491–500 of 611 posts
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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!
I wonder what markets WhatsApp is important to. In the UK quite a few people used it while briefly lived there, but in the US, Thailand, Vietnam, et.al. I didn't see anyone using or ever talking about it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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!
I wonder what markets WhatsApp is important to. In the UK quite a few people used it while briefly lived there, but in the US, Thailand, Vietnam, et.al. I didn't see anyone using or ever talking about it.
More roughly, my understanding of the messaging space was:
- USA: Facebook Messenger
- Japan, Taiwan: LINE
- China: WeChat
- Everywhere Else in the World: WhatsApp
And the comments here seem to basically bear that out.
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> why can we not return to purchasing a copy of software? Because your competitors are free and users expect free and we have a culture stuck in a rut of "everything is free" because ads don't have them taking money out of their wallet. Not every software is in a niche where they can flip the switch back into a premium model and have a good outcome. If Firefox did it, most of us would stop using it. Maybe Firefox is…
Huge businesses are built on the freemium model. Firefox would only gain from embracing the same.
Examples: Pocket and their new VPN service.
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.
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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.
> 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. I've seen a number of comments on Windows Phone since then (on HN), and one and all they emphasize how much better and nicer Windows Phone was -- from a consumer perspective -- than any other phone. What was the failure? This isn't a retrospective that makes a…
As of 2019, however, 52.4% of the mobile OS market belongs to iOS, and 47% to Android[1]. Neither of our favorite mobile phone OSes have succeeded in comparison.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/266572/market-share-held...
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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!
I wonder what markets WhatsApp is important to. In the UK quite a few people used it while briefly lived there, but in the US, Thailand, Vietnam, et.al. I didn't see anyone using or ever talking about it.
> 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…
This is the Linux experience I find (running Ubuntu) and is also driving me crazy. On my Windows7 installation Ctrl+Tab switches to the next tab and Ctrl+Shift+Tab switches to the previous tab. New tabs are open after the current tab. This might be related to the window manager or the Linux build defaults?
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…
I've said this many times and I'm going to repeat it again; I wish Mozilla would offer me a way to purchase a monthly subscription for Firefox.
I want to support the open Web and I want to support FireFox development (but not any n+1 random Mozilla products / experiments) and I hate that they don't offer this.
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Were you actually alive in 2005-2010 or are you just guessing? Flash-based unskippable intros on fixed 640x480 centered viewports are the reality of the 2005 web, regardless of whatever nostalgia you suffer from.
Just imagine how boring the web would have been without Flash - at that time. Or did you prefer crashing Java applets? Yes, you had the annoying unskippable intros, but some jaw dropping websites were made with Flash, something you barely see these days. I still remember sites like heavy.com, music bands and movies mini-sites, ... Take a look at The Web Design Museum, Gallery of Flash Websites: https://www.webdesignm…
Flash is an important quirk of internet history and a stepping stone that created expectations of what the web could one day be: a rich, open, cross-device application platform accessible by URL.
And that's what the web achieved with only a few exceptions.
> 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've yet to be sold on tabs. I sometimes modify the user chrome to hide the tab bar - although it is problematic. Currently, I have the hn comments in one window, and the article in another window, and hn front page in another window on a "smaller" 2K monitor. Customized for compact density, os tab bar moved to the right, menu bar off (the default) and still the 30 links on the hn front page don't fit on the page. Wh…