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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.
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
except that I have it installed on my Android right now. By "mobile devices" did you mean crApple by any chance, fanboi?
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.
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 :) )
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.'"
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?
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
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!
Flag on the field, 15 yards for BS. Linux had jack and shit to do with Sun dying, it was the fallout from the dotbomb that slaughtered 'em. For a good 6 years after the dotbomb you could get Sun hardware for WAAAAY below cost thanks to all the bankrupt dotbombs that bought walls of the stuff, I should know as me and several of my friends doing consulting made a killing off of it! A $450 SunRay thin client? Less than $15 in bulk, a $4k+ Sun server? You could pick 'em up all day for less than $200.
Linux didn't enter into the equation, there was several years where Sun had to compete with their own hardware which was being sold for less than a fifth of what they paid for it, and they just couldn't afford to have cratered sales for a half a decade so they slowly bled out.
As for TFA? If I didn't know better I'd swear that Moz has an Elop on the inside trying to torpedo the company for GOOG. How else do you explain repeatedly giving their customers the finger while their share tumbles? Even MSFT got the message when their sales tanked and punt kicked the sweaty one and his Metro crap to the curb, yet Moz doubles down and gives its users a double bird by making the UI more and more Chrome-like with every release.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
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.