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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.
But Firefox got embarassed and offered to re-open my tabs.
Just about everything in the summary is wrong. I'm going to assume that the article isn't much better.
Required reading for internet skeptics
Mozilla is non profit foundation while Sun was a publicly traded for profit corporation. Apples and Oranges.
except that I have it installed on my Android right now. By "mobile devices" did you mean crApple by any chance, fanboi?
Firefox is still my favorite Windows browser. IE still sucks, and Chrome chews up so much memory that it is useless after a few hours. On Mac, I prefer Safari, although I keep Firefox around for those rare sites that don't support Safari.
So I think they're still doing a good job on the desktop/laptop browser market. I just hope that their struggles in the mobile market don't impact the desktop.
No sig? Sigh...
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.
It made Netscape's open-sourced browser actually work. At a time, when using IE was unpleasant, if not downright dangerous, this is very useful.
It later introduced tabbed browsing via middle-mouse-click -- a major 'productivity booster' (ahem!) for Internet addicts everywhere.
It wasn't so much that they innovated, because when they added new features they were typically already available in other browsers. It's that they provided a free, open source alternative to IE at a time when one was badly needed. In the early days they made big strides forward with things like tabbed browsing and SVG support. I suppose you could say they were in the right place at the right time.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Sun died a slow death following 1970's midwest business principals in a 2000's world. Even its open source efforts, although noble, were crippled by managements tunnel vision. Sun was practically predicated on the phrase "cash money millionaires" and everything, absolutely everything was licensed and contracted in perpetuity. The allure of Linux combined with chipset advances and the culture, in my opinion, are what killed Sun.
the help was no help either. Suns doc portal online was a festering carbunkle with a search feature and their community of greybeards on IRC were nothing less than violent toward anyone who dared to question the OS without having studiously memorized the entire canon of SUN scriptures. Being gobbled up by Oracle/whatever was an inevitability.
now, does Mozilla fit that profile? maybe yes, maybe who cares. theyre already the realmedia player of the browser world with a video chat system and an inline tile targeted advertising program. They validate your searches with google by default, and often times new releases steamroll your configuration options like download path. They arguably havent worked toward their stated mission since 2006 but that isnt the point. Mozillas license alone gives the community so much power over its direction that its path and principle arent relevant. One profoundly stupid move is all it takes before a massive fork, and there have been forks. iceweasel itself is proof the mozilla brand is only as effective as its adherence to principal.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Firefox rose to prominence when the market desperately needed an alternative to the execrable Internet Explorer. Well, it worked. Firefox broke IE's stranglehold on the browser market, and now Chrome and Safari have kept it beat down. (And IE is now a pretty decent browser that is no longer a festering nest of standards-breaking crapola.)
Keeping a browser up to date and holding pace with the feature race is difficult and expensive. It's not surprising that Firefox has fallen behind while the commercial efforts keep steaming forward.
(Speaking for myself, I was a die-hard Firefox user for years, but switched to Chrome when Firefox's memory leaks kept getting worse and worse... with Chrome, I can "kill" a resource-hogging tab without killing my whole browser. I know what Google "charges" for Chrome (privacy) and it's a price I'm willing to pay.)
I'm grateful for what Firefox accomplished, but that doesn't mean we need it any more. (And there's no reason to think that should an open browser be needed again, one can't appear.)
Surely main stream-ish tabbed browsing was down to Opera (who was pre-empted by some other browser which was not Mozilla)
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
Alright everybody - if you think Firefox is better at everything, step over to this side of the line. If you think that Chrome is better at everything, step over to *this* side of the line. Yes sir? Yes, you. Opera? Listen - you just get the hell out of here, and leave your meal ticket on the table. Everybody else: being shouting!
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
If you care about privacy, ability to remove tracking, block ads and customize your web experience - Firefox is unbeatable. No other browser has ability to allow extensions to do so much (quite by design, I am sure - as the other 3 major browser makers are driven specifically by desire to mine information and sell your clicks to advertisers). As such, I don't see a viable replacement to Firefox in foreseeable future.
I suspect that the "big 3" would very much like Firefox to become a failure, if only because it would make their click-tracking ad-inserting behavior-recording job so much easier.
Thank you, FF, Ghostery, AdBlock Edge, Cookie Controller, Ref Control, UA Control and, of course, Greasemonkey, (without whom Google would be still tracking my ever click :) )
Ordinarily, I'd agree with you, but a few weeks ago I saw Chrome hit just a little short of 9GB RAM utilization on a machine that had been rebooted perhaps four hours before, with only a dozen open tabs. Was that a poor interaction between Chrome and my ad blocker and whatever the hell javascript and .GIFVs on Imgur does? Probably. But there's no way a browser's processes should be using more RAM than running virtual machines.
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
Not making electrolysis their #1 priority a few years ago and turning on Eich. I just switched to Chrome and can't imagine what the hell people are thinking when they say that Firefox is now "just as fast as Chrome." Uh, no. It's noticeably less responsive in many cases. And with the Eich issue, they alienated a heck of a lot of conservative and libertarian users who switched to various forks or Chrome afterward in protest. Then their online magazine waded into the gamergate waters and took a pro-censorship of comments stance when the message didn't line up.
This is increasingly not a Mozilla that I want to support. If they want my support, they can make electrolysis their #1 priority so it becomes as fast and responsive as Chrome and then drive out the social justice warriors.
What killed Sun wasn't just aimless dicking around, it was the endless cycle of purchasing companies that had stuff they were missing, then laying off all of the top-paid employees — the ones who understood the products they'd just bought. Then they failed at an iteration of their Ultrasparc processor, it took them so long that by the time it came to market it would have been old and slow, so they skipped it. They never recovered in the land of single-thread performance, instead optimizing for the kind of workload which was already at the time increasingly being handled by cheap x86 clusters. This was an obvious road to destruction, and many of us pointed this out at the time, not that anyone expected Sun to listen to the people in the trenches by that time when they had proven conclusively that they were interested in no such thing.
Solaris provided only two innovative features probably ever: containers and ZFS. Both were too little too late to save Sun, and ZFS got open-sourced anyway, eliminating any potential competitive advantage.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The question then becomes; is it bad if Mozilla were gone?
What is the added value of Mozilla and their products right now?
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
Sorry, "Introduced tabs [to the masses]". No one uses opera.
Chrome is bloated too, so #1 is a non-issue. #2 is the main problem.
I like Chrome and use it both at home and work almost exclusively.
Whenever I take a look at Firefox (mostly for compatibility testing) I just think "why bother?",
Why bother using something that is identical to the thing you already use?
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
You can thank Mozilla for being the first browser to seriously disrupt Internet Explorer's monopoly and bring us back to a standards based internet. It did plenty more besides that and continues to do so.
Sun's attitude always was "If we make cool things, people will buy them." Which was largely true, until they weren't cool anymore. But at that point the company was so big and entrenched that they'd lost sight of that. It was no longer "If we make cool things, people will buy them." Instead it was "If we keep making the things we've been making all along, people will buy them." The people in charge no longer understood that the engine of their success was constant innovation, and sat back and rested on their success. Assuming they ever understood that in the first place. It's entirely possible that Sun's success was entirely accidental. The gimmicks they started using to try to attract talent exposed their lack of understanding. It was not "Work for us and you'll get to design some of the coolest, bleeding edge technology in the world." It was "Work for us and we'll have a circus at work while we flail around aimlessly (And make you fill in a 12 page form to unlock version control.)"
Google's now in that position of making cool stuff that people will buy and use because it's cool. Their current leadership also seems to understand that they need to keep innovating to remain in the position they are now. Every so often you see some jackass writing about how Google needs to stop spending so much on "Useless R&D." I would suggest that you avoid taking stock advice from those people. Anywhoo, given that Google seems to understand that innovation is the key to success, the question is, can Mozilla keep up with them? Mozilla should have the advantage that they're able to focus on the one thing they do and do that really well. But to make serious advances in market share, they'd have to significantly stand out from the competition. I'm not entirely sure I can see that happening.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Maybe they are where they are partially because they force people out or actually fire them for the employees' political beliefs.
The CEO that stepped down because of a vocal bunch who didn't like his politics is the first to come to mind. He was one of the founders of Mozilla! Likely a big voice in it's innovation.
I also have a personal friend who helped a client in the British government - and he was let go because his boss got angry - the British government has been known to spy on some of it's inhabitants apparently, and helping the client doomed my friend.
Have you compiled your kernel today??
Last time I checked, Sun was a corporation selling pro-level branded hardware and insanely expensive services (like they all do), being bought out by Oracle and Mozilla was a FOSS orgranisation watching over branding and provided guidance to a set of web- and mobile-centric FOSS projects.
Those two things couldn't be more wider apart.
As for Mozillas market and mindshare being eaten by Google: That is due to Google releasing the awesome Chrome browser, because the web is too important an income vector to them, so they decided to pull it inhouse and cut out the policy middleman. Mozilla itself is ten git commits away from switching from Gecko to Blink, and the devs could probalby do this in a weekend. Probalby have been doing it privately already just for the kicks. So no big deal, it's all free and replacable anyway.
The one big thing that Mozilla has going for them is their branding, and as far as I can tell that is going pretty well. Right now, anything standing between a totalitarian Googlezied control of the web and freedom loving citizens is Mozilla - at least in most peoples perception and if they continue playing their cards right, relyably drumming the hip and flashy but yet still underdog/freedom theme, they'll continue to do just fine.
IMHO Firefox OS was a bit of a stretch, but if they manage to keep things simple and intuitive in that ecosystem, having a mobile plattform that puts web-technology front and center could be just exactly the right thing a continuingly fragmented mobile space needs.
As for the browser: Google-independant "Hello" voicechat by Telefonica, Search by Yahoo, neat, google-independant environment syncing, etc. All these things aren't too bad. In fact they're all pretty interesting to me. And I am an IT opinion leader, as we all are. That should have Apple and Google raising their eyebrows.
What we need is a replacement for the Google online suite of apps, and if Mozilla can manage to pull yet another underdog of the industry in to help build that, we have a free-free competitor to all the Google stuff. Desperately needed!
Meantime, Mozilla IMHO is doing just fine making neat celebrative movies and playing to the hippster independant "we are different and free" crowd. That's what made apple big. Apple, however, is a PLC, dependant on profit. Google is too. Mozilla, OTOH, is mostly a FOSS organisation. They can all go on vacation 10 years and then come back and everything will still be the same for them. What does that have to do with revenue and eval problems Sun had back when Oracle scooped them up? ... Nothing.
I see Mozilla as a hip web-zentric play of the old and bland EFF & GNU organisations with a solid focus on branding (very smart btw.). They'll do just fine if they don't spread themselves to thin and wait for the big boys get all paniky about profits somewhere down the line.
I've got FF in everyday use and will continue to use it. If they build an independant contacts application for mobile and web alongside a calendar and perhaps some simple docs management, preferably all of it encrypted, I'll be on board from day one.
Google doesn't have to get *that* big or know everything.
My 2 cents.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
At the time Opera was spyware/adware and was treated like plague blankets so for all intents and purposes it might as well have been Moz because nobody was shelling out $30 USD just to get Opera decrapified.
It is just too bad somebody at Moz is pulling an Elop and fucking the company for Google, because ever since they have turned Moz into a shitty ersatz Chrome their share has just nosedived, even those that are hooked on the extensions going to one of the alternate like PaleMoon,Waterfox, IceDragon,etc. I personally tossed FF from my software collection I give my customers, I now give 'em Seamonkey if they remember Netscape and PaleMoon if they don't. I mean if all I'm going to get from FF is an ersatz Chrome, why not just run Chrome?
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Mozilla is a non-profit counterpart to other browsers. It started as a community browser with a call for donations - and many, many people (including everybody in my family) donated. However - with big Google and Yahoo deals and money, Firefox has left its roots. Market share has become more important than being a community browser. They incorporated interfaces for DRM content though there was strong opposition from the users, they changed their synchronization api and made hundreds of open source sync interfaces useless (and the new sync api is a nightmare), they now want all extensions to be signed by them exclusively, ignoring the pleas from the developers. I am still a friend of Mozilla. But no longer a fan. If they don't come back and start listening to the users and developers again, they will become just another browser. And there's still Chromium.
He chose to make his support public
To be fair, while all donations are public, he didn't really publicize it, per se, but rather had it publicized for him by our new puritans.
A faster, leaner and generally less quirky alternative to Chromium-based browsers, especially on mobile. Lots of work on the standards front. Plus MDN is one of the best web development knowledgebases I know. Also Thunderbird, the only platform-independent mail client used by more then a handful of people. Oh, and they came up with asm.js, which allows massive performance gains for generated JS code.
Honestly, I have no idea what the article is talking about:
- The "waning market share" doesn't seem to wane all that much, going by international market share numbers (although I'm in Germany where Firefox is still the undisputed top dog so that may color my perception).
- The only thing close to "questions over tooling for their platform" I am aware of is that they're implementing Gecko's successor in Rust, their own programming language.
- While FirefoxOS has pretty much zero presence today it's still easy to run Firefox on Android (and I recommend it because the bundled browser is usually an antique, plus mobile Blink/WebKit ain't all that hot anyway).
- I have no idea what "Gecko-flavored JavaScript" is supposed to be and how it's supposed to deliver "standard tools" that other browser vendors somehow have.
Even if Mozilla sucked at what they're doing (cf. Microsoft, although they're at least trying these days) they'd create competition and thus drive the other players forward.
(No, I don't work for Mozilla. I'm just a web dev.)
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
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.
The web 20 years ago was a dark and miserable place. Netscape was the dominant player and their Navigator product was clunky, with a very awkward rendering engine and a lot of proprietary web extensions.
Microsoft, never being one to miss a trick, launched IE4 in 1997 which in many ways was a superior product. It supported dynamic content a lot better than Netscape (still in a largely proprietary way), was faster etc. It was so integrated in to Windows that it could replace your entire shell on Windows 95 or NT4. Windows 98 continued this.
Anyway, whilst IE4 and later 5 were unstable, they were subjectively better and easier to obtain for Windows users. Netscape was such a mess that they gave up entirely on their code base and created the Mozilla project for a next-generation browser. Microsoft launched IE6 in 2001 with just the right mix of Netscape compatibility and proprietary (shiny) extensions that everyone went for it. At one point, IE had almost 90% market share!
With this dominant position, Microsoft basically gave up developing their clunky, insecure web browser as businesses flocked to make applications require it. The Mozilla project spun out of the AOL-owned Netscape and launched a niche browser 'suite' which included email and web page editing all built in. It was slow, buggy and bloated - but very standards based (contrasting to IE).
A group of people took the good bits from the Mozilla project (browser) and tidied up the extension engine. They called it Phoenix and added useful features like tabs, download management etc. This got renamed to Firebird and then to Firefox for trade mark reasons... The world was given a browser that could take on IE. On launch day they had elaborate marketing schemes like full page adverts in the press and heavy promotion via Google.
Mozilla alone created a product that could take on Internet Explorers dominance, forced Microsoft to continue to develop IE towards a more standards-focussed goal and empowered us users to get back the web.
As Chrome (and Blink/WebKit) become more dominant it's critical that we have choice. The web was a dark place with too many sites requiring proprietary Microsoft extensions just to run apps. Lets hope it never happens again!
Now there's one hoopy frood who really knows where his towel is!
The destruction of it's ecosystem.
Too many choices have been made to simplify Firefox when maybe they should have done a bit more spelunking to see what the users were actually using.
Taking away the status bar. Yeah, there are multiple extensions to get that back, the trouble being that they aren't the original status bar and some of the extensions that I use expect the old status bar, not the extension status bar. Update that extension? Well, the person writing that extension has thrown in the towel. When other issues cropped up, somebody else did come along and fix the issues, but the original programmer can come around and kill it because it's still technically his copyright. Yeah, he didn't GPL or put any other kind of license on it. So, it might exist today, but tomorrow it won't.
Making Firefox look like Chrome is just stupid in my book. There was zero reason to change it. Talk about getting the desktop to look like the mobile is pure crap. They are different environments. What works on a phone or tablet doesn't necessarily mean that it works on the desktop, even Microsoft has figured that part out with Windows 10 coming out now. Extremely obvious to me, so I must be a genius. Or not.
They have changed things such that old themes no longer work. The old personas, which I guess are now considered to be theme extensions, seem to be the only new themes actually getting developed. And they're ugly.
Their mobile push (for Firefox OS) was interesting, but again, desktop seemed to suffer again because of it. They started actually pushing a 64-bit version of Firefox on their Nightly page. Then decided that tracking those bugs specific to it might be too much, so they decided to stop it, then after an outcry, decided to keep doing the 64-bit builds, but if you had a problem, don't bother filling a bug for it unless it also happened on the 32-bit version. And then they decided to back track on that as well. You just can't find the 64-bit version on the Nightly page anymore. But it can be found, at least.
I run the 64 and 32 bit Nightlies, release and beta versions. And they work for me. At least for now.
I don't like IE. Chrome works. I'm just not sure I want Google tracking me that much.
Bryan
The question then becomes; is it bad if Mozilla were gone? What is the added value of Mozilla and their products right now?
Without Mozilla the Microsoft/Google/Apple triumvirate will control all browser standards. I think Mozilla brings a different perspective that would be missed. It would be nice if Firefox OS gained enough traction to make a similar difference in mobile but the chance of that happening seems slim.
Firefox was once really innovative, and alongside the browser the Thunderbird mail client was a rising star - and it is still the case that Thunderbird is well utilised as probably the most comprehensive mail client that has more extensive functionality than any other existing MUA. What other mail client can deal with html mail, calendar sync, imap and have a pretty clean gui, and run on all the main computer operating systems, even if there are perhaps still too many unfixed bugs? Chrome is the preferred browser for both Windows and Linux users for many users, even though there remains a core of Windows users who for various reasons never moved away from I.E.! If Mozilla continues to wither, and Thunderbird then withers with the decline in the browser, it would be so nice if Google would build a Chrome-related email client that had as much functionality as Thunderbird but based on modern build tools, with efficient libraries! Anyone else have similar thoughts?
mike c
How can you compare a business that has only two real products (Firefox and Thunderbird) to a company that had several iterations of hardware and dozens of software products, as well as service, support, and contracting arms?
Of course Mozilla is on the downslide -- Chrome came along to compete with them, and Internet Explorer was improved, while Safari came into existence. Mozilla still make my browser and email clients of choice, but not all people make the same choice.
And so it should be.
But while Mozilla may be waning in popularity and market share, they are hardly imploding like Sun did. They were never any where near as big nor as important to the industry to begin with!
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
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.
While some things have improved in Firefox, much of the browser has gotten worse over time. Simple illustration... it leaks huge amounts of memory. After only 3 days of sitting around:
UID PID PPID CPU PRI NI VSZ RSS WCHAN STAT TT TIME COMMAND
101 164892 1738 128 230 0 1.45G 1.02G - R2L ?? 3d09:44 firefox -geometry +2820+80
After around 2 weeks the machine starts to swap. I've seen the image grow to over 6GB (with 4GB *active*) before I've had to kill it and start a fresh copy. WTF is firefox using all that memory for? It makes no sense whatsoever.
Other problems include severe instability, particularly with the file requestor (when uploading files), which results in seg-faults. And even with all the threading there seem to be severe interdependencies between tabs running javascript, so if one tab is javascript-heavy, it messes up the performance of other tabs.
The menu system is in a complete shambles, and I was really unhappy when the last upgrade changed my default search preferences to Yahoo without so much as a by-your-leave.
-Matt
No. Even if it was discovered that this was the case, they wouldn't care as long as it's shiny. Very few people really care about privacy or have any concern that having too much info out there about them could be a problem. Just look at all the people who use Facebook.
It's INFOWORLD: The Trabant of the IT journalism world. If you want Clue, look elsewhere.
Sometimes the "writing on the wall" is blood spatter...
Firefox became my primary browser once I found it stable enough for me to use. These last few releases seem to be a step backwards and I found myself using Chrome more. Buggy and this change for sake of change nonsense. I keep forgetting how to turn the search box behavior back to the way it used to be after being forced to reset FF because of problems.
Have you looked at the data Chrome sends around?
I have and I wasn't happy about it when using Chrome for something that should have remained private to the application's users.
I tried every combination of command-line options, including undocumented ones, to turn off reporting to Google, including the options that are for this purpose, and there was still a trickle of reporting things that I didn't want reported.
But that was a few years ago. Maybe Chrome is more privacy respecting now :-)
I don't mind that it talks to Google by default, after all there are some good services if you like them, and phishing protection (for example) is a good thing.
But I was surprised and disappointed that using all the options to turn off reporting didn't turn it all off.