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A list of discontinued Mozilla products and services
- joeldo 6y agoDoesn't have quite the same effect as the Google one.
- raspyberr 6y agoThe funny thing is the Google one has google trackers on it and requires JS to view whilst this one has neither.
- moooo99 6y ago> The funny thing is the Google one has google trackers Maybe that'll change once Google kills Google Analytics
- wizzwizz4 6y agoGoogle Analytics must Google loads, or they wouldn't push it so much.
- avery42 6y agoHaha, the Google one definitely looks better than my 30 lines of CSS though. If anyone is interested, I'm using a very simple Hugo setup, just one template that reads from a yaml file with all the services. I'm using BunnyCDN to host (first time), cache hit rate is currently sitting at 70% which I'm happy with.
- danesparza 6y agoI'm still bitter over Google Reader. Damn you, Google.
- me_me_me 6y agoRIP Google Reader Feedly is almost as good though. Its the first replacement that I stuck with.
- andrewshadura 6y agoThe Old Reader looks and feels pretty much the same.
- sp332 6y agoGoogle deleted a bunch of archived blogs that are no longer accessible though.
- freebasenic 6y agoI knew someone was going to make/post this when Mozilla discontinued Firefox Send, lol
- martin_a 6y agoI'd really have loved to have a brand-associated file sending service next to WeTransfer. Any other suggestions?
- BeaglePlaza 6y agoThese are amazing efforts. I wish they would open source Firefox Send, I would love to continue the project. Let someone else take it over. Many of these projects seem like they may have been funded by a specific donor, then when the donor got what they needed from the project, ended the funding?
- eeh 6y agohttps://github.com/mozilla/send https://github.com/mozilla/send
- smcleod 6y agoFirefox Send is open source: https://github.com/mozilla/send https://github.com/mozilla/send
- floatingatoll 6y agoThe costs of running a Send server probably exceed those of its source code alone, which makes it a tricky proposition to say "here's the source code" alone. I'm not familiar myself, but I imagine it looks the same as any other public non-P2P file sharing service: - Webapp & hosting costs - Data storage & transfer costs - Copyright & Abuse response costs
- BeaglePlaza 6y agoYes, but those are business challenges. Some handle it better than others, Mega seems to be doing it with a fairly small staff.
- rusl1 6y agoIt is already open source https://github.com/mozilla/send https://github.com/mozilla/send
- BeaglePlaza 6y agoThanks, very cool!
- toyg 6y agoSome of these are a bit spurious. I mean, Venkman was replaced by Firebug, which was much better. MXR was similarly replaced by DXR. Unlike Google, which look much more arbitrary in their shutdowns, Mozilla typically kill projects that are already on their last leg, or replace them with something objectively better.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- pletnes 6y agoMaybe that’s true, but this is why I never use any mozilla features to store important data such as passwords - suddenly the project is on the last leg, and shortly thereafter the last leg is cut off life support.
- toyg 6y agoI honestly don't know what important data you might have been storing or how, but passwords are definitely one thing that is still synchronized between all your FF instances.
- pletnes 6y agoI know it’s there now. But when will it end? Same argument goes for Send and other services.
- toyg 6y agoProfile sync is so deeply tied into the browser that ripping it out to abandon it would likely be more costly than just keeping those servers running forever, I think. As long as FF lives, it will keep that sync going. Any new "external" feature is another matter, of course.
- teekert 6y agoIm getting a bit afraid about my use of lockbox indeed... Also for all the people I recommended it tot :s
- avery42 6y agoHi HN, this is a quick website I made this weekend. It was super fun reading about older projects and digging up links in the Internet Archive! The list is far from complete (I still have a long list of services I stumbled across to add), please let me know if you have any feedback, or find anything I missed or got wrong. It was difficult to find info on the older items on the list!
- ChrisSD 6y agoGreat list! But some of the last few entries seem like a bit of stretch to call "killed by Mozilla". They look like Netscape leftovers that were simply open sourced.
- smcleod 6y agoI’m not sure “killed” is the correct term as most of Mozilla’s offerings have been free and often open source. I think “discontinued” or something like “stopped internal development of” would be more sensible, but I guess that wouldn’t make a good domain name or get the clicks.
- hn_throwaway_99 6y agoMost of Google's offerings that get killed are free and HN jumps all over that (rightfully, IMO).
- floatingatoll 6y agoIt's an effective word for manipulating the emotions of the reader, and neatly sidesteps the HN prohibition on clickbait titles by putting it in the domain name where it can't be corrected to something less manipulative. I don't necessarily think that it was malicious, and given the parallel to the Google site of the same name, I can't really object strongly, but it's still uncomfortable to see a domain name wielded in service of that outcome for any topic (even the original Google one).
- gilrain 6y agoIt's just a domain shorthand at this point, like arewewhateveryet.com
- david_draco 6y agoBetter Mozilla products being discontinued than Mozilla being discontinued.
- darksaints 6y agoNot sure I understand the intent. The Google page had an obvious implied message: don't use google products, they will abandon them even if they are wildly popular, and not even open source the project so someone else can keep it alive. None of these were ever very popular in the first place, and most of them (if not all?) were open source even from the very beginning.
- a1369209993 6y agoI mean, it's clearly a tu quoque for Google (although apparently a inadvertant one according to the author's comments here?), but it falls a bit flat since Mozilla doesn't have a multi-billion dollar malware business with which to bankroll its projects, and thus has nontrivial opprotunity costs for continuing any given project, as well as for the reasons you mentioned.
- rpncreator 6y agoThanks for putting the list together! There are a few that you may want to include: 1. Mozilla Labs (first iteration) 2. Mozilla Ubiquity (which we are seeing the concept re-emerge in Google Chrome) 3. Mozilla Prism 4. Mozilla Bespin (which sorta-lives-on) 5. XULRunner 6. Mozilla Test Pilot (1st and 2nd iterations) I'm likely missing a few more. But a lot of these were experiments, and not concrete product offerings, so take with a grain of salt.
- flamboyant_ride 6y agoUbiquity is one of the best extensions I've used. I hope it makes a good comeback (atleast with this resurgence on chrome).
- eb0la 6y agoI guess I still have the O'Reilly XUL book somewhere. XULRunner was the precursor to Atom. It was the way mozilla bootstraped firefox long time ago ¿before gecko? and they made public the tool to do it by yourself. They eventually abandoned XUL entirely because it was hard to maintain and extend. I wonder how many XUL projects were out there not from mozilla.
- smnrchrds 6y ago> I wonder how many XUL projects were out there not from mozilla. ActiveState IDEs and Zotero come to mind.
- jszymborski 6y agoSongbird while it was alive as well [0] (Anyone here work on that? I have great nostalgia for it and the cute black bird logo) [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Songbird_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Songbird_(software)
- notRobot 6y ago> In January 2010, Philips announced they would ship a personalized version of Songbird with some of their line of portable audio/video players. I used Philips Songbird quite a bit in the early '10s. I really loved it. It was so much better than iTunes, IMO.
- dvh 6y agoMissing remote xul!
- me_me_me 6y agoThey really do try to compete with Google at every level they can :)
- antoineMoPa 6y agoAbsent from this list: the shader editor. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Tools/Shader_Editor https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Tools/Shader_Editor I really enjoyed using this.
- azdle 6y agoI'm still sad to this day that FirefoxOS got axed. Doubly so now since I'm trying to find a new phone after my Nexus 5X stopped getting official builds of LineageOS. I really hope that there's some diabolical plan within Mozilla to bring it back once the wasm world is more established and makes having a fully browser based OS less of a performance hit.
- fabrice_d 6y agoPerformance is not on the top 5 list of things that killed FirefoxOS...
- azdle 6y agoI mean, that's probably true. But if I tell myself that the problem was technical I can still hold out hope that they're secretly solving those problems and will try again. :P I've still never seen a good retrospective on what went wrong, do you happen to have any links/stories?
- fabrice_d 6y agotl;dr: we could not get some apps officially supported. This creates a chicken and egg situation where app editors wants to see market traction to invest in your platform, but users are not buying devices because their must-have app is not available. KaiOS managed to break this cycle thanks to the large device shipments sold by Jio in India.
- cferr 6y agoIt still lives on as KaiOS. My old flip phone runs it.
- throw_m239339 6y agowhat model? How did you manage to install it on an old device?
- perardi 6y ago
- varshithr 6y agoI really liked pastebin.mozilla.org and used it a lot back in the day.
- kbrosnan 6y agoIt collected a lot of garbage data and was quite the headache to manage. https://paste.mozilla.org/ https://paste.mozilla.org/ is fairly similar but there is no longer an option to persist data for more than 21 days.
- codyogden 6y agoNice list! Glad Killed by Google was an inspiration. :)
- fullstop 6y ago"A walkthrough of Venkman shows off many of it’s features." *its Also, was Camino ever officially a Mozilla product?
- avery42 6y agoThank you, will fix that! I really should hook up a spell/grammar checker on post-commit or something... > Also, was Camino ever officially a Mozilla product? It was until at least late 2004/early 2005, when the website was hosted at mozilla.org/projects/camino [0]. The project's website moved to caminobrowser.org in March 2005 [1], but it's unclear if it remained a Mozilla project after that. [0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20041117091214/http://www.mozilla.org/projects/camino/ https://web.archive.org/web/20041117091214/http://www.mozill... [1]: http://caminobrowser.org/blog/2005/#itsofficial http://caminobrowser.org/blog/2005/#itsofficial
- CoUHKT57BSe 6y agoYou can also add 3D View to the list, that was so handy. Funny that Mozilla killed it and inspired MS and now it's in Edge :-D
- kroltan 6y ago3D View taught me that Bootstrap layouts are maniac and ridiculously convoluted, with layouts deeper than they are wide on default settings. To this day I always try to keep the element tree as shallow as possible (turns out this also has performance benefits in most cases)
- johnchristopher 6y agoWasn't there some kind of firefox hello, messaging thing ? https://support.mozilla.org/fr/products/firefox/chat-and-share/firefox-hello-webrtc https://support.mozilla.org/fr/products/firefox/chat-and-sha...
- maproot 6y agoI have a bad habit of keeping everything I done forever online.
- specialist 6y agoKilling projects isn't bad. I've worked places that simply could not kill off their zombie projects. It was hell. None of these killed projects evokes any kind of wistfulness, nostalgia, or resentment in me. (Edit: Except Persona. Agreeing with another reply.) Certainly nothing like when Autodesk killed Generic CADD. What Google, Microsoft, Autodesk, others do is altogether different. The projects they snuff are often economically important to their customers and partners. That's sabotage.
- kevincox 6y agoThe project I am most salty about being dropped is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matchstick_TV https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matchstick_TV. Of course they are probably right that without Netflix support it wouldn't find widespread adoption, however I would have loved to have an open Chromecast.
- sciurus 6y agoThis was not a Mozilla project.