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Mozilla Jumps On IoT Bandwagon (thestack.com)
mikejuk writes: Mozilla has been clarifying some of its plans to convert the Firefox OS project into four IoT based projects. At a casual glance, this seems like a naive move that is doomed to failure. Project Link is a 'user agent' for the smart home, that helps the end user set preferences for device interaction, and automates those connections for the user in a secure environment. Next, Project Sensor Web will be a pilot project for crowdsourcing a pm2.5 sensor network. Project Smart Home is focused on bridging the gap in IoT smart home providers between completely boxed solutions like Apple HomeKit, and completely DIY solutions like Raspberry Pi. Finally, Project Vaani is a voice interface for IoT access, which Mozilla credits as the 'most natural way to interact with connected devices.' With Firefox losing market share and projects like Firefox OS, Thunderbird, Shumway, and Persona closing down, perhaps Mozilla should try and find its way back to core concerns. All four of the projects need significant AI expertise and a powerful cloud computing resource neither of which Mozilla is likely to be able to afford.
what are people in charge of mozilla thinking ? or can they even think ?
they are ultra concerned with everything other than their core project, which has suffered and is losing.
it is not just related peripherals, but what amounts completely different things which should be handled as completely separate projects with groups and resources set up for them, if there is a need.
nor is that all, mozilla is way too much concerned with pandering to market hype (hype not market reality as represented by numbers) and spout out the latest buzz words and social ideology of the western 'liberal' elite.
shame!
My thermostat using my 2TB NAS as swap space after running for 3 days.
It's no secret that Firefox is seriously losing market share. Firefox is likely under 8% of the browser market now, across all desktop and mobile platforms! To put that number into perspective, note that desktop Chrome 48 alone has over 3 times the number of users that Firefox has in total, and Chrome for Android 47 has over 2 times that number. IE 11, iOS Safari 9.2, and UC Browser for Android each have about the same number of users as Firefox does. Firefox nearly has fewer users than even Opera Mini has! And Firefox has essentially no mobile presence at all. Firefox for Android is only at 0.04%!
Despite being one of the most popular browsers several years ago, I think that Mozilla has gone out of their way to alienate Firefox users as often as they can. They've trashed Firefox's UI, turning it into an awful clone of Chrome. They've injected unwanted shit like Pocket and Hello into Firefox by default. They even put ads into the browser itself, although rumor has it they finally realized how fucking idiotic this was and are removing them. They've removed useful options from the preferences window. And despite making all of these changes that users don't want, they never seem to get around to fixing the longstanding memory and performance issues that have plagued Firefox for years.
The mandatory extension signing bullshit they've got in the works, along with changing to Chrome's extension model at some point, will utterly destroy Firefox's usability I think. The inconvenience these changes will bring to Firefox's few remaining users and extension developers will likely be enough to push them away completely. Firefox's 8% of the browser market will likely drop to the low single digits far quicker than anyone will have imagined.
To make matters worse, Mozilla has wasted a huge amount of time and effort on the Rust programming language and the Servo browser engine. In my view, Rust is a totally failed attempt to replace C++ with a "safer" language. I think that all they've managed to create is a language with an ugly syntax (even by C++'s standards!), an impractical ownership system, a single slow implementation (which itself is quite buggy despite being written in Rust, a language that's supposed to avoid this!), a rather awful standard library, and a questionable community that's highly focused on codes of conduct and censorship in the name of "tolerance" and "diversity".
Servo, which is written in Rust, is abysmal in my experience. I tried it last week, and I think I'd get better results using IE 3 today. Hell, Servo wouldn't even render any page for me for more than a minute before it crashed! Despite all of the hype around it, it fails to deliver even a 1990s browser experience.
In my opinion, things are looking extraordinarily bleak for Mozilla. They've ruined Firefox for so many users already. The replacement is going absolutely nowhere. And now it appears that they're going to make the Firefox experience even worse for the few users who remain! It's unbelievably sad what's happening to Firefox and Mozilla. Please, Mozilla, don't do this! Don't make yourself irrelevant! Please! For the sake of the web, please!
This is the worst kind of open source flaw. Developers are going to scratch their itch...and what they want has nothing to do with what users want. It's a damn shame to see things end up this way. They're just chasing the latest trend, late to the game as usual, and will end up making a terrible mess of things.
However the resumes of the people involved will be enhanced, and that's what it's all about. Sadly.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
We don't want to have to be negative about Mozilla. We love the concept of Mozilla. We love what Mozilla once was, years ago. We loved them when they produced the best web browser around. But then they went and threw it all away.
They turned Firefox into a really shitty imitation of Chrome. Each new release somehow manages to be worse than the last.
They pretty much gave up on Thunderbird.
They've failed with one stupid idea after another. I mean, Firefox OS?! Really?! How the fuck did they ever hope to succeed with a slow, shitty mobile OS that was more primitive than even the initial versions of Android and iOS were, years before?!
Servo is going nowhere. Seriously, try it out if you haven't already. It's nowhere near usable.
Rust is pathetic. It has the worst programming language community I've ever experienced. They have a goddamn moderation team, for crying out loud! No other programming language community has its own Staatssicherheit like Rust has.
Then there's all the social justice nonsense. Their former CEO lost his job merely because of his views about marriage, for crying out loud! Nobody should lose their job over something like that, especially when it comes to an organization that's supposedly so about "openness" and "tolerance" and "diversity".
We want the old Mozilla back. We want the pre-hipster Mozilla back. We want the Mozilla that produced a highly usable and very extensible web browser that worked well for beginners and power users alike. We want the Mozilla that produced one of the better email clients. We want the Mozilla that made us happy with each new release of their software. We want the real Mozilla back!
The internet of this will be run by cheap micros like the esp8266. WiFi, 32 bit CPU and more for less than 2$ a piece.
SJW's need a new project to infect.
Or a Thunderbird local server unified messaging platform using Firefox as the client (my proposal): http://pdfernhout.net/thunderb...
Mozilla rejected my application to do that project the very next day after I sent it. The rejected a related proposal by me a couple years earlier to improve Thunderbird desktop. From an earlier poster who works at Mozilla, I now understand that situation better. I had not realized how dysfunctional the organization had become.
That Thunderbird server project is currently on hiatus as I just started a new job, but I still hope I can do some bits and pieces of that idea of a FOSS messaging platform now and then that might someday add up to it.
Meanwhile, a proprietary Slack is eating the free/standard messaging sphere: http://pdfernhout.net/reasons-...
One year of Mozilla's revenues is about the same as all the VC money that has gone into Slack. Meanwhile the Mozilla CEO says essentially that FOSS messaging tools like Thunderbird do not matter any more and kisses off Thunderbird. To my mind, at this point, Thunderbird is the more viable concept compared to Firefox (let alone any of the other ill-considered projects) -- as the success of Slack shows.
I can be thankful for Mattermost and Matrix.org as free Slack alternatives.
http://www.mattermost.org/
http://matrix.org/
But imagine what such FOSS messaging software could be like with hundreds of millions of dollars a year behind it to fund a team of thousands of full-time developers.
Bottom line: Mozilla is pissing away hundreds of millions of dollars a year of money (and thousands of developer years) that should be earmarked for essential FOSS (like communications tools) on projects with near zero chance of success(a new mobile OS?) or that are unneeded (yet another programming language?) -- while paying huge executive salaries.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.