Remove Firefox Hello from FF49
bugzilla.mozilla.org
bugzilla.mozilla.org
Firefox Hello was probably an atempt to fuel WebRTC or provide some capabilities to Firefox OS. But it was included in the main distribution - Firefox - spending resources for what ?
Looks like they have somehow realized that though as the approach with "experiments" is a different one.
* Messing up the marketing behind critical projects (Persona) and then shutting them down when their usage is too low for their taste.
* Axing Thunderbird, one of the last usable non-web-based email clients. I don't like nor use TB, but maintaining a decent email client cant be that hard for Mozilla, and it is important for the web.
* Putting a ton of money into Firefox OS, an atrociously bad and slow OS that had the worst mobile UX I've ever experienced. Then putting even more money into the Flame so that they can have a bad OS on dedicatedly-bad hardware.
* Constantly messing up feature development on Firefox with Hello, Pocket and more, all pointing to Mozilla clearly not understanding the Firefox userbase.
* In the mean time, Firefox is still far slower than chrome. Scrolling especially. Gmail and irccloud are unusable for me on Firefox. My own project hits Firefox's performance issues (compare seeking on this player in Chrome/Firefox: https://hsreplay.net/replay/vZEz7JoNnfgVo34HJUHhEF - Firefox is a solid 10x slower).
So to recap: Axing critical projects in a market they understand, so that they can spend the money on futile projects in a market they don't understand. Introducing controversial new features in Firefox while the browser is still far slower than Chrome, losing what's left of their market share. And this is just the big stuff, I could go on for another 10 paragraphs.
Mozilla is heading into a mountain. They need to seriously rethink their structure and priorities if they want to avoid a crash.
Edit/PS: Most of these issues are structural. Pocket's functionality is useful in a web browser. A truly-free mobile OS/smartphone is also something we need. And foss communications are extremely important to the web, which is currently locked in to hangouts/messenger. But Mozilla is messing all these up at every corner; underestimating costs, underestimating effort, misunderstanding (being disconnected from) their userbase, not marketing anything properly and giving up too easily.
I don't want to be overly cynical, but how is supporting a native email client helping the web? Email isn't "web" unless you access it through a web browser. So it seems totally in keeping with Mozilla's current web-only strategy to ditch their native email client and encourage everybody to use webmail. After all they want people to ditch all native apps (except the web browser) and use the web as their operating system. Supporting a native email client don't fit in with that strategy.
Without free and open email, it makes every internet based company's job that much harder (potentially impossible).
Any long-time firefox user with a shred of sense could have predicted (and did predict) the massive fallout that came from Pocket. Yet, Mozilla didn't.
Everybody assumed Mozilla took money from Pocket. Yet, Mozilla didn't.
The Pocket situation is hilarious. People see a 3rd party service being shoved down the throats of the user, they immediately assume Firefox is "selling out". Mozilla got all the negatives of a bad deal, and none of the money. It takes a certain skill to mess up this bad.
"Although the company emphasizes that Pocket and Telefonica didn’t pay for placement in the Firefox browser, Mozilla Corp. chief legal and business officer Denelle Dixon-Thayer told WIRED that Mozilla has revenue sharing arrangements with both companies."
http://www.wired.com/2015/12/mozilla-is-flailing-when-the-we...
They already have Sync that moves extensions, bookmarks and settings around between browsers.
The reading mode in Pocket is far from perfect. I use to maintain a FF extension that did something similar and it wasn't much more that a CSS file.
I mean the project has it's momentum but in terms of industry it means nothing so i wonder if they will cut money someday like they are doing with these features.
And in terms of industry: https://www.rust-lang.org/en-US/friends.html
Firefox OS in its pre-shutdown iteration did not serve these people perfectly yet, but it was well on its way to be a solid choice for them. A choice that held their values first, not just the values of western consumers trimmed to fit.
And now there are no 'open' choices for an open mobile internet device (below 50USD) The cheap knockoff Android phones that dominate that market are preloaded with untrustworthy applications, and ship with unverifiable firmware. The latter is almost never updateable to anything recent or patched for security. This makes for a very exploitative, dangerous web, and it grows more so as it grows more integral to peoples livelihood.
I applaud Mozilla for starting it, but I think the decision to shutter the whole initiative was incredibly damaging. At the very least because now it, falsely, appears to be a cautionary tale to anyone else that may wish to attempt this initiative.
Firefox OS (or more generally, a free phone&OS) is something I do believe is needed but Mozilla had the completely wrong approach towards it. They severely underestimated how much effort is involved. I heard from several mozillians the attitude was "we'll just do everything in HTML5 and gecko will do just fine". (Sounds familiar? It was Jobs' vision for iOS. See how that turned out.)
They didn't understand how much work is involved into making not just a platform, but also an OS (with all the builtin apps, making them not suck is a prerequisite) and the hardware itself. My Flame's only redeeming quality was that the battery died after a week, which kept me from finding out more issues with it.
I don't know that FxOs was ever a solid choice. It was barely ever even a choice. I wish Mozilla would've just funded or partnered with one of several existing players in that space, such as Jolla.
Sadly, their ideological mission conflicted with the realities of their target market (and in this case, price-point).
[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Archive/Firefox_OS/...
They did. They partnered with Meego (The Intel and Nokia lead platform.). Remember Meego?
This does need to be close to a 'from the ground up' initiative. And that has nothing to do with latest developer trends.
For the rest you unfortunately have a point.
Minus a couple adjectives, what you're describing is the way that companies grow and learn. If one of Mozilla's projects ends up being the Next Big Thing, then all this experimentation will look really smart in retrospect. Until then, it feels unfocused. That's normal.
Every member of the Steering Committee should issue a public apology and resign for gross incompetence.
Instead of judging people on their technical merits I propose we totally start to judge them on how well their ideology lines up with ours. That's the best way to promote diversity and ensure technical capability. Clearly it has worked well for Mozilla
These audiences are, in increasing order of vocalness:
[a] the impressionable; the next-wave of web user who has recently gotten online
[b] the alternative-seeker; the average web user who is uneasy with Google
[c] the idealist; the open web, open-source advocate
There is, of course, some amount of overlap between the audiences. But Chrome (despite Chromium), Edge, and Safari are largely missing audience [c] entirely; some of audience [b] will try to avoid any Chromium-derived product.
These and other interactions create conflicting pressures between people who want Firefox have close feature-parity with Chrome, and people who want Firefox to stick closer to the mission of providing an open, elegant, minimalist browser open to user customization.
No, the server is MPLv2 licensed: https://github.com/mozilla-services/loop-server
Loop Server was indeed open source but sat downstream from the WebRTC and STUN / TURN provider
https://wiki.mozilla.org/File:Loop-network.png
Interesting to see OpenTok's pricing, though presumably Mozilla had an 'arrangement' with Telefonica:
Maybe they want to transform it into a regular addon. But the bugreport does not mention it, and I saw no additional explication elsewhere.
I'm not saying a clipping service like Pocket is bad, or a WebRTC service like Hello shouldn't exist, but it should never have been part of the base install. One of the greatest strengths of browsers like Firefox and Chrome is the ability to use plugins, yet Mozilla chose to forego that twice over.
http://www.howtogeek.com/228863/how-to-remove-firefox-hello-...
So, one has to assume a lazy, insecure method on their part until they prove otherwise. Assuming benevolence and diligence from a company that is blatantly anti-open-source is foolish.
In my opinion, it doesn't make any sense. We should keep separated tools that do different jobs, and make each one general enough that it can be used in every situation.
But I don't think that should apply to the browser. Firefox already gives you extensions, which means you can add to it whatever you need.
Would you say the browser should come with a painter program by default? Maybe a file manager too? What about a specific program to print for a specific printer?
At what point should you stop reinventing the wheel?
Software takes up no space.
One of the newer features of Hello is tab sharing, which is niche but clever, and needs some sort of browser integration.
People use their browser (through webapps) for chat, mail, etc anyways, instead of using dedicated applications, so there doesn't seem to be much purity in that regard. And Hello is mostly build on web-tech the browser already has to support. Putting it there makes it more likely for people to quickly try it, and learn that browsers now can do cool new things with WebRTC.
The browser should be a rendering engine, which is a pure sandbox, for client side applications. The client side applications will have access to standard local dbs, standard Dom and CSS renderers and standard method of running code through webassembly.
Webassembly with DOM access is IMO the final piece to do this. And then all OS device access will be done through this sandbox environment where there can be highly controlled access to things like mounted disks, etc. In this utopian future, all developers will be able to target any browser/OS with identical code and never have compatability issues. (And a choir of angels sing out in joy)
And wasn't that computing model all the range 40 years ago, with "big iron" (less powerful than my phone now) mainframes that lived far away and dumb terminals (essentially a keyboard and a screen with very little processing happening locally)?
Are we saying computing is so hard that people can't be trusted with a real computer? Everything needs to be on someone else's computer and you are only allowed to have a locked down browser locally?
I don't get this everything old is new again trend. And how enthusiastic today's kids are about their grandfather's computing model.
Portability (and not just between architectures--between operating systems as well).
> and now treating JavaScript as CPU op codes?
Web Assembly does not treat JavaScript as "CPU op codes".
I'll add that I think your confused about what I am saying. In the JavaScript world, the single page app is really just a pure client side app, no different than an app dedicated to Windows like Word. The difference is that it targets web standards for building applications, in a sense the browser is the operating system and application development environment that the OS used to provide.
The key is that it's a standard, and should work the same across platforms. The fact that it's on the web is just a delivery platform for the software.
Webassembly will bring the performance of these browser based applications to be on par with any native application. It's the write once run everywhere development that we've all wanted since the promise that Java made.
I do think that there is a benefit to this model over Java, which is that it's more flexible than Java was in allowing for design choice, and many more languages (in large part thanks to the LLVM).
It seems like like that will achieve little more than pissing off their users.
Or even better: distribute a clean browser and let users install things like Flash and EME as plugins.
Adobe Flash: why isn't it dead yet?
Pocket is retarded, and it's icon is a non-sequiteur, with no clear purpose. It's a non-obvious add-on that found it's way into the default build probably due to funding.
And chatting and video calls with a browser extension alway felt very Netscape Navigator to me.
DRM is something worth the cost of ignoring and avoiding.
I find disturbing that even after I removed Pocket as per official instruction[1] and restart the browser, I can still see it in there as per `about:memory`:
0.10 MB (00.04%) ++ firefox@getpocket.com/js-non-window/zones/zone(...)/compartment([System Principal], jar:file:///usr/lib/firefox/browser/features/firefox@getpocket.com.xpi!/bootstrap.js (from: resource://gre/modules/addons/XPIProvider.jsm:4519))
In any case, there will be an unbranded release of firefox eventually without the eme included