A list of discontinued Mozilla products and services • Hacker News Board

Re: A list of discontinued Mozilla products and services

#81

Post by vlang1dot0 » Tue, Sep 22, 2020, 6:50 PM UTC

syshum wrote: post #56

healsdata wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>> Like Google Nexus? No, they 100% killed Nexus.... Pixel line is in no way, in any shape or form a successor to Nexus. Nexus was a reasonably priced unlocked reference phone targeted to Power Users Pixel is an iPhone Competitor targeted to Carriers to be featured as an iPhone Alternative Completely different markets, focus and goals >>AngularJS? They took the framework in a different direction. Again no, Angular is…

>> Nexus was a reasonably priced unlocked reference phone targeted to Power Users

Nexus One: $530 Nexus S: $530 Galaxy Nexus: $200 with standard 2 year contract (basically the same as any flagship phone at that time) Nexus 4: $300 Nexus 5: $350 Nexus 6: $650 Nexus 6p: $500 Nexus 5x: $379

Arguably Nexus 4 & 5 were the odd ones out with their relatively low pricing. The others (excluding the 5x) were pretty much on part with flagship phone prices at launch time.

Re: A list of discontinued Mozilla products and services

#82

Post by throw_m239339 » Tue, Sep 22, 2020, 6:59 PM UTC

cferr wrote: post #47

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.

It still lives on as KaiOS. My old flip phone runs it.

what model? How did you manage to install it on an old device?

Re: A list of discontinued Mozilla products and services

#83

Post by pletnes » Tue, Sep 22, 2020, 7:03 PM UTC

toyg wrote: post #38

pletnes wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I know it’s there now. But when will it end? Same argument goes for Send and other services.

Re: A list of discontinued Mozilla products and services

#84

Post by Lukas_Skywalker » Tue, Sep 22, 2020, 7:13 PM UTC

jszymborski wrote: post #46

smnrchrds wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I wonder how many XUL projects were out there not from mozilla. ActiveState IDEs and Zotero come to mind.

Songbird while it was alive as well [0] (Anyone here work on that? I have great nostalgia for it and the cute black bird logo) [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Songbird_(software)

I created a few addons and worked on the application itself, continuing with the fork called Nightingale after POTI discontinued Songbird.

One of the addons I created was TagNinja [0] which let you automatically tag, rename and download cover art for entire albums. It tried to match your naming to an online database and used the best match to automatically update your local files. Worked pretty well, but sadly there are no screenshots left :(

I later created an application on XULRunner that let you search for music which was then searched on various online music sites and played immediately. Kind of like Spotify.

The development experience was awesome. Thanks to XULRunner, there was an integrated update mechanism (there was a program to create a binary diff between two versions of the application, and you needed to place an XML file on the server specifying the path to the update file. This was automatically detected by the application and it would update in the same way Firefox does). You could also use Firefox' download manager. Everything was just ready to use and had a really nice UI. I'm definitely missing it :)

[0] http://wiki.getnightingale.com/doku.php?id=add-on:tagninja

Re: A list of discontinued Mozilla products and services

#85

Post by a1369209993 » Tue, Sep 22, 2020, 7:17 PM UTC

darksaints wrote: post #18

Not sure I understand the intent. The Google page had an obvious implied message: don't use google products, they will abandon them even if they are wildly popular, and not even open source the project so someone else can keep it alive. None of these were ever very popular in the first place, and most of them (if not all?) were open source even from the very beginning.

I mean, it's clearly a tu quoque for Google (although apparently a inadvertant one according to the author's comments here?), but it falls a bit flat since Mozilla doesn't have a multi-billion dollar malware business with which to bankroll its projects, and thus has nontrivial opprotunity costs for continuing any given project, as well as for the reasons you mentioned.

Re: A list of discontinued Mozilla products and services

#86

Post by rhn_mk1 » Tue, Sep 22, 2020, 7:54 PM UTC

stickfigure wrote: post #50

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.

Persona stands out here as a huge opportunity lost. It offered a future with a fully decentralized, federated authentication scheme, based on open protocols. Yes, they made some mistakes and adoption was poor. But it worked well and the underlying protocols are something the internet still desperately needs.

Why is it not continued as a community project?

Re: A list of discontinued Mozilla products and services

#87

Post by BeaglePlaza » Tue, Sep 22, 2020, 8:09 PM UTC

rusl1 wrote: post #8

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?

It is already open source https://github.com/mozilla/send

Thanks, very cool!

Re: A list of discontinued Mozilla products and services

#88

Post by BeaglePlaza » Tue, Sep 22, 2020, 8:11 PM UTC

floatingatoll wrote: post #24

smcleod wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yes, but those are business challenges. Some handle it better than others, Mega seems to be doing it with a fairly small staff.

Re: A list of discontinued Mozilla products and services

#89

Post by stickfigure » Tue, Sep 22, 2020, 8:25 PM UTC

rhn_mk1 wrote: post #86

stickfigure wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Persona stands out here as a huge opportunity lost. It offered a future with a fully decentralized, federated authentication scheme, based on open protocols. Yes, they made some mistakes and adoption was poor. But it worked well and the underlying protocols are something the internet still desperately needs.

Why is it not continued as a community project?

This is related to how it was built.

IMO, the main mistake was that it used a centralized authentication system to "bootstrap" the protocol - basically a fallback auth source back when nobody supported the protocol. In theory, after the protocol was adopted widely, they could shut down the Mozilla Persona servers. In practice, it ended up being perceived as "Mozilla Login" and the branding (dropping BrowserID) didn't help.

It didn't have to be this way, although I understand the reasons for it. The fallback auth system could have simply been a piece of software infrastructure that you (the site operator) were expected to run locally. It would have had two downsides: 1) it's a fairly complex piece of software that sends email and interacts with the website, so it would have been hard to make portable, and 2) it would mean doing the email auth dance separately on each site (like we do already).

The main advantage, though, would have been that it wouldn't depend on Mozilla running servers. The project could live on.

Honestly, if I had free time, this is one of the things I would be working on. The protocols are already written up, it just needs software.

Re: A list of discontinued Mozilla products and services

#90

Post by stickfigure » Tue, Sep 22, 2020, 8:30 PM UTC

pavon wrote: post #75

stickfigure wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Persona stands out here as a huge opportunity lost. It offered a future with a fully decentralized, federated authentication scheme, based on open protocols. Yes, they made some mistakes and adoption was poor. But it worked well and the underlying protocols are something the internet still desperately needs.

Agree. What really frustrated me about Persona, was that the way they portrayed the project was that it was not yet ready for production adoption[1]. And then they cancel it because people weren't using it. I know I played around with a proof of concept implementation internally, but never deployed it publicly, which was a decision based primarily on their own messaging. [1] EG the JS implementation and the dependenc…

I used it for my company at the time as part of a dual-auth system (Facebook / Persona). We were even featured as an example on the Persona dev website. The service worked great, even for my technically-not-literate audience. And it was reliable (we sold event tickets).