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The future of Mozilla Hubs
- totetsu 3y agoI always wanted to use Hubs, but was never able to convince others what was cool about it.
- bits-n-bytes 3y agoI hope a new community forms to support hubs, it's such a cool platform!
- djbusby 3y agoRight above you (at the moment) is someone saying they couldn't convince others what's cool about it. What is cool about it?
- andybak 3y agoIt's the only comparable platform that can run on anything from a phone to a PC to a VR headset. It's fully open and based on open standards. It's flawed, but I've seen it used to great effect for community, performance and arts events.
- arpu 3y ago[dead]
- 1317 3y agoWhat was Mozilla Hubs? Never heard of it until now.
- a_bonobo 3y agoThe community took Mozilla's announcement of shutting down parts of the org very negatively, but your comment agrees with my feelings: they're shutting down the stuff nobody uses. Hubs is/was a private 3D world for conference and teaching, it's essentially metaverse: https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/29/for-20-a-month-you-can-host-meetings-in-mozillas-mini-metaverse/ https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/29/for-20-a-month-you-can-hos... But I've never seen anyone actually use it. Good on Mozilla for making the hard decisions.
- wkat4242 3y agoI've considered using it at work but it wasn't really great. There was only a web client. I think it was a weird tangent for Mozilla, but the product itself is not bad at the core. Probably some more specialised org will take over management of it like what happened to Mozilla's other abandoned products.
- a_bonobo 3y agoYes, let's hope! The strategy has worked out sometimes - Google shut down 'Google Refine' 10 years ago, it got turned into 'Open Refine', last release five days ago. https://github.com/OpenRefine/OpenRefine https://github.com/OpenRefine/OpenRefine It's a hugely useful tool if you're working with messy Excel-scale data, i.e., most biologists or social scientists.
- dale_glass 3y agoI think of the weird things that Mozilla does, this one made sense. It's a web-based environment. At the very least it's useful to push Firefox to do 3D better. If you're looking for something desktop based, by the way, I work on such a thing.
- 3y ago
- lolinder 3y agoFor anyone else who missed the Feb 13 announcement: Mozilla downsizes as it refocuses on Firefox and AI (176 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39362481 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39362481
- binkHN 3y ago> refocuses on Firefox About damn time; they let their most popular product languish.
- rcMgD2BwE72F 3y agoHow so? What browser capability lacks in Firefox?
- stavros 3y agoInnovation.
- solarkraft 3y agoReliability, speed, power user features
- 1oooqooq 3y agochrome is only faster if you account for all the tricks, like ultra-aggressive pre-loading of links and using their own DNS instead. With those two things off it is slower today. Also, most google properties were caught red handed slowing down on firefox, like meet and youtube.
- 392 3y agoI use Firefox because they don't threaten to shut down power user extensions every few years. I find it faster and more reliable because it doesn't chew all of my RAM and lead to swap / early-oom-kill. I'm quite confused by folks' opinion of Firefox in this thread because my only problem with it is that maybe once per year (or less) I find an online checkout that is subtly broken in it (sometimes it's just my adblocker). But I have occasionally found sites that are inverse, only working in Firefox.
- dangus 3y agoBefore people pile on the typical negativity I tend to see surrounding Mozilla, can we step back and admire this type of product shutdown announcement? The code is open source, and the announcement emphasizes the ways in which the community can own it if they so desire. If every SaaS that shutdown went this way, I think it would be really pleasant.
- ale42 3y ago> If every SaaS that shutdown went this way, I think it would be really pleasant. Indeed... just think about Google's regular service shutdown announcements
- ijhuygft776 3y ago[flagged]
- djbusby 3y agohttps://m.youtube.com/watch?v=30CKfFLfNh0 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=30CKfFLfNh0
- jodrellblank 3y agoKeep up, threatening women on the internet isn’t okay. I mean, keep up, Mitchell Baker isn’t the CEO anymore. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39302744 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39302744
- Dalewyn 3y agoThreatening anyone, anywhere isn't okay. Doesn't matter if they're a male, female, or something else nor if it happened on the internet or somewhere else. Threats aren't okay. I am giving you the benefit of the doubt and assuming you didn't actually mean the dark implications of specifying women and the internet exactly.
- jodrellblank 3y agoIn the same way 'Black Lives Matter' does not mean 'other lives do not matter', saying 'threatening women is not okay' is not an endorsement of threatening other-gender people, saying that 'threatening people on the internet is not okay' is not an endorsement of threatening people in person. It just made a quippy snappy echoing pattern "X isn't right anymore, I mean Y isn't right anymore" which is better than a long dull balanced diatribe, easier to write on a smartphone, and doesn't outright insult them for the lame "tough guy on the internet" stuff. I was specifically reminded of Kathy Sierra who used to run the Creating Passionate Users blog and the way she was threatened and harassed off the internet. I deleted the first 'anymore' to avoid saying that threatening women used to be okay, which it never was - but I am trying to reference that the internet has historically been a more 'men-abusing-women' space than any other combination and that is changing with things like the #MeToo movement. e.g. [1] women get worse kinds of harassment online, and report being more upset by it, than men. [1] https://www.wired.co.uk/article/women-internet-harassment https://www.wired.co.uk/article/women-internet-harassment
- pyeri 3y agoI call it efficiency and think it's good. If the resources freed from this project are utilized in improving the firefox browser itself (need of the hour), it's win-win for all. The browser's performance and long outstanding bugs, especially on the android/ios platforms, is the reason people are still sticking to chrome and clones. I really hope they will do it.
- 878654Tom 3y agoPeople are sticking to Chrome and clones as they got an advertising budget that is higher than the whole Mozilla foundation cash flow and are installed as default browser on the OS. Combine that with aggressive approaches that try to persuade users from switching when trying to change the default browser on an OS. The features most people on HN are complaining about are very gimmicky and not even widely used in the developer market.
- ByQuyzzy 3y agoThe future? I didn't know it had a past! I ignore everything Mozilla except Firefox and Thunderbird, and I'm slowly quitting Thunderbird. Going to try to move to Seamonkey for everything soon.
- neilv 3y agoThat's wild, that SeaMonkey is seeing updates. Netscape had some good ideas about Internet clients early on. Do you think SeaMonkey has the right developer resources to wrangle that code base for security?
- ByQuyzzy 3y agoI pray that developers leave the project alone as much as possible. Too much love is what is bloating Firefox. At least FF is ripping out their Rust remnants.
- dale_glass 3y agoI thought Thunderbird was doing better as of late? They had some interesting presentations at FOSDEM, and apparently are now on their own.
- addicted 3y agoYeah, Thunderbird is finally getting better. They’re gonna ruffle some feathers as they ditch unmainrained, and unmentionable functionality that has been languishing in the code base for over a decade and currently serve little purpose other than being a security nightmare, but they’ve been improving Thunderbird significantly, especially in terms of speed and performance.
- dale_glass 3y ago> They’re gonna ruffle some feathers as they ditch unmainrained, and unmentionable functionality that has been languishing in the code base for over a decade and currently serve little purpose other than being a security nightmare Like what?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- rollulus 3y agoI used it for my 1:1’s with a coworker who wasn’t too comfortable with such talks. We strolling around through a virtual world, me as a dancing woman in a pyjama and he as a fox made things more more relaxed for him.
- zecg 3y agoNow remove fucking Pocket and all the other stuff no one wanted and just maintain your damn browser.
- giancarlostoro 3y agoThe funnier part to me about Pocket is Mozilla could have just re-implemented it as their own service. I'm still sour about them having a password vault, and then not maintaining it for iOS any longer (and maybe android?) when they were my default password manager for over a decade. I have opted to use BitWarden, but what I preferred about using Firefox's password manager was that it was built-in.
- CatWChainsaw 3y agoHonestly if Mozilla just focused on keeping Firefox up to date that could be a winning move. Whenever MV2 is phased out of Chrome, people will start seeing more ads and noticing their adblockers don't work so well anymore and start browser shopping. They don't need pocket, they don't need Mr. Robot, they don't need the metaverse or crypto. They just need to suck the least.
- cookie_monsta 3y agoI have used firefox for I guess 15 years now and only have a dim awareness of what pocket is. I definitely see the hostility towards it but I don't really understand the depth of it. If you don't like a feature you could just ignore it, right?
- e12e 3y agoInteresting to see Mozilla dropping this while others are all in, like: "Croquet for Unity: Live, network-transparent 3D gaming... but it's so much more": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38769416 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38769416 https://croquet.io/ https://croquet.io/
- someonehere 3y agoGenuine question. I went past the Mozilla office in SF the other day on the Embarcadero. Looks like they closed up shop there. Did they move or focus on being all remote?
- unsignedint 3y agoIt's disheartening to learn of this development. Although my personal usage of Mozilla Hubs is limited, I frequently utilize NTT DOOR [1], which is built upon Mozilla Hubs and enhanced with additional features. Mozilla Hubs has gained some traction in various sectors across Japan, particularly among those eager to join the "Metaverse" trend. However, with the potential decline in upstream support, we may witness a reduction in its adoption, as maintaining and securing it could become challenging. On the other hand, NTT DOOR is overseen by a team that appears quite capable, especially given their ability to create extensions. Nevertheless, there's a lingering concern about its long-term viability as well. [1]: https://door.ntt https://door.ntt
- hackburg 3y ago[dead]
- hackburg 3y ago[dead]