Can the mods edit the title? Mozilla officially stopped their development efforts of Firefox OS on smartphones, not the brand in general.
“We will end development on Firefox OS for smartphones after the 2.6 release”
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Re: “We will end development on Firefox OS for smartphones after the 2.6 release”
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I just buy plain old dumb TVs, no need to worry about anything. This is a bit short sighted. In the near future, we will only have 'smart' TVs to chose from.
Or you can just buy a smart tv and not use any of it's features. I will never use built in functionality and always opt for my RasPlex (RPi 2), AppleTV, or Chromecast.
It does not necessarily help. I accidentally bought a Smart TV about one year ago, an LG model with WebOS. I never dared connect it to the internet, but it was horrible nonetheless because the software was so abysmally slow.
For example, to change a channel:
1. Grab the remote, press "5", press "OK". 2. Put down the remote. 3. Wait five seconds. 4. Overlay with "5" appears. 5. Wait five seconds. 6. Channel switches.
I sold this shit a few months ago, and am now using my five-year-old dumb TV again.
Re: “We will end development on Firefox OS for smartphones after the 2.6 release”
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
Mozilla wants people to be able to trust the Firefox brand. They don't even use "Firefox" branding on their own nightly or dev builds. They only put it on software that's been through their own QA. So you're free to use the code, but they won't let you put the name or logo on any forks or even builds they haven't signed off on.
I think at this point that the Firefox brand has been tarnished, unfortunately. For many average users, the term "Firefox" reminds them of the slow browser they used to use before switching to Chrome. For more advanced users, the term "Firefox" reminds them of the browser that includes ads (even if these are being removed), has unnecessary functionality built in (Pocket, Hello), and has undergone questionable UI chan…
I disagree.
Most "normal" users who used Firefox before Chrome came around are savvy enough to understand that software improves and evolves. There's no doubt that Chrome gave Firefox a much-needed shot in the arm.
Many developers/advanced users, including myself, see Firefox as a bastion of freedom in what is otherwise a land grab by major OS vendors, an attempt to further increase their lock-in. Users remember Firefox as the browser that was so flexible, Firebug was possible, which sent every browser vendor into a tizzy to try to clone the featureset natively. Users remember Firefox as the browser that gives them control over their experience, unlike Chrome which babysits and won't let you interfere with Google's need to harvest data.
The first 2 years that Chrome was out, it trounced Firefox all around. I switched back to Fx around that time. These days, Firefox's JavaScript performance is comparable if not better than Chrome's [0] and its extension ecosystem and extreme configurability make it a much better option than Chrome for me. The only reason I use Chrome now is to take advantage of the proprietary extensions that allow me to use Netflix or Flash on Linux.
Mozilla has always and will always be a tinkerer's vendor. These people are not going to be offended when reasonable experiments are conducted, nor when reasonable experiments fail, as Firefox OS did.
The biggest grudge I hold against Mozilla is really more about the community than the company itself, and that's the Brendan Eich debacle.
Re: “We will end development on Firefox OS for smartphones after the 2.6 release”
#74This is a good news. Firefox OS was never a real product, but a PoC. IMHO, Mozilla should absorb the Tor project and focus on Free Web technologies, e.g. a really Free email service and a Free cloud storage service. Yes, I intentionally use capitol F for Free. How to raise money? Freemium model. A good email+cloud storage service, with the optional pay model for using a custom domain. And stop attacking the Linux dis…
I would love to use a email/webmail service from Mozilla. It would have to be ads supported but there might not be as much of a stigma against it as with suggested tiles.
I mean there is Mozilla Thunderbird, but it hasn't been the focus of much development since 2012, with intention to decouple it from Firefox development in 2015.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Thunderbird] [https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/]
Re: “We will end development on Firefox OS for smartphones after the 2.6 release”
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you don't allow it access to your network, it's a dumb TV again.
Unless it shows "you need to connect me to internet to finish the setup wizard" like bunch of other smart devices do.
You could turn it on initially and turn it off subsequently I guess.
I guess you could also set up some smart devices with some log-in credentials on a guest network you activate once a month to allow everything to update without it being too invasive or something.
Re: “We will end development on Firefox OS for smartphones after the 2.6 release”
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
> IMHO, Mozilla should absorb the Tor project Tor has too many legal and ethical issues around it for Mozilla to take that kind of risk. > And stop attacking the Linux distros for the Firefox trademark (forcing them to create the Iceweasel fork) or including proprietary services (e.g. Pocket) forcing the creation of the Icecat fork. Debian made a bunch of changes to Firefox and was still calling it Firefox. Debian al…
> Pocket code in Firefox is open source, you can examine it yourself You can see the client side code but what Pocket is doing with all the data on the server side is completely opaque and source is unavailable.
So is basically every single website you visit and all the data you share with them wittingly or unwittingly. Pocket isn't a password manager, it's a short scrapbook of things you want to read later.
Re: “We will end development on Firefox OS for smartphones after the 2.6 release”
#77Some people seem gleeful about this, but Firefox OS is actually an excellent Smart TV OS, especially at a time where a lot of manufacturers feel comfortable inserting ads into people's TVs without their consent. It's obviously ridiculous that this is something we need to deal with in the first place, but I'm definitely happy that I got one of the few TVs without a scummy OS. The smartphone OS was always a vague idea…
It wasn't going to function well as a TV OS though. The UI descriptions and mockups were overly complex and seemed like something designed for a computer rather than a smart TV. I like how open Mozilla was about it. I just disliked the actual OS, and how it was made.
I don't know whether we'll ever have the privilege of a great TV OS, though. The iTV was supposed to deliver us (from) that, but looks like we're stuck with just the Apple TV for now.
I'm not impressed with any interfaces, but at least my Panasonic's FxOS is better than my old Panasonic's.
Re: “We will end development on Firefox OS for smartphones after the 2.6 release”
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or you can just buy a smart tv and not use any of it's features. I will never use built in functionality and always opt for my RasPlex (RPi 2), AppleTV, or Chromecast.
It does not necessarily help. I accidentally bought a Smart TV about one year ago, an LG model with WebOS. I never dared connect it to the internet, but it was horrible nonetheless because the software was so abysmally slow. For example, to change a channel: 1. Grab the remote, press "5", press "OK". 2. Put down the remote. 3. Wait five seconds. 4. Overlay with "5" appears. 5. Wait five seconds. 6. Channel switches.…
Ugh, channel switching is such a goddamn pain, even on modern TVs. It blows my mind that this is still a bloody thing with fancypants TVs.
Re: “We will end development on Firefox OS for smartphones after the 2.6 release”
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think at this point that the Firefox brand has been tarnished, unfortunately. For many average users, the term "Firefox" reminds them of the slow browser they used to use before switching to Chrome. For more advanced users, the term "Firefox" reminds them of the browser that includes ads (even if these are being removed), has unnecessary functionality built in (Pocket, Hello), and has undergone questionable UI chan…
I disagree. Most "normal" users who used Firefox before Chrome came around are savvy enough to understand that software improves and evolves. There's no doubt that Chrome gave Firefox a much-needed shot in the arm. Many developers/advanced users, including myself, see Firefox as a bastion of freedom in what is otherwise a land grab by major OS vendors, an attempt to further increase their lock-in. Users remember Fire…
Users remember Firefox as the browser that gives them control over their experience
Power users, or users? Among the crowd here, sure. But in the rest of the world?
unlike Chrome which babysits and won't let you interfere with Google's need to harvest data.
Firefox has been getting more and more nannyish and chromelike with every release.
* There's the "let's throw out semantic versioning since Chrome already did it"
* There's the UI rework which sacrificed information density and usability for what I evaluate as a weak attempt to look more like Chrome.
* There's the "thou shalt not install plugins from places other than we say is okay" rule that was recently implemented - which Chrome did first.
* There's the upcoming "all your plugins are going to break, many permanently" when XUL gets thrown out and the new hotness won't have feature parity at release (in other words, Firefox plugins will be as limited as Chrome plugins)
Re: “We will end development on Firefox OS for smartphones after the 2.6 release”
#80tl/dr: ffos is not dead, it's open source, and it's already a product, not a PoC. I probably read like a broken record at this point: Despite Mozilla dropping development on it, FirefoxOS is still not "dead". Open source things only die when no one has interest in them any more. AFAIK FirefoxOS is still the most open mobile operating system. If some other company decides to take up where mozilla left off, fork Firefo…
Sure thing. You can say about BSD as not all major players today deploy BSD servers, but the community is strill thriving. But I bet to you FFOS is going to be a much smaller community over time and eventually so small only those people are dogfooding themselves. Code will live on but nothing else and that's why people called it dead.
There is a difference between dead in popular perception and dead eternally. Eventually you will left with maybe one person looking at the code and then nobody ever looking at the code even on a monthly basis.
Who knows.