A person. How JavaScript creator Brendan Ike came to found his company

Brendan Ike is not the most famous character. This is partly due to his modesty, and partly due to the specifics of his work. But his contribution to the IT industry is large enough for millions to learn about him. We can say that he himself is great.

Ike still continues to create something new. A recent example is its "anti-advertising" browser, which was met contradictory, but not indifferent.

Brendan Ike was born July 4, 1961 in Pittsburgh (Pennsylvania). Ike graduated from a university in Santa Clara County with a bachelor's degree. In 1986, he graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he received a master's degree.

Brendan Ike began his career at Silicon Graphics, a company specializing in the production of graphic terminals. He worked for 7 years at the company, after which he transferred to MicroUnity Systems Engineering.

After 3 years, in April 1995, Brendan began working at Netscape. He was faced with the task of embedding a programming language similar to Scheme in the Netscape Navigator browser.

However, the statement of the problem was, to put it mildly, not very accurate, and Ika was transferred to the group responsible for server products, where he worked for a month, improving the HTTP protocol.

Javascript

In May, the developer was transferred back to the client team (browser), where he immediately began to develop the concept of a new programming language.

After some time, a scripting language called LiveScript appeared. It was created to implement interactivity in HTML documents that were previously static. LiveScript support was implemented in the first versions of the Netscape Navigator browser, it was very popular and successful.



As a result of the agreement between Netscape Communications and Sun Microsystems and the integration of LiveScript ideas with the Java framework, an environment called “Mocha” was created for developing web applications and, ultimately, for creating dynamic web pages. The environment was released as open source software and was independent of the software platform used.

The project culminated in the creation of specifications that were published by two companies in December 1995 under the name JavaScript 1.0.

It cannot be said that Brendan Ike single-handedly created this language, but authorship and conception undoubtedly belong to Brendan. Nevertheless, with his characteristic modesty, Ike says that he was only a member of the team. This allows us to draw certain conclusions about his character: he is a “techie” who is doing his job and does not like to stick his head out. Moreover, this partly explains why he has not held high positions in companies for a long time.

Mozilla

However, three years later, Netscape, along with its browser, began a rapid movement to failure. Microsoft Internet Explorer 4 has become the new market leader with better support for HTML 4, CSS, DOM, and ECMAScript. In November 1998, work on the Netscape 5.0 browser was discontinued, the developers decided to write a completely new software from scratch.



The new source code was named Mozilla, on the basis of which Netscape 6 was created with minor changes.

In January 1998, Netscape decided to develop a browser as part of an open source project. An informal Mozilla Organization group was created, which was mainly funded by Netscape.

Brendan Ike immediately took a prominent position in the community. When AOL closed the Netscape division in July 2003, he remained at the Mozilla Foundation.

In August 2005, having worked as the chief technologist and member of the board of directors of the Mozilla Foundation, Brendan became the technical director of Mozilla Corporation, which had been formed at that time, and on March 26, 2014 he was appointed CEO.

Ike Strategy

Mozilla Firefox’s main competitor was Google Chrome. Brendan Ike had a clear plan of action - it was necessary to level out the strengths of Chrome and hit the weaknesses of Google. In his opinion, Chrome is strong with two technologies - an isolation multiprocess architecture, which shared tabs, extensions, windows and plugins for various processes, increasing their stability and security; as well as an Adobe Flash Player module integrated into the browser at the level of a secure PPAPI module.



That is why Ike considered it necessary to focus on the development of Electrolysis and Shumway projects.

The first project was designed to implement multi-process architecture with the further implementation of the sandbox. However, this led to incompatibility with the add-ons and extensions platform, so the implementation of Electrolysis was postponed indefinitely.

The open-source Shumway project, designed to play back SWF Flash using standardized HTML5 and JavaScript technologies, also ran into difficulties. On the one hand, its development continues with the efforts of the community and some Mozilla employees, but the main development led by project management has stopped, so its fate is in question.

According to Brendan, Ike without the implementation of Electrolysis and Shumway Firefox is not able to compete with Chrome. And the opinion of an expert of this level at least deserves attention and respect, it would seem. But ...

Ike mentioned privacy issues as one of Google’s weaknesses. After high-profile stories with Julian Assange and Edward Snowden, which exposed the actions of special services to intercept private information on the Internet, ordinary users also became interested in protecting personal data.

Chrome is closely associated with Google services and even with all the options for transferring data to the company disabled, it can create a basic unique web fingerprint of the user.

But unfortunately, the moment was missed, and Mozilla could not use this fact to the maximum advantage.

Many experts agreed with Brendan Ike and also noted a temporary decrease in the market share of the Chrome browser - it was difficult to come up with a more favorable moment for overtaking. Well, when the hype around the leak of personal data subsided, Chrome began to regain its position.

In 2014, after Ike left, Mozilla was in an ambiguous position: the Firefox browser continued to compete with Chrome, but Mozilla Corporation receives 90% of its budget from a contract with Google, which paid for using its default search in Firefox. As a result, the share of Mozilla Firefox declined even more - from 18% to 15.5%.

For ideological reasons

In April 2014, Mozilla CEO Brendan Ike announced his resignation. Ike worked as the head of Mozilla for less than two weeks. His departure was not planned. The fact is that some details of his past became known.

The outraged public demanded resignation, almost equating Brendan Ike's long-standing act to crime.

In 2008, Ike allocated $ 1,000 from his personal funds in support of an amendment to California law, known as Proposal 8. This amendment defined marriage as “union between a man and a woman.” The amendment was accepted, but in 2013 it was canceled by the US Supreme Court.

That is, he spent a rather modest amount of money to support the bill, which was canceled three years ago.



In order, for example, in the USSR to successfully advance on the career ladder, it was necessary to have a good “characteristic”, which, in particular, designated a person as a reliable adherent of the only true Marxist-Leninist teaching. To “ruin a characterization” —that is, to receive a record of “moral instability” —was a serious threat. Now the United States is actually moving on to this late Soviet practice.

“Mozilla has clearly outlined its hiring policy: no Catholics, no Protestants, no Orthodox, no Muslims, no Jews, no Mormons — unless you are the“ right ”type of believer. Those who believe that their religious and philosophical traditions, which regard marriage as a union of a man and a woman, are false, and the views of the modern liberal elite are true, ”writes American commentator Robert George.

As in the late USSR, a person who wants to make a career must express his loyalty to the prevailing ideology.

The similarities between gender and communist ideologies cannot be overlooked, ” writes Sergey Khudiev. Both are “progressive” and claim their inevitable historical victory. Both are totalitarian, that is, equating disagreement with a crime. Both begin to persecute dissidents as soon as they get this opportunity.

Any totalitarian movement needs enemies - and ensures the unity of supporters due to their persecution. To get on the list of enemies is very easy - for example, as we see in this case, give some money in support of a bill that liberals do not like. To wonder what kind of equality and inclusiveness is there, when a person is forced to leave because of his ideologically incorrect views, is meaningless in the framework of liberal discourse, Khudiev concludes.

By the way, Brendan himself is married to a woman named Eleanor. They have joint children.

Be brave

In January 2016, Ike announced the launch of a new open source browser, Brave, the distinguishing feature of which is blocking ads out of the box, as well as protecting user privacy.

To implement this project, Ike and his team received $ 2.5 million investment. In August, the developers of the Brave browser managed to attract additional investments totaling $ 4.5 million.

Brave is developed on the basis of the Electron platform, which, in turn, is based on the Chromium engine and Node.js. The creators of Brave say that the browser at the same time works faster than competitors by 1.5-4 times. We managed to achieve such results not just by cutting ads from sites, but also by removing from the pages the numerous tracking codes that any website that supports ads is teeming with.

In September, Brave gave users the ability to make micropayments. “Users can already replenish wallets associated with anonymous identifiers in the Brave browser, and automatically make micropayments in favor of their favorite sites,” Brendan Hayk, co-founder and CEO of Brave Software, quotes CoinDesk.



The browser is integrated with BitGo and Coinbase, which offer a wallet and payment tools.

At the same time, in the browser, payments by default for some sites are disabled by default. These include sites that rely on user-generated content, such as YouTube and Twitter. “We do not want such sites to receive payments, because we support content that users themselves create. We want the authors to be able to receive the money, not the owners of such sites, ”Hayk said.

The previously announced Brave business model has garnered dissatisfaction with the Newspaper Association of America (NAA), including publications such as the New York Times, Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal. Seeing this as a threat to their interests, they called the Brave approach "blatantly illegal."

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How popular will the new Hayk project become, time will tell. It may now be noted that Brendan finally created his own project, he is engaged in what is interesting to him, in what he believes.

This time, the opinion of the “public” is not so important for him, no one can dismiss him, he is his own boss.

Perhaps this step should have been taken earlier, but I want to believe that Brendan Ike has time to implement more than one new idea.