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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

#91

Post by jszymborski »

Lukas_Skywalker wrote: post #84
jszymborski wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I definitely used TagNinja! Loved SongBird and used it quite a bit throughout high school.

Re: A list of discontinued Mozilla products and services

#92

Post by sciurus »

avery42 wrote: post #58
jcranmer wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Thank you for the feedback, I'm really glad to get some insight from someone who worked on some of these projects! Thanks for the info about Sunbird, I had the understanding that some code was shared, but wasn't sure how much. I'll update it's description at some point. You bring up good points about stuff like forks, internal tooling, and hosted versions. Up until now I haven't included forks and hosted versions tha…

> I'd like to include internal tools where possible, but I think the main obstacle is finding sufficient info...

But why? What's the purpose of a public website with a catchy domain that chronicles when internal-facing tools were killed (usually because they were replaced with something better)?

I understand the agenda behind Killed By Google, but right now your site just leaves me scratching my head.

(Disclaimer: I work for Mozilla on the ops team that ran many of these services)

Re: A list of discontinued Mozilla products and services

#93

Post by _rdvw »

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.

Shamless plug: I provide heavily patched 8.1 builds for bullhead with over 250+ kernel CVE patches.

https://divestos.org/index.php?page=devices&base=LineageOS https://github.com/Divested-Mobile/DivestOS-Build/blob/maste...

Re: A list of discontinued Mozilla products and services

#94

Post by bscphil »

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)

Oh man, I had completely forgotten about that. I was so excited about the project when it was announced (I was at pretty much the perfect age to get into following free software projects), and used it on Windows for years. It was actually a pretty decent alternative to using iTunes for a while, which was pretty slow and flaky on Windows, at least at the time.

Pretty sure I contributed an add-on or some code, or something. Also followed Nightingale for a while, mentioned by a sibling comment.

Re: A list of discontinued Mozilla products and services

#95

Post by rascul »

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?

Portier "considers itself a spiritual successor to Mozilla Persona" and is also sponsored by Mozilla (or at least the claim appears to be made on the bottom of the web site).

https://portier.github.io/

Re: A list of discontinued Mozilla products and services

#96

Post by toyg »

pletnes wrote: post #83
toyg wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Profile sync is so deeply tied into the browser that ripping it out to abandon it would likely be more costly than just keeping those servers running forever, I think. As long as FF lives, it will keep that sync going.

Any new "external" feature is another matter, of course.

Re: A list of discontinued Mozilla products and services

#97

Post by Anthony-G »

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.

The thing that annoyed me most about Persona was that it wan't publicised very well. I only (re)joined the tech sector around 2013 but even though I've been personally using Netscape/Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox since the late 90s, I never heard about Persona until the announcement of its discontinuation in 2016.

Re: A list of discontinued Mozilla products and services

#98

Post by hakfoo »

perardi wrote: post #77
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.

What would FirefoxOS have brought to the average consumer or phone manufacturer? If your selling points are “it’s all web apps and open source, isn’t that great!”, that is a…marketing challenge, to be sure.

I think a big appeal is having a second vendor to keep the market leader honest.

Google selling their own hardware and trying to stiffen requirements on Android devices are probably making most vendors feel a little nervous. Not necessarily that they'll be driven out of the market, but more that it will be ever harder to differentiate via software. App developers are clearly champing at the 30% tax bit.

So I'd expect the push to come from manufacturers and devs first, dragging consumers along. They might pick niches like low-cost devices where it's "this or a flip phone", like when the cheap Lumias outsold the entire rest of the Windows Phone market.

Comparable would be Samsung's tail-chasing with Tizen and Huwaei's forced embrace of its own OS.

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