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Update on Firefox Send and Firefox Notes

blog.mozilla.org

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Re: Update on Firefox Send and Firefox Notes

#191

Post by dralley »

btrask wrote: post #190
dralley wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It was written in 2013... when Servo was announced. Servo was originally intended to replace Gecko. Anything else is a retcon. Here is a quote from the Servo wiki from 2014, which is the earliest snapshot present in the WaybackMachine archives. >Servo is explicitly not aiming to create a full Web browser (except for demonstration and experimentation purposes). Rather it is focused on creating a solid, embeddable en…

Thanks for taking the time to reply! In your quote, they didn't want to create a full browser , but they did want to create a full engine . And it was designed to be "productizable." I think it supports what I'm saying. Servo was the last big plan from Mozilla to turn things around. Since then, we've just gotten Pocket, random bundled add-ons, etc. It seems like they are mostly just content to slide into irrelevance.…

>Here's the thing though: What this Servo dev thought of as "production ready" and what the Gecko team thinks is "production ready" are very different things. In Gecko-land, it's not enough to do best-practice things like continuous integration, regression tests, error handling, etc. For Gecko, it's also about compatibility -- both with 25+ years of web content (much of it malformed) and a wide range of supported combinations of operating systems and hardware.

>If you're working on Servo, you can be much more strict about what hardware combinations you support and what kind of content renders well. Look, there's a reason that the lineage of all widespread web engines go back 20+ years: it's much easier to incrementally improve that engine while ensuring that you're not breaking anything than it is to start over from scratch.

>I would also like to point out that you don't have to take my word for it: It has taken at least 3 years (probably closer to 4 years) to get WebRender ported over to Gecko from Servo and get it running well enough to the point that we can start saying that it will likely reach 100% deployment within months instead of years.

>My point is that, while Servo was great for demonstrating new ideas and producing eye-popping demos, it was not going to replace Gecko anytime soon, regardless of what those few Servo developers thought. In all the time I've worked at Mozilla, I have never once heard anybody in charge of Firefox say that we were going to do a wholesale swap out of Gecko with Servo.

https://web.archive.org/web/20200815135321/https://tildes.ne...

Re: Update on Firefox Send and Firefox Notes

#192

Post by btrask »

dralley wrote: post #191
btrask wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for taking the time to reply! In your quote, they didn't want to create a full browser , but they did want to create a full engine . And it was designed to be "productizable." I think it supports what I'm saying. Servo was the last big plan from Mozilla to turn things around. Since then, we've just gotten Pocket, random bundled add-ons, etc. It seems like they are mostly just content to slide into irrelevance.…

>Here's the thing though: What this Servo dev thought of as "production ready" and what the Gecko team thinks is "production ready" are very different things. In Gecko-land, it's not enough to do best-practice things like continuous integration, regression tests, error handling, etc. For Gecko, it's also about compatibility -- both with 25+ years of web content (much of it malformed) and a wide range of supported com…

Thanks for that link!

We might be arguing past each other. He says this:

> Unfortunately a narrative kind of built up around all this stuff that Gecko developers were a bunch of bumbling idiots who were just maintaining a bunch of outdated bloatware, while the Servo project was where all the action was.

This is precisely my complaint. Firefox really did need some sort of strong direction to save it, and Servo was all they came up with. I don't think it was just a few self-important Servo devs, I think (at least part of) management was in on it too. In fact, the blog post above was signed by Brendan Eich, which I find really disappointing (I thought he, at least, was smarter than that...).

Anyway, once Servo sucked all the other oxygen out of the room, Firefox was really doomed. Now Servo is dead and we have... a few incremental improvements to Gecko to show for it. I definitely feel bad for the guys working on Gecko the whole time. That said, they could've came up with some "response" to Servo, but they didn't.

Re: Update on Firefox Send and Firefox Notes

#193

Post by jrnichols »

kyleee wrote: post #39
kilroy123 wrote: post #9

Why couldn’t they make send work and make money while https://wetransfer.com/ is flourishing?

I'll bet they got gunshy dealing with abuse and illegal uses of the service. A real shame as it's a no-brainer service to have in their software suite, and a great complement to the browser

especially when both sides of the political coin gunning for Section 230, I can see how they were concerned about it.

Re: Update on Firefox Send and Firefox Notes

#194

Post by dundercoder »

binaryjay wrote: post #56
hinkley wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And this is why we all should have shouted louder when Google set this precedent five years ago. This is going to become the status quo. If Google can do it why can’t we?

It's absolutely amazing how some people can find new ways to blame Google for something they had nothing to do with. Just Incredible. Additionally, if it had not been for the money given to Mozilla by Google the development of Firefox would have severely been in decline and possibly abandoned. >And this is why we all should have shouted louder when Google set this precedent five years ago. Do you also shout loud when…

Boy that list brings back memories. Front page, bob, zune...

Re: Update on Firefox Send and Firefox Notes

#195

Post by dddw »

mwexler wrote: post #182

While sad to see Notes go, I've been pretty impressed with the continued support of the free Simplenote https://simplenote.com from Automattic. It's basic but nice, and I've actually gotten help from them the few times I've had issues.

Be sure to backup those notes. Heard some horrorstories back in the day about unrecoverable notes. simplenote is nearly integrated in nvalt.

Re: Update on Firefox Send and Firefox Notes

#196

Post by dddw »

ebfe1 wrote: post #90

If you want a minimal setup that does similar job with all encryption done in browser and absolute no plaintext, password send back to server, i just wrote https://www.relaysecret.com earlier this week. It is opensource, with minimal footprint on aws (1lambda, 1 gateway, 1 s3), deploy using terraform and should be very cheap to run. It's a pet project so i limit the filesize to 30mb but you can change that easily if…

Looks nice!

Re: Update on Firefox Send and Firefox Notes

#197

Post by fzzzy »

propogandist wrote: post #144
fzzzy wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We had the monetization angle in place from before Send shipped. Charge a small monthly fee. Management didn't care.

What was the angle they were after then...people will use it so much and love it that they will use FF? Was there any angle at play other than releasing it? It was a great feature and even a small fee would've been more viable than freemium only.

No, it was just fumbled through three generations of management changes.

Re: Update on Firefox Send and Firefox Notes

#198

Post by rixtox »

quyleanh wrote: post #142
timvisee wrote: post #67

Sad! Developer of `ffsend` here. I've built `ffsend` as CLI tool for Send to securely share files from the command line. It has been a great success! Thanks Mozilla, for building and providing this amazing service! For the interested: https://github.com/timvisee/ffsend I'm currently hosting a public Send instance myself to ffsend keep working. Let's see how long I can keep this going (and funded).

Your tool is very useful for me. Have used it since a long time. First transfer.sh and now Firefox Send are closed. What service should I trust to send file quickly and securely.

I started to used wormhole: https://github.com/warner/magic-wormhole

There is also a Golang port: https://github.com/psanford/wormhole-william

Re: Update on Firefox Send and Firefox Notes

#199

Post by fspoettel »

fzzzy wrote: post #197
propogandist wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What was the angle they were after then...people will use it so much and love it that they will use FF? Was there any angle at play other than releasing it? It was a great feature and even a small fee would've been more viable than freemium only.

No, it was just fumbled through three generations of management changes.

It's a shame to hear that. Send was a very good product that saw adoption in my circle, especially among creatives. It was used to share files with clients and replaced WeTransfer for some. I believe a monetization strategy among those lines could have been successful.
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