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Mozilla Is Developing an IoT Board Powered By Firefox OS (softpedia.com)
prisoninmate writes: An SBC called Chirimen was designed from the outset to use web browser technologies in various science projects by extending the I2C and GPIO WebAPIs to control devices powered by Mozilla's Firefox OS 2.0 and higher operating system. As such, Web developers can easily use browser technologies to develop awesome things. The board is developed by MozillaFactory.org in Japan.
A bloated browser (pretending to be a operating system) trying to run on things like a clock or a refrigerator (IoT)? What can go wrong? They have not learned the lesson from the "Firefox OS" for mobile?
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
Here is an example of having too much money and not knowing what to do next. Reminds me of the company I work for, except the give the "excess" money to the execs and investors.
I'm sure they're having a lot of fun wanking around with these pointless projects. It must be a great way to distract yourself from the ~24,000 open bugs still waiting to be fixed in Firefox.
g*d d*mn mozilla. Keep your focus on the task you were created for! Please!
We *need* you as a browser maker, you're teh internets' only hope on a trustworthy browser and you're flunking it!
We don't *need* another f*cking 'IoT' board, theyre already a dime a dozen.
Sorry I got carried away there, but as a linux user I'm screwed if Firefox finally bites the dust.
So let's make hardware that also sucks run our ever increasingly bloated software!
Dear Mozilla,
Focus and at least get ONE thing that works well, or close up shop and go home, you're embarrassing the OSS community at this point.
I would encourage the Mozilla team to maybe put their weight behind making Firefox a better browser. Are there no more avenues to making it a bit faster, maybe a bit less resource-hungry, maybe make is more secure? I mostly use Chrome, but because of Zotero I need to use Firefox from time to time, and I don't dislike it, I just wish more efforts were made in the directions I mentioned above.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
It's not just Firefox that has become a bug-ridden disaster. Mozilla has managed to do the same with much newer projects like Rust and Servo.
It's particularly funny in the case of Rust. Rust is supposed to be a programming language that, according to its website, "prevents segfaults", "guarantees thread safety", and should make writing buggy code much, much harder. Yet the Rust compiler and standard library, much of which are implemented in Rust by the people who know Rust the best, suffers from thousands of open bugs!
Servo, which is supposed to be Mozilla's next-generation browser engine, also has over 1,000 open bugs. Servo is written in Rust, so theoretically it should have far fewer bugs than that, but because Rust is a disaster then Servo ends up being a disaster, too. And this is the foundation that Mozilla wants to build future versions of Firefox on!
Instead of wasting so much time and effort on Rust and Servo, both of which are proving to be quite lousy, Mozilla should have just taken Gecko and gradually transitioned it to C++14. C++14 is already well-supported by multiple C++ compiler systems which run on all of the major platforms, and it offers pretty much all of the benefits of Rust. As part of this transition they could have focused on fixing bugs.
Firefox OS needs to go. Rust needs to go. Servo needs to go. Mozilla needs to focus on salvaging Firefox, their only remaining project that still has users. Firefox's share of the market is now only about 7%, across all versions and platforms, and it's dropping each month. Soon it will be sub-5%. Once it gets there, Mozilla's influence will dwindle to next to nothing. Lucrative search deals will be pointless. Mozilla's say on web standards will evaporate.
More wasted time, effort and money on crap no one wants or will use.
Meanwhile, the bloated browser continues to invade my privacy and enable tracking across the web.
Firefox OS needs to go. Rust needs to go. Servo needs to go.
You forgot the main one: Asa Dotzler needs to go.
does anyone remember microsoft's ActiveDesktop, and why it failed? it failed because they took away all of the privilege separation that you get from having separate programs with permissions, and enabled and empowered a single process with carte blanche to access a vast array of resources... *and* failed to properly secure them. the mozilla foundation is now spending its sponsor's money on re-discovering why this is a non-starter, by permitting javascript direct access to hardware GPIO.
there is a better way - i have actually told the mozilla developers this but they are in some sort of hell-bound zombie sleep-walk mode - which is to go back to basics, remove *all* "special" APIs, then write JSON or other local services running on 127.0.0.1 loopback that carry out the "special" work that has absolutely nothing to do with GUI rendering.
this design strategy has the key advantage that high-priority code may be written in an *APPROPRIATE* programming language, but it does have the disadvantage that you can't really write eye-catching press releases....
So they give up on...
Browsers
Email clients
Mobile phone
and now they want IoT?
I bet they give up on that too, IoT SoC boards are plentyful, we don't need yours.
Mozilla are lost, looking for a reason to exist.
No thanks.
IOT needs to be low power and easy. ESP8266 currently destroys ANYTHING you guys can come up with in size, power consumption, and most of all, price.
It's trivial to program now because of the Open Hardware hacker movement and makers. So unless you guys are going to sell a product that costs retail $1.00 and has 100% open everything your project is already an epic failure.
SIncerely, all of us that are WAY ahead of you on this.
P.S. Stop using IOT... it's stupid. It's internet enabled small processing. Internet of Things is what the uneducated calls this stuff.
Can I get a filter that blocks anything containing "IoT" or "Internet of things" from my life?
This story is perfect for it.
Never heard of these before,. and i am pretty sure that wont like these.
Accessing HW busses is nothing which should be passed in any non-abstracted way to the web. The focus of the web (transmitting asynchronous, stateless, hardware abstracted information) could not be further apart from GPIO pins.
And so is this project from the core business of mozilla.
They should focus on firefox, servo, for the future of firefox, and thunderbird and abandon anything not related to the support of those projects. But no they have to try to be all cool, hip, socially inclusive and accept evryfucktard buzzwordy ideas. Bunch of cricle jerking wankers !!!
I don't see how anyone can suggest that Mozilla isn't innovative.
Mozilla has shown itself to be among the leaders in the field of Social Justice innovation.
Just look at how swiftly their former CEO Brendan Eich was ousted merely for expressing his views about marriage.
Then there's Rust, which is one of the first open source projects to have a harsh code of conduct enforced by an unaccountable moderation team.
I don't know what else they're working on, but I would not be at all surprised if we saw them make some great strides with automated privilege detection, and make some breakthroughs in the prevention of triggering.
Well, "IoT" just got added: "Indication of Trouble"
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
It is time to accept it. You see, Firefox is essentially abandonware. Mozilla does not want to make the browser anymore. I can't blame them - they probably figure that they have already lost to Chrome.
So now they are seeing what can they hack together with all the good work they did in making the platform. Firefox went against Chrome and lost. Firefox OS went against Android and lost. Now Firefox OS is trying to not go against Google. They are trying to pick an easier fight.
Google made Chrome OS - which arguably was not an idea that really took off. That's because Google kept this light "browser as OS" very limited and tied to the Internet. Neither has Google particularly encouraged Android on the IoT. The most Android did was make some entry into media stations and such.
That's where Mozilla now thinks Firefox OS has a chance. Maybe FirefoxOS will do what Android and ChromeOS never accomplished beyong phones and netbooks. It's a gamble Mozilla is taking mainly because this way they won't have to compete with Google (yet).
This also means that we should no longer expect them to fix Firefox in the near future.
Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem.
why ? already running python scripts from PHP code on rasberry pi to access and control GPIO 's , nothing new under the sun there , or is that mozilla OS now able to do it is the news ?
Every time a Mozilla article is posted on Slashdot, the entire conversation just becomes a huge slag-fest. You would have thought Asa Dotzler shot their dog.
Mozilla is a fairly large company. It has resources to do more than a single thing at a time. As long as those things generally fall into their "Free, Open Web" philosophy and don't completely sap their ability to pump out Firefox releases, who cares?
In the same post, you will have people complaining about the feverish release cycle of Firefox and also complaining about how they've "abandoned" the project. Or complaining about issues (like memory usage or speed) that haven't been true for years. Firefox is certainly within the ballpark of every other browser when it comes to speed, memory use, standards compliance, promptness of exploit fixes, etc. There are a few areas (multiprocess and 64 bit being primary) where they lag.
All the freaking whinging about the Australis GUI (when you can get extensions that will drag you right back to 1999) or frequent release cycles is ridiculous. Mozilla always tried to be competitive with other browsers. Four years ago, people complained about slow release cycles vis-a-vis Chrome or talked about how clean the Chrome GUI was - Mozilla listened to those complainers and got a new set of complainers.
There will also be a bunch of people recommending Pale Moon or Iceweasel or whatever. Those browsers wouldn't exist without Firefox - if Mozilla goes dark, those projects will run out of steam very quickly. It's healthier to look at them as distributions rather than alternatives - tweaked to a specific user base.
I like Firefox because the extension ecosystem is still miles better than Chrome after Chrome has had 50+ releases to become competitive. I like Mozilla because they at least give one crap for the concept of a free, open web that isn't incessantly spying on you.
This isn't to say Mozilla is perfect - they've certainly screwed up their share of times. But we should want a healthy Mozilla out there - your alternatives are Google or Microsoft monetizing your every click.
Why does Mozilla think FirefoxOS would be more relevant in IoT than it was on smartphones?
never go full sjw
Every time we discuss Firefox or Mozilla here, some shithead will come along and claim that anyone who isn't raving about how great Firefox and Mozilla are is some kind of a "hater".
That sort of attitude is exactly why Firefox and Mozilla are both falling flat on their asses.
These alleged "haters" are typically people who have been using Firefox for years, often back to when it was still called Firebird and Phoenix! These alleged "haters" were the people who urged others to use Firefox back in the day. These alleged "haters" are the people who write the extensions that make Firefox useful. These alleged "haters" often donated money to Mozilla. These alleged "haters" were some of the biggest supporters of Mozilla in years past!
These alleged "haters" are also the people who have witnessed Firefox go from the best browser around to a steaming pile of donkey shit thanks to fucking idiotic changes that Mozilla has forced on them. They've seen Firefox's UI go from being usable to being terribly unusable. They've seen shit like ads, Hello and Pocket included in Firefox, although they're totally unwanted. They've seen man long-standing Firefox bugs go unfixed, some for years at a time. They've seen Firefox's performance continue to be worse than Chrome's, and IE's, and Safari's, and Opera's.
You Mozilla supporters treat the few remaining Firefox users like absolute shit. And you know what? These users don't deserve it! They've stuck with Mozilla and Firefox through disastrous times, and here you are basically telling them to "fuck off and die" just because they expressed displeasure with the direction Mozilla and Firefox are going in.
These are the very users who will need to keep using Firefox if Firefox is to have any hope of surviving, never mind thriving!
Here's an idea for you and Mozilla: STOP TREATING THE REMAINING FIREFOX USERS LIKE THEY'RE SHIT! Listen to them, and do what they say to do. It's what will bring users back to Firefox!
My first Android app was a garage door opener. No lie. Of course, it required the presence of a laptop tucked into the garage attic and wired into the garage door opener with a service running that would accept "OPEN" as an HTTP POST payload and open the door. The app itself just made the HTTP call.
It was, for all practical purposes, redundant and actually kind of dangerous. If I accidentally hit the button on the app from work, it would happily pop open my garage door.
So why did I do it? Because I could. And this is sounding like that.
*** *** You're just jealous 'cause the voices talk to me... ***
Isn't FFOS borrowing android to boot into gecko? And what is the point of a browser for an IoT device?
It's good to know that Mozilla is trying to make lemonade with its lemon. But I don't want FFOS on a late-to-the-party SBC when I have a few Raspberry Pi boards lying around and will soon have an Odroid and an Arduino Micro as well.
No, what I want FFOS on is the viable smartphone they promised when FFOS was launched, so I can have some control over my own phone. I'm not interested in some lame IOT SBC, thanks just the same.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
Rust by the people who know Rust the best, suffers from thousands of open bugs!
Most of those "bugs" are feature requests, suggested improvements, or documentation items.
So they are in fact bugs, like the GP said. Thanks for clarifying it.