Brendan Eich

Brendan Eich photo

Brendan Eich is an American programmer, creator of the programming language JavaScript. Since 1995, he worked at Netscape; participated in the founding of Mozilla, until 2014 he was the chief engineer at the Mozilla Corporation. In March 2014, he was appointed CEO, but he soon left Mozilla under pressure from those who were dissatisfied with his appointment because of his support for the 2008 same-sex marriage ban. Currently, he is the Executive Director of Brave Software.

Biography

Eich was born in 1961 in Pittsburgh, PA. Eich received a bachelor’s degree from the University of Santa Clara County. In 1986, he received a master’s degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Eich began his career at Silicon Graphics, where he worked for seven years. He spent the next three years at MicroUnity Systems Engineering.

Aich is best known for his work in Netscape and Mozilla. He began work at Netscape in April 1995, where he developed a programming language, called initially “Mocha,” then renamed to “LiveScript,” and finally renamed to JavaScript for the Netscape Navigator browser. In early 1998, he participated in the opening of mozilla.org as the chief architect. When AOL closed the Netscape division in July 2003, Eich joined the Mozilla Foundation.

In August 2005, after working as a chief technologist and a member of the board of directors of the Mozilla Foundation, Brendan became the technical director of the Mozilla Corporation, and on March 26, 2014, he was appointed an executive director.

However, already on April 3, he left this post in response to a protest by the US LGBT community (in particular, noted an appeal to OkCupid Firefox users) because in 2008 he supported the California bill banning same-sex marriage.

On January 20, 2016, the company released developer versions of its open-source Brave web browser, which blocked ads and trackers and included a micropayments system to offer users a choice between viewing selected ads or paying websites not to display them.

At Brave Software, Eich co-created the Basic Attention Token (BAT), a cryptocurrency designed for use in the Brave browser. BAT launched its ICO on May 31, 2017, and raised $35 million.

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