5 ms·

While Mozilla has had quite a few projects that didn't really pan out, I'm not sure you're giving them enough credit. They developed (well... became the first

While Mozilla has had quite a few projects that didn't really pan out, I'm not sure you're giving them enough credit. They developed (well... became the first and most significant major backer of) an entirely new programming language, purely for the purposes of building a better browser. And then devoted tons of resources for years into developing Servo, a massive and complex project that is only being realized now. I'd rather they think big and be ambitious like this, than be yet another stagnating tech company kept alive by former glory. Also, it's unfair to argue that they have neglected the browser. Firefox is a massive legacy codebase that couldn't be cleaned up without breaking A LOT OF THINGS, and at every step in the process they faced people begging them not to break their things, despite the alternative being the continued rot of Firefox's internals. But they did try, for years, to move forward without breaking everything - it just came at the cost of glacially slow and cautious progress.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
hueving 9y ago
Did you forget about the Firefox OS for mobile phones?
- sametmax 9y ago
  Like you can't make mistakes in business, come on ! Who in this bloody comment thread did something as spectacular as mozilla ? As useful ? As hard ? And without grave mistakes ? Seriously get a reality check.
  - trapperkeeper74 9y ago
    It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat. - Theodore Roosevelt
    - thecrazyone 9y ago
      wow, this! This is in fact m status message on Whatsapp since I learnt when recounted by Brene Brown
  - int_19h 9y ago
    The question you should rather be asking is, who in this bloody comment thread didn't expect Firefox OS to fail, back when it was first announced?
    - ZenoArrow 9y ago
      I thought Firefox OS could've found a niche on low-end phones. There's still nothing fundamentally wrong with a phone OS that uses web technologies for its UI, Mozilla wasn't even the first to try it (the Palm Pre got there first). Also, there are tons of phone apps that are just websites in an application wrapper, so it's not like they had to start from scratch to build up their app ecosystem. Lastly, whilst Mozilla has stopped funding it, a fork of it lives on as a smart TV OS for a major TV manufacturer, so it did find a niche, just not the intended one.
      - int_19h 9y ago
        > There's still nothing fundamentally wrong with a phone OS that uses web technologies for its UI There isn't, of course. But that wasn't why it failed. It failed because it didn't answer any questions that weren't already answered, except for some (like "more privacy") that too few people wanted an answer to, to have a market. And that part, unfortunately, was utterly predictable.
        ZenoArrow 9y ago
        As I said before, I saw Firefox OS's primary niche being low-end phones. In that market, many people barely care about the OS being run. They could've easily racked up some decent sales in this area without many of their customers caring about the long term benefits. In some ways, Firefox OS was a case of unfortunate timing, part of me wonders if it would've been better to have a longer incubation period to make the platform better before announcing it, but another part of me thinks that they had to release it when they did, before the vacuum that Symbian had left behind was completely filled by Android.
        Brakenshire 9y ago
  - coldtea 9y ago
    >Like you can't make mistakes in business, come on ! Who in this bloody comment thread did something as spectacular as mozilla ? As useful ? As hard ? Considering this is HN, and not Slashdot, probably several readers...
- trapperkeeper74 9y ago
  It seemed risky but innovation demands taking risks. Mozilla could use another “product” category than mainly just a browser.
- glogla 9y ago
  I don't get people complaining about FirefoxOS. It didn't work out because at that time, the phone hardware wasn't ready, and because they didn't have the political power and economies of scale. But at least they tried. Everyone else just gave up and either accepted Apple's overpriced walled garden or handed over their deepest secrets to Google.
  - abritinthebay 9y ago
    The reasons it did not work were obvious when they announced it however. It was never going to work, and didn’t. Should never had a cent spent on it.
    - AsyncAwait 9y ago
      It was worth a shot certainly, no company ever didn't undertake projects that didn't pan out in the end, at least somebody tried to break the smartphone duopoly. I can imagine the money being spent on much worse things.
  - digi_owl 9y ago
    It was not about the hardware. It was their goals, and their partners. First off their goals, effectively OLPC the phone. A cheap "smartphone" built on web tech that allowed the owner to modify the software as he saw fit. This then clashed with the partners they found, carriers that had zero interest in owner-modifiable phones. It was doomed from the start, but it allowed some execs to pat themselves on the back and tell their fellow gallery dwellers that they had done something for the third world...
lugg 9y ago
The above poster is also neglecting to realise Mozilla is not a normal business in it for profit (as far as I understand it - correct me if I'm wrong.) https://wiki.mozilla.org/Mozilla_Foundation_Projects https://wiki.mozilla.org/Mozilla_Foundation_Projects The foundation has a crazy long history of funding open source and various pursuits. Comparing their style of execution to google is just rediculously unfair on so many levels.
- philipov 9y ago
  Not only that, but it fails to recognize how much money Google has 'wasted' on projects they went on to kill off. They have quite a reputation for it. Google just has a lot more money to 'waste' on research.
- bigbugbag 9y ago
  Are you confusing the not for profit mozilla foundation and the for profit mozilla corporation here ? The foundation had engaged in tax evasion over the money raised through the corporation and ended up settling with the IRS by paying a $1.5 millions fine[1], they had provisioned $15 millions for this fine, suddenly they got a few unexpected millions to spend on whatever. I agree that comparing mozilla to google makes little sense as mozilla was working for google in exchange for 85-95% of their revenue. Without google paying mozilla for their users privacy, mozilla would have had to find an actual business model and would not have had the option to wander away from their core product. On the other hand, without mozilla google would have been mostly the same though would have probably missed some data about millions of users . [1]: https://www.cnet.com/news/mozilla-gets-lucky-settles-irs-audit-for-1-5m/ https://www.cnet.com/news/mozilla-gets-lucky-settles-irs-aud...
  - lugg 9y ago
    Is there a difference? Is there a reason we say Google and not ABC? The seperation is purely legal and financial, no?
    - steveklabnik 9y ago
eric-hu 9y ago
> Firefox is a massive legacy codebase that couldn't be cleaned up without breaking A LOT OF THINGS, and at every step in the process they faced people begging them not to break their things, despite the alternative being the continued rot of Firefox's internals. I've made a couple small contributions to Firefox. Though I'd been a Firefox user for years, this never occurred to me until I looked at the source in 2015 and saw TODO comments to upgrade a C++ operation to something available in C++11 (that's C++ released in 2011) when Firefox dropped Windows XP support. I was surprised at the time that so much of the code was ES6. My mentor pointed out that web app companies might need to wait a few years for users to mass-adopt ES6 browsers. On the other hand, Firefox can use ES6 everywhere in its own code where JS makes sense, since it's only going to be running on latest Firefox JS engine. I think Firefox hit full ES6 compatibility first among the browsers because there was this extra incentive to modernize the codebase. Chrome didn't have to build off of the Netscape source, so it didn't have the same legacy problems in 2008 that Firefox did. I think Mozilla has done a remarkable job keeping pace with Google, taking this into account.
- masklinn 9y ago
  > I think Firefox hit full ES6 compatibility first among the browsers because there was this extra incentive to modernize the codebase. A number of ES6 additions were initially Firefox extensions (though some standard-track features like comprehensions also got removed).
- JosephLark 9y ago
  > something available in C++11 (that's C++ released in 2011) Nit: The standard was finalized in 2011 - August 2011 to be more specific, so quite late in the year. Full compliance in various compilers was not achieved for quite some time after that - MSVC being quite problematic in that regard. Major projects - esp. those compiled on multiple systems across several compilers, like Firefox - absolutely could not just go ahead and start using C++11 in 2011. I was really into native development around that time, and C++11 was the first time I was exposed to the complexities and gotchas around standardization vs. implementation. I've stopped paying as much attention since, but I believe C++14 fared much better.
- 9y ago
bigbugbag 9y ago
I don't know what you're trying to defend here, high ranked people from mozilla admitted themselves they made bad decision and wasted money and time and developers on the wrong things instead of focusing on their core product[1]. They've also been criticized for years for their business model being too dependent on a single income source contrary to their values. They did nothing about it until it became clear that they were losing the game. IMHO this is bad management for years. [1]: https://andreasgal.com/2017/05/25/chrome-won/ https://andreasgal.com/2017/05/25/chrome-won/
- JohnBooty 9y ago
  Their core product, Firefox, has always been on shaky ground. They need to diversify. Firefox will always be at the mercy of multiple other parties. First, OS manufacturers who have unlimited power to steer users toward their own browsers. This was true in the Windows days, and it's an order of magnitude more true in the mobile world where one of the leading platforms, iOS, won't even allow "real" versions of competitors' browsers onto their devices. Second, they're at the mercy of purveyors of web content. How screwed would Firefox be if a couple of major sites like Facebook and Youtube started treating FF like a second-class citizen? FF already kind of feels like a second-class citizen sometimes; as far as I know Google Hangouts still doesn't work on FF: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/google-hangouts-temporarily-wont-work-on-firefox https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/google-hangouts-tempora... So, in the long run, Mozilla is going to have to do something about their tenuous position. Realistically, they can't blow the doors off of incumbent browsers (Edge, Safari, Chrome) like they did back in the IE6 days. That was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Microsoft, having achieved dominance, had literally disbanded their browser team despite the fact that IE6 was atrocious. But that will never happen again. MS, Apple, and Google each have gobs of engineering talent allocated to their browser efforts and the only way Mozilla can excel its way to the front of the pack is if the other three major browser vendors simultaneously slack off at once and give FF an IE6-like opening. Also, the importance of the browser is decreasing. Watch kids on phones. It's all apps. They don't do jack shit in a web browser. A web browser is something they use, at most, to look up homework answers. The world is a better place for Mozilla's presence and I hope that, while keeping FF strong, they manage to figure out an Apple-like second act at some point.
coldtea 9y ago
>Also, it's unfair to argue that they have neglected the browser. Firefox is a massive legacy codebase that couldn't be cleaned up without breaking A LOT OF THINGS They said that for Netscape too (compared to Mozilla/Firefox). At what point do they start writing nice extensible code? Webkit based browsers don't seem to have the same issues.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

hueving 9y ago

Did you forget about the Firefox OS for mobile phones?

sametmax 9y ago
Like you can't make mistakes in business, come on ! Who in this bloody comment thread did something as spectacular as mozilla ? As useful ? As hard ? And without grave mistakes ? Seriously get a reality check.
- trapperkeeper74 9y ago
  It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat. - Theodore Roosevelt
  - thecrazyone 9y ago
    wow, this! This is in fact m status message on Whatsapp since I learnt when recounted by Brene Brown
- int_19h 9y ago
  The question you should rather be asking is, who in this bloody comment thread didn't expect Firefox OS to fail, back when it was first announced?
  - ZenoArrow 9y ago
    I thought Firefox OS could've found a niche on low-end phones. There's still nothing fundamentally wrong with a phone OS that uses web technologies for its UI, Mozilla wasn't even the first to try it (the Palm Pre got there first). Also, there are tons of phone apps that are just websites in an application wrapper, so it's not like they had to start from scratch to build up their app ecosystem. Lastly, whilst Mozilla has stopped funding it, a fork of it lives on as a smart TV OS for a major TV manufacturer, so it did find a niche, just not the intended one.
    - int_19h 9y ago
      > There's still nothing fundamentally wrong with a phone OS that uses web technologies for its UI There isn't, of course. But that wasn't why it failed. It failed because it didn't answer any questions that weren't already answered, except for some (like "more privacy") that too few people wanted an answer to, to have a market. And that part, unfortunately, was utterly predictable.
      - ZenoArrow 9y ago
        As I said before, I saw Firefox OS's primary niche being low-end phones. In that market, many people barely care about the OS being run. They could've easily racked up some decent sales in this area without many of their customers caring about the long term benefits. In some ways, Firefox OS was a case of unfortunate timing, part of me wonders if it would've been better to have a longer incubation period to make the platform better before announcing it, but another part of me thinks that they had to release it when they did, before the vacuum that Symbian had left behind was completely filled by Android.
        Brakenshire 9y ago
- coldtea 9y ago
  >Like you can't make mistakes in business, come on ! Who in this bloody comment thread did something as spectacular as mozilla ? As useful ? As hard ? Considering this is HN, and not Slashdot, probably several readers...
trapperkeeper74 9y ago
It seemed risky but innovation demands taking risks. Mozilla could use another “product” category than mainly just a browser.
glogla 9y ago
I don't get people complaining about FirefoxOS. It didn't work out because at that time, the phone hardware wasn't ready, and because they didn't have the political power and economies of scale. But at least they tried. Everyone else just gave up and either accepted Apple's overpriced walled garden or handed over their deepest secrets to Google.
- abritinthebay 9y ago
  The reasons it did not work were obvious when they announced it however. It was never going to work, and didn’t. Should never had a cent spent on it.
  - AsyncAwait 9y ago
    It was worth a shot certainly, no company ever didn't undertake projects that didn't pan out in the end, at least somebody tried to break the smartphone duopoly. I can imagine the money being spent on much worse things.
- digi_owl 9y ago
  It was not about the hardware. It was their goals, and their partners. First off their goals, effectively OLPC the phone. A cheap "smartphone" built on web tech that allowed the owner to modify the software as he saw fit. This then clashed with the partners they found, carriers that had zero interest in owner-modifiable phones. It was doomed from the start, but it allowed some execs to pat themselves on the back and tell their fellow gallery dwellers that they had done something for the third world...

lugg 9y ago

The above poster is also neglecting to realise Mozilla is not a normal business in it for profit (as far as I understand it - correct me if I'm wrong.) https://wiki.mozilla.org/Mozilla_Foundation_Projects https://wiki.mozilla.org/Mozilla_Foundation_Projects The foundation has a crazy long history of funding open source and various pursuits. Comparing their style of execution to google is just rediculously unfair on so many levels.

philipov 9y ago
Not only that, but it fails to recognize how much money Google has 'wasted' on projects they went on to kill off. They have quite a reputation for it. Google just has a lot more money to 'waste' on research.
bigbugbag 9y ago
Are you confusing the not for profit mozilla foundation and the for profit mozilla corporation here ? The foundation had engaged in tax evasion over the money raised through the corporation and ended up settling with the IRS by paying a $1.5 millions fine[1], they had provisioned $15 millions for this fine, suddenly they got a few unexpected millions to spend on whatever. I agree that comparing mozilla to google makes little sense as mozilla was working for google in exchange for 85-95% of their revenue. Without google paying mozilla for their users privacy, mozilla would have had to find an actual business model and would not have had the option to wander away from their core product. On the other hand, without mozilla google would have been mostly the same though would have probably missed some data about millions of users . [1]: https://www.cnet.com/news/mozilla-gets-lucky-settles-irs-audit-for-1-5m/ https://www.cnet.com/news/mozilla-gets-lucky-settles-irs-aud...
- lugg 9y ago
  Is there a difference? Is there a reason we say Google and not ABC? The seperation is purely legal and financial, no?
  - steveklabnik 9y ago

eric-hu 9y ago

> Firefox is a massive legacy codebase that couldn't be cleaned up without breaking A LOT OF THINGS, and at every step in the process they faced people begging them not to break their things, despite the alternative being the continued rot of Firefox's internals. I've made a couple small contributions to Firefox. Though I'd been a Firefox user for years, this never occurred to me until I looked at the source in 2015 and saw TODO comments to upgrade a C++ operation to something available in C++11 (that's C++ released in 2011) when Firefox dropped Windows XP support. I was surprised at the time that so much of the code was ES6. My mentor pointed out that web app companies might need to wait a few years for users to mass-adopt ES6 browsers. On the other hand, Firefox can use ES6 everywhere in its own code where JS makes sense, since it's only going to be running on latest Firefox JS engine. I think Firefox hit full ES6 compatibility first among the browsers because there was this extra incentive to modernize the codebase. Chrome didn't have to build off of the Netscape source, so it didn't have the same legacy problems in 2008 that Firefox did. I think Mozilla has done a remarkable job keeping pace with Google, taking this into account.

masklinn 9y ago
> I think Firefox hit full ES6 compatibility first among the browsers because there was this extra incentive to modernize the codebase. A number of ES6 additions were initially Firefox extensions (though some standard-track features like comprehensions also got removed).
JosephLark 9y ago
> something available in C++11 (that's C++ released in 2011) Nit: The standard was finalized in 2011 - August 2011 to be more specific, so quite late in the year. Full compliance in various compilers was not achieved for quite some time after that - MSVC being quite problematic in that regard. Major projects - esp. those compiled on multiple systems across several compilers, like Firefox - absolutely could not just go ahead and start using C++11 in 2011. I was really into native development around that time, and C++11 was the first time I was exposed to the complexities and gotchas around standardization vs. implementation. I've stopped paying as much attention since, but I believe C++14 fared much better.
9y ago

bigbugbag 9y ago

I don't know what you're trying to defend here, high ranked people from mozilla admitted themselves they made bad decision and wasted money and time and developers on the wrong things instead of focusing on their core product[1]. They've also been criticized for years for their business model being too dependent on a single income source contrary to their values. They did nothing about it until it became clear that they were losing the game. IMHO this is bad management for years. [1]: https://andreasgal.com/2017/05/25/chrome-won/ https://andreasgal.com/2017/05/25/chrome-won/

JohnBooty 9y ago
Their core product, Firefox, has always been on shaky ground. They need to diversify. Firefox will always be at the mercy of multiple other parties. First, OS manufacturers who have unlimited power to steer users toward their own browsers. This was true in the Windows days, and it's an order of magnitude more true in the mobile world where one of the leading platforms, iOS, won't even allow "real" versions of competitors' browsers onto their devices. Second, they're at the mercy of purveyors of web content. How screwed would Firefox be if a couple of major sites like Facebook and Youtube started treating FF like a second-class citizen? FF already kind of feels like a second-class citizen sometimes; as far as I know Google Hangouts still doesn't work on FF: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/google-hangouts-temporarily-wont-work-on-firefox https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/google-hangouts-tempora... So, in the long run, Mozilla is going to have to do something about their tenuous position. Realistically, they can't blow the doors off of incumbent browsers (Edge, Safari, Chrome) like they did back in the IE6 days. That was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Microsoft, having achieved dominance, had literally disbanded their browser team despite the fact that IE6 was atrocious. But that will never happen again. MS, Apple, and Google each have gobs of engineering talent allocated to their browser efforts and the only way Mozilla can excel its way to the front of the pack is if the other three major browser vendors simultaneously slack off at once and give FF an IE6-like opening. Also, the importance of the browser is decreasing. Watch kids on phones. It's all apps. They don't do jack shit in a web browser. A web browser is something they use, at most, to look up homework answers. The world is a better place for Mozilla's presence and I hope that, while keeping FF strong, they manage to figure out an Apple-like second act at some point.

coldtea 9y ago

>Also, it's unfair to argue that they have neglected the browser. Firefox is a massive legacy codebase that couldn't be cleaned up without breaking A LOT OF THINGS They said that for Netscape too (compared to Mozilla/Firefox). At what point do they start writing nice extensible code? Webkit based browsers don't seem to have the same issues.