Mozilla: Following In Sun's Faltering Footsteps?

snydeq writes: The trajectory of Mozilla, from the trail-blazing technologies to the travails of being left in the dust, may be seen as paralleling that of the now-defunct Unix systems giant Sun. The article claims, "Mozilla has become the modern-day Sun Microsystems: While known for churning out showstopping innovation, its bread-and-butter technology now struggles." It goes on to mention Firefox's waning market share, questions over tooling for the platform, Firefox's absence on mobile devices, developers' lack of standard tools (e.g., 'Gecko-flavored JavaScript'), and relatively slow development of Firefox OS, in comparison with mobile incumbents.

Comments

Zero Research

[narcc]

Just about everything in the summary is wrong. I'm going to assume that the article isn't much better.

Re:Zero Research

[_Sharp'r_]

At least they didn't talk about how Mozilla are leaders in the diversity movement and have pride in having a different standard.

I guess once you put politically correct groupthink over people with a proven track record of innovation, innovation starts to suffer and go away.

This process is also known a "Bad Luck". Sounds like Mozilla is suffering from bad luck...

Damn for that absence on mobile devices

[Anonymous Coward]

except that I have it installed on my Android right now. By "mobile devices" did you mean crApple by any chance, fanboi?

Since when?

[Marginal Coward]

Since when is a corporation like Sun that got acquired by another corporation (Oracle) "defunct", as in "no longer in existence; dead; extinct?" The fact that Java, which was created and popularized by Sun is alive and (arguably) well is ample evidence that Sun is not defunct. It has simply been acquired.

Likewise, whatever the future of Mozilla may be, it's far more likely to trudge on and/or take on some other new life than to ever become "no longer in existence; dead; extinct." Just like the old Netscape browser that was its foundation.

Re:A serious question

[DrXym]

Yes of course it would be bad. Google is the new Microsoft and Chrome is the new Internet Explorer. Without competition or choice they would be just as inclined to throw half baked standards as Microsoft. They've already done it a multiple times with SPDY, WebM, NaCl etc. and without competition to reject, criticise, formalize or standardize these things would have been a fait acompli.

It is better for everyone to have strong competing implementations of web standards. Firefox is still a great browser (better IMO than Chrome) and takes privacy far more seriously. I have no inclination to switch browser at this time.

Re:A serious question

[Grishnakh]

The standard answer is Chrome.

I used to use Chromium (the open-source version) because for a while Firefox was really crashy, but I finally switched because Chrome is such a memory hog and Firefox seems to be working quite well these days.

This article seems to basically be saying "if you aren't continuously growing, you're dying". It's hogwash. That's like saying that the bash shell is "dying" because it isn't adding tons of new functionality, including a built-in text editor and a web browser. Notice that one of the complaints is slow development of Firefox OS. Who cares? I use Firefox because I want a solid web browser; I don't need a new OS. Web browsers are a fairly mature product these days, thanks to HTML5 and modern Javascript engines. Where else is there for them to go? And for Firefox's supposed absence on mobile devices, it seems to work great on my Android phone, so I have no idea what they're talking about there.

In summary, this article is bullshit.