6 ms·

This is very exciting. I've had the chance to meet Brendan Eich a couple of times at Moz conferences, and he never fails to strike me as a visionary and a super

by pvnick 13y ago

This is very exciting. I've had the chance to meet Brendan Eich a couple of times at Moz conferences, and he never fails to strike me as a visionary and a super nice guy. Between the asm.js stuff and Rust (which I actually had the privilege of witnessing the much-anticipated unveilling several years ago. Honestly I thought it was an overly-ambitious fools errand but that's why I'm not cto of mozilla), he really seems to be driving Mozilla exactly in the right path of where the web is going.

Pacabel 13y ago
From what I can see, Mozilla is generally going in a direction that's alienating existing users, without necessarily bringing in any new ones. For example, it's widely understood today that Firefox has a much smaller share of the market now than it did a few years ago. Most measures I've seen show a drop from somewhere in the mid 30%'s down to under 20% today. Proportionally fewer Firefox users means less influence over the future direction of the web, of course. SeaMonkey never really had that much penetration to begin with, and still remains basically irrelevant. Firefox OS doesn't really seem to be taking off. While it may sound nice from an ideological standpoint in terms of openness and standards and all of that, in practice it doesn't sound very enjoyable or practical to use. I've seen enough people show displeasure over the low-end devices it's commonly used with, with the highly restrictive development environment (being forced to essentially use JavaScript/HTML5/CSS for apps), with a lack of features, and a lack of apps. Those are very serious and fundamental shortcomings. Thunderbird and Persona have both been "turned over to the community". That appears to be a polite way of saying that Mozilla has given up on them. Asm.js is pretty unremarkable. It's a human-unfriendly subset of JavaScript. NaCl is a much better approach that would ideally be adopted by the major browsers. Unfortunately, we've seen nothing but hostility toward it from Mozilla. Rust sounds appealing, but it's not really usable today. We keep hearing that there will be a stable release sometime later this year, but we'll need to see that actually happen first before it'll have any chance at being widely adopted. Even then, it's doubtful Rust alone will have any major impact on the web any time soon. Servo may, but that's clearly very much also an unusable work in progress at this point. So overall, I don't see Mozilla as heading in a very positive direction. They really haven't had any wildly successful new offerings in quite some time now, and what they have been working on lately doesn't seem to be getting all that much adoption. Without a large base of users, their influence over the development of the web will just get weaker and weaker.
- aluhut 13y ago
  I see with my parents and their peer group I've been supporting for years why the numbers for market share may also be misleading. I installed Firefox on all of their computers, taking favorites from IE. They all use Chrome today. You know why? They don't know. It was just there. Suddenly. Already set as preferred browser application. Every time I come by, I uninstall it. Every time I come back, it's there again. Installed with some regular update. (If someone has an idea how I could prevent it being installed at all, I would be very thankful) After testing it for some months I saw absolutely no reason to switch. After some more months now, I see is as an annoying piece of crapware I started to hate. So even if it may lead in marked share, it doesn't mean that people likes or wants it.. I see the style and feature growth within FF as a problem. I liked the old school application I could modify with stuff I need. Less is more. Today I have the feeling using a tool that has features I'll never find or use at all with a look I don't like and need to style-down. But still: I can style it down. It has all the Add-Ons I need and it works more stable and less resource hungry then Chrome. If anything happens, there is ONE process. I kill it, restart, works again. I stay where I am. Thanks for the great job!
  - bronxbomber92 13y ago
    I really have no idea what point this post is trying to make. I see anti IE (installing FF over IE), anti Chrome ("crapware") and anti FF ("feature growth within FF) sentiments, but no tie-together logic. Do you have a conclusive point you're trying to get across?
    - bzbarsky 13y ago
      I think aluhut's point is that at various points in time Chrome has come bundled with various other software on Windows, often enough as an opt-out install, not an opt-in. Needless to say, Google has spent a fair amount of money on those sorts of deals. This is an effective, if sleazy, way of gaining market share.
- soapdog 13y ago
  Firefox OS has been launched in 16 countries. You may not be on an emerging market but people on most of these countries are enjoying what affordable smartphones can give them. In Venezuela alone Firefox OS already has a larger marketshare than Windows Phone. Firefox OS went from 0 to 16 countries, 4 hardware manufacturers and 4 global telecoms in 2 years. And it did that while being open, accepting contribution, encouraging sharing and open culture, placing privacy and values over profits. Yes, Android and iOS are larger, much much larger, but we need to think what kind of world do we want in ten years. A world where each mobile device is a silo with its platform under complete draconian control of a single company thats usually from the northern region of California or where each platform is embracing open standards, where apps are light and cross platform where people can go from consuming content to creating content fairly easy (HTML being way easier to learn than Obj-C). There is a reason why we're using the World Wide Web right now. Its not an app. Its an ecosystem based on standards where everyone agrees more or less to play by the same rules. Its also easy to learn so anyone can put anything online, it doesn't matter if you're building a home page about crappy gingerbread people, you don't need permission from Apple or Google or a lot of knowledge to do it. The Web won as main medium to exchange stuff because its easy and open. Initiatives such as NaCL and similar are not open. ASM.js based stuff work even on platforms that doesn't support it. Its about being compatible and playing well with others. Mozilla is a strong player and it is not playing a game where the others need to lose for it to win. Its playing a game where cooperation is the main objective. Firefox OS doesn't need to win, it just need to show people that you can do whatever you need using web technologies that don't belong in a silo. Sorry if this sounds like a rant but I get really frustrated when people seem to be content to throw all the advancements we did for the web during the last 20 years into something as shallow as user base numbers. Four years ago no one could believe that a whole OS could be built on top of a web engine. That browser would be able to play AAA games without plugins. That we could do videoconferences using p2p with nothing but HTML/CSS/JS and yet we can. Now, put your imagination and dreams to work and imagine what the next four years will bring. Thing a bit longer and imagine what could happen if instead of trying to embrace proprietary tech we decided to move the web forward...

by pvnick 13y ago

Pacabel 13y ago

From what I can see, Mozilla is generally going in a direction that's alienating existing users, without necessarily bringing in any new ones. For example, it's widely understood today that Firefox has a much smaller share of the market now than it did a few years ago. Most measures I've seen show a drop from somewhere in the mid 30%'s down to under 20% today. Proportionally fewer Firefox users means less influence over the future direction of the web, of course. SeaMonkey never really had that much penetration to begin with, and still remains basically irrelevant. Firefox OS doesn't really seem to be taking off. While it may sound nice from an ideological standpoint in terms of openness and standards and all of that, in practice it doesn't sound very enjoyable or practical to use. I've seen enough people show displeasure over the low-end devices it's commonly used with, with the highly restrictive development environment (being forced to essentially use JavaScript/HTML5/CSS for apps), with a lack of features, and a lack of apps. Those are very serious and fundamental shortcomings. Thunderbird and Persona have both been "turned over to the community". That appears to be a polite way of saying that Mozilla has given up on them. Asm.js is pretty unremarkable. It's a human-unfriendly subset of JavaScript. NaCl is a much better approach that would ideally be adopted by the major browsers. Unfortunately, we've seen nothing but hostility toward it from Mozilla. Rust sounds appealing, but it's not really usable today. We keep hearing that there will be a stable release sometime later this year, but we'll need to see that actually happen first before it'll have any chance at being widely adopted. Even then, it's doubtful Rust alone will have any major impact on the web any time soon. Servo may, but that's clearly very much also an unusable work in progress at this point. So overall, I don't see Mozilla as heading in a very positive direction. They really haven't had any wildly successful new offerings in quite some time now, and what they have been working on lately doesn't seem to be getting all that much adoption. Without a large base of users, their influence over the development of the web will just get weaker and weaker.

aluhut 13y ago
I see with my parents and their peer group I've been supporting for years why the numbers for market share may also be misleading. I installed Firefox on all of their computers, taking favorites from IE. They all use Chrome today. You know why? They don't know. It was just there. Suddenly. Already set as preferred browser application. Every time I come by, I uninstall it. Every time I come back, it's there again. Installed with some regular update. (If someone has an idea how I could prevent it being installed at all, I would be very thankful) After testing it for some months I saw absolutely no reason to switch. After some more months now, I see is as an annoying piece of crapware I started to hate. So even if it may lead in marked share, it doesn't mean that people likes or wants it.. I see the style and feature growth within FF as a problem. I liked the old school application I could modify with stuff I need. Less is more. Today I have the feeling using a tool that has features I'll never find or use at all with a look I don't like and need to style-down. But still: I can style it down. It has all the Add-Ons I need and it works more stable and less resource hungry then Chrome. If anything happens, there is ONE process. I kill it, restart, works again. I stay where I am. Thanks for the great job!
- bronxbomber92 13y ago
  I really have no idea what point this post is trying to make. I see anti IE (installing FF over IE), anti Chrome ("crapware") and anti FF ("feature growth within FF) sentiments, but no tie-together logic. Do you have a conclusive point you're trying to get across?
  - bzbarsky 13y ago
    I think aluhut's point is that at various points in time Chrome has come bundled with various other software on Windows, often enough as an opt-out install, not an opt-in. Needless to say, Google has spent a fair amount of money on those sorts of deals. This is an effective, if sleazy, way of gaining market share.
soapdog 13y ago
Firefox OS has been launched in 16 countries. You may not be on an emerging market but people on most of these countries are enjoying what affordable smartphones can give them. In Venezuela alone Firefox OS already has a larger marketshare than Windows Phone. Firefox OS went from 0 to 16 countries, 4 hardware manufacturers and 4 global telecoms in 2 years. And it did that while being open, accepting contribution, encouraging sharing and open culture, placing privacy and values over profits. Yes, Android and iOS are larger, much much larger, but we need to think what kind of world do we want in ten years. A world where each mobile device is a silo with its platform under complete draconian control of a single company thats usually from the northern region of California or where each platform is embracing open standards, where apps are light and cross platform where people can go from consuming content to creating content fairly easy (HTML being way easier to learn than Obj-C). There is a reason why we're using the World Wide Web right now. Its not an app. Its an ecosystem based on standards where everyone agrees more or less to play by the same rules. Its also easy to learn so anyone can put anything online, it doesn't matter if you're building a home page about crappy gingerbread people, you don't need permission from Apple or Google or a lot of knowledge to do it. The Web won as main medium to exchange stuff because its easy and open. Initiatives such as NaCL and similar are not open. ASM.js based stuff work even on platforms that doesn't support it. Its about being compatible and playing well with others. Mozilla is a strong player and it is not playing a game where the others need to lose for it to win. Its playing a game where cooperation is the main objective. Firefox OS doesn't need to win, it just need to show people that you can do whatever you need using web technologies that don't belong in a silo. Sorry if this sounds like a rant but I get really frustrated when people seem to be content to throw all the advancements we did for the web during the last 20 years into something as shallow as user base numbers. Four years ago no one could believe that a whole OS could be built on top of a web engine. That browser would be able to play AAA games without plugins. That we could do videoconferences using p2p with nothing but HTML/CSS/JS and yet we can. Now, put your imagination and dreams to work and imagine what the next four years will bring. Thing a bit longer and imagine what could happen if instead of trying to embrace proprietary tech we decided to move the web forward...