you're still on the other your friends find you and the browser could preserve a combined view you could resurrect almost across networks it's something i want to maybe quickly ask you about on that front there's been a quite a lot of um centralized we talked about wall street bets and then uh robin hood has been centralized banning of different accounts and removing like parlor for example from aws and this kind of overreach of centralized control is your hope that it's possible to like what are your thoughts about that in general is it and is it possible to create tools that give individual people the power to fight back against overreach of such control so we're talking about oligarchy i do think and that if it controls a nation state that's formidable it's the tax and the police power the military power it means that you may have the great firewall of china you may have people in china who are jailed because of their tweets right this is a serious threat i can't minimize it or say that we'll win i don't know how it's going to go but i do think like i said earlier about the cutting of reason people find ways around things the internet routes around censorship and this is not to endorse any particular bad faction one of the things that happens when you try to wave the free speech flag too much you say i'm not going to censor anything and you get colonized by terrible terrible people right yes i don't care if you call them neo-nazis some of them could be doing illegal things right and you don't want them colonizing because it'll ruin your reputation and destroy your business so what you really want is that kind of user first subsidiary that subjectivity i want my social networks to be composited in some multi-social user interface where i don't lose track of people across networks and if they leave one or they get banned from one i can find them on another i can still sort of thread them together yeah that's brilliant and and this didn't happen because browsers got captured by the central powers why did they get captured mostly because of search and search is a central algorithm so you know larry page said this too many years ago he said with search you're giving up a little privacy by handing the query over to us and we'll error correct that alan eustis used to be a google and google executive he said oh yeah we used to laugh they'd all be doing typos and they'd be typing the wrong word like no dummy type that query and it's like okay google you might want to dial back that ego a little bit but yeah yes you do see all the queries and you can improve them and you can find the best results and that was google's forte when we did the firefox deal in 2004 google was really good and over time you know seo which is an adversarial game yeah and google itself buying all these companies and crowding its own results page with its own tied in yeah stuff the youtube the slipper slope that happens when you when yeah when you have control over these kinds of really important mechanisms yeah monopoly capitalism or cartel you get this with the robin hoods and the the hedge funds you get uh sort of the money interests take over and kind of abuse their power and wear out their welcome so what how do you get around that you have to have either new land to go to which you know some people's ancestors not mine i did to found the country um um mostly irish german um you have uh new virtual space people go to and that requires you know an isp to or a colo center or amazon to host you it requires domain name registrar who will not strike you and so when parlor was taken down you know i thought that was egregious parlor i i it was not well designed and i i tried it out because i tried all these things yeah um but i didn't use it and i i also felt they were being unfairly scored for not moderating because you can find tweets to this day that are horrendous and threaten all sorts of violence where's twitter why isn't twitter being taken down but so it was very selective it was the insiders who have the power are going to take out the newcomer and it it looked bad sort of like the the hedge funds um sorting gamestop looked bad you know you're seeing a piece in time magazine this week that's like basically saying yeah we interfere with the election but it was great aren't we good i don't know if you've seen this piece yet no i haven't if you tried to say that as a trump supporter in in november after the election you get banned from twitter but now time in its twitter account is saying you know we saved the day we we it's afl-cio and big business the better business bureau got together and kept trump from you know spreading fake news so the country's kind of broken i don't know how to fix that the oligarchs have run wild in my opinion and big tech is in the antitrust stock what's going to happen i don't think they get out i think some of the doj and certainly the state cases because they're separate cases are not going to go away just because somebody got elected differently and these are career prosecutors and they have a strong case and google smart microsoft almost got split up right the judge thomas penfield jackson he overreached he didn't hold a hearing about the remedy he just said i'm going to break you up and microsoft appealed and the higher level court said go back and figure this out you're not breaking them off you didn't even hold a hearing and when they got back microsoft said let's settle let's settle we want to get broken up because jackson was going to make the opsco the operating system company and the appsco office you know word in excel and uh that would have been a huge blow to microsoft so but ultimately i don't know you i don't know if you're optimistic or cynical about the possibility of breaking out big tech to me uh i'm optimistic that tools like brave i love the idea of owning your friendships and like yes users more and more owning stuff is the only real way unfortunately it's like the wall street bet subreddit is the only real way to fight the centralized power you can't break them up the regulation is very difficult certainly i want to wait for the law netscape was long dead or acquired by aol and effectively dead it was only mozilla that returned firefox to the market uh by the time that the usb microsoft case was finally settled and the penalties were put in place and uh and yet ana trust has a role to play those penalties caused microsoft to kind of turn away from the web they did windows vista and they thought the web's too painful we got punished in court and we got we had to standardize things with those iggy standards people so they ran back to proprietary lock-in and windows vista flopped it was late it was bloated longhorn remember now what google i was going to say but google's smart enough they won't get split up they'll split something out to get off the hook i think this is a complicated subject but i myself was so i i decided to journey out from the world of being a researcher at mit and potentially doing a startup myself and i've been thinking of you know i wanted to come to silicon valley to do so it's the land of the entrepreneur and there's a lot of my friends a lot of them are successfully have been entrepreneurs themselves have said do not come to silicon valley it'd be you've you've started you you ran amazing teams of engineers you started a lot of successful businesses i i wondered if you could comment on why a lot of people are leaving california is there something that could be fixed about california if you were starting a business today would you consider somewhere else like austin or some other place or is silicon valley still is it just a little lull everybody's being overdramatic during uh this particular year of the coronavirus and so on i think you know even austin's getting overheated i hear um yes and i've had relatives and friends moved to texas within the last few months so uh texas as a whole is a big place and uh you know people are moving to florida there's a big movement toward miami um peter thiel keith where will all these people um the mayor has been very uh business friendly about it which i think is just good politics um america is fundamentally a commercial republic so you would think this would be what's happening for a long time california was the golden state i came here in late 76 when i was a teenager it's in crushing debt due to the lockdowns it's got the highest taxes that's gotta matter people will do fleet high taxes um it's got uh likely fires every year because of the deadfall it's not global warming it's because the forests weren't managed like they had been in the first part of the 20th century um just i would say corruption at all levels especially up to the governor who you know famously was eating at the french laundry and yes claimed the outside it was inside and they were masks off and it was great uh do what i say not what i do uh rules for thee but not for me when you see that in leadership people either run or they they get rid of the leadership so there's a recall drive which is about to reach the threshold or in the old days they get their guns right you don't put up with this junk but ultimately the thing that made silicon valley a special place it gave freedom to like young kids entrepreneurs young minds brave minds to think bold to try different stuff i mean even if the taxes are high so outside of financial stuff outside of all of that housing super expensive housing yeah so it's hard okay everything about this was narrow and they didn't plan the roads right yeah they got rid of public transportation in l.a like the who framed roger rabbit cartoon show they used to have trolley cars in portland too yeah the oil companies and the dod conspired to build highways and make cars dominant and the rights of way are long gone like elon's going to go underground and rush him well that's probably the only way to do it now yeah but it still a place do you think it's possible that silicon valley is still a place where magic happens where the next google is built or the next i mean brave is built where uh i think all good things come to an end i think the problem is silicon valley had strong network effects through stanford through uh the angel investor networks and the wealth effect and originally you have to give the federal government credit like the arpanet was a government project that's not kid ourselves this wasn't wild free market you know libertarian capitalism this was all cold war stuff um you had uh out of the academia you had shockley and then the the traitorous aid and fairchild and intel and but now you know when's the last fab that was built in the valley micro unity might have been the last i don't know i haven't followed but we built a fab in sunnyvale and uh in microunity in starting early 90s and now the fabs are overseas um and the one thing that i would say the oligarchs have intentionally done in both parties is sort of labor and environmental protection law arbitrage by going where the labor is cheaper and the environmental laws aren't strict and you know that's polluted the hell out of parts of china but it's made things you can make cheaper junk and uh this this is not uh this is not a story that's over yet so what is silicon valley for now it's for the network effect the the brain trust of who you know the parties the stanford um sort of network that's fragile too over time i'm afraid right stanford a lot of good professors i like they still filter you know mainly based on socioeconomic status but it's kind of a skate school i had a friend uh hired out of harvard 20 years ago at netscape and we talked about harvard and he said yeah they're still professors are great on the curve and i said oh yeah i don't think they're any doing that at stanford and he said oh it was shocking some of the students got c's and d's and they were crying it's like yes that's right the the precious deers can't take that at stanford so they get a's and b's yeah now you look at china and people say what you all about china they improve russia too a lot of math science training a lot of engineering a lot of people who are doing their course work to get the a's and b's so um i'm an american i'm born in the fourth of july i'm early fourth of july yeah wow and america as i say fundamentally is a commercial republic you can try to make it something else you can say it's the new atlantis and mystify it you could you could talk about it in a more i think correct way which is 13 colonies that grew and then there's a lot of local or written original design anyway the federal federalist papers talk about this there's a lot of subsidiarity but that's that's been eroded over time and like i say a lot of the offshoring has hurt so what happened with coronavirus people working from home and at first it was funny because i have friends at google who used to grumble that not only did they have to come into the office if they joined a different team that was centered in a different office they had to move or you know if if the v8 team was reconstituted in munich which it was after lars bach just got tired of javascript that they hired in munich or they hired phds in germany and moved them to munich um with chronovirus everyone's working from home and it's like what a relief i can work for google from home but then the next few dropped and people started asking mark zuckerberg hey can i move to my hometown in the midwest yeah and he said okay and they said oh can i keep getting my silicon valley pay no we're going to figure out what your cost of living there is and we're going to adjust your pay accordingly and and these colonies and these little mini experiments that all combine to the big giant experiment i have a i don't know i have this uh vision of america which that country i was born in russia like i said here and this is truly a wonderful country i'm i wasn't born in the fourth of july people still i still and i'm uh red-blooded american at this point and i have a sense that we figured it out somehow if silicon valley burns another place will come up in this place that even more innovation and people will move and the remote work might change fundamentally how we work or might not it might just give you the freedom to then create many other small silicon valleys throughout the place like austin included but other places as well and we somehow figure it figure it out and uh i think that's that's true that there will be more mobility and maybe new places that come up i don't know if silicon valley has you know passed some sell-by date because it did hurt the the chronovirus hurt the lockdowns hurt and the fact in the sense that part of what keeps things going is social and so a lot of young people even before coronavirus moved to san francisco it was very strange to watch because in the 80s we all lived in the valley and it was less populated in san francisco it was grungier it was more like dirty harry in the 70s yes but but by the 90s uh and jamie runs a nightclub there and he's talked about this you had sort of wealthy tech people moving in south of market fancy townhouses being built and uh that's continued and such a point that it's almost like what's the movie by the south african director nell's jody foster up in the space colony uh matt damon is the guy on the earth who has to go up and anyway it's about the stratification it's about the great inequality the people in the space station have like amazing medical auto docs that can extend their life or save them cure cancer people on earth are all suffering ground down in poverty um and uh you know that sort of happened while i was here you saw a lot of money drive prices up along the narrow peninsula and the single people wanted nightlife so they were in the city and the condos in the city got super expensive and you i know even google friends who are you know socially responsible say we should have more housing built we should have yes in my backyard not not in my backyard but that's not happening as far as i can tell and from the government to the incumbent you know landowners and renters it's just not happening and that has to drive people away i i i appreciate that people come here and you should wait for the prices to monitor yeah they will but um but a lot of people are going to go where the prices are lower you uh and sorry facility questions here but just looking back you have created things have been part of creating things that have transformed this world the world of technology perhaps more than almost anything else um but you're still a human being and uh unfortunately this ride ends do you ever think about your own mortality not too much i mean i'm i'm a roman catholic so i am not afraid of death i think a lot of people who um have problems with death are suffering from some lack of either faith in their transcending death or maybe they don't have children or they feel like you know they get later in life and they feel like they they've missed opportunities to do something that endures and i i sympathize a lot because i i'm old i got married fairly old so i i understand all that i nothing human is alien to me as terence said uh but um i don't fear it no what do you hope your legacy is it's gonna be javascript i think no i think you know my legacy has more to do with my children and and their children i think it also has to do with um web standards it has to do with things like brave the things we did with firefox when we did um you know i'm not going to oversolve rape but i think brave is important and we will continue to prove this in a way that counts for many decades to come but even firefox whatever it's future fortune showed you can restart the browser market this thing you said about people opting out and routing around you don't need everybody to do that it's more like telus stubborn minorities that do that it's the lead users eric hipple's lead users you can be a few percent you can tilt the market and that can be done in spite of the incumbents the moneyed interests not being in favor of what you're doing so i think what we do with firefox won't be forgotten and it needs to be done more and we're doing it brave and you could argue that other projects are doing in some ways blockchain is doing it the robinhood uh takedown uh the use of uh robin hood by the the wall street vets kids yeah similar so yeah that that kind of spirit endures and i think it um in some ways it's american right it's uh it's not hard revolutionary it's not trying to burn the past and destroy everything it's more like we have these certain let's say um rights we have duties too so there's some debate about which comes first in american jurisprudence and the founding documents but as long as things are working we'll we'll we'll be like pragmatic americans like um de tocqueville described in his writings but if if things get too out of whack for one reason or another uh too unequal too oligarchic and abusive we're going to start our rights and even a few of us can do it and even in the american revolution it was a minority who fought and put their you know lives treasure and sacred honor at stake it was a bunch of people went to you know upper canada i think it was called uh ontario yeah that's the beautiful i mean that's that is at the core where your work stands for is that a few people can have the power to transform society with just a few radical ideas with just a little bit of code yeah change the world got to do it and that's empowering and that is the american way that's why this country is i believe the greatest country on earth that's not over rometz says it too much but uh i think some special things have already happened in this country and will continue to happen and that's and that spirit can continue no matter you know who comes here they can they can adopt those folk ways and that spirit brandon i said i can't tell you how much i was freaking out how much of an honor just to talk to you you're an incredible human being it's one of my favorite conversations ever thank you so much for wasting all this time with me i really appreciate it oh it seems like a breeze my pleasure thank you for listening to this conversation with brandon nike and thank you to our sponsors jordan harbinger's show sun basket meal delivery service better help online therapy and eight sleep self-cooling mattress click the sponsor links to get a discount and to support this podcast and now let me leave you with some words from jeff atwood any app that can be written in javascript will eventually be written in javascript thank you for listening and hope to see you next time you