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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

#31

Post by healsdata »

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.

To be fair, I think that logic applies to some of the items on Google's list too. Like Google Nexus? They changed the name and scope of their phone line. AngularJS? They took the framework in a different direction.

Re: A list of discontinued Mozilla products and services

#32

Post by selykg »

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.

"Abandoned" is probably a bit more accurate.

Re: A list of discontinued Mozilla products and services

#34

Post by azdle »

I'm still sad to this day that FirefoxOS got axed. Doubly so now since I'm trying to find a new phone after my Nexus 5X stopped getting official builds of LineageOS.

I really hope that there's some diabolical plan within Mozilla to bring it back once the wasm world is more established and makes having a fully browser based OS less of a performance hit.

Re: A list of discontinued Mozilla products and services

#35

Post by toyg »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #17
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.

Most of Google's offerings that get killed are free and HN jumps all over that (rightfully, IMO).

No Google product is ever free: you pay for it with your data.

Re: A list of discontinued Mozilla products and services

#37

Post by flamboyant_ride »

rpncreator wrote: post #23

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,…

Ubiquity is one of the best extensions I've used. I hope it makes a good comeback (atleast with this resurgence on chrome).

Re: A list of discontinued Mozilla products and services

#38

Post by toyg »

pletnes wrote: post #25
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.

I honestly don't know what important data you might have been storing or how, but passwords are definitely one thing that is still synchronized between all your FF instances.

Re: A list of discontinued Mozilla products and services

#39

Post by fabrice_d »

azdle wrote: post #34

I'm still sad to this day that FirefoxOS got axed. Doubly so now since I'm trying to find a new phone after my Nexus 5X stopped getting official builds of LineageOS. I really hope that there's some diabolical plan within Mozilla to bring it back once the wasm world is more established and makes having a fully browser based OS less of a performance hit.

Performance is not on the top 5 list of things that killed FirefoxOS...

Re: A list of discontinued Mozilla products and services

#40

Post by jcranmer »

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.

Having personal experience of some of these projects, some of their inclusion is definitely moderately unwarranted.

Take Sunbird. The source tree is organized as a set of backend modules, with various products including as many of them as they need and then throwing up the main frontend window on top (although SeaMonkey really has diverged its UI in quite a few places). Sunbird was the standalone calendar app, but it was decided that the calendar maintenance team was too small to maintain a standalone calendar and instead shifted their UI focus to only supporting SeaMonkey/Thunderbird integration (aka the Lightning extension). No code that actually did anything was removed--I was the one to actually hg rm it here: https://hg.mozilla.org/comm-central/rev/f2e605ee5475

As you mention, MXR was phased out in favor of DXR, which is itself being phased out in favor of searchfox. (I too worked on DXR, back in 2011). Prior to MXR, there was LXR (as in, lxr.mozilla.org), but I'm not sure it's worth mentioning as a separate project since it's basically an unmaintained fork of the LXR project.

While we're on the topic, there's a lot of "missing" webspaces here. Bonsai was a webtool to display atomic CVS commits, Tinderbox was the UI for seeing if the tree was broken (on fire) or not (this later gets supplanted by TBPL (tinderbox/pushlog), itself rewritten to not be a pile of hacks as treeherder), and there's definitely a buildbot clone/fork/I don't know floating about somewhere in the mix.

There's various versions of things like the addons website or support websites that I can't even enumerate off the top of my head as well. Some of these (like old addons stuff) was completely in-house, while others (like pastebin and etherpad) are hosted versions, potentially with some modifications, of other projects. None of these are listed, but do they even deserve to be listed? It's not consumer-facing, and I'm sure even many Mozilla developers would struggle to realize some of this stuff existed.

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