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Mozilla Document Shows Firefox OS Tablet, TV Stick, Router, Keyboard Computer
An anonymous reader writes: Earlier this month, Mozilla announced that Firefox OS smartphones would no longer be sold via carriers. Because the company refused to talk about what's next for Firefox OS, aside from saying it will experiment with "connected devices," many were left simply to speculate as to what could be in the pipeline. Today, we have a leaked document, which Mozilla confirmed is legitimate. My favorite of the concepts is a Raspberry Pi-based keyboard.
It's all reverting back to what we had decades ago with the Commodore 64, Color Computer 2, Atari ST, Amiga 500, etc.
Why is Mozilla branching out to these markets? They don't seem to jive with the company's primary products and since they don't really sell anything, that's a big deal.
More shit no one wants...
I think a lot of people would like to get one of those Raspberry Pi keyboard computer.
I'm not saying they'd stay with Mozilla OS though, but the hardware would certainly sell.
But...well....hmm...darn...
Wish AC was incorrect.... But seriously who is steering this company now? Capt. Peter âoeWrong Wayâ Peachfuzz?
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
I've always wanted a lightweight browser with fast JS and page rendering, good memory management, and a well audited code base. Maybe Mozilla can work on something like this?
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Mozilla's core is made up of whatever products have the most users. Traditionally, that has been Firefox and Thunderbird, with Bugzilla a distant third.
Bugzilla is ancient history now.
Mozilla has basically tossed Thunderbird into the trash.
So all they really have left is Firefox. Yes, Firefox's share of the market is dropping, but it's because of what Mozilla has done to it, and to its users, for several years now.
They've made one fucking dumb change to Firefox after another, again and again.
The dwindling number of remaining Firefox users scream out in pain, yelling, "NO! DON'T DO THAT! WE DON'T WANT THAT!", yet Mozilla goes ahead and does it anyway.
Since these changes are dumb, like removing the menu bar, or removing the status bar, or fucking up the UI in other ways, or not fixing long-standing bugs, or integrating unwanted shit like Pocket and Hello, no new users are attracted to Firefox, and existing users leave for greener pastures.
Mozilla fanatics will claim that people are leaving Firefox because of "Google advertising Chrome everywhere" or some nonsense excuse like that. But the real reason is that Mozilla has turned Firefox into a steaming pile of donkey shit.
Many of us Firefox-refugees don't want to be using Chrome or Edge or Safari or some other browser, but we have no other choice because of what Mozilla has done to ruin Firefox for us.
Chrome gives a shitty experience, but since Firefox gives an even shittier Chrome-like experience, we might as well just take the least-worst ass fucking and use Chrome directly, which is what we do. We'd use Pale Moon, but it doesn't support the platforms we use!
There's so much else that Mozilla has done that has made no sense. Firefox OS is clearly a dumb idea, and was from the very start.
Why the fuck did they ever think that somebody would want to use a mobile OS that's worse than Android, iOS, and pretty much every other modern mobile OS out there?!
Why the fuck did they ever think that somebody would want to develop for a mobile OS that pretty much limits them to using JavaScript, which is among the worst programming languages?!
Rust is starting to look like a failure. It took them ages to get a 1.0 release out, and aside from some fanatics who likely don't even really use it, people who have tried it have not been impressed. They've found that they're better off using C++11 or C++14.
Servo is starting to look like a failure, too. It has been pretty much unusable when I've tried it. At this pace it'll be 2020 by the time Servo catches up with 2015's Gecko!
Branching out has done nothing good for Mozilla. What they need to do to ensure their future viability is to turn Firefox back into something that users actually want to use.
They need to stop blaming "advertising" for Chrome's success, when Chrome is successful because it's clearly a fuck of a lot better than Firefox is! They need to revert the UI back to what it was in Firefox 3.6. They need to fix its performance problems. They need to reduce its memory usage. They need to get rid of Pocket, Hello, and the integrated tile ads.
And instead of wasting time with Rust and Servo, they need to ditch those failing projects and gradually upgrade Firefox to using C++14, including for its UI. At least then they're building on a real, working project, rather than experimental hypefests like Rust and Servo are.
Mozilla just needs to listen to its users, and do what its users want, and Mozilla will likely find success again. That's what happened in the early and mid 2000s. It could happen again, if only Mozilla tried it!
Even I couldn't mess up this bad.. :)
Mozilla needs to step up their game.
The smartphone situation wasn't much of a success because they did it backwards in my opinion. I understand where they were coming from, and it was noble indeed (if you don't follow, they started selling "affordable" phones in developing countries). If they had gone the other way and shot for the moon and announced a superphone in North America, and did a good job of it, they would be in a better position today in my opinion.
In my experience people want the best specs for their money. I feel the sweet spot is 5-inch+ display, 2-3GB RAM, 16GB+ storage, quad-core CPU in the $300-$400 range. Bonus points if they can get it for $0 on a 2-year contract, but thats not my cup of tea.
Personally, I would have been all over a Firefox OS phone if they offered something with nice spec's and made it easy to obtain in Canada.
I'm sorry, but I installed Firefox on my phone just to have browser options and support Open Source, but it sucked so bad, I knew I would never use it, and was afraid its extreme suction would implode my phone. Thus I uninstalled it.
Mozilla has lost its way.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
They've made one fucking dumb change to Firefox after another, again and again. The dwindling number of remaining Firefox users scream out in pain, yelling, "NO! DON'T DO THAT! WE DON'T WANT THAT!", yet Mozilla goes ahead and does it anyway.
So true, sigh.
Borrowing a line from Blackadder, I've been longing to send the following telegram:
Brendan Eich had a lot worse stuff that was about to come to light. Mozilla let him get out of there with a cover story.
If I want to use an application, I want to use a real desktop application!
How are you going to do that if the desktop application that you want to use happens not to be ported to the operating system that runs on your device? The advantage of web applications is that one application can run on a Windows PC running Edge, a Mac or iPad running Safari, an GNU/Linux PC running Firefox, an Android tablet running Chrome, or even a PlayStation or Nintendo device running NetFront. Good luck even becoming an authorized developer on all those platforms, let alone porting your app and getting it approved on all of them.
TL;DR: Good luck running a Mac .app on a Windows or Linux PC.
You appear to have replaced your computer with a Mac (starting at $500 from Apple.com) and bought a copy of Parallels Desktop ($80 from Parallels.com) and a copy of Windows ($200 from Microsoft Store) for this Mac in order to be able to run all native apps. But you and others who chose to spend upwards of $780 on a Mac + Parallels + retail Windows are in the minority. Native apps are superior only for this minority case who doesn't have to worry about application platform incompatibility. The rest of us do have to worry about that because we lack the money to replace each of our computers with a comparable Mac + Parallels + retail Windows. This in turn means that application developers cannot assume that their prospective customers will have already purchased a Mac + Parallels + retail Windows. So instead, to target those who have not yet bought a Mac + Parallels + retail Windows, they develop web apps.
Besides, if you are using a computer owned by someone else in your household, you have to wait for the computer's administrator to become available in order to elevate and install the app. With a web app, you can just launch it in your browser.
Until it diverges even further from Firefox, making it less accepted on the web, have fewer and fewer extensions, and die entirely in any practical sense.
I used to love Pale Moon. On a philosophical level I still do. But it's just Moonchild and a few others. The real heavy lifting has been the Firefox code base, with Moonchild et al just extending, tweaking, reverting, and removing some of it.
No, it's not just a clone of Firefox, but it's nowhere near the complete standalone project that PM fans seem to believe it is. Yes, he's now doing his own not-Gecko Gecko replacement Goanna, but seriously, do you think it's all new code? That a tiny team can keep up with new security fixes and HTML5 / CSS / ECMAscript features once they are so diverged from Firefox that they can't pull in that code?
Never mind the QA and multi-platform build issues. PM can barely keep their forked-away sync server running. I agree with the reason for that divergence (Mozilla stupidly and decreased security in order to hawk "Firefox Accounts") but PM has not adequately replaced that part of the ecosystem. Not for "normals" it hasn't. Nor is there anything on Mac, and only an essentially abandoned and rough-edged fork if Firefox for Android as PM Mobile.
With FF itself down to single digits, the idea that website owners, site developers, and extension developers are going to do anything special for working in PM, is ludicrous. That was enough of a challenge back in 2002 forward, trying to get sites to support slowly growing "Mozilla Suite" and then Firefox. A decade and a half later expecting even the simplest changes for a miniscule share spinoff of a rapidly dying browser is insane.
No matter how nice that would be.
Now, if Moonchild took the approach that PM would continue to be Gecko and continue to identify as the latest FF or at least the latest FF ESR, and build CTR into it the same way he did with Status-4-Evar, instead of "We're not Firefox, and if we are we're long-insecure FF 25, and we have our own GUID so tough luck extensions", then PM might have a future.
But in his own way, MC made decisions as dumb as did Mozilla.
Enjoy PM for now? Sure. Don't expect it to survive. Unless a whole crapload of Firefox devs jump ship to it, the way that LibreOffice got the disaffected OpenOffice.org device community. But Moonchild would need a wakeup call on opening his process more and being more true to Free/Libre software principles than he seems to be, as well. (Many non-open tools from him and major snits about who as BS where he allows his baby to be distributed.)
A canceled HDMI stick named Matchstick (site currently offline) was successfully funded on Kickstarter.
These are the assholes who said that maintaining the only good GUI open source mail client was a distraction / waste of time.
Now we find out they're working on half a dozen hardware projects? And an entire goddamn OS?
Please help metamoderate.
Seeing the conceptional models... given their coloring and font, it's pretty clear that Mozilla is aiming to be acquired by Tonka.
Nope, haven't missed the point at all. I made it clear I like what Pale Moon was, and still is, but that Pale Moon's policies make it near-impossible for PM to thrive on its own.
I did so in a reply to someone saying they were switching to PM on all their PCs, as a warning to why that wasn't going to be a long-term successful strategy.
I agree there is a great browser still somewhere inside Mozilla-originated Firefox, even though that greatness is not within Mozilla itself anymore. But Pale Moon, as good a Firefox-variant as it is, maybe the best right now, has its own organizational and cultural fatal flaws.
Like I suggested, if core oldschool Firefox devs, not the ones who are ruining it, came over to Pale Moon the way OO.o devs did to The Document Foundation and made LibreOffice the real successor, that'd be great. But they might have to step on Moonchild's toes to do that.
I'm obviously totally writing off any possibility of Mozilla itself ever coming to their senses. Too far gone. It ain't happening within that broken organization.
They're not your users in the first place if the application doesn't run on their system.
What good is an application without users?
So as we continue to clarify the metrics that a developer may consider optimizing, let me rephrase: The potential number of users that can be reached per unit of developer effort is greater with web apps than with native apps.