Brendan Eich: belief

Transcript context

…It feels similar to me in terms of narrative and market perception to silicon and to semiconductors. A couple of years ago, people were like, semiconductors are so boring. It's not like all the innovations way, way, way up the stack from that. Actually, it turns out, semiconductors are pretty freaking important, and TSMC is a very, very, very important company. One of the top 10 most valuable in the world. The browser feels similar to me. It's so easy to discount it and yet people in the world spend the majority of their days on it. It's an immortal app. It's the universal app. The bigger the screen and the better the input and bandwidth, the more you live in the browser. You don't want to install some—even Slack, we have a lot of our users of Slack. Brave uses the browser to load slack as a web app instead of loading this bloated electron app that Slack has been slowly maintaining. There's a real trade-off there that I think is part of the browser's immortality, but the web content is also sticky and accretive, and that's important too. I'll sum it all up in one sentence. Firefox did really, really well and gained a huge market share. Then when Chrome launched, it's been slowly etched away every year by Chrome now, and it's down around something like 3%. I want to fast forward all the way to the moment where you're starting to think about Brave. Yet, there have been all these attempts to start a new upstart browser that has a different take on things—I'm thinking of Dolphin and RockMelt—that has not worked.…

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