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• The role of ad exchanges and fake ad agencies in spreading malware through targeted ads |
• Brave's approach to handling user data and potential business models |
• Malvertising and malware on reputable websites, including The New York Times and BBC |
• Programmatic advertising and ad exchanges allowing malicious ads to be displayed |
• Risk of ransomware and other types of malware through malvertising |
• Publishers tolerating low-quality ad space due to financial pressure |
• The rise of ad blocking and its impact on the advertising industry |
• Brave's goals of creating a better advertising model that benefits users and provides them with revenue control |
• Concerns about user understanding of Brave's unique approach to advertising |
• Legacies with JavaScript and its use for third-party ads |
• Importance of user privacy and safety in web browsing |
• Brave's approach to advertising, focusing on user opt-in and publisher opt-in |
• The concept of "Wanamaker's dilemma" and the need for targeted marketing |
• Brave's vision for a private, secure system where users own their data |
• Potential for personal ad businesses and local computation |
• Sustainability issues in developing and using browsers, including funding models |
• Comparison to open source development and funding challenges |
• The role of platform code as a cost center and the need for shared costs |
• The traditional model of newspaper revenue was based on advertising, but with the rise of digital platforms, this is no longer sustainable |
• Facebook and Google take 80% of the $70 billion spent on ads in the US, leaving little for publishers |
• Many ads are not viewed or are fraudulent, highlighting a need for more efficient and private ad platforms |
• Brave's proposed solution uses Bitcoin and micro-payments to fund the web while respecting user privacy |
• The future of online revenue may involve frictionless payments, permissionless transactions, and automated micro-royalties for creators |
• Open-source approach for ad-blocking browser |
• Need for secure and trustworthy data handling |
• Proprietary ads compromised by third-party intermediaries |
• 50/50 revenue share between Brave and users |
• Private matching of device identifiers for advertising |
• Zero-knowledge proof protocol for verifying ad impressions |
• Importance of transparency and auditability in open-source code |
• Lock-in from user trust and brand value |
**Nadia Eghbal:** I'm Nadia Eghbal... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** And I'm Mikeal Rogers. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** On today's show, Mikeal and I talk with Brendan Eich, who founded Brave, an open source web browser based on Chromium. He's also the creator of JavaScript and co-founder of Mozilla. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** We talked with Brendan about how the web has been founded, including a look back on the early browser wars and emerging monetization models. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** We also talked about why big problems are hard to solve for the internet, and the tradeoffs between centralization and distribution. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Brendan, you've been in the browser game since they invented browsers, so why don't you give us just a quick background on the browsers that you've worked on and how the browser landscape has changed over the last 20 years? |
**Brendan Eich:** Sure. Actually, Tim Berners-Lee keeps moving the date when he started browsers back, so I don't know if it was '89 or '90. I became aware of them in '93 and started using Mosaic around then. I think I then used Netscape when it came out in the fall of '94. That was super hot and took over the browser ... |
Those were the days, right? Browsers were big, we were doing secure socket layer, so-called HTTPS, now TLS (Transport Layer Security) so you could have your credit card number flying around to various sites without worrying about snoopers stealing it. |
JavaScript was kind of a toy then, but it was also in the browsers, right there on the page; you could write it, integrate it with your HTML... You could do very sweet, single-page application tricks even in 1995; without bugs and without XHR, you could do a lot. |
So the promise was there... Java was supposed to be the big thing, but eventually it was just a plugin, I think. It always was inside this rectangle, it always was a complex language for people to learn if you weren't a professional programmer, so the whole Java, JavaScript, Netscape+Java takes down Windows - they didn... |
\[02:58\] I got Microsoft's attention and they did IE. Bill Gates did his famous Internet Tidal Wave speech, because he had a bunch of people he had to whip into shape who thought they were just gonna take down AOL or Compuserve or something, and they were building a proprietary dial-up content system, and I'm sure it ... |
I founded Mozilla, because I was done standardizing JavaScript; it was 1997 toward the end of the year... I remember going to the Paris sales office of Netscape and I realized, well, [Jim] Barksdale has been telling us Microsoft is taking the price of the browser to zero, because at that time Netscape actually sold the... |
Netscape had also gone public in '95, well before being profitable, but it was a super hot startup. The stock zoomed up on the first day, and that kicked off the dotcom era of crazy startups. And it gave Netscape a war chest to buy companies, which hardly ever works. Mergers and acquisitions rarely work. In this case, ... |
Jamie Zawinski's got some old articles about this, if you wanna read about that era. It was not fun to go through that, but the only things that I remember being positive were getting JavaScript standardized, and then founding Mozilla. Mozilla was meant to be an escape pod, right? In Star Wars episode 4, A New Hope, th... |
\[05:59\] It took four years to actually get the code in decent shape, which was many more years than some of my friends, the principle engineers who were working on it told their management at Netscape, so Netscape kept missing the mark with things like Netscape 6, which was a terrible release... Black-and-blue colore... |
By 2002, Mozilla code was actually getting good. We were doing builds initially... Jamie Zawinski said, "Don't do builds... You have to be a developer, you have to have a compiler, you have to know what C is. Do your own builds!" and it limited testing and limited reach, so we started doing QA builds of Mozilla, which ... |
So Mozilla builds were cleaner, and they actually got fairly popular. I think at some point they were actually more popular than Netscape. But after we did Mozilla 1.0 in 2002, we said "Now the code's good enough we can build something." We already had a pirate ship called initially Mozilla/browser, then Phoenix, then ... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Oh, yeah! |
**Brendan Eich:** As Blake joked about this, "Yes, I want to use my suite so I can look in my address book for my friend and open a new email Compose window, tell them about the George Foreman grill that I saw while browsing the web, and then send them an AIM link so they can AIM or ICQ back to me." Nobody did that, ri... |
So in 2003, Dave Hyatt who had already quit Netscape and gone on to Apple to help Safari actually reach the big time... Dave was a huge win for Apple, because when he left, he had lots of expertise on web compatibility and CSS rendering and everything. I think the WebKit team, as strong as they were, lacked that skills... |
\[08:59\] So Hyatt was a huge recruit to Apple. But even at Apple, he kept working on Phoenix. Got in a little trouble sometimes for blogging about it a little too openly; he would blog about what he'd learned about implementing tabbed browsing multiple times in Phoenix and Chimera (which then became Camino) and other ... |
Anyway, Hyatt was a huge force for Mozilla code, and even after he went to Apple he was helping Phoenix, Firebird and Firefox. In 2003 Hyatt and I wrote a Roadmap update. Roadmap was the Mozilla document that I wrote and updated every year, trying to get people all moving in the same direction without having to tell th... |
What Hyatt and I did double down on that by saying, "Let's do just a browser. Let's get rid of this suite (the Mozilla suite)." It became Seamonkey, volunteers tended it. "Let's do a browser. Firebird." I think it was probably in 2003. "Let's do just a mail app. Thunderbird. Let's do extensions for them. Let's take out... |
They were lightweight enough that you could have people build them without having to become experts on the code. They had fairly stable APIs for integrating, and they could integrate with a lot of the user interface. They could change the toolbars, they could inject content or context menu items, things like that. |
So that was a big Roadmap update in 2003 that Hyatt and I did. I don't think Apple got mad at him for putting his name on it. That really just aimed the rocket that became Firefox toward release in November 2004. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** In a way I think that up 'till that point -- now you have essentially tab browsing, now you have kind of the beginnings of Safari, and then that leads into Chrome, eventually. But by this point, the cost of all browsers has gone to zero, right? The last browser that people paid for was probably Netsc... |
**Brendan Eich:** No, even that was, I believe, free. Netscape went free in the '90s because of Microsoft taking the price -- I would say the price went to zero; the cost all-in was still like a billion dollars over multiple years. Estimates from the U.S. v. Microsoft antitrust case and things you hear about the cost o... |
\[12:04\] It's still an awful lot of non-recurring engineering. And the good thing is Mozilla taught everybody the benefits of open source, so you have now three open source engines in full Chromium/Blink WebKit and Mozilla originally. And WebKit reabsorbed KHTML from which it sprang. Hyatt had to make it web-compatibl... |
So the good news is that these huge sunk costs and ongoing costs are being developed in the open, so in some ways you could say the cost is zero to -- like, my company Brave... \[laughter\] Nothing's ever free, but thanks to all this open source and open standards - and they go together - we have significant web engine... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** There's still a cost though that you're incurring to develop on top of it. |
**Brendan Eich:** Absolutely. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** But before we get into Brave's model, how are these other browsers funding their browsers? Especially with some of them taking on billion-dollar costs and then later maybe a little bit less, like Chrome... What are the incentive structures there and how do they actually end up making money? |
**Brendan Eich:** I think it's easy. Let's start in historical order - IE was to avoid "Netscape + Java kills Windows." I think Gates did think that was scary. Andreas was going around waving his arms, saying "Too much!" and a bunch of us were like "Shut up! Can you all get their attention?" and I heard that a board me... |
So Microsoft did IE, and they did a good job eventually with IE 4 on Windows. It was better than Netscape, which had been sort of trashed by that groupware company, and the founders kind of being burned down, mostly not working on it. But IE was actually pretty good, and Microsoft needed it, I think, to keep up with th... |
So the internet mattered, and even though Microsoft hadn't given up on Windows lock-in, and still had hopes going into the noughties that they would bring back Windows Vista, or make the web kind of fade away again. The web was their estate, so Microsoft needed a browser, and he needed to own the category. |
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