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The Mozilla Fallout

Posted on April 01, 2014 by Abhinav Kumar in blog

Few days ago, the Mozilla board named Brandan Eich, the creator of ECMAScript (popularily known as JavaScript), as the top boss of the corporation. It caused quite a furor on the interwebz, as Eich has already been on the radars for contributing dollars for a homophobic cause. Leading the announcement, many Mozilla developers have raised their voices against the popular browser-maker. A lot of app developers have denounced this recent move of Mozilla by shutting their apps out of Mozilla's infant mobile marketplace. Half of Mozilla board which includes two of its ex-CEOs, has also resigned on a slightly unrelated note. According to some sources, they wanted an outsider to take up the top-job instead of Eich who is also a co-founder and was the CTO of the company since 2005. After 2 weeks of this PR debacle, Brendan Eich offered his resignation to the board.

It can be rightly said that, Mozilla and its leadership team is on the crossroads at the moment with Eich having resigned. All this has come down when Mozilla is in quite a tight spot. Firefox OS is not getting nowhere or atleast what it deserves. Chrome has become the new favorite browser of masses and is on the way to displace much-maligned IE from the throne. Thunderbird's development has become stalled. And things are definitely not looking for the reception of new Australis interface which is due for release in Firefox 29.

Even after his resignation, things are not looking good, as now the conservatives are now deriding Mozilla for handling this poorly. It would take Mozilla atleast some time to get out of this difficult phase.