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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
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.
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.