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Mozilla closes Connected Devices division, lays off 50

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Re: Mozilla closes Connected Devices division, lays off 50

#101

The original announcement that Netscape would release Mozilla as open source included some FAQs, including one question along the lines of "are you going to release your own operating system?" The answer was that there was no good reason to build an operating system on a browser. If only they had remembered that!

Of course nothing whatsoever changed in the web ecosystem since 1998.

Re: Mozilla closes Connected Devices division, lays off 50

#102
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Still an US only phenomenon, I haven't seen anyone in education related domains with a Chromebook, specially since in Europe it is up to the students to care for their own hardware, as consumer purchase.

If I am reading this article correctly, it looks like the %/market that Chromebooks have managed to capture in the field of education is large worldwide. http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/3058517

Ah, one of those Gartner studies that companies buy from 2015, yet we don't see them on the stores.

When we do happen to see one, if it is a store we visit regularly, what we see is the same device on display being discounted to death until the store finally manages to get rid of it.

I must have seen around 5 like that, so I don't get where Gartner is getting their values from.

Re: Mozilla closes Connected Devices division, lays off 50

#103
post #9

I use to have a Firefox OS phone (the Flame), but since I broke it last july, I switched to Android and 7 month in I still miss my FFOS phone :/. Android UX is just terrible, and the interface looks so slow (my new phone is a $400 phone from 2016, compared to a 180$ phone from 2014 …)

What Android phone are you using? Stock Android is pretty good in my opinion but the manufacturer and carrier-flavored versions of Android can get pretty disgusting.

I run AOSP on my phone, without the Google stuff. I was using FFOS for privacy and freedom reasons and I'm not giving up.

Re: Mozilla closes Connected Devices division, lays off 50

#104
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Electrolysis? Servo? Rust? I'm far from an expert, but the switch to multithreading has been perilous to not break everyone's favourite plugins, likewise the switch from XUL Electrolysis is basically here and working, slowly rolling out

Indeed. From where I stand Mozilla is working hard at making the transition it's just: - it's a hard problem - they don't have the resources of MS or Google - they have a much bigger extension culture and must support it - the current work is not sexy and visible and hence get little advertisement Mozilla created an entire freaking language to level up their game. And in a few years it became one of the most promisin…

It is a hard problem, and Mozilla has put a ton of effort into Rust, but at this point they aren't supporting any of their current extensions (XUL) and WebExtensions will not cover most use cases that XUL covered. This isn't a Python 2 to Python 3 event, this is Mozilla going from the equivalent of C to Java.

Most of your favorite extensions will die, and it is directly forcing me to drop firefox for chromium at work, which I abhor. Sadly the feature I need (decent kiosk mode) will die in its current form (as a XUL addon) only a year after deploying this solution, versus with chromium its built in, and not going away any time soon.

Re: Mozilla closes Connected Devices division, lays off 50

#105
post #82
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The journalists definitely got their facts wrong here, but they missed the overarching story. Why is Mozilla acting like a tech company/startup, and not as a non-profit here to push Firefox and other projects under their management to new heights? Mozilla has basically ignored Firefox for the past few years and let it languish as a single threaded browser in a multi-threaded world, where the other 3 major competitors…

Electrolysis? Servo? Rust? I'm far from an expert, but the switch to multithreading has been perilous to not break everyone's favourite plugins, likewise the switch from XUL Electrolysis is basically here and working, slowly rolling out

Electrolysis is here and fairly reliably working with my main XUL based extensions, but the ship for WebExtensions has sailed and I'm not gonna be on the wrong side of things (eg. Python 2 vs 3, Systemd vs "fun" init scripts), just gonna prepare for the realities of it, no matter that it breaks my heart to be forced to chromium at work :(

I get that Mozilla wants to dump all the cruft added by XUL based extensions, and that they offed all the Firefox OS bits ASAP, but there are still markets for both those things. The latter prolly had more life in it if it were targeted as a Firefox chromebook type deal to give to the parents/kids, as that is eating into laptops marketshare in the double digits, and that on a Pinebook could easily make it the year of the Linux Laptop.

Re: Mozilla closes Connected Devices division, lays off 50

#106
post #91
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The journalists definitely got their facts wrong here, but they missed the overarching story. Why is Mozilla acting like a tech company/startup, and not as a non-profit here to push Firefox and other projects under their management to new heights? Mozilla has basically ignored Firefox for the past few years and let it languish as a single threaded browser in a multi-threaded world, where the other 3 major competitors…

> where they have an illicit monopoly Not in any legal sense of the word.

Its the exact same deal as with IE on Windows just a decade ago, by force bundling it, and then with Apple taking the additional step of blocking ALL competition, you get no choice.

Today, I can build a SIP client for the browser and it will work well on every major platform except iOS, where Apple is still dragging ass years after WebRTC was standardized and implemented by every other browser.

Re: Mozilla closes Connected Devices division, lays off 50

#107
post #91
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The journalists definitely got their facts wrong here, but they missed the overarching story. Why is Mozilla acting like a tech company/startup, and not as a non-profit here to push Firefox and other projects under their management to new heights? Mozilla has basically ignored Firefox for the past few years and let it languish as a single threaded browser in a multi-threaded world, where the other 3 major competitors…

> where they have an illicit monopoly Not in any legal sense of the word.

US appeals court revives antitrust lawsuit against Apple

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13396785

Re: Mozilla closes Connected Devices division, lays off 50

#108
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The journalists definitely got their facts wrong here, but they missed the overarching story. Why is Mozilla acting like a tech company/startup, and not as a non-profit here to push Firefox and other projects under their management to new heights? Mozilla has basically ignored Firefox for the past few years and let it languish as a single threaded browser in a multi-threaded world, where the other 3 major competitors…

> Why is Mozilla acting like a tech company/startup, and not as a non-profit here to push Firefox and other projects under their management to new heights? Call me cynical, but Mozilla is made of people. People don't mind making a name for themselves: no one works at Mozilla for life. One might as well prepare for life at tech giants or startups. Firefox is printing money so they can afford the Jonesing (for now). A…

Sure, but quite a few employees are at Mozilla for significant periods of time, and (theoretically) Mozilla doesn't have free reign to run the non-profit into the ground by letting marketshare continue to slip away.

Another perspective a friend recently shared with me is that perhaps it is time for Firefox to go the way of Icedove, Mozilla has taken it pretty far, but it is not its main focus even now, and it can be picked up and developed on into the future (not that there haven't been forks already).

Re: Mozilla closes Connected Devices division, lays off 50

#109
post #41

I don't know where journalists get their facts, but this article is terrible. 1) FirefoxOS was killed a year ago. 2) We never attempted to bring FxOS to other kind of connected devices beyond phones and TVs. If they had took the time to check the projects being worked on (see https://wiki.mozilla.org/Connected_Devices/Projects ) they would have understood the activities a bit better. For instance, the device built fo…

Unfortunately Ars Technica is not even a shadow of the site it once was. It now reprints press releases and rumors like so many other tech sites.

What tech sites would you consider to be still good, or the least bad?

Re: Mozilla closes Connected Devices division, lays off 50

#110
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The journalists definitely got their facts wrong here, but they missed the overarching story. Why is Mozilla acting like a tech company/startup, and not as a non-profit here to push Firefox and other projects under their management to new heights? Mozilla has basically ignored Firefox for the past few years and let it languish as a single threaded browser in a multi-threaded world, where the other 3 major competitors…

> Why is Mozilla acting like a tech company/startup, and not as a non-profit here to push Firefox and other projects under their management to new heights? Call me cynical, but Mozilla is made of people. People don't mind making a name for themselves: no one works at Mozilla for life. One might as well prepare for life at tech giants or startups. Firefox is printing money so they can afford the Jonesing (for now). A…

> no one works at Mozilla for life

Is that a fact? FWIW, I have little to no interest in working for any other tech company.

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