I don't think Mozilla is lost - although they lost a battle. The war continues, and now it's all about Servo and Rust. Don't be too shocked if a new browser-based-OS comes out in time, too; with the new tech. The timing for such a thing is better every day as HTML5 adoption increases, etc. And remember how far Mozilla fell once upon a time before an independent effort called Firefox revived them and then some. Rust has massive advantages. I do wish they'd look over at Chromium's license and change their license terms so that they could be almost assured that they were building the future because they were building for everybody, though.
Mozilla closes Connected Devices division, lays off 50
71–80 of 131 posts
Re: Mozilla closes Connected Devices division, lays off 50
#72I don't know where journalists get their facts, but this article is terrible. 1) FirefoxOS was killed a year ago. 2) We never attempted to bring FxOS to other kind of connected devices beyond phones and TVs. If they had took the time to check the projects being worked on (see https://wiki.mozilla.org/Connected_Devices/Projects ) they would have understood the activities a bit better. For instance, the device built fo…
Unfortunately Ars Technica is not even a shadow of the site it once was. It now reprints press releases and rumors like so many other tech sites.
Ars Technica used to be very bad... I thought that it was getting better in the last year or two but I guess that I was wrong.
Re: Mozilla closes Connected Devices division, lays off 50
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unfortunately Ars Technica is not even a shadow of the site it once was. It now reprints press releases and rumors like so many other tech sites.
Ars Technica used to be very bad... I thought that it was getting better in the last year or two but I guess that I was wrong.
When I refer to how it used to be I'm talking like 10+ years ago. It used to be one of the best tech sites bar none.
Re: Mozilla closes Connected Devices division, lays off 50
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are you comparing the web now to the web then? I would even argue that Chromebooks are a pretty big flop.
By what metric?
Chromebooks are successful as school computers, children's laptops and literally nothing else. If that was the goal then great but I've never seen someone who wasn't under 14 or a student using one.
Re: Mozilla closes Connected Devices division, lays off 50
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
The thing that's probably second most upsetting about Firefox OS is this: If you say what you've just said right now, you'll be told you have the benefit of hindsight working in your favor. On the other hand, if you had the ability to go back in time to make your argument back then, even with perfect omniscience about how things would turn out, then you would have been subjected to claims that there is no market for…
I had perfect omniscience on this one. At least I thought that was the direction they were taking FirefoxOS. In fact, I sent a product request over to Panasonic to make a FirefoxBook about 6 years ago[0] and made sure I mentioned it to Eich as well[1]. Since they were integrating it into their TVs I figured they were my best bet to push the product idea onto. I'm a Mozilla fan and wanted a privacy respecting, libre t…
Is it too late for them to try such a strategy? It seems Google has proven there's a market for this sort of product. Or is Google Docs (etc.) an additional part of the appeal of Chromebooks? I know there's been backlash regarding student usage tracking with ChromeOS; seems like a point of differentiation for Mozilla. It also would seem to have more synergy with improving the desktop Firefox client.
Re: Mozilla closes Connected Devices division, lays off 50
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is true. It may not be a truth people in professional circles like to here. But PCs used to be mass market consumer products in the 90s (during the internet boom) but now Smartphones, tablets and in some cases set top boxes have taken their place.
This is exactly the kind of argument I'm trying to burn to the ground in the second part of my comment above (see "nerd niche itch"). You write this, thinking that you're revealing some uncomfortable truth that the bubbleheads don't understand. But the real truth is that Chromebooks are killing. The penetration Chromebooks have made in education is huge. And even if it were an entirely no-profit/break-even situation,…
That is an US phenomenon, there are hardly any queues of people buying Chromebooks outside US, let alone having them on display.
Re: Mozilla closes Connected Devices division, lays off 50
#77I don't know where journalists get their facts, but this article is terrible. 1) FirefoxOS was killed a year ago. 2) We never attempted to bring FxOS to other kind of connected devices beyond phones and TVs. If they had took the time to check the projects being worked on (see https://wiki.mozilla.org/Connected_Devices/Projects ) they would have understood the activities a bit better. For instance, the device built fo…
Unfortunately Ars Technica is not even a shadow of the site it once was. It now reprints press releases and rumors like so many other tech sites.
I'm not sure how you can make those claims; if anything, they've been even more active in reviewing hardware, etc. since they actually have better corporate sponsorship.
The only thing I do miss are the articles written by Jon Stokes: https://arstechnica.com/author/hannibal/
But all things change, and the heady era of technological advances that we saw in the 90s and early 2000s are long gone, at least in the desktop and server computer world.
Electronics has now become mainstream-consumer oriented and the sites reflect that interest, since after all, they only exist due to advertising funds.
Re: Mozilla closes Connected Devices division, lays off 50
#78I don't know where journalists get their facts, but this article is terrible. 1) FirefoxOS was killed a year ago. 2) We never attempted to bring FxOS to other kind of connected devices beyond phones and TVs. If they had took the time to check the projects being worked on (see https://wiki.mozilla.org/Connected_Devices/Projects ) they would have understood the activities a bit better. For instance, the device built fo…
The journalists definitely got their facts wrong here, but they missed the overarching story. Why is Mozilla acting like a tech company/startup, and not as a non-profit here to push Firefox and other projects under their management to new heights?
Mozilla has basically ignored Firefox for the past few years and let it languish as a single threaded browser in a multi-threaded world, where the other 3 major competitors are highly optimizing their browsers to the respective laptop/tablet/phones. Google with Chromebooks (shipping more than Macbooks[1]) & Android, Microsoft with Surface, Apple with iOS (where they have an illicit monopoly) & on Macbooks.
Mozilla can fight this battle and provide a better user experience, but as it stands a few years have been sunk down the drain on Firefox OS and Mozilla isn't even trying to leverage it into a Chromebook killer!
Sure, trying to win on price (which is what Moz tried with Firefox OS) isn't going to be a battle that can be won. Google and others already have the relationships with manufacturers who know they can drive volume, but what they don't have is the community support & buy in that Mozilla has. Create a compelling user experience! Netscape won the war against the monoculture of a decade ago by creating a user experience that people loved, in spite of the IE6 monoculture of the time.
Today, we have a Webkit monoculture, with Edge nipping at its heels. This is a very similar situation to a decade ago, where Deer Park Alpha lead the way out of the shadowy darkness, with flash free video & audio and performance and protocol support that ran circles around the others.
1 - http://www.theverge.com/2016/5/19/11711714/chromebooks-outso...
Re: Mozilla closes Connected Devices division, lays off 50
#79I don't know where journalists get their facts, but this article is terrible. 1) FirefoxOS was killed a year ago. 2) We never attempted to bring FxOS to other kind of connected devices beyond phones and TVs. If they had took the time to check the projects being worked on (see https://wiki.mozilla.org/Connected_Devices/Projects ) they would have understood the activities a bit better. For instance, the device built fo…
Is the layoff part wrong too?
No.
Re: Mozilla closes Connected Devices division, lays off 50
#80Never mind sufficient adoption to challenge iOS/Android, what are the chances any of these other OS's even manages to survive? * Windows Phone * Tizen * Ubuntu Touch * Sailfish OS Honorable mentions: CyanogenMod, Plasma Mobile
Tizen is a joke, no serious developer would ever care about it.
- Branched from MeeGo
- Got the BADA SDK, with its C++ dialect similar to the horrible Symbian C++
- After the Enlightenment guys joined in, the SDK was thrown away and replaced by C one
- A new C++ SDK was created to appease the crowds that in spite of Symbian C++ like experience wouldn't touch pure C
- Recently they adopted .NET as the new apps tooling besides C
So no serious business will ever considere earning money on Tizen apps.
Salfish, nice idea but didn't learn from OS/2 and BlackBerry.
People don't want Qt/C++ and freedom. They want the apps their friends are using.
No point in getting an OS that emulates Android when they can get the real deal.
Windows Phone similarly to Tizen, suffered from the SDK changes between 7, 8, 8.1 and 10.
However Microsoft has the muscle to still push them as enterprise device. Apparently some companies are actually doing that.