Opinion
Eich: Mozilla became captured by Google and cannot compete on distribution
“When I was thinking about Brave, I realized not only had Mozilla become captured by its search partner and was probably going to die because it couldn't compete, not just on Chrome intrinsic qualities, but on distribution, which really matters at scale.”
Opinion
Eich: Google is complicit with digital ad fraudsters by collecting fees
“And that Google still gets the fee when this advertising money is stolen by fraudsters makes Google complicit with the fraudsters to some degree. It misaligns the interests again. It's a conflict of interest.”
Assertion Partly supported
Eich: Google Chrome Changed in 2018 to Auto-Sign In Users for Ad Tracking
“In 2018 September, Google said, gosh darn it, people aren't signing into the browser enough. We're going to just do it whenever you sign in to Gmail or YouTube in a tab. We'll just sign you in across all the tabs and we'll track you.”
Insight
Eich: JavaScript's mutable design ensured survival but sacrificed security integrity
“JavaScript's mutability was a huge boon. It probably wouldn't have survived without it, but it also means there's no
Security property called integrity.”
Insight
Eich: Ten on-chain microtransactions provide enough entropy to fingerprint a user
“So for our system with users getting ad revenue share and publishers then getting creators on YouTube, getting, you know, tips or recurring donations, just 10 of those or so could fingerprint you as a user, right? If there are a few bits each, that's enough bi…”
Insight
Eich: Browser extensions have fundamentally weaker security than native apps
“The extension is just weaker. Both in terms of its powers, but also its security model. If it's doing its own secure store for a private key, it's just in a weaker footing than a native app by design.”
Insight
Eich: Virtualizing credit cards natively in browsers can deconstruct Amazon
“And if we virtualize the credit card, then we can actually put e-commerce in the browser. We can deconstruct Amazon. Every site, without having to change its merchant JavaScript, which is not going to happen easily, can have an option where you can use somethi…”
Assertion Supported
Eich: Brave pays users 70% of ad revenue via Basic Attention Token
“It also involves something we talked about from the beginning and we prototyped in Bitcoin, and that's the basic attention token system for users who choose to participating in Private ads that are anonymous, but that pay them 70% of the revenue and that let t…”
Assertion Partly supported
Eich: Apple Safari beat Firefox on privacy by blocking third-party cookies
“The very first Safari had private windows. It had a third party cookie blocker. Neither of these things were in Firefox at the time. Private windows came in quickly. We never shipped a third party cookie blocker in my time there.”
Disclosure
Eich: A Brave vendor shared user data with Experian without consent
“We have a vendor at Brave that has information on people. It shared it with Experian. We didn't know this was happening. I don't know if there's a privacy law that was breached. We believe their privacy policy was breached by their own action or their setting …”
Assertion Supported
Eich: DuckDuckGo's keyword search is pretty much still powered by Bing
“DuckDuckGo always had a more private sort of search front end on Bing. It's pretty much Bing still for the keyword search.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Eich: Every Mozilla executive believed Google would eventually kill them
“I also at Mozilla thought, we're going to get killed by Google. I think every executive thought this at Mozilla.”
Disclosure
Eich tried to build a WebKit-based browser at Mozilla with Apple engineers
“And I actually talked at one point with Dave Hyatt about doing this. But I couldn't recruit them away from Apple, and I tried to get Hewitt as well, and it would have been a WebKit-based Mozilla browser, but it was too risky. I couldn't get the talent I needed…”
Disclosure
Brave is developing Themis, a zero-knowledge ad verification system on Solana
“So our next generation ad system, which is aiming at Solana is called Themis. It uses a black box accumulator in the browser to build up an authentic, cryptographically secure ad performance set of numbers that can then be put into a zero knowledge proof syste…”
Opinion
Eich: Opera will endure despite Chinese ownership and trust concerns
“Opera will always be there, kind of like Brave, even though it's now Chinese-owned and a little less trustworthy just in Western eyes.”
Disclosure
Brave agreed to make Solana default for agnostic multi-chain dApps
“We like Solana. We agreed to make it the default for multi-chain dApps where they don't express a preference for default and the user doesn't.”
Assertion Supported
Eich: Google only pays browsers for default search status
“Google only pays for default because they're king of the hill and they figure they'll get the traffic anyway.”
Prediction Open · timeframe Feb 2027
Eich: US will not ban crypto due to wealthy family office adoption
“Crypto gets banned in the US or something like that. Don't think it's going to happen. One of the reasons is because I do see too many rich people partaking through their family offices and so on.”
Insight
Eich: Evolutionary forces mandate backwards compatibility across the web
“So there's this strong evolutionary
Force, this gradient forcing compatibility on the web.
This is something a lot of people in computer science, especially programming languages, just hate because it means you really can't make incompatible changes except v…”
Insight
Eich: Simultaneous breakthroughs collapse startup success odds exponentially
“Trying to do all at once, you just run into the multiplication principle and your odds of success go to one in a billion or ten billion.”
Assertion Supported
Eich: Netscape's 1995 IPO broke precedent by listing unprofitably on speculation
“In the eighties, SGI had to have three profitable quarters before it could IPO, whereas Netscape just went on forward speculation and forward multiples, and it was not profitable.”
Assertion Supported
Eich: Mozilla created the first browser extension ecosystem before Chrome
“That was the first browser extension ecosystem way ahead of Chrome's.”
Insight
Eich: Monopolies Hold Back the Web Every Decade Until Upstarts Emerge
“Every 10 years or so. You just get people holding the web back. Usually it's a monopoly power or a market power. And then the upstart comes because people still use the web.”
Insight
Eich: Using Electron for Brave was a mistake due to sandboxing issues
“Using Electron was a mistake. It wasn't designed for a browser. It turned off the sandbox. That was horrifying to discover, and it's kind of bloated and replaced a lot of middleware files in the Chromium code that Google was Breaking through internal API shift…”
Brendan Eich