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Comment by carmate383 | Hacker News Reader

C'mon Mozilla, please. Less projects that will end up like Firefox OS, more work on _Firefox_.

Seriously? IoT is a quickly growing, potentially massive and ubiquitous field. Given the shit state of security and technical implementation of its initial era, in very glad that a well-resourced non-profit is helping to create an open standard.

And six years ago, mobile was a quick-growing massive and ubiquitous field. How did that pan out for Mozilla? A failed operating system and the beginning of a huge decline in both marketshare and performance for Firefox.

If we stopped doing things because they might fail we'd be nowhere.

And if Mozilla keeps making the same mistakes it will go nowhere.

They develeoped and pushed WebStandards nonstop.

It did not lead to widespread Firefox mobiles, but it was not wasted work.

With Chrome of all things now, lets see how it pans out.

Last I checked, Mozilla was still a functioning, funded company pushing out regular updates to Firefox, among other projects. Mobile still is a massive and ubiquitous field, and Firefox Mobile is one of Mozilla's ongoing projects. You believe that a failed project means a company should stop innovating and entering emerging fields?

maybe if they'd actually ENTER it'd matter. partner up with a chinese manufacturer and make mozilla branded IoT stuff. providing a platform without associating a manufacturer is doomed to failure imo. Especially in the saturated hyper competitive markets mozilla chooses to enter.

I do expect them to be attempting to partner, so hopefully we'll see some announcements in the future.

Honestly this looks like a reasonable platform but who is really going to set up an OpenWRT or raspberry pi gateway? Almost nobody.

The real thing that kills this is that there's no native support from Google Home or Alexa. They're easily the best way to control IoT devices.

I'd do. I appreciate having my data on my local server(s).

But since you pointed out a necessity, and for every necessity there is a customer, one can start a SaaS for (Mozilla) gateways, charging for traffic/storage.

There are others IoT providers, but I think there is none for Mozilla's (?).

The phone OS market was already pretty entrenched when they started on Firefox OS. They're focusing on IoT now exactly to prevent it from ending up like Firefox OS, and to prevent them from ending up in a Firefox Desktop-like situation, where its relevancy keeps declining both because the relevance of desktop is declining, and because people do not use Firefox on mobile and thus cannot sync.

Firefox OS has been rebranded as KaiOS since Mozilla stopped working on it, and it has been gaining significant market share since then. A $5 LTE bar or flip phone based on a Qualcomm 205 with 128MB of ram isn't able to run Android (especially not in a fast manner), but it will run KaiOS just fine.

Can you link to a $5 flip phone with Firefox OS I can buy today?

The JioPhone is effectively offered for free, with a ₹1,500 ($21.60) deposit that is refunded after 3 years. To be precise, it's a candybar phone that runs on KaiOS (forked from Firefox OS, closed source).

https://www.jiophone.com/

I was looking for an unlocked option that would work in the US.

afaik there are no unlocked phones that exist that run KaiOS(outside of tinkerers in shenzhen)

You cant get the source code. Reliance telco does not care - nor does KaiOS people.

So you're encouraging Mozilla to create more abandonware?

If it has a reasonable chance of not becoming abandonware, sure. I'm sick of people being so pessimistic. Imagine if Google stuck to search and never released new products. Maybe some people would prefer that but personally I can't live without Google Maps for instance.

And how much money do you donate to Mozilla to fund their abandonware habbit?

Why are you being so anti innovation? I could pass it off as opinion for a few comments, but this comment section is now littered with your comments that all seem to say that mozilla shouldn't bother developing anything new. Do you have skin in this game? Did you get personally burnt by mozilla somewhere along the line?

If you somehow feel that firefox is moving too slowly (check the vcs history its very active) you can always contribute yourself, it's OSS :)

No he can't always contribute himself because most people myself included can't contribute to whatever project just because it is open source. You need to have an intimate knowledge of the technology and the experience and since you suggesting that he "can always contribute" I'd ask you: can you?

An up front cost in learning doesn't mean you can't contribute.

Exactly. Theres plenty of documentation to be written and translating to be done

I guess there's no sense in ever complaining about politics and laws since you can just run for office yourself. Didn't realize upfront costs don't matter :shrug:

Because developers are interchangeable gears that can work on any kind of project without any bump, and can be stacked into any number on a shared project without any issue.

What kind of work on Firefox are you referring to?

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