20 dead Mozilla and Firefox products
Those are rookie numbers!
--A single Google product manager, probably
this post was submitted on 28 Sep 2024
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Honestly a number of these were abandoned for reasons that are fair enough.
Additionally, lots of these are open source and either have been or can be forked.
Many of these have public, archived repositories, differently from hundreds of dead Google projects.
Another day, more Mozilla FUD. I just saw the switched on Linux guy posted some too. They arent a perfect company, but lets not pretend they're exactly like google or a mini google. It feels almost coordinated to get you to feel like all companies are compromised, so you should just use the popular thing and forget about privacy and security.
It feels almost coordinated to get you to feel like all companies are compromised, so you should just use the popular thing and forget about privacy and security.
People are criticizing Mozilla for the ads, tracking, and AI stuff. The stuff Google does. Criticizing Mozilla is not an endorsement of Google, in fact quite the opposite.
Their ad metrics thing is 100% private. Nobody, not even Mozilla, can tie the data back to you. Each data point is packaged separately (so that you can't get all of it and easily work out who it is). Mozilla created an effective way to have genuinely privacy-respecting and metrics and they're hated for it.
I don't like ads, I use an adblock, but the internet runs on ads. Ads unfortunately have to exist if we still want all this online content, and if they do exist, they should be private.
With any hope, the likes of the EU will push for this over the kinds of ad systems that Google and Meta push.
As for the AI integration in Firefox - it runs locally and does stuff like offline translation (i.e not sending the contents of the page to Google translate), as well as enhanced screen reader functionality for blind people. Stop trying to equate it to the likes of ChatGPT.
the internet doesn't run on ads. we were all fine before the megacorporations came in and started pushing ads down our throats for delivering the exact same services that already existed for free. it just so happens ads are more profitable, and with more profit, you have more ways to achieve exposure, which gives you more profit, ad infinitum.
point is, we'd be fine without ads.
Do you use any Firefox or chromium web browser, JavaScript, HTML5, CSS, or WASM because I'm 90% most of the development for all of that comes from Ad companies or companies funded by ads.
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What services were free and not ad supported that survived unlimited VC funds from the 90s?
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People see AI and immediately think of ChatGPT. This is despite the fact that AI has been around far longer and does way more things including OCR and data mining. It's never been AI that's the problem, but rather certain uses of AI.
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It is not really FUD to point out that Mozilla wastes ungodly amounts of money on projects of dubious utility instead of investing it into their browser. Their current trajectory doesn't inspire much confidence either. Mozilla started to waste even more money on 'AI' features nobody asked for.
Mozilla doesn't exist to fund Firefox. Firefox exists to fund Mozilla. It's been that since the very fucking beginning: Mozilla is a general internet charity that makes money with a browser. It's always been that way. It never has been any different. I may have to repeat myself: The purpose of Mozilla isn't to fund Firefox the purpose of Firefox is to be a money-maker for Mozilla's charitable causes.
usually you invest in the main product to drive higher returns for diversifying. diversifying first means your baseline is unstable.
During the google money years the ROI on Firefox was so mind-bogglingly high it would've been insanity to drop it all into the browser: It couldn't possibly have soaked up the sheer amount of resources.
Meanwhile, yes they did sink a large amount of resources into it in a way a profit-driven company never would have: They designed a whole fucking new programming language to get proper concurrency into the thing. Rust is, in a very real way, a language to write browsers in. That's its purpose. And then they set the language free because, among other things, you can't make money with it.
Sure, lots of those investments tanked. But OTOH you have stuff like pocket which makes money and could probably keep the lights on by itself. If everything but pocket were to fail Mozilla absolutely would have to downsize, would definitely have to scale back its charity spending, rely more on the FLOSS community to actually write code, but it'd continue with the same kind of force as say Blender, which wouldn't be what it is without its paid staff (both coders and artists) and sidle-hustles (commercial support, training, and cloud services, mostly. Oh, t-shirts and mugs. Don't forget t-shirts and mugs).
I guess overall the gripe I have with the "Mozilla should invest more in Firefox" chorus is that it implies "Do you want Mozilla to be way smaller and less capable of shaping the web than it currently is". People have no sense of the scale of Mozilla, think that it's running on donations etc.
wait, pocket makes money?
There's a subscription if you want and they're also earning some money off referrals. In 2022 they made ~80m dollars off all those side hustles, should probably be 100m by now. Selling the default search engine spot is still the biggest number, about 500m. And they have a piggy bank of over a billion.
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Actually, their new AI thing is actually useful: stays on-device, and summarizes web pages and videos.
But yes, they could stand to spend more money on the browser, and less on their CEO and other non-browser things.
Yeah. Offline translation (i.e. that doesn't send data to Google to translate), better screen reader functionality for blind people? Sign me the fuck up.
People are just seeing "AI" and getting upset about it. Absolutely stupid.
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Enshittification isn't an overnight thing, red flags are building and it's important to call it out.
The Mozilla FUD where I said I like Firefox and pointed out how many of the projects continued in some form after Mozilla ended them?
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Seeing "the source is available here on GitHub", "the project was forked and is now maintained as (other name)", etc. after most of these really helps show the difference with Google. Well that and the length of the article, Google has far more deaths under their belt.
The loss of FirefoxOS was quite a shame at the time, but i can’t say i miss the rest. Servo, on the other hand, is all but dead. Cannot wait to see what the future holds for the project
I think Firefox OS could have a successful reboot today. JavaScript frameworks were not what they are now, and between react, vue, svelte, and angular, I think we are in a good place.
I feel electron and tauri have demonstrated how well JavaScript can be used for interface while allowing it to access system resources in a safe way.
Perhaps it should not be run by Mozilla, though, IMO they should focus on Firefox.
Servo isn't dead it's just on slow burn. Also, under the umbrella of the Linux Foundation Europe. As far as Mozilla is concerned it has served its purpose: Prototype stuff that then got included in Firefox to get rid of a quite large amount of technical debt.
The long and short of it is: Firefox is supposed to make money for Mozilla's charitable causes. It's not an end in itself, but a means to an end.
so you missed the huge amount of effort going into Servo recently?
A forgotten one is webassembly.studio, an in-browser IDE for creating WASM projects with way less pain than other methods. It got discontinued the year I needed it for my school project. It was open source but I failed to rehost it myself and public mirrors only appeared after I spent days trying to make Emscripten work, tore my hair out over WebGL and then finally painfully built the whole thing with CSS (and a bit of JS; yes, it was indeed a disaster).
Do you still use WASM? I've been exploring the space and wasn't sure what the best tools are for developing in that space.
Nope. But I guess a mirror of WebAssembly Studio would still be the best starting point despite its slow development lately. The WAsm plugin for VSCodium was broken for me too.
Note that unlike JS, WASM won't run from file:// URLs; you need to run a local http server or commit to an online repo to run your code. There might be an about:config option to change this but many IDEs (incl. WA Studio, presumably) come with servers for this reason.
I wonder if Mozilla would've benefitted if something like Hello was still around when the pandemic hit. Hello was a Firefox feature that made video chatting easy. You just needed to click the link.
Imagine my disappointment when I realized "Firefox advance" wasn't for the Gameboy advance :(
Twenty things Mozilla the company killed and they didn't mention ITS OWN NAMESAKE APP. It's didn't 'evolve' into Firefox: they split the baby in half and cut away the connective tissue.
Seamonkey is still kinda alive.
I used the Notes quite a bit and thought it was a mistake to get rid of it. People pay for notes and tasks related sync services, so it could have been a revenue source. I also miss Firefox Panorama
I felt the firefox send death, used all the time to share quick files with friends, thankfully I discovered litterbox after they killed it.
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