121–130 of 331 posts
Lots of headlines at HN from Mozilla these days. Tried Firefox OS emulator and it's fine, but not impressed enough to actually to get a real device. Yes they better focus on privacy/identity and revamp Thuderbird to make it a unique product.
They're having a developer conference so big announcements are concentrated.
A few days ago, it looked like they were ditching Thunderbird so they could concentrate on their phone products. What's left besides Firefox? - "WebMaker", whatever that does. - Rust. - The $60 Mozilla hoodie. - Their world tour of meetups.[1] - The really fancy headquarters overlooking SF bay. A tight focus on Firefox might be a win. I'm looking forward to an all-Rust browser. [1] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/contr…
I do not begrudge high their salaries in the slightest, but I can't help but think bringing on folks with half the salary of the above employees would buy enough coders to do more innovation, which they really need. The Technical Lead in 2013 got $179,000 (the job is not listed in the financials in 2014).
The those three top job cost the equivalent of 20% of the Foundations revenue in the 2014 year ($13.5 million, more or less evenly split between donations and "program service revenue").
[0] Year end 2013 Financials: https://static.mozilla.com/moco/en-US/pdf/2013_Mozilla_Found...
[1] Year end 2014 Financials: https://static.mozilla.com/moco/en-US/pdf/2014_Mozilla_Found...
Edit: revised 2014 figures higher as I was not looking at total compensation.
Most of you are probably not aware that Opera Software (where I spent a decade on Opera Mini/Mobile) went down the same rabbit hole around 2002-2006, spending many many man-years building a web-based (pre-smartphone) phone UI platform using web technologies. The product name was "Opera Platform". Here are some screenshots: http://imgur.com/on4gHdi It failed for the same, predictable reasons: Yes, there are many web d…
To be fair, the "low-end" devices Firefox OS were targeting were miles more powerful than what Opera Platform targeted a decade prior, and JS VMs are far quicker than they were a decade prior… I'm not sure it's so obvious that low-end devices doomed it to failure (of course, you actually worked on this stuff unlike me!). I think it's worthwhile to remember at the time Firefox OS launched much of Android ran on the Da…
The execution of the code, be it javascript on some modern engine or Java/Dalvik bytecode - that isn't typically the performance bottleneck. It is fast enough now.
I'm not an expert on this (this is where I thread on thin ice), but my understanding is that the HTML/CSS logdoc/layout tree model is inherently non-performant compared to a more traditional hierarchical windowed object oriented model. It is too easy to write HTML/CSS that is not performant (it's way too easy to accidentally cause performance issues), while it is a lot more natural to write performant windowing/OO code. And inversely, harder to write code that is not performant.
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But when they tried to pioneer privacy respecting ads in the new tab window, they were repeatedly and roundly criticised here, too...
That's not the kind of innovation that users want, nor is it the kind that they truly benefit from. In general, users don't want any ads at all showing in their browser. They don't want them as part of web pages, they don't want them embedded in videos, and they surely don't want them as part of the browser itself! This should have been obvious given the popularity of various ad-blocking extensions for Firefox. Going…
Most of you are probably not aware that Opera Software (where I spent a decade on Opera Mini/Mobile) went down the same rabbit hole around 2002-2006, spending many many man-years building a web-based (pre-smartphone) phone UI platform using web technologies. The product name was "Opera Platform". Here are some screenshots: http://imgur.com/on4gHdi It failed for the same, predictable reasons: Yes, there are many web d…
Mean while, Firefox isn't getting that much better and seems to be loosing marketshare.
What's the long-term plan?
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According to IDC the Worldwide Smartphone Market in 2015: Android ... 81.2% iOS ... 15.8% Windows Phone ... 2.2% Others ... 0.8% Worldwide Smartphone Forecast by OS for 2019: Android ... 82.6% iOS ... 14.1% Windows Phone ... 2.3% Others ... 0.9% Source: http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS40664915 @downvoter: it's a forcast by the well known IDC, also the current market share (2015) is interesting on its ow…
Same 'forecasters' that had WP over 20% in 2015, lol. http://cdn.geekwire.com/wp-content/uploads/idc21.jpg
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But when they tried to pioneer privacy respecting ads in the new tab window, they were repeatedly and roundly criticised here, too...
That's not the kind of innovation that users want, nor is it the kind that they truly benefit from. In general, users don't want any ads at all showing in their browser. They don't want them as part of web pages, they don't want them embedded in videos, and they surely don't want them as part of the browser itself! This should have been obvious given the popularity of various ad-blocking extensions for Firefox. Going…
I do block anything that I notice if it looks like a tracker, but I am ready to believe that Mozilla's description of client-side ad selection was correct.
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"We" (I have since left Opera Software) really screwed it up with the desktop browser around 2004. Management (i.e. the then-CEO Jon) was too worried about recurring revenue to pull that obnoxious ad banner in the free version until it was too late. At the time the desktop Opera had superior performance compared to Mozilla/Firefox.. but wasn't free/ad-less. It was really depressing to watch. (But at the same time, I…
I'll argue there was a later screw-up on the desktop browser (and really mobile too): Unite sucked resources from much for a long while, failure to tackle some of the technical debt (things that manifested itself such as the integer maths used for percentage values in CSS, contrary to every other browser out there, and that went unchanged as layouts became increasingly complex and the web relied ever more heavily on…
I don't buy the argument about a lack of investment in Presto. IIRC there were like 90 (most of them really good) people working on Presto at its peak. And we still couldn't keep up. (And most of those issues were about lacking desktop market share, which caused sites to de-prioritize Opera, anyway.)
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I really agree on this. They should focus on a browser that respects privacy and email that respects privacy (perhaps by resuming Thunderbird development). On top of that, I'd argue IM + video/audio chat that respects privacy is something that desperately needs better solutions. I'd push software forward, and then innovate on protocols. Peer to peer might be the only way to achieve true privacy.
They're trying something with Firefox Hello. Unfortunately, short of Google open sourcing Hangouts and making it a truly open protocol, I don't see a change happening in the IM space any time soon =/