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“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”

#111

Post by toyg »

jldugger wrote: post #106
paride5745 wrote: post #3

This 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…

> including proprietary services (e.g. Pocket) forcing the creation of the Icecat fork. The search bar is an equally proprietary backend service, and pretty much universally funds Mozilla, but I don't hear many complaints about it.

At the time it was implemented, it was controversial; but the overall sentiment was that it was a necessary evil to get Mozilla some stable funding. Also, OpenSearch is a standard and anyone could easily replace the default.

Pocket was simply an extension that got bundled outright. After decades of Mozilla declining to include even uber-popular extensions in order to "keep up appearances" of being a neutral community project, they basically endorsed a random startup without any sort of consultation or public competition. That's what people objected to. If they had implemented a standard and just blessed Pocket as a reference implementation without bundling it, nobody would have complained.

Re: “We will end development on Firefox OS for smartphones after the 2.6 release”

#112

Post by epoch1970 »

pcwalton wrote: post #102
Karunamon wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I said more nannyish AND chromelike. Three good plugins? Have nine. Here's my plugin load right now: * uBlock * Privacy Badger * HTTPS Everywhere * Calomel SSL Validation * FoxReplace * Vimperator (which used to be Pentadactyl before Mozilla decided that I can't use it anymore[1]) * Noscript * DevEdition theme enabler * 1Password And please spare me the "insecure legacy tech" argument. The new plugin architecture exp…

XUL is insecure legacy tech. There isn't a coherent argument otherwise: XUL is insecure in that it gives addons all the power of the browser, and XUL is legacy, unspecified, single-implementation-wedded XML stuff from the '90s whose functionality has been entirely superseded by HTML at this point. The idea that nothing can be insecure and legacy unless the new alternatives support absolutely everything the old techno…

Is there a list somewhere of which extensions have been deemed "important"?

As far as I'm concerned, every single Firefox extension I currently use is important, regardless of what Mozilla thinks of their importance.

I also have several extensions that I wrote myself for my own personal use. I'm not looking forward to having to modify them, assuming they'll even work with the new model.

This is a good example of the Firefox brand being tarnished.

The name "Firefox" used to make me think of empowerment, and being able to get so much more out of the web browser and the web experience.

Now when I think of "Firefox" it makes me think of uncertainty, of broken extensions, of my time being wasted updating my own extensions, and of enduring all of this for little to no benefit to me.

Re: “We will end development on Firefox OS for smartphones after the 2.6 release”

#113

Post by zanny »

nileshtrivedi wrote: post #96
Manishearth wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This only matters if you use Pocket. This is no different from search integration. There's local code that lets you do Google/Yahoo/etc searches from the home page or the awesomebar. What these sites do with your data on the server side is unknown.

Firefox gives many choices for search integration. Perhaps something like that would have made Pocket more acceptable.

Almost like you could install Pocket whenever you wanted to use it in your browser and remove it when you didn't want it, like you can with search engines?

Also, I would not particularly call those search engines a great comparison. They are simply keyworded bookmarks - you set the URL and when you enter a character or click the icon it loads the bookmark. The extent of integration was the search options menu where you can add any website's search field and it inherits the icon from that website, so its generic.

Re: “We will end development on Firefox OS for smartphones after the 2.6 release”

#114

Post by whitegrape »

izacus wrote: post #59
listic wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One can choose from the older models, then, or use a monitor. I don't want the crappy smarts in my devices.

Again, where do we find one of those? Pretty much all stores carry only smart TVs in decent sizes.

Online. Why would you buy a TV from a physical store unless it's really the cheapest place to get it?

Re: “We will end development on Firefox OS for smartphones after the 2.6 release”

#115

Post by yeukhon »

snom380 wrote: post #107
yeukhon wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Eventu…

Sure. But do you think FFOS will be closer to FreeBSD or closer to WebOS?

I'd say WebOS if I have to choose one. I don't know the reputation of WebOS, but given Mozilla is behind FFOS, a lot of the contributors are drawn from existing active Mozilla contributor pool. I don't expect an immediate drop of contributions but I can bet within a year many contributors (paid or not) will put time into other new Mozilla-branded open source projects. Just look at Persona, huge community love, but very little activity (there is always something you can improve but why so few?) Because so few people actually use Persona at large scale (maybe a few), and those who do have to seek for a migration path.

Re: “We will end development on Firefox OS for smartphones after the 2.6 release”

#116

Post by JonathonW »

jcranmer wrote: post #88
Karunamon wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 "let's throw out semantic versioning since Chrome already did it" Firefox never followed semantic versioning. Versions 2.0, 3.0, 3.5, 3.6, and 4.0 all had equally major changes to them. It's worse if you look at the internal version numbers: 1.8, 1.9, 1.9.1, 1.9.2, 4.0. The change to the rapid-release model was driven more by the pain of the protracted Firefox 4 release than by trying to ape Chrome. > T…

As far as I can tell, the Australis work dates back roughly to 2012 (that's when their wiki meeting notes start, and when the Australis tracking bug in Bugzilla was opened).

You may be mixing Australis up with the theme work done for Firefox 4.0 (which moved tabs to the top by default and added the orange Firefox menu button). The early work on that would've been contemporaneous with the earliest public versions of Chrome (2/3/4)-- the design that would become Firefox 4 started being shown off in public around the fall of 2009.

Re: “We will end development on Firefox OS for smartphones after the 2.6 release”

#117

Post by CaptSpify »

kmfrk wrote: post #75
izacus wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Honestly, I'd just return it and get a computer monitor. I'm not putting that much work into my TV

Re: “We will end development on Firefox OS for smartphones after the 2.6 release”

#118

Post by atomicUpdate »

hardwaresofton wrote: post #66
creshal wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I could. I could also just do the same with my beefier Android phone instead.

So what I did was bought a beefier android phone (not that beefy, just a Nexus 5), and flashed FirefoxOS on it :) The default phones that FFOS comes with are pretty weak (except for the flame which wasn't that bad), but they have some pretty decent support for flashing popular phones. I don't blame you if you don't do that, obviously -- android is definitely easier to use and update, and better supported than Firefox…

> So what I did was bought a beefier android phone (not that beefy, just a Nexus 5), and flashed FirefoxOS on it :)

Isn't going from Android to FFOS taking a few steps backwards?

Re: “We will end development on Firefox OS for smartphones after the 2.6 release”

#119

Post by asadotzler »

Boot to Gecko is an open source technology stack. Firefox OS is a product built on that stack. B2G can live on if there's interest from enough hackers and testers.

A decade ago, Mozilla abandoned the Mozilla Application Suite in favor of Firefox, both built on the Gecko technology stack. Because a product ends doesn't mean the open source technology ends too.

(BTW, volunteers picked up the Mozilla Application Suite, renamed it to Seamonkey, and it still runs today.)

Re: “We will end development on Firefox OS for smartphones after the 2.6 release”

#120

Post by bobajeff »

50CNT wrote: post #74
bobajeff wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/ ]

That's just a client we were talking about a service. (eg. Yahoo Mail, Gmail etc.)
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