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A list of discontinued Mozilla products and services

killedbymozilla.com

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Re: A list of discontinued Mozilla products and services

#21

Post by floatingatoll »

toyg wrote: post #19
BeaglePlaza wrote: post #4

These are amazing efforts. I wish they would open source Firefox Send, I would love to continue the project. Let someone else take it over. Many of these projects seem like they may have been funded by a specific donor, then when the donor got what they needed from the project, ended the funding?

> Many of these projects seem like they may have been funded by a specific donor, Uhm, that's not the impression I got, as a total outsider. Things like FFSend or FFNotes were thought up as extensions to the browser model; others were attempts to cook up de-facto web standards (Persona, deuxdrop); others were just moonshots (FFOS). In the early years, Netscape's needs definitely played a large part; after they got th…

Persona was also known as BrowserID. I've never heard of deuxdrop before though!

Re: A list of discontinued Mozilla products and services

#23

Post by rpncreator »

Thanks for putting the list together! There are a few that you may want to include:

1. Mozilla Labs (first iteration)

2. Mozilla Ubiquity (which we are seeing the concept re-emerge in Google Chrome)

3. Mozilla Prism

4. Mozilla Bespin (which sorta-lives-on)

5. XULRunner

6. Mozilla Test Pilot (1st and 2nd iterations)

I'm likely missing a few more. But a lot of these were experiments, and not concrete product offerings, so take with a grain of salt.

Re: A list of discontinued Mozilla products and services

#24

Post by floatingatoll »

smcleod wrote: post #6
BeaglePlaza wrote: post #4

These are amazing efforts. I wish they would open source Firefox Send, I would love to continue the project. Let someone else take it over. Many of these projects seem like they may have been funded by a specific donor, then when the donor got what they needed from the project, ended the funding?

Firefox Send is open source: https://github.com/mozilla/send

The costs of running a Send server probably exceed those of its source code alone, which makes it a tricky proposition to say "here's the source code" alone. I'm not familiar myself, but I imagine it looks the same as any other public non-P2P file sharing service:

- Webapp & hosting costs

- Data storage & transfer costs

- Copyright & Abuse response costs

Re: A list of discontinued Mozilla products and services

#25

Post by pletnes »

toyg wrote: post #7

Some of these are a bit spurious. I mean, Venkman was replaced by Firebug, which was much better. MXR was similarly replaced by DXR. Unlike Google, which look much more arbitrary in their shutdowns, Mozilla typically kill projects that are already on their last leg, or replace them with something objectively better.

Maybe that’s true, but this is why I never use any mozilla features to store important data such as passwords - suddenly the project is on the last leg, and shortly thereafter the last leg is cut off life support.

Re: A list of discontinued Mozilla products and services

#26

Post by floatingatoll »

smcleod wrote: post #11

I’m not sure “killed” is the correct term as most of Mozilla’s offerings have been free and often open source. I think “discontinued” or something like “stopped internal development of” would be more sensible, but I guess that wouldn’t make a good domain name or get the clicks.

It's an effective word for manipulating the emotions of the reader, and neatly sidesteps the HN prohibition on clickbait titles by putting it in the domain name where it can't be corrected to something less manipulative. I don't necessarily think that it was malicious, and given the parallel to the Google site of the same name, I can't really object strongly, but it's still uncomfortable to see a domain name wielded in service of that outcome for any topic (even the original Google one).
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