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A list of discontinued Mozilla products and services

killedbymozilla.com

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Re: A list of discontinued Mozilla products and services

#61

Post by gilrain »

floatingatoll wrote: post #26
smcleod wrote: post #11

I’m not sure “killed” is the correct term as most of Mozilla’s offerings have been free and often open source. I think “discontinued” or something like “stopped internal development of” would be more sensible, but I guess that wouldn’t make a good domain name or get the clicks.

It's an effective word for manipulating the emotions of the reader, and neatly sidesteps the HN prohibition on clickbait titles by putting it in the domain name where it can't be corrected to something less manipulative. I don't necessarily think that it was malicious, and given the parallel to the Google site of the same name, I can't really object strongly, but it's still uncomfortable to see a domain name wielded…

It's just a domain shorthand at this point, like arewewhateveryet.com

Re: A list of discontinued Mozilla products and services

#62

Post by avery42 »

rpncreator wrote: post #23

Thanks for putting the list together! There are a few that you may want to include: 1. Mozilla Labs (first iteration) 2. Mozilla Ubiquity (which we are seeing the concept re-emerge in Google Chrome) 3. Mozilla Prism 4. Mozilla Bespin (which sorta-lives-on) 5. XULRunner 6. Mozilla Test Pilot (1st and 2nd iterations) I'm likely missing a few more. But a lot of these were experiments, and not concrete product offerings,…

Thank you, I'll look into these!

Re: A list of discontinued Mozilla products and services

#64

Post by kroltan »

CoUHKT57BSe wrote: post #52

You can also add 3D View to the list, that was so handy. Funny that Mozilla killed it and inspired MS and now it's in Edge :-D

3D View taught me that Bootstrap layouts are maniac and ridiculously convoluted, with layouts deeper than they are wide on default settings.

To this day I always try to keep the element tree as shallow as possible (turns out this also has performance benefits in most cases)

Re: A list of discontinued Mozilla products and services

#66

Post by i80and »

stickfigure wrote: post #50
toyg wrote: post #7

Some of these are a bit spurious. I mean, Venkman was replaced by Firebug, which was much better. MXR was similarly replaced by DXR. Unlike Google, which look much more arbitrary in their shutdowns, Mozilla typically kill projects that are already on their last leg, or replace them with something objectively better.

Persona stands out here as a huge opportunity lost. It offered a future with a fully decentralized, federated authentication scheme, based on open protocols. Yes, they made some mistakes and adoption was poor. But it worked well and the underlying protocols are something the internet still desperately needs.

I dabbled in Persona for personal things.

It was DELIGHTFUL, and while I understand the rationales for why it was canned, I still harbor some sour grapes.

Re: A list of discontinued Mozilla products and services

#67

Post by fabrice_d »

azdle wrote: post #42
fabrice_d wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Performance is not on the top 5 list of things that killed FirefoxOS...

I mean, that's probably true. But if I tell myself that the problem was technical I can still hold out hope that they're secretly solving those problems and will try again. :P I've still never seen a good retrospective on what went wrong, do you happen to have any links/stories?

tl;dr: we could not get some apps officially supported. This creates a chicken and egg situation where app editors wants to see market traction to invest in your platform, but users are not buying devices because their must-have app is not available.

KaiOS managed to break this cycle thanks to the large device shipments sold by Jio in India.

Re: A list of discontinued Mozilla products and services

#68

Post by avery42 »

floatingatoll wrote: post #26
smcleod wrote: post #11

I’m not sure “killed” is the correct term as most of Mozilla’s offerings have been free and often open source. I think “discontinued” or something like “stopped internal development of” would be more sensible, but I guess that wouldn’t make a good domain name or get the clicks.

It's an effective word for manipulating the emotions of the reader, and neatly sidesteps the HN prohibition on clickbait titles by putting it in the domain name where it can't be corrected to something less manipulative. I don't necessarily think that it was malicious, and given the parallel to the Google site of the same name, I can't really object strongly, but it's still uncomfortable to see a domain name wielded…

Sorry - that definitely wasn't my intention! Although to be clear, I don't mean this to be anything negative about Mozilla, just an interesting collection of their past projects. There are definitely some changes I can make to the copy though, especially since this list is meant to include everything from commercial products to experiments and internal tools.

I think this differs from Killed by Google somewhat in that Google has killed off several commercially-viable products with active users, so I can see a possible intention there as a warning about relying on Google services.

Edit: as another comment said below, "abandoned" is probably a better choice of words for a lot of these projects.

Re: A list of discontinued Mozilla products and services

#69

Post by notRobot »

jszymborski wrote: post #46
smnrchrds wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I wonder how many XUL projects were out there not from mozilla. ActiveState IDEs and Zotero come to mind.

Songbird while it was alive as well [0] (Anyone here work on that? I have great nostalgia for it and the cute black bird logo) [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Songbird_(software)

> In January 2010, Philips announced they would ship a personalized version of Songbird with some of their line of portable audio/video players.

I used Philips Songbird quite a bit in the early '10s. I really loved it. It was so much better than iTunes, IMO.

Re: A list of discontinued Mozilla products and services

#70

Post by avery42 »

raspyberr wrote: post #9
joeldo wrote: post #2

Doesn't have quite the same effect as the Google one.

The funny thing is the Google one has google trackers on it and requires JS to view whilst this one has neither.

Haha, the Google one definitely looks better than my 30 lines of CSS though.

If anyone is interested, I'm using a very simple Hugo setup, just one template that reads from a yaml file with all the services. I'm using BunnyCDN to host (first time), cache hit rate is currently sitting at 70% which I'm happy with.

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