Hacker News Reader

Comment by mrweasel | Hacker News Reader

Dear Mozilla, I love you, but stop working on these side projects. Your work in these non-browser projects is excellent, but pointless.

It may be that I don't understand Mozilla, but I believe they should focus on Firefox, Thunderbird and MDN. Even Rust is sort of a weird CS project that you don't technically need, but fair enough, if makes Firefox development easier, go for it.

Mozilla get most of their money from search engine companies, so may they should start focusing on trimming down to the point where they could survive without that big Google check and drop some of the side projects.

And why is it that there's no "Support Us By Donating" button on www.mozilla.org? I feel there should be.

View on HN

This is exactly the kind of thing Mozilla should be working on, in my opinion. It's enabling something new to work in a browser, and if Mozilla didn't do this Google would have, only it would be locked into Google Sheets or something.

Maybe, but is this honestly solving a problem for anyone but the slimmest niche group. Thimble is no more and in my mind that's a similar kind of project (I bet most of you forgot that Thimble was a thing). Firefox OS is dead, Persona is dead, Pocket and Send is still being questioned.

Why should Pyodide or the whole Iodide project be any different. Other than Firefox, Thunderbird and MDN, only Bugzilla and Rust really stands out as successful projects, and that's only because they've been developed to solve an actual problem.

I'd be surprised if the Iodide project will see any real usage 5 years from now. Are any data scientists really look to move to a browser based workflow?

This project was designed to meet the internal needs of data science at Mozilla. Them releasing and developing it openly likely has no/little impact on the amount of energy going into their core products.

I think it is good, if for no other reason, than it gives a Mozilla a large project they can use to test how well the browser, dev-tools, etc. perform with a large complex web application. I think one reason why the chrome dev-tools is better than the firefox dev-tools is that they have a lot of other projects where developers need to make heavy use of the dev-tools for large complex web appjs.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com