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Nov 15, 2010 · —Brendan Eich, creator of JavaScript JavaScript is the language of the Web, and it's at the heart of every modern website from the lowliest personal blog to the mighty Google Apps. Though it's simple for beginners to pick up and play with, JavaScript is not a toy—it's a flexible and complex language, capable of much more than the showy ...
Jun 15, 2020 · A newly published paper by Brendan Eich, CEO of Chromium-based browser Brave and the key designer of JavaScript, looks back at two decades of the definitive programming language for the web,...
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Jun 12, 2020 · Brendan Eich, Allen Wirfs-Brock. How a sidekick scripting language for Java, created at Netscape in a ten-day hack, ships first as a de facto Web standard and eventually becomes the world's most widely used programming language. This paper [at 190 pages, long enough to be a book] tells the story of the creation, design, evolution, and ...
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- JavaScript is born
- Mozilla breaks free
- Brave new world
- Empire building
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By Joel Khalili
published 8 February 2022
The creations of Brendan Eich are stitched into the fabric of the web
(Image credit: Shutterstock / local_doctor)
The story of Brendan Eich is in many ways the story of the evolution of the internet and the technologies we use to access it. It is also a story of battles won, lost and soon to play out.
Today, JavaScript is deployed across practically all websites, as part of a famous trifecta that also includes HTML and CSS. It allows web developers to code in all the rich features and dynamic content users interact with on the web, and can also be deployed server-side and for various other purposes.
Given its ubiquity and the extent of its influence over the web, it’s easy to forget JavaScript is the creation of a single person, who put it together in under a fortnight. “The web was evolving almost in a biological fashion [in the 1990s],” Eich told TechRadar Pro. “My big contribution to the process was JavaScript.”
When Eich joined Netscape in 1995, he says there was a “feeling of doom” hanging over the company, because Microsoft was breathing down its neck. The infamous Microsoft strategy was to “embrace, extend and extinguish”; it would embrace a new type of software, extend it with proprietary facilities that only functioned inside Windows, and harness these new capabilities to extinguish the competition.
The previous year, Netscape had spurned a low-ball acquisition offer from Microsoft, so the company knew it was next in line for the typical treatment. The plan to shield itself relied heavily on the integration of Java into the browser and the opportunities made possible by JavaScript, which was designed as a dynamic companion language that non-expert developers could use to add interactivity to their websites.
“We knew Microsoft was coming after us and we wanted to get Netscape Navigator 2.0 out the door, with Java as the big programming language and JavaScript as the sidekick that let the average scripter glue things together,” Eich explained.
To some extent, the endeavor was a success. Microsoft, which had previously stated its intentions to make VBScript the go-to language for building web applications, was ultimately forced to build support for JavaScript into Internet Explorer. This meant the company did not have control over the favorite scripting language of the web.
Knowing itself beaten, Netscape decided to open source its browser code. Eich says the idea was to create a community like the one that surrounded Linux, which would engender new browser innovation.
The company tasked Eich and a group of other developers with setting in motion the project, which came to be called Mozilla. The team worked “inside a fishbowl” at Netscape, at a remove from the rest of the company, Eich explained.
In the coming years, however, the relationship between the Mozilla team and Netscape executives soured. The two groups traded blows over product design, release timelines, the toxic working culture and other topics.
“It was a difficult time,” said Eich. “I stopped using my Netscape email as much as I could and used an ISP email instead. I acted as if I were completely outside the firewall.”
“I also acted as a proxy for the developers we were trying to bring in, who didn’t have the advantage of being employees. Meanwhile, Netscape kept regressing to the mean when it came to the strength of its programmers.”
After a series of layoffs in 2003, Eich and the Mozilla team broke out of their fishbowl to form a standalone non-profit called the Mozilla Foundation, which was tasked with carrying the project forward.
While no rational person would dispute the importance of Eich’s contribution to the web, it is also true that he has been on the losing side of both so-called browser wars; first at Netscape, then at Mozilla.
This is a pattern he is hoping to break with Brave, which is pitched as the antidote to the threats posed by Google and its stranglehold on the browser and search markets.
Brave’s browser blocks all advertising by default and has a no-tolerance policy towards third-party cookies, which track users across the web to help inform highly-targeted advertising efforts.
Although there are now plenty of browsers that block invasive tracking techniques, Brave stands apart for its ambitions to rewire the economics that underpin the digital advertising industry.
“The plan was that Brave would be faster, easier on the battery and more private,” said Eich. “And with the help of blockchain technology, we also wanted to replumb the economic engine [of the web].”
The company’s unusual model is built around its Basic Attention Token (BAT), which was launched in 2017 via an initial coin offering (ICO). When an advertiser signs up for a campaign, Brave uses 70% of the fee to purchase BAT from the open market, and these tokens are then distributed to users who have opted-in to the ads program.
Over the last couple of years, Brave has quietly set about expanding its empire with new privacy-centric products. Orbiting its browser, there is now a Brave VPN, firewall, encrypted video conferencing service, crypto wallet, news aggregator and search engine.
Asked which areas Brave will look to expand into next, Eich declined to provide any concrete information, but did concede the company is “looking at the larger space”. We wouldn’t be surprised to see an encrypted email service from Brave in the near future, for example.
All of these technologies will be foundational to Web 3.0, a new generation of the internet defined by decentralization, disintermediation and greater user privacy. Among those attempting to bring Web 3.0 into being, many believe blockchain and cryptocurrency will play a fundamental role in the transition.
Naturally, Brave has attracted a large number of cryptocurrency enthusiasts, whose ambitions with regards to economic freedom align closely with the company’s attempts to create a more equitable and private web.
The long-term success of the project, however, will be determined by how effectively Brave is able to sell itself to a wider and less technical audience. It has a lot of ground to make up before it can hope to challenge the dominance of Google and other incumbents.
However, as Eich’s story demonstrates, the internet is littered with the corpses of fallen giants. The cry for greater privacy on the web is growing louder and louder, and Brave has put itself in a position to ride the zeitgeist.
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Book description Since 1996, JavaScript: The Definitive Guide has been the bible for JavaScript programmers—a programmer's guide and comprehensive reference to the core language and to the client-side JavaScript APIs defined by web browsers.
More than 300,000 JavaScript programmers around the world have madethis their indispensable reference book for building JavaScript applications. "A must-have reference for expert JavaScript...
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Mar 14, 2020 · Allen Wirfs-Brock (editor of ES6) and Brendan Eich (you know what he did) have published the definitive 20 year history of JavaScript. It is a 190 page treatment for The History of Programming Languages Conference, which only occur once every 13-15 years (1978, 1993, 2007, 2020).
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