Firefox OS pivots to IoT, wants to build an AI smart home assistant | Hacker News Reader

Firefox OS pivots to IoT, wants to build an AI smart home assistant

techcrunch.com

20 pointsilyaeck14 comments

Fits in with the recent story “I've been working at Mozilla for many years, from peak to decline” (slashdot.org)" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11230084

> We keep getting ridiculous thing after ridiculous thing. A lot of people opposed FirefoxOS vs getting back to the roots and attempting to do something about the web. FirefoxOS sounds like a nice concept, but everyone with a bit of a brain knew we had ZERO technical AND market chance.

> Then, when it sounded like we're ok killing that and doing things well again BOOM IoT. Same mistake only even worse!

I think we should limit open source non-profits to a maximum of 3 buzzwords by announcement.

Maybe Mozilla should concentrate on improving its browser instead of chasing fads.

I too think this one will die eventually. They should focus on core tech: - RUST - Embeddable webview and JS engine - Make Thunderbird more a priority than "something that we don't care about"

The Thunderbird one is somewhat understandable at least: not that many people are still using standalone email clients any more. Almost everyone's moved to webmail. Not everyone, of course: there's still some stalwarts out there using pine, for instance, but pine isn't under active development or even maintenance AFAIK, and doesn't require full-time developers to maintain it.

But yeah, they really should focus on core technologies, especially the browser itself. There just aren't many alternatives: Microsoft's "Edge" (or whatever they call it today) (closed-source, corporate-controlled, Windows-only, not well supported by plugins), Apple's Safari (closed-source with FOSS engine, corporate-controlled, Win/Mac/iOS-only, not well supported by plugins), Google Chrome (open-source but not completely, corporate-controlled, privacy issues), and Google Chromium (same as Chrome but missing the closed-source stuff). Oh yeah, don't forget whatever piece-of-junk browser that Android comes with by default.

We really need a non-for-profit-corporation-controlled browser that keeps up with standards and gives us open access to the web, arguably the most important communications technology now in existence. So Mozilla is really doing society a disservice by losing their focus on this and screwing around with unimportant BS like FirefoxOS, IoT, etc.

> not that many people are still using standalone email clients any more.

Dozens ( hundreds? ) of millions of office workers still use Outlook. Thunderbird was starting to play in that space and have some success with S/MIME and client-certificate authentication, both aspects essential to enterprises but infeasible for web-mail.

You have a very good point there; I actually use Thunderbird at work, using client-certificate authentication like you say.

However, I thought my smallish company was just weird that way.

And it doesn't seem like many companies are willing to move away from Microsoft office tools; the FOSS community has been pushing Open/LibreOffice, Thunderbird, etc. for probably 20 years now, with very little uptake. I can see how Mozilla might have finally gotten tired of it.

Also, the big problem with Thunderbird is (correct me if I'm wrong) it doesn't do any calendaring (I don't see it at my company), which is the "killer feature" that Outlook has. Google does it with GMail, and it works great, and it's really necessary if you're going to try to get anyone to switch from Outlook/Exchange. But FOSS has never done a very good job of coming up with a drop-in replacement for that.

Consider yourself corrected, Thunderbird supports CalDav out of the box now that lightning has been integrated.

Interesting. Unfortunately, from the Wikipedia page about CalDAV, it appears that Microsoft Outlook and Exchange are curiously missing, and do not support this open standard at all. (There is an open-source plugin for Outlook.)

I was at a linux and open source focussed conference once and a speaker started talking about the future for their FOSS office software. I think it was going to be some multimedia or video something or other but I turned off. It was already bloated enough and it still was missing functionality demanded by people coming from other platforms. At the time my wife couldn't get it to do some basic job the market leading product could do and a feature request had been outstanding for several years to implement that feature.

Firefox needs to keep up with Chrome. Then when they have done they need to get better than Chrome. Then when they have done that they can provide a development environment better than Chrome. Then they can try and take market share back from IE and Chrome. Then they can make a purely Rust based next gen browser that is more secure than any other browser. And perhaps they can produce a ChromeOS competitor which has a decent IMAP mail client (I would buy that).

I don't get why both can't co-exist at the same time. FF OS is ideal for the low-end market with a more light-weight OS that can run on cheaper devices.

Perhaps they should open a satellite office in a place like Kenya so that they can understand a tech-savvy local African market.

Then again, this is Mozilla, the company that tried to kill Thunderbird...

I think that the issue is that people would rather have an Android device (with a healthy ecosystem), on specs that barely support it running Gingerbread than have a brand new Firefox OS device (which isn't bad, I had an early unit) with no history and a poor ecosystem. I've talked to lower middle class people in India about this and my understanding is they are fine with feature phones if they're trying to save money or a cheap Android if they want a full smartphone. The middle ground of Firefox OS does not have a good enough value proposition.

Seems Firefox OS is missing a killer app.

The similarities to WebOS are striking.

The reasons why are different but they made some of the same mistakes and are ending up in the same place.

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