Brendan Eich, Mozilla's alpha nerd, takes over as CEO
Brendan Eich, the programmer who invented JavaScript in a 10-day burst of activity at Netscape in 1995, now is the chief executive of Mozilla, the nonprofit organization that develops the Firefox browser and Firefox OS mobile operating system.
Eich worked on the Netscape Navigator browser and -- after Microsoft won the first browser wars of the 1990s -- on Mozilla's effort to make something useful of the Netscape open-source code base. Although Mozilla succeeded in restoring competition to the browser market, and JavaScript has proved remarkably adaptable as the Web's programming language, Eich is now grappling with bigger issues than just competing against Microsoft.
Specifically, Mozilla is trying to crack the mobile OS market, first with Firefox for Android and now with the Firefox OS smartphone operating system. And it's trying to launch services, too. That puts companies like Apple and Google in Mozilla's crosshairs.
