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Mozilla closes Connected Devices division, lays off 50

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Re: Mozilla closes Connected Devices division, lays off 50

#91

Post by coldtea »

trome wrote: post #78
fabrice_d wrote: post #27

I 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…

>where they have an illicit monopoly

Not in any legal sense of the word.

Re: Mozilla closes Connected Devices division, lays off 50

#92

Post by sametmax »

synotna wrote: post #82
trome wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Electrolysis? Servo? Rust? I'm far from an expert, but the switch to multithreading has been perilous to not break everyone's favourite plugins, likewise the switch from XUL Electrolysis is basically here and working, slowly rolling out

Indeed. From where I stand Mozilla is working hard at making the transition it's just:

- it's a hard problem

- they don't have the resources of MS or Google

- they have a much bigger extension culture and must support it

- the current work is not sexy and visible and hence get little advertisement

Mozilla created an entire freaking language to level up their game. And in a few years it became one of the most promising technology of the decade, with a vibrant community.

If it was a movie, this period of their life would be the scene with a small outsider named "Moz" training by night in a dirty gym or during the night under the rain.

Next one will be the training paying off and him kicking the other guy's ass in the ring.

But you need the unsexy and hard training first.

Re: Mozilla closes Connected Devices division, lays off 50

#93

Post by sangnoir »

trome wrote: post #78
fabrice_d wrote: post #27

I 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…

> 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?

Call me cynical, but Mozilla is made of people. People don't mind making a name for themselves: no one works at Mozilla for life. One might as well prepare for life at tech giants or startups. Firefox is printing money so they can afford the Jonesing (for now).

A less cynical reason is that Mozilla shares the same hiring pool as startups and tech giants and people go back and forth; changing mindsets is hard.

Re: Mozilla closes Connected Devices division, lays off 50

#94

Post by pjmlp »

flukus wrote: post #89
pjmlp wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tizen went that way and no one really wanted to go back to using pure C for GUI apps, hence the revamped C++ SDK, followed by the adoption of .NET.

I don't really mean for app development to be in raw c, just the core libraries so that bindings can be made available for a number of languages (go, rust, c++, .net). Lately I've been playing with gtk in c and now rust and it's fantastic how simple gui development is.

You can see the C APIs here,

https://developer.tizen.org/development/training/native-appl...

https://developer.tizen.org/development/api-references/nativ...

And the upcoming .NET SDK here

https://developer.tizen.org/development/tizen-.net-preview/i...

Here you can have a look how C++ SDK used to look like, before the Enlightenment guys took over the show on Tizen 2.3.

http://mikeasoft.com/~mike/tizen2-native-dev-draft/

https://developer.tizen.org/ko/forums/native-application-dev...

Nice for you to enjoy doing GUIs in C, but having been coding since the 80's and exposed to so many more productive ways to do GUI development, I don't enjoy it at all, and many that do UI/UX as part of their daily job think the same way.

Re: Mozilla closes Connected Devices division, lays off 50

#95

Post by tybit »

overcast wrote: post #16
rrdharan wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> web apps will be able to cover 50-80% of native app use-cases in the next 2-3 years Feels like this has been 2-3 years out for almost as long as "native apps" have existed. Reminds me of the first scene in "Snatch" - Turkish: What's happening with them sausages, Charlie? Sausage Charlie: Five minutes, Turkish. Turkish: It was two minutes five minutes ago.

I think we're really starting to see the saturation point with native apps, particularly on phones. I am so sick of having to install yet another mobile app, for something that basically shows me a bunch of text, pics, and like buttons. 90% of these shouldn't exist. There is a time and place for it, but I think there is going to be a shift to the web app with more OS integration stuff.

Hard to tell, Android Instant Apps and the like may solve those problems and keep native apps ahead of web apps.

Re: Mozilla closes Connected Devices division, lays off 50

#96

Post by pjmlp »

BuckRogers wrote: post #53
carussell wrote: post #44

Earlier 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…

No thin-client OS that depends on the web is privacy respecting, as applications run on other people's computers.

I have to trust them as much as the closed source native applications on my computer, and I know which ones I would prefer.

Re: Mozilla closes Connected Devices division, lays off 50

#97

Post by pjmlp »

sidlls wrote: post #30
overcast wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we're really starting to see the saturation point with native apps, particularly on phones. I am so sick of having to install yet another mobile app, for something that basically shows me a bunch of text, pics, and like buttons. 90% of these shouldn't exist. There is a time and place for it, but I think there is going to be a shift to the web app with more OS integration stuff.

Aren't most of those "native" apps just webapps packaged standalone with some framework anyway?

Not really, not the majority of the ones that people really care about and don't drain their battery.

Even those that are, they can access the full spectrum of OS APIs, instead of a document model bended to be a VM.

Re: Mozilla closes Connected Devices division, lays off 50

#98

Post by flukus »

pjmlp wrote: post #94
flukus wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really mean for app development to be in raw c, just the core libraries so that bindings can be made available for a number of languages (go, rust, c++, .net). Lately I've been playing with gtk in c and now rust and it's fantastic how simple gui development is.

You can see the C APIs here, https://developer.tizen.org/development/training/native-appl... https://developer.tizen.org/development/api-references/nativ... And the upcoming .NET SDK here https://developer.tizen.org/development/tizen-.net-preview/i... Here you can have a look how C++ SDK used to look like, before the Enlightenment guys took over the show on Tizen 2.3. http://mikeasoft.com/~mike/tizen2-native-dev-draf…

Thanks, I'll take a look over the weekend.

I've use qt, gtk, win32, swing, winforms, etc, right up to more modern approaches like wpf with mvvm and similar JavaScript ones. After going back to c and gtk I think we've really lost our way and made some really simple problems really complicated.

Re: Mozilla closes Connected Devices division, lays off 50

#99

Post by Baeocystin »

pjmlp wrote: post #88
chris_wot wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He wasn't talking about consumer purchases - he was talking about education.

Still an US only phenomenon, I haven't seen anyone in education related domains with a Chromebook, specially since in Europe it is up to the students to care for their own hardware, as consumer purchase.

If I am reading this article correctly, it looks like the %/market that Chromebooks have managed to capture in the field of education is large worldwide.

http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/3058517

Re: Mozilla closes Connected Devices division, lays off 50

#100

Post by [deleted] »

maxlybbert wrote: post #10

The original announcement that Netscape would release Mozilla as open source included some FAQs, including one question along the lines of "are you going to release your own operating system?" The answer was that there was no good reason to build an operating system on a browser. If only they had remembered that!

[deleted]
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