30 ms·

Goodbye Mozilla

• Splendor 9y ago
  Google cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://chrislord.net/index.php/2017/06/28/goodbye-mozilla/ http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...
  • greggyb 9y ago
    Also, this delightful add-on for Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/wayback-machine_new/?src=search https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/wayback-machi...
    • thegeomaster 9y ago
      And its Chromium sibling: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/wayback-machine/fpnmgdkabkmnadcjpehmlllkndpkmiak https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/wayback-machine/fp...
    • bmn__ 9y ago
      Why only one cache when you can have several? https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/resurrect-pages-isup-edition https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/resurrect-pages-isu...
  • edwinksl 9y ago
    Hug of death from HN.
    • VA3FXP 9y ago
      I've upvoted you, but this has bugged me for awhile. While I understand that we should be calling it a DDOS, it isn't an 'attack'; so that seems a little severe. Can't we just go back to calling it 'slashdotted'? =)
      • spraak 9y ago
        'Hug of death' isn't saying it's an attack/DDOS. It's equivalent to your suggestion of 'slashdotted' but probably a much more frequently used and relevant term.
      • sp332 9y ago
        I'm pretty sure the "hug" part means it's not an attack.
  • dredmorbius 9y ago
    http://web.archive.org/web/20170629000311/http://chrislord.net/index.php/2017/06/28/goodbye-mozilla/ http://web.archive.org/web/20170629000311/http://chrislord.n... https://archive.is/uoWea https://archive.is/uoWea
• qazqwert 9y ago
  wtf?....
• gcb0 9y ago
  wow, the are way too many toxic teams at Mozilla :( I'd expect the company to be pretty democratic. but every month you hear a story like that. specially shocking: "What business a not-for-profit company, based primarily on doing open-source, web-based engineering has making physical, commercial products is questionable, but it failed long before that could be considered." ...and that was right after their failed mobile phone line failure!
  • owebmaster 9y ago
    I guess one of the problems of Mozilla (as a not-for-profit company and with current trend on social media behavior) is that every single person working there feels entitled to criticize the strategy, just like what happens today in polítics.
    • daenney 9y ago
      Why shouldn't they criticize strategy? Do you expect people to just blindly follow and abide by what the company's leadership sets out to do?
      • ksk 9y ago
        Depends on who's doing it. In the abstract, everyone has a "right" to speak their mind, and everybody else has a "right" to ignore them. But that gets you nowhere. IMHO Unless you've done something that makes your opinion worth something, you should be focused on proving yourself.
      • rockdoe 9y ago
        Mozilla people for some reason feel they can criticize their own company publicly. That just isn't done elsewhere. You criticize internally and form a front to the outside. Meanwhile, Mozilla employees cry for their own CEO to be fired. That's just insane and wouldn't fly elsewhere.
        • fabrice_d 9y ago
          No one in Mozilla Corp asked for their CEO to be fired. These were Mozilla Foundation employees.
• i80and 9y ago
  The author's remarks about FirefoxOS actually mirror my own perspective as an outsider. It was a beautifully-made product that felt mismanaged and somewhat unfocused. It was definitely prematurely killed just as it was coming into its own. I'm still sore about that.
  • malkia 9y ago
    I've got two Firefox OS phones, and was very excited at first, but when I was no longer getting updates I felt where this was going to. One of the phones, orange, I think the first or second model, is still in use. My wife now uses it on our annual trip to home country, and it still works fine as a phone. It's somewhat safer to use it, than the iPhone she has here in US - simply for not being stolen. It works just fine years after development. Most surprisingly though... the battery life was at 50%, a year after we haven't used it. (unless my son secretly charged it, and used it...) I kind of wish for Firefox OS to come back. I liked the idea of apps being web apps, though it was a bit blurry what's downloaded and what's not, but with today's prevalent mobile internet that should not be a big deal (just a bit more pricey)
    • BrendanEich 9y ago
      See http://kaiostech.com/ http://kaiostech.com/. B2G lives, for now -- the "G" (for Gecko) part is not likely to last. Blonk, not Gonk, coming, I hope with Muon (https://github.com/brave/muon/ https://github.com/brave/muon/) included, but the "Muonk" name goes too far ;-).
  • jldugger 9y ago
    IMO, they were already way, way late to market the day they assigned their first engineer to work on FirefoxOS.
  • wwayer 9y ago
    I'm sore about it too. I had one of the original phones and I loved it. It was simple and elegant. The author mentioned something about spending too much time copying Android. That was definitely misplaced effort. Why not spend the time making something original? IMO, Mozilla spends too much time in general copying others. Look at the Firefox browser. It seems more and more like Chrome every release. I much preferred the original Firefox.
• Santosh83 9y ago
  Mozilla isn't Google or Microsoft. They can't afford to spread their focus, and resources, so widely that effective focus on any particular area is degraded.
  • DannyBee 9y ago
    Google and Microsoft can't afford to do this either :)
    • toxican 9y ago
      Clearly they can. Google especially likes throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks. Whether or not their brand can afford the failures, is another question, but from a financial standpoint, they're much better equipped to weather a failure than Mozilla is.
      • DannyBee 9y ago
        " Clearly they can. Google especially likes throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks." Having worked there for 11 1/2 years, i can tell you this is not really accurate (it was until ~2007). It certainly may appear that way to the outside, however :)
        • nostrademons 9y ago
          I'd put the start date of the "throw stuff against the wall and see what sticks" era at 2004 and end date in late 2010 or early 2011, basically when Larry became CEO again. I started in 2009 and we were still very much encouraged to throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks. It continued, for me personally, until early 2013, but I suspect that company policy changed around early 2011 and it just took 2 years for the memo to filter down my management chain. (I worked in one of the oldest and most experimental departments, Search, and a bunch of my management chain was pre-IPO and so had a lot of latitude with what they did.)
• deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
• jancsika 9y ago
  Any info on Mozilla's speech recognition efforts? Is the aim to do the actual work on the client? Slightly related if anyone knows: is speech recognition a priority for the folks at Gnu/FSF?
  • mobilethrow 9y ago
    GNU is more of an umbrella than an organization with research and goals. FSF is more focused, but mainly towards industry. If you create a decent Siri/Alexa clone and license it under GPL, I'm sure GNU would be happy to adopt it. :) That said, a quick web search dug up these: http://lucida.ai/ http://lucida.ai/ https://jasperproject.github.io/ https://jasperproject.github.io/
  • fabrice_d 9y ago
    The speech recognition effort span a few projects: - https://voice.mozilla.org/ https://voice.mozilla.org/ to collect training data. - an implementation of the DeepSpeech algorithm, with a goal of running inference client side. (https://github.com/mozilla/DeepSpeech https://github.com/mozilla/DeepSpeech)
• mabynogy 9y ago
  Mozilla failed projects as an argument is not really valid as the others (like Google or Microsoft) fail a lot too.
• tsunamifury 9y ago
  Mozilla was never able to leverage its success in the desktop browser market into a successive platform story that evolved into mobile and beyond. They realized this too late, and then their extreme over-correction was to build a new mobile operating system. However an open-source OS already existed in the market with AOSP so FirefoxOS needed to try to thread a convoluted set of needles to justify its existence. It actually was a confusing set of Android Browser web-apps mixed with an OS for new devices -- a contradictory strategy that they could never resolve. The worst part of the current tech-environment is that companies are dead years before they even know it. The next platform is already tearing apart your current one, while its in its infancy. And the entrenched players in the next space will be incredibly hard to unseat. By the time you recognize the threat, attempt to turn the ship to respond, you are already deep down aware that there is very little chance of a happy ending. This results in convoluted late-stage product strategies that have 3+ directions since management knows no single one of them are viable. This is a deeply uncomfortable truth that keeps me up at night.
  • Touche 9y ago
    Thank you for stating this. What people forget is that the early Android Browser was really, really bad. Chrome helped considerably, but it wasn't released until several years into Android. Also remember that Chrome was not preinstalled when it came out; you had to download it. Firefox had an opportunity to become what Chrome for Android eventually became; the better 3rd party browser. But they made 2 critical mistakes (as an outside observer): 1. They didn't take mobile (and specifically Android) very seriously at first. Fennec felt like a side-project at best. 2. XUL didn't work very well on Android, and it took them a long time to make the switch to native. I believe things could have turned out very differently had they done the right thing from the beginning.
    • digi_owl 9y ago
      The built in WebKit engine was perhaps a bit out there, but besides Mozilla there was also Opera who had been doing mobile browsing for quite some time (Opera Mobile originated on Windows PocketPC).
• mehrdada 9y ago
  To me, Mozilla jumped the shark when they did not take a principled stance against web DRM. At that point, to me, their raison d'être of advocating the open web was meaningless, since today, in contrast of when they started, the most popular browser is an open-source product anyway and there is a relatively healthy ecosystem of decentralized power across commercial companies in place to check and balance each other. The place where it breaks and a non-profit model would have been helpful was pushing back on DRM, but Mozilla chose to play along sacrificing its principles for popularity as any other commercial entity would. This is why people like Richard Stallman who don't compromise on principles are critically important.
  • mcantelon 9y ago
    And then there was also that whole Eich purge fiasco.
  • Karunamon 9y ago
    Let's be honest here, though. You're not the target market if you're willing to change browsers on philosophical principle. Principles are fine and dandy until you have to commit suicide to maintain them. Given the good Mozilla does as a going concern, becoming "that one weird browser that can't play your videos" would just result in more people using Chrome and Edge. This kinda reminds me of the GCC/Clang thing. If I recall right, Clang got a huge influx of attention, in part, due to Stallman's unwillingness to allow GCC to export its AST. Perhaps we need a rule for this. "The tech community interprets developer obstinance as damage, and routes around it."
    • DannyBee 9y ago
      "This kinda reminds me of the GCC/Clang thing. If I recall right, Clang got a huge influx of attention, in part, due to Stallman's unwillingness to allow GCC to export its AST. " This is one of a number of reasons, yes.
  • kibwen 9y ago
    Mozilla did take a principled stand against DRM. It proposed an alternative to EME that involved watermarking content rather than client-side DRM. But the combination of Google, Microsoft, and Netflix was enough to win over the W3C, and by the time that the developer community at large finally got up in arms about it (late 2012, early 2013) it was already too late to change course; by that point, Chrome was already shipping EME for use with Netflix. The tragedy is that Mozilla did try, and nobody cared. And, frankly, even if they had cared, I don't think any amount of dev outrage would actually counter such an influential industry consortium (but maybe I'm just cynical).
• pm90 9y ago
  I can empathize with the author on wanting to leave when not feeling like an essential part of a team. Personally, I like coding and designing, and definitely I like being part of a team and working towards a goal. But for all the dev managers out there: try to inoculate some form of ownership, so that your devs feel a sense of belonging. Its not so much that I actively seek to leave when that happens as much as I become more receptive to other opportunities. And recruiters and other companies are very good at luring candidates, so it all adds up.
• digi_owl 9y ago
  As an aside, I have found Firefox on Android to work fine as long as the device is relatively pristine. But quickly deteriorates in performance and responsiveness as internal storage fills up etc. This while webit/blink based browsers seems to behave fine under the same conditions.
  • zeep 9y ago
    Firefox works fine on my low-spec pre-paid Android phone that I purchased for $50 a year ago. And the storage space on that phone just got filled up recently and I haven't noticed slow downs...
  • TheLilHipster 9y ago
    I personally use firefox as my mobile browser. Native add-on support (adblocker, anti-adblockers, anti-tracking, paywall bypasses) are of a huge value to me. I like the consistent experience between the desktop and mobile versions - eliminating the need to download dedicated apps for each adblock-like service you want on your phone and the dependencies that come with it (root etc).
  • wooger 9y ago
    If you think Firefox on Android is fine, please go to http://browserbench.org/Speedometer/ http://browserbench.org/Speedometer/ and let us know how it does. Safari on my near 2 year old iPhone 6s scores 89. Mobile devices are approaching desktop performance for web, but I have never seen anything approaching this from Firefox on Android.