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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.
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....
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.
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.
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?
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... ***
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.
There are 52,000 reported bugs open in Chromium. That doesn't even include the closed/wontfix ones.