461–470 of 611 posts
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Lack of WhatsApp support did not kill FirefoxOS.
Commercially, it totally did. Without Whatsapp we could not sell enough devices, but without enough volume Whatsapp was not interested to build an official app. Chicken, meet egg!
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also completely baffled by this. i'd have happily paid $100/yr if it went directly to firefox dev, not their other marketing shenanigns. they fired so much talent to focus on junk to drive revenue, that it's not something i can do anymore. very sad.
It's weird that when I tell my kids that when they want to help, but they won't help in the way that someone needs help, that they aren't actually helping, they understand it. Mozilla has buckets of money, between the Corporation and the Foundation. They are separate, for good-ish reasons? But they are separate. If they start allowing customers or businesses to pay for Firefox, then they will have to provide an entir…
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> Imagine a web developer learning just a few APIs and being being able to customize their web app for smart TVs This was WebOS in 2009. Windows Phone, WebOS, Meego and Ubuntu Phone all "failed" around the same time period as Firefox OS. I have a hard time laying blame solely on Mozilla there.
MeeGo was a bizarre affair. There was I think Maemo, Moblin, LImo, SLP, Bada, Leste, MeeGo, Mer, Tizen, Sailfish, Nemo... all forks, merges, reforks. They seemed to spend all their time and energy continually rebranding, forming and disbanding consortiums, creating new websites and logos. They never just got on with it.
So, what would have happened to Android, if Google didn't have the Maps / Play Store big stick?
Every device manufacturer wants to differentiate. None of them are good at it.
> (Ironically [the Firefox UI bits] were called “chrome” before Chrome even existed.) Not ironic, intentional. Chrome was made by former Firefox engineers, and the name was a joke about exactly this. I remember struggling to come up with a better name for the app other than this code name and then they eventually launched it with it anyway.
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> support Mozilla's mission and Firefox development. That's the rub here. Mozilla's mission is a much larger scope than just Firefox. Some people want to support Firefox, but don't want to donate to Mozilla's mission. One such reason is because it's important to have more than one browser implementation. There's no way to support that without Mozilla allocating some portion of your donation to some unrelated part of…
Ok but now you're asking for something weirder and more restrictive than "paying for firefox", right? If I buy a laptop from Lenovo I don't get to say oh I don't want to pay for tablet development, I just want all of this money to go to your laptop division.
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> support Mozilla's mission and Firefox development. That's the rub here. Mozilla's mission is a much larger scope than just Firefox. Some people want to support Firefox, but don't want to donate to Mozilla's mission. One such reason is because it's important to have more than one browser implementation. There's no way to support that without Mozilla allocating some portion of your donation to some unrelated part of…
Ok but now you're asking for something weirder and more restrictive than "paying for firefox", right? If I buy a laptop from Lenovo I don't get to say oh I don't want to pay for tablet development, I just want all of this money to go to your laptop division.
(Maybe you can? I haven't donated to them...)
Mozilla doesn't have a real sustainable business model right now. FireFox OS could have provided such model, in fact, its successor kaios is doing very well and one can imagine that in the future, it will be the primary OS of half the mobile users on the planet. 'Feature phones' aren't dead. They provide a cheap alternative to touch phones, are usually more robust, and allowing them to run web apps instead of MIDP st…
>So yes Firefox was always enough. Leadership at Mozilla doesn't get it. that is why founder started brave.
> Remember what was really cool in Firefox? Tabs! Ah how this resonates with me so much, I remember the difference of tabless IE and oh so magical Netscape / Firefox when those were new. I consider myself Mozilla fanboy to this days. But alas, every time I try clean installation with default settings I cannot believe how … bad this became and how far it diverged from original experience: by now Firefox is browser wit…
I don't mind customizing things the way I want them, but it would be helpful if there was an easier way to share setting between profiles.
It seems to me that Mozilla isn't just technologically pessimistic, but they also just lack vision for the future of the web and what roles the browser could play in it. Right now, the only reason we're talking about them is that Firefox is sitting atop a sizable share of a practically impenetrable market. Very successful companies are being started around much less of a product, but Mozilla seems to genuinely have n…
Even an Electron like package as well - but also sold with support contracts, and offered as FOSS to the community - would have lots of potential.
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Charging money for the browser will quickly push them down to single-digit marketshare, and will make "works on Chrome, ship it" the only correct way to develop for the web. If you want to pay for using their browser, you could always donate to them.
the donations never went to firefox. it was dispersed to many of their other misguided and failed revenue gen efforts. they redirected a ton of servo engineers to focus on VR/Magic leap, ffs.
That was the straw that broke the camel's back for me.
The day I found out about that I stopped using Firefox and switched to qutebrowser.