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Firefox Was Always Enough

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Re: Firefox Was Always Enough

#561

Post by addicted »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #484
heavyset_go wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

WebOS wasn’t tried in any meaningful sense. It was abandoned within less than a single product lifecycle by the various companies under which it operated.

Windows Phone was an epic disaster in how badly it was rolled out. It was Ballmer at his worst. MS kept oscillating between whether they wanted Windows Phone to be an iPhone competitor or an Android competitor. They picked the worst of all worlds, by choosing to focus on distributing through 3rd party vendors, but refusing to allow them to make any changes to the interface, therefore basically eliminating any major vendors from adopting and promoting Windows Phone. It’s still amazing that MS was unable to unseat Android at a time OEMs were desperate for an Android alternative thanks to the uncertainty around the Oracle lawsuits (and were already paying more to MS than Google for Android! thanks to MS’s OS related patent portfolio).

Ubuntu Phone never made any sense, targeting the most expensive niche of the market as it did.

Re: Firefox Was Always Enough

#562

Post by addicted »

nemothekid wrote: post #536
thaumasiotes wrote: post #484

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> What was the failure? This isn't a retrospective that makes any sense. Windows Phone had great, snappy, intuitive UI (which was really surprising coming from Microsoft). However it had no apps. If you look at the top 10 iPhone apps in the app store, only Facebook and Netflix were officially supported on the platform. I recall there being (great) 3rd party apps for apps like Instagram, but there was a dearth of anyt…

Windows Phones biggest problem was a lack of major OEM support.

They needed Samsung and HTC to have adopted them at the time.

Re: Firefox Was Always Enough

#563

Post by unparagoned »

Yhippa wrote: post #357
jdc wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW webOS is still alive and well. https://www.webosose.org https://github.com/webosose

Hey, thanks for this link. I was a huge fan of webOS since the days of the Palm Pre. I noticed that this runs on the Raspberry Pi 4. Do you know what the use case for this is? Store displays?

The lg smart TVs use webOS as their OS. So I guess everything you do with the TV uses it

Re: Firefox Was Always Enough

#564

Post by majani »

A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote: post #285
fragmede wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can be done with a browser in the future? There's no shortcoming of vision , the problem is monetizing it. A browser in the future is going to let me copy and paste seamless between mobile and desktop. What, are you going to charge 1 cent per completed copy and paste? Am I going to pay a dollar to get nightly builds of Firefox onto my device? If I have an Apple device that's not even possible!

I know this may sound like a blasphemy and anachronism rolled into one, but why can we not return to purchasing a copy of software? All of a sudden, the incentives to deliver 'monetizable' product are gone, because you already got your money. Or that does not jibe with continuous rent seeking?

The math of free vs paid has been long settled. If a product can get hundreds of millions of free users from "Western" countries, free trumps any paid model. Firefox still has 250 million users, so free still makes the most sense.

Re: Firefox Was Always Enough

#565

Post by jdc »

jdc wrote: post #343
heavyset_go wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

FWIW webOS is still alive and well. https://www.webosose.org https://github.com/webosose

Also see Enact, the Enyo framework's sucessor.

https://enactjs.com

Re: Firefox Was Always Enough

#566

Post by sobani »

toastal wrote: post #461
fabrice_d wrote: post #447

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.

In the Netherlands WhatsApp is so ubiquitous that it always surprises me to hear other countries are not 100% WA. (Besides China, for obvious reasons it doesn't surprise me China has their own app.)

The only people I know who don't use WhatsApp are very privacy focused and therefor use Signal.

Re: Firefox Was Always Enough

#567

Post by higerordermap »

throw_m239339 wrote: post #271

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 was using Firefox on both mobile and desktop for a significant period of time.

I was little infuriated when they added pocket.

Google meet does work well on chrome only. (Not firefox's fault completely)

I didn't like how they suddenly changed layout on Android and made many extensions unusable.

I didn't like Mozilla the corp / foundation's political alignments, a personal opinion and actually I don't even care about politics. But we Indians (much like South America I guess), have an aversion to SJW virtue-signalling politics because we have seen how it brings too-much right leaning parties into power. Why would a tech company get into politics at all unless it's about some virtue signalling execs pushing their agenda?

They fired some actually talented programmers but kept the C-suite, with their non-technical CEO being paid big amounts despite company being in losing game. While I personally don't like some aspects of rust community, the language itself is solid and could be a differentiating point for firefox.

As soon as I have seen their management take such decisions and their pushing of political agenda, I can't trust these people to maintain a browser well. No offense to engineers I was telling about Mozilla itself. So I somehow migrated to chrome. I miss UBO on mobile but bromite is good enough. Google is not much better

They may not lose much from a middle-class Indian dude switching to other browser. But think about it. Bringing politics and favoring useless C suite execs is a great way to lose future donors. A company should not do politics. They say they do politics for open web, that's not what I am talking about. FSF has done much better than Mozilla foundation in this regard. Mozilla just favoured execs and their agendas before technology, and lost the market.

Re: Firefox Was Always Enough

#568

Post by buran77 »

mushufasa wrote: post #183
buran77 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What many don't realize is the reason open/free software doesn't easily make it in the corporate zone is that there's no company behind them to put their name behind an SLA. This and integration with the ecosystem (MS has an easier time selling Windows+365+Exchange+cloudstuff). The jump from "providing an email client" to "providing a privacy focus email service for independent professionals and small businesses" is…

> there's no company behind them to put their name behind an SLA. I agree that this is a sticking issue; most procurement offices have vendor/supplier questionnaires that ask about their cash flows etc., because companies want to deal with going concerns. FOSS without an org doesn't check that box. BUT isn't this exactly the point of having a Mozilla Corporation, as separate from the nonprofit???

> ask about their cash flows etc.

That's just the "smaller" half the story.

> isn't this exactly the point of having a Mozilla Corporation

This is the critical part. If I am using Thunderbird (or the hypothetical mail service discussed above) in my company today and have an issue or request (bug, configuration error, need assistance with a deployment, want additional features in the product, want additional integration with other products) can I contact someone directly and know that this will be treated according to my specific expectations?

In other words can I call someone at Mozilla Corporation now and ask for dedicated tech support, for a bug fix in a specified time frame, for a consultant to listen to my needs and come up with a solution? Because if my business relies on that product or service and I get no guarantees then I won't be happy to pay you just so I can queue up on Github and raise issues, and I'll go with %prominent software vendor% who gives me that.

RedHat doesn't sell you "Linux", they sell everything that comes with it, and create an entire ecosystem to go with that (partners that offer certification, training, consultancy and support, dev support, etc.).

Re: Firefox Was Always Enough

#569

Post by higerordermap »

pfraze wrote: post #351
krmboya wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't understand how Mozilla failed to execute on Firefox OS. From where I am at it was a massive opportunity for Mozilla and Web developers all round the world. They didn't have to take on Android and iOS directly, but may have gotten there eventually thru 'worse is better'. Imagine a web developer learning just a few APIs and being being able to customize their web app for smart TVs

Well you know what's really tragic: FFOS is a pretty big success. It was forked and became KaiOS, which has decent market-share in India.

It didn't need to be KaiOS. The OS on jio phones is severely crippled and it could be any OS with a webview. I don't count it as success of FFOS, at least on technical merits.

Re: Firefox Was Always Enough

#570

Post by iggldiggl »

dralley wrote: post #531
betwixthewires wrote: post #506

I have recently gone from a Mozilla fanboy to a Mozilla hater in the span of under a year. I'm sure this won't be popular, but I refuse to use Firefox particularly, and would rather use chromium at this point, which, if you'd heard the way I trash google, you'd ask me what on earth was going through my head. It has gotten that bad. They keep progressively crippling the browser. There isn't a single Firefox major upda…

>Recently, they artificially limited the extensions available in Firefox mobile. I uninstalled Firefox immediately on all my machines. They did not "artificially limit" the extensions available, you are misinformed. They rewrote the engine of their mobile browser, and swapped the old engine for the new one before the new one had 100% support for all of the extension APIs. They have been working on this, and over the…

> They did not "artificially limit" the extensions available, you are misinformed.

They certainly did – https://github.com/mozilla/video-bg-play for example is a very simply content script which doesn't use any special extension APIs at all and so would have worked right from the start, yet it still took several months until it was eventually added to the list of officially "blessed" add-ons.

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