And that Eich went on to create the privacy focused Brave browser based on Chromium.

Yet, these mistakes didn’t really change the downward trajectory. Apple and Google are the dominant mobile platforms and I can’t see how an independent desktop browser can grow against competent conglomerates.

Brave has grown every month since early beta launch. It can be done, but Firefox has lost share almost every month for a long time.

Google distributing and marketing Chrome definitely hurts Firefox, and yet Brave grows. A mystery to discuss another time.

sradman

Since I have your ear, in hindsight do you think the promotion of IndexedDB over SQLite/WebSQL was a good move?

I think persistent SQLite is on the verge of returning to the browser via WebAssembly but it needs a proper POSIX-like WASI [1] (WebAssembly System Interface) implementation in the browser. If you are looking for (very) small footholds in the market for Brave, a WASI implementation supporting a SQLite VFS [2] extension has my vote.

[1] https://github.com/WebAssembly/WASI

[2] https://www.sqlite.org/vfs.html