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Mozilla's Vision of an 'Internet Life' Platform

Posted by Soulskill on from the wrapping-people-in-data dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Mozilla chairperson Mitchell Baker has been saying the company may be changing and thinking beyond Firefox in the future. Her ideas have become clearer: she is formulating an 'Internet Life' platform (not based on Gecko) that would enable users to manage their identity on web. Mozilla believes this could be a way for the company reach new users. She wrote, 'Windows is a locked down operating system compared to Linux. One is proprietary, one is free software. In the early days some Mozilla contributors urged that we should care only about Linux. They felt our mission would be better served by limiting our offering to platforms that align well with the Mozilla mission. We choose a different path. We chose to take our values to where people live. People were living on Windows, so we went there. We made it easy for people to switch from Windows to Linux by providing key functionality across platforms. If we hadn’t, the web would be a very sorry place today. We should bring Mozilla values to where people are living today. We should do so at multiple layers of Internet life.'"

10 of 105 comments (clear)

  1. Mozilla has lost its way by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    All we want is a great browser! They've lost the ability to do that much.

    1. Re:Mozilla has lost its way by MightyMartian · · Score: 3, Insightful

      It really is beginning to look like the same mad road Netscape went down, chasing ghosts into irrelevancy.

      --
      The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
    2. Re:Mozilla has lost its way by Lunix+Nutcase · · Score: 3, Insightful

      They seem to have chrome and android envy

      I don't blame them too much when Chrome is eating market share both from IE and Firefox. The problem is that Firefox's response is to copy Chrome. But why would I want to run a poor copy when I can just run the original?

    3. Re:Mozilla has lost its way by Hognoxious · · Score: 2

      It reminds me of realplayer. Remember when all it did was play videos - and do it moderately well? And then I installed an update and the next time I went for a piss it said "Would you like realplayer to hold your dick?"

      In the unlikely event that this megalomaniacal scope creep isn't already somebody's law, you can name it after me or Bono.

      --
      Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
    4. Re:Mozilla has lost its way by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      Because H.264 is the de facto standard for most video production on the internet today, and the de facto standard for almost all consumer devices which can capture video?

      Just a wild thought, but maybe that has something to do with it.

    5. Re:Mozilla has lost its way by Anrego · · Score: 2

      I totally remember that.

      Realplayer went from simple to "omg what just happened" in a single version... and then just kept getting worse The new version was so bloated that my PC at the time (pentium 1 @ 200MHZ and like 90MHz of ram) couldn't run it... and trying to revert to the previous version (which worked just fine) was next to impossible.

      Also it's impossible to mention realplayer without the obligatory: buffering.. buffering..

    6. Re:Mozilla has lost its way by Requiem18th · · Score: 2

      Before commenting on open standards let me say something on this idealism-vs-practicality. All but the most abstract forms of idealist are essentially long term practicality.

      Mozilla is not served well by including h264 in it's browser. Firstly, it costs money, they make a free product, large part of the success of Mozilla comes from the fact that their product can be reproduced at virtually zero cost. Secondly, the license doesn't cover versions compiled by third parties, which means that their open source software can't be legally compiled from source legally, they become another tivo. This is specially means that distro-specific packages would need to be licensed again. This is specially ridiculous given that Linux is the only platform for which built-in h264 is necessary, MS made a h264 for Firefox anyway because they are promoting h264 so the platform who would benefit form the builtin codec is the one that can't inherit it. All of this to perpetuate a codec that can't be used to produce, reproduce or *even stream* without a license? Maybe you think escaping from h264 at this point is impossible, but I don't blame Mozilla for believing it could be done.

      Now, to talk about open standards, you say that the thing that Mozilla needs is to stop being heavy handed and make a protocol G+ and facebook can use to import and export user profiles without the kind of moral restrictions these companies don't like.

      Do you realise how awful that sounds?

      So if Mozilla makes a protocol that requires the user's consent to reveal the users contact list and facebook doesn't like it, are you really suggesting that Mozilla you make it opt-out by default just to please the facebook God? What kinds of morals are you asking them to forgo? Hopefully is not "has much as required to make facebook adopt this standard".

      Also, you must be delusional, even if Mozilla agreed to make it mandatory that all the users offline browsing history would be transferred to facebook in the background along with a UID and behavioural fingerprinting, facebook will only implement the half of the protocol that allows them to import user data.

      The half required to export data will never be implemented because facebook has made it clear that they are against people scrapping their own profile to export your data to another network.

      --
      But... the future refused to change.
  2. Fuck sakes... by Anrego · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Am I the only one who just wants a damn browser! I'm not even that old and yet every time firefox (or anyone) releases a new browser my first thought is "oh great, what new age approach are they going with this time".

    Is it so much to want:
    - My browser to look like every other application on my computer. Title bar where it's supposed to be.. toolbar that functions normally.. etc
    - A URL bar where you enter.. a URL
    - An area where the website is displayed

    Extra features are nice (I have a fair number of extensions installed), as long as they don't hinder this basic functionality. I don't need a "paradigm shift" here. I use my web browser a lot, but it's not the central focus of my computer. More to the point, I like the way I browse the web.. stop trying to change it!

    1. Re:Fuck sakes... by GrumblyStuff · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I agree completely. I'm sick of having to choose between updating for security reasons and not updating so my UI doesn't get all tossed around.

      They should just start it as a new project rather than crumming up Firefox even more. (Remember Firefox was suppose to be like Mozilla-lite, lean and fast?)

    2. Re:Fuck sakes... by pseudonomous · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Despite massive code-churn, chrome's UI has been pretty much static, at least for as long as it's had a Linux port. I think they're on to something. Once people get used to using the browser (or any program, for that matter), they don't want to relearn the interface after every update, they just want the damn thing to work.