The day Mozilla fired Brendan Eich for political reasons, Firefox died. It just took a while for everyone to realise that. That was when they collectively decided that other things are more important to them than the quality and usability of Firefox.
The new CEO is just the final nail in their coffin.
I don't know, if the CEO of some software I used suddenly came out as anti-miscegenation, and started donating money to the cause, I'd stop using the software until the CEO was fired too.
Where this analogy breaks is that at the time (2008), Eich's position had majority support in the US. The proposition he wad funding passed with majority support. Mixed marriages by contrast had overwhelming support in 2008.
Eich didn't suddenly come out against anything in 2014. People dug up his prior funding.
Demanding permanent ostracization for supporting a majority position is fairly anti-democratic. You can beat someone in a process (Eich's side lost) without demanding total victory forever or declaring more than half of a whole society as permanent villains. In 2008 55% of the US opposed gay marriage, 36% supported it.
This is a non-sequitur. He didn't donate because it was the popular thing to do, he donated because it was consistent with his religious beliefs.
Christianity has never been a popularity contest. It has steadfastness in the face of rejection and martyrdom in the face of oppression baked into its fundamental fabric, borne from its oppression as a minority religion in the first centuries of its existence.
There's three options on every stance: support, oppose, and neutral. When in doubt, you should be neutral - not opposed.
Just because everyone else is opposing gay marriage, or integration, or emancipation, doesn't mean you should.
Maybe you don't have the time or energy to try to find out what path you should take. Okay, fair. You can always do nothing. You can literally say "I don't know enough about this to have an opinion".
But following the majority IS NOT that. You ARE taking a hard stance if you do that! You're making a choice, and that means you better understand that choice. You are responsible for it, accountable to it!
> Demanding permanent ostracization for supporting a majority position is fairly anti-democratic.
It depends a lot on what that position is. Donating your personal wealth to discriminate against a marginalized group, which includes many of your employees is worth calling out.
Segregation was once a "majority position" in this country. Shaming segregationists was a really effective way to change that. For example, George Wallace, who eventually redeemed himself.
So you agree: for you, it's more important that the Mozilla CEO shares your political views, than that Mozilla makes a quality product.
That's exactly what the parent post is talking about. When Mozilla started prioritizing political correctness over software quality, software quality predictably declined. That's why they are struggling now: they reduced their user base to the tiny group of political extremists that will put up with an inferior product for the sake of political signaling.
By the way, Eich didn't “come out” as anything. His private donation (a mere $1000) was exposed by people who wanted to cancel him for his political views. It wasn't Eich who forced the issue, it was his political opponents, who do not tolerate any viewpoint diversity. Eich's views weren't even fringe or extreme at the time: Proposition 8 passed with support from the majority of Californian voters.
I think the correct formulation is: "There are political views that the CEO of Mozilla could hold which would be sufficient for me to abandon the use of products that Mozilla makes". And I think that would be non-controversial for most people.
The problem with that formulation is that it denies the importance of the quantative aspect of the difference of opinion.
Of course there are views so extreme almost nobody would put up with them. But at the same time, being tolerant of differences of opinion is an important aspect of a free society and a functioning democracy. There is a word for people who cannot tolerate even the smallest difference of opinion: bigots.
But differences of opinion aren't binary; they lie on a spectrum. Similarly, bigotry lies on a spectrum. The person who doesn't brook the smallest disagreement is a greater bigot that only considers the most odious points of view beyond the pale.
For an extreme example, consider these cases: 1) A CEO is fired for arguing that the US government should round up all Jews and put them in extermination camps Nazi Germany style. 2) A CEO is fired for arguing that the local sales tax should be raised by 0.25 percentage points.
Are these cases exactly the same? You could argue in both cases the CEO gets fired for expressing sufficiently unorthodox political views, but that doesn't cut at the heart of the matter. Clearly it's necessary to quantify how extreme those views are. The extent to which the board that fires their CEO is bigoted depends on how unreasonable the CEO's views are; they are inversely proportional.
So now back to Eich. What was his sin? He donated $1000 to support Proposition 8, which restricted the legal definition of marriage to couples consisting of a man and a woman. This view was shared at the time by Barack Obama and a majority of California voters. It didn't strip gay couples of any formal rights: all the same rights could be obtained through a domestic partnership or an out-of-state marriage. It was just a nominal dispute about what the word “marriage” means.
Clearly this is a relatively unimportant issue; closer to a tax dispute than a genocide. You can disagree with Eich and the Californian public on this one, but being unable to tolerate their point of view doesn't make them monsters; it makes you a bigot.
The fact that Mozilla didn't allow their CEO to deviate from the majority point of view on this issue (again, a minority viewpoint in California at the time!) revealed Mozilla to be a heavily politicized, extremely bigoted corporation, that puts ideological conformity first.
I feel like we've awakened from a dream. I look around, and I see that the hyper-transphobe's book series has become a best-selling videogame. I wish I were asleep like you...
I think treating every human with equal dignity goes beyond politics. While the specific context here was political, but that is only the context, not the principle.
> So you agree: for you, it's more important that the Mozilla CEO shares your political views, than that Mozilla makes a quality product.
He doesn't have to share all of them, but we have to have enough overlap for him to consider me & my friends enough of a human being to share the same rights that he does.
As another commenter pointed out, there are beliefs heinous enough that will override the quality of optional software that I might choose to use.
In 2008. You know, the year the majority of Americans didn't approve of gay marriage? [1] The year Obama said that marriage is between a man and a woman? [2]
Applying modern sensibilities to history is stupid.
Are you referring to his donation to prop 8? Im a younger dev and a bit out of the loop but how would that be anti-miscegenation? Wasn’t that more related to gay marriage?
I used anti-miscegenation as a stand-in, as an example of a ludicrous, indefensible position to hold today, while there are still holdouts who apparently think that gay marriage is some sort of affront to the moral fabric of society.
Oh okay, I see. It is wild to see how much things change because amongst my generation your analogy makes sense, but at the time prop 8 was passed by a majority of Californians.
Eich was appointed Mozilla CEO in 2014. Not 2008. 2014 polls said 60% to 70% of Californians supported same sex marriage. Most California voters would not qualify for most jobs in any case. And Eich's 2008 discrimination support mattered less than his 2014 inability to say he wouldn't do it again.
As an example, Loving v Virginia, the Supreme Court case that struck down all anti-miscegenation laws, was in 1967. In 1968, a Gallup poll indicated that less that 20% of white Americans "approved of marriage between whites and non-whites."
Three decades later, in 2000, Alabama finally voted to repeal its (inactive) law, and a full 40% of voters voted to keep the racist, useless law in their state constitution.
State-declared marriage is an tax saving scheme, that the state does in expect for future tax payers. Not granting it to people who won't "produce" tax payers seems entirely reasonable to me.
Exactly. It's one thing to be an idiot on Twitter, it's another for you to donate money to a cause specifically designed to deny rights to people - a cause that was actually successful for a time. That's something that speaks to a fundamental lack of empathy that I'm not sure he's ever directly addressed.
But in any case, I've heard this argument before, and the timeline doesn't make sense. At the time he resigned, Chrome was very firmly ahead of Firefox, and given his track record with Brave, the idea that Eich would have single-handedly saved Mozilla is also pretty dubious to me.
It seems like a disingenuous and lazy talking point tailor made to blame the demise of Firefox on a culture war politics, when in reality it's the fact that Google was willing to throw much more time and resources at the browser market than a non-profit, unimpeded by the same sort of anti-trust and lack of development that brought Internet Explorer low.
A) Firing a CEO because there is an immediate, massive public shaming of them is entirely rational from a business perspective
B) This is the hill you want to die on? That being a bigot should be a protected status for CEOs?
> This is the hill you want to die on? That being a bigot should be a protected status for CEOs?
That is a wildly uncharitable take. I'm not OP, but I believe that nobody, CEOs or otherwise, should be fired for their activities outside of work. That can be political beliefs, but doesn't have to be either. And yes, that means that sometimes someone whose beliefs you find repugnant is going to have a good job. That is the price of a free society, and I think it's worth it.
Imagine, instead, the opinion he expressed outside of work is that Firefox sucks and nobody should use it. Should he be fired then?
As a CEO, your opinion and perspective is MARKETING. You determine if customers stay or leave. And causing customers to leave is obviously a fireable offense.
So Subway should bring back Jared and Jello should bring back Cosby? Freedom is not a one-way street that guarantees the right to be awful without social consequences.
The words "bigot" and "racist" have been so overused that they've lost all meaning. "Fascist" is not all that far behind. In a recent interview, Nick Fuentes (much more deserving of the bigot label than Eich) openly said he's a racist. I suspect he lost 0 supporters by doing this. Abusing the language like this has consequences - not good ones.
Definition of bigot from Oxford Languages: a person who is obstinately or unreasonably attached to a belief, opinion, or faction, especially one who is prejudiced against or antagonistic toward a person or people on the basis of their membership of a particular group.
Explain how the word isn't being used according to its definition.
> Nick Fuentes openly said he's a racist.
Do you doubt him? In March 2025, he said, "Jews are running society, women need to shut the fuck up, Blacks need to be imprisoned for the most part, and we would live in paradise ... White men need to run the household, they need to run the country, they need to run the companies. They just need to run everything, it's that simple. It's literally that simple."
> I suspect he lost 0 supporters by doing this.
You seem to believe that his supporters think he isn't actually racist.
I think GP's point isn't that Fuentes isn't racist, it's that the term "racist" lost a lot of its bite precisely because it was thrown around so recklessly and applied to people who obviously weren't "bad guys". So now you can actually go and openly say things like "I'm racist" and mean it, and there's still plenty of people who don't see a problem with that.
> So now you can actually go and openly say things like "I'm racist" and mean it, and there's still plenty of people who don't see a problem with that.
My point is that the people (Fuentes supporters) that he said see no problem with that are racists themselves, or why would they be Fuentes supporters? That's his whole schtick. They don't see a problem with him saying racist things, so why would they see a problem with him directly admitting he is a racist? https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/conservative-writer-says...
Firefox improved in quality significantly between 2014 and the recent decline. And it's not like Brave has shown incredibly good judgement in these areas.
Equivocating speech and crime as both being "violence" (of similar class, deserving similar response) is a fallacy that lets people justify murder in response to disagreement as long as it's deemed serious enough.
Yes it's not violence, but it's not speech either. Donating money is performing material harm. That might be an unfortunate reality, but it's undeniable. It's a different thing from just saying something.
Also, you can absolutely be fired for just saying something and that's been the case forever. As a CEO, you are essentially marketing your company. Marketing it poorly and losing customers can, and will, get you fired - in every company, ever.
Really? Having an opinion endorsed by the mainstream doctrine of several world religions with billions of adherents is the same as robbing a bank?
That being said, I disagree with Eich and it probably made sense for the org to let him go given how his views might impact public perception of Mozilla.
I'd say it's complicated. If you are running a company in San Francisco I think you want to be sensitive to the culture there. That cause of gay marriage that he opposed was not one of these radicalism for the sake of radicalism queer positions you see on Twitter-dervied platforms but something mainstream at the root. I think of how on The Bulwark podcasts you hear gay people with a conservative but never-Trump viewpoint describing their cozy family life and it just sounds so sweet... and mainstream making the opposition to it not seem so mainstream.
On the other hand I think San Francisco is part of the Mozilla problem because it is less than an hour on the 101 to go see people at Facebook and Google yet they are distant from the 99% of of web developers and web users that live somewhere else whose use Firefox because they don't like what Chrome stands for.
I wish Mozilla was in Boulder or Minneapolis or Cleveland or Dublin or some other second-tier but vibrant city where they might have the capacity to listen to us rather than be in the same monoculture that brings us Chrome and Instagram.
Yeah, I can't say I feel comfortable in the medtech culture around Boston. I worked remote at a clinical notes startup based in research triangle park -- our mission was "CRUSH EPIC!" and do that through user-centric thinking and I think medtech culture would be a buzzkill for that.
Yeah no, (1) Mozilla was going to be in for a tough go no matter what; I don't think Eich would have fared any better. But (2) you can't donate to stop your own employees and users from having civil rights without repercussions.
People with an axe to grind always hide what Brendan Eich did behind "politics" which is a dishonest slight of hand.
> Yeah no, (1) Mozilla was going to be in for a tough go no matter what; I don't think Eich would have fared any better.
Nobody knows this for sure. We do know that Eich was fired for political reasons, and not because of his technological direction.
This betrays a decision making process that prioritizes political correctness above leadership qualities and technical contributions.
> you can't donate to stop your own employees and users from having civil rights without repercussions.
Why not? Why can't the CEO of Mozilla have his own private political views just like anyone else, and donate his own private money to whatever democratic causes he likes?
This really isn't obvious to anyone except the people, like you, who view Mozilla as a political project first, and as a software project a distant second.
Firing your CEO for not being sufficiently aligned with the American Democratic Party only makes sense if you assume the purpose of Mozilla is to push American Democratic politics, rather than make good software that anyone in the world may use (spoiler alert: many users of open-source software are not American Democrats!)
We both know that CEOs are never fired, but there is a difference between resigning on their own accord and “resigning” because they had no organizational support. What happened to Eich was the CEO-equivalent of getting fired.
> Donations are public material support. Not private views.
Not really? Nobody would know what causes Eich donates to if they didn't make an effort to look it up and broadcast that information.
Even if you take that view, are you saying that nobody who works for Mozilla is allowed to make any political donations ever? Or are you simply saying that you Mozillians aren't allowed to donate money to conservative causes? Because it sounds a lot like the second one, and then we're back to the original allegation: that Mozilla today is a political project first, and a technological project second. Otherwise, how do you explain Mozilla caring so much about which political campaigns its employees donate to?
> We both know that CEOs are never fired, but there is a difference between resigning on their own accord and “resigning” because they had no organizational support.
CEOs are never fired is false objectively. CEOs must earn support. And there was no reason to state false information if you believed everyone would understand the context of the facts.
> Not really?
Really. Public records are public.
> Nobody would know what causes Eich donates to if they didn't make an effort to look it up and broadcast that information.
No one would know most news stories if someone didn't research and publish them. No one would know what Mozilla's CEO was paid if no one looked it up and published it.
> Even if you take that view, are you saying that nobody who works for Mozilla is allowed to make any political donations ever?
People are allowed to make donations. People are allowed to choose who they follow or support or not.
And jobs have different standards. Eich remained CTO years after his donation was published with little controversy.
> Otherwise, how do you explain Mozilla caring so much about which political campaigns its employees donate to?
Who are Mozilla to you? The board appointed Eich CEO years after his donation was published
>It's your own fault you lost this argument because you decided to attempt such a pathetically transparent lie, and you can't back-pedal enough to make up for that. Face it, you're just a dishonest bigot on the wrong side of history, still salty that gay marriage is finally legal, impotent to do anything about it besides being a lying keyboard warrior troll.
>I hope for your own family's sake that your own straight marriage isn't so fragile that it was undermined by gay marriage being legal, as Brendan's and other homophobic bigot's tired arguments claim is the insidious threat of gay marriage.
>Maybe you made bad life choices and want to punish people who didn't, but that's on you, so don't take it out on gay people, even if you're one of the jealous hateful closeted self loathing ones yourself.
This is a particularly egregious post that I think warrants more intervention than just a flag @dang. This user has been doing this quite a lot, over a period of many months, if you search his posts for the word "Eich" or "bigot".
> Firing your CEO for not being sufficiently aligned with the American Democratic Party
This is not what happened. He gave money to a cause with the explicit goal of using that money to prevent his coworkers and users from having equal civil rights based on an inalienable trait they were born with.
That's not an "American Democratic Party" alignment issue, and if you genuinely believe it is, your dog whistle may be broken. It's sounding an awful lot like a normal whistle.
He has a right to do that without fear of government retaliation. But Mozilla has a right to fire him for being a bad person because of it.
That's just factually wrong. Proposition 8 deprived nobody of any rights. Gay couples could get exactly the same rights as straight couples through a domestic partnership, or get married out of state, as even Wikipedia admits:
> A same-sex marriage lawfully performed in another state or foreign jurisdiction on or after November 5, 2008 was fully recognized in California, but Proposition 8 precluded California from designating these relationships with the word "marriage." These couples were afforded every single one of the legal rights, benefits, and obligations of marriage.
Note the last sentence!
Additionally, proposition 8 was not extreme. It was carried by a majority of California voters, and Barack Obama said at the time: “I personally believe that marriage is between a man and a woman” which is essentially what the proposition established too, though Obama opposed using a ballot proposition to settle the issue.
> He has a right to do that without fear of government retaliation. But Mozilla has a right to fire him for being a bad person because of it.
I never argued that Mozilla doesn't have the right to fire people for their political views. We're just establishing that Eich _was_ fired for his political views, and that that shows Mozilla had become a political organization first, and a technological company second.
In a politically neutral technology company there should be room for people who side with Barack Obama and the majority of Californian voters. The fact that that is not true of Mozilla proves it's not a politically neutral company; it's a political project that inherited a software project they are not particularly interested in maintaining except as a vehicle for further promoting their politics.
> That's just factually wrong. Proposition 8 deprived nobody of any rights. Gay couples could get exactly the same rights as straight couples through a domestic partnership, or get married out of state, as even Wikipedia admits:
The US rejected separate but equal since decades.
California domestic partnerships provided most of the same rights as marriage. Not all. The California legislature had to pass bills after to address this.[1]
The bill which afforded same sex couples married out of state the same rights as heterosexual couples married in state passed over 11 months after Proposition 8 took effect. The citation of the last sentence revealed this. You did not read it?
Heterosexual couples were not required to marry out of state.
> Additionally, proposition 8 was not extreme. It was carried by a majority of California voters
Most jobs have requirements which most California voters would not meet.
> Barack Obama said at the time: “I personally believe that marriage is between a man and a woman” which is essentially what the proposition established too, though Obama opposed using a ballot proposition to settle the issue.
Obama opposed stripping rights by vote is a significant difference.
And Obama changed his public position by 2014. Eich was unable to say he would not repeat his harmful action.
And many people suspected Obama's opposition to same sex marriage was a lie in 2008 even. 1 of his advisers claimed this later.
> Eich _was_ fired for his political views
Eich said he resigned because he could not be an effective leader under the circumstances.[2] Did he lie?
Let's say everything you said is right: Just because a heterosexual, Christian majority say they don't support "blacks" in their bathrooms and claim the black community should be happy with their "equal" bathrooms, does NOT mean that it is morally acceptable to financially support legal requirements for segregated bathrooms.
> Barack Obama said at the time: “I personally believe that marriage is between a man and a woman”
And yet he didn't force the country to only recognize marriages between men and women. Instead, he did the opposite. He voted against DOMA in 1996. He repealed Don't Ask Don't Tell in 2010.
He appointed judges who looked favorably on gay marriage and then told the justice department not to defend DOMA against constitutional attacks. Then he celebrated the Supreme Court's ruling against DOMA.
> In a politically neutral technology company there should be room for people who side with Barack Obama and the majority of Californian voters.
Barack Obama and California voters (64% of likely voters in 2013 according to PPIC) were on the other side in 2014 when Eich was appointed CEO. Eich remained (and remains to this day) on the wrong side.
The new CEO is just the final nail in their coffin.