A list of discontinued Mozilla products and services | Hacker News Reader

A list of discontinued Mozilla products and services

killedbymozilla.com

158 pointsavery4295 comments

Some of these are a bit spurious. I mean, Venkman was replaced by Firebug, which was much better. MXR was similarly replaced by DXR.

Unlike Google, which look much more arbitrary in their shutdowns, Mozilla typically kill projects that are already on their last leg, or replace them with something objectively better.

Persona stands out here as a huge opportunity lost. It offered a future with a fully decentralized, federated authentication scheme, based on open protocols.

Yes, they made some mistakes and adoption was poor. But it worked well and the underlying protocols are something the internet still desperately needs.

Agree. What really frustrated me about Persona, was that the way they portrayed the project was that it was not yet ready for production adoption[1]. And then they cancel it because people weren't using it.

I know I played around with a proof of concept implementation internally, but never deployed it publicly, which was a decision based primarily on their own messaging.

[1] EG the JS implementation and the dependency on persona.org were both temporary stop-gaps to enable fast-prototyping and use in other browsers, but would be replaced with a "real" implementation in the browser that supported multiple providers before broad roll-out.

I used it for my company at the time as part of a dual-auth system (Facebook / Persona). We were even featured as an example on the Persona dev website. The service worked great, even for my technically-not-literate audience. And it was reliable (we sold event tickets).

I dabbled in Persona for personal things.

It was DELIGHTFUL, and while I understand the rationales for why it was canned, I still harbor some sour grapes.

I was all in on Persona for side projects, and would have started using it professionally... was extremely disappointed they gave up on it. It was excellent to use.

The thing that annoyed me most about Persona was that it wan't publicised very well. I only (re)joined the tech sector around 2013 but even though I've been personally using Netscape/Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox since the late 90s, I never heard about Persona until the announcement of its discontinuation in 2016.

Why is it not continued as a community project?

This is related to how it was built.

IMO, the main mistake was that it used a centralized authentication system to "bootstrap" the protocol - basically a fallback auth source back when nobody supported the protocol. In theory, after the protocol was adopted widely, they could shut down the Mozilla Persona servers. In practice, it ended up being perceived as "Mozilla Login" and the branding (dropping BrowserID) didn't help.

It didn't have to be this way, although I understand the reasons for it. The fallback auth system could have simply been a piece of software infrastructure that you (the site operator) were expected to run locally. It would have had two downsides: 1) it's a fairly complex piece of software that sends email and interacts with the website, so it would have been hard to make portable, and 2) it would mean doing the email auth dance separately on each site (like we do already).

The main advantage, though, would have been that it wouldn't depend on Mozilla running servers. The project could live on.

Honestly, if I had free time, this is one of the things I would be working on. The protocols are already written up, it just needs software.

Portier "considers itself a spiritual successor to Mozilla Persona" and is also sponsored by Mozilla (or at least the claim appears to be made on the bottom of the web site).

https://portier.github.io/

Having personal experience of some of these projects, some of their inclusion is definitely moderately unwarranted.

Take Sunbird. The source tree is organized as a set of backend modules, with various products including as many of them as they need and then throwing up the main frontend window on top (although SeaMonkey really has diverged its UI in quite a few places). Sunbird was the standalone calendar app, but it was decided that the calendar maintenance team was too small to maintain a standalone calendar and instead shifted their UI focus to only supporting SeaMonkey/Thunderbird integration (aka the Lightning extension). No code that actually did anything was removed--I was the one to actually hg rm it here: https://hg.mozilla.org/comm-central/rev/f2e605ee5475

As you mention, MXR was phased out in favor of DXR, which is itself being phased out in favor of searchfox. (I too worked on DXR, back in 2011). Prior to MXR, there was LXR (as in, lxr.mozilla.org), but I'm not sure it's worth mentioning as a separate project since it's basically an unmaintained fork of the LXR project.

While we're on the topic, there's a lot of "missing" webspaces here. Bonsai was a webtool to display atomic CVS commits, Tinderbox was the UI for seeing if the tree was broken (on fire) or not (this later gets supplanted by TBPL (tinderbox/pushlog), itself rewritten to not be a pile of hacks as treeherder), and there's definitely a buildbot clone/fork/I don't know floating about somewhere in the mix.

There's various versions of things like the addons website or support websites that I can't even enumerate off the top of my head as well. Some of these (like old addons stuff) was completely in-house, while others (like pastebin and etherpad) are hosted versions, potentially with some modifications, of other projects. None of these are listed, but do they even deserve to be listed? It's not consumer-facing, and I'm sure even many Mozilla developers would struggle to realize some of this stuff existed.

Thank you for the feedback, I'm really glad to get some insight from someone who worked on some of these projects!

Thanks for the info about Sunbird, I had the understanding that some code was shared, but wasn't sure how much. I'll update it's description at some point.

You bring up good points about stuff like forks, internal tooling, and hosted versions. Up until now I haven't included forks and hosted versions that didn't make significant changes (which is why I included MXR and not the LXR instance). I'd like to include internal tools where possible, but I think the main obstacle is finding sufficient info.

I think where this differs from Killed by Google is that Mozilla has had less consumer services that were discontinued while they had an active user base. I'm happy to include old experiments, internal tools, etc., I really enjoy digging these things up.

Thank you again, I'll take a look at some of the services you mentioned!

> I'd like to include internal tools where possible, but I think the main obstacle is finding sufficient info...

But why? What's the purpose of a public website with a catchy domain that chronicles when internal-facing tools were killed (usually because they were replaced with something better)?

I understand the agenda behind Killed By Google, but right now your site just leaves me scratching my head.

(Disclaimer: I work for Mozilla on the ops team that ran many of these services)

To be fair, I think that logic applies to some of the items on Google's list too. Like Google Nexus? They changed the name and scope of their phone line. AngularJS? They took the framework in a different direction.

The targeting of the Nexus line was completely different to Pixel though, they could easily have co-existed. And there was a gap between them. I've never worked for Google, but I assume 'kill Nexus' and 'launch Pixel' were independent decisions, the latter unforeseen at the time of the former.

Isn't the Pixel "a" line similar to the old Nexus line? Granted there was a decent gap in time since it didn't exist until the 3rd generation Pixel.

>> Like Google Nexus?

No, they 100% killed Nexus.... Pixel line is in no way, in any shape or form a successor to Nexus.

Nexus was a reasonably priced unlocked reference phone targeted to Power Users

Pixel is an iPhone Competitor targeted to Carriers to be featured as an iPhone Alternative

Completely different markets, focus and goals

>>AngularJS? They took the framework in a different direction.

Again no, Angular is TypeScript, AngularJS is Javascript, these are not the same thing, and it is far from "a different direction"

>> Nexus was a reasonably priced unlocked reference phone targeted to Power Users

Nexus One: $530 Nexus S: $530 Galaxy Nexus: $200 with standard 2 year contract (basically the same as any flagship phone at that time) Nexus 4: $300 Nexus 5: $350 Nexus 6: $650 Nexus 6p: $500 Nexus 5x: $379

Arguably Nexus 4 & 5 were the odd ones out with their relatively low pricing. The others (excluding the 5x) were pretty much on part with flagship phone prices at launch time.

Maybe that’s true, but this is why I never use any mozilla features to store important data such as passwords - suddenly the project is on the last leg, and shortly thereafter the last leg is cut off life support.

I honestly don't know what important data you might have been storing or how, but passwords are definitely one thing that is still synchronized between all your FF instances.

I know it’s there now. But when will it end? Same argument goes for Send and other services.

Profile sync is so deeply tied into the browser that ripping it out to abandon it would likely be more costly than just keeping those servers running forever, I think. As long as FF lives, it will keep that sync going.

Any new "external" feature is another matter, of course.

Im getting a bit afraid about my use of lockbox indeed... Also for all the people I recommended it tot :s

I’m not sure “killed” is the correct term as most of Mozilla’s offerings have been free and often open source. I think “discontinued” or something like “stopped internal development of” would be more sensible, but I guess that wouldn’t make a good domain name or get the clicks.

It's an effective word for manipulating the emotions of the reader, and neatly sidesteps the HN prohibition on clickbait titles by putting it in the domain name where it can't be corrected to something less manipulative. I don't necessarily think that it was malicious, and given the parallel to the Google site of the same name, I can't really object strongly, but it's still uncomfortable to see a domain name wielded in service of that outcome for any topic (even the original Google one).

Sorry - that definitely wasn't my intention! Although to be clear, I don't mean this to be anything negative about Mozilla, just an interesting collection of their past projects. There are definitely some changes I can make to the copy though, especially since this list is meant to include everything from commercial products to experiments and internal tools.

I think this differs from Killed by Google somewhat in that Google has killed off several commercially-viable products with active users, so I can see a possible intention there as a warning about relying on Google services.

Edit: as another comment said below, "abandoned" is probably a better choice of words for a lot of these projects.

The killed by google site is not a great HN post - lists are not good HN posts, the discontinued products themselves usually get multiple lengthy discussions, etc.

In Mozilla's case, the layoffs are fairly recent, the discontinued products and services have had their own front page discussions (there was one just yesterday), real people have actually lost their jobs, etc. Intentional or not, this sort of post feels a bit like gawking at a traffic accident.

It's just a domain shorthand at this point, like arewewhateveryet.com

"Abandoned" is probably a bit more accurate.

Most of Google's offerings that get killed are free and HN jumps all over that (rightfully, IMO).

No Google product is ever free: you pay for it with your data.

Different sense of the word 'free' in use here.

Libre versus gratis. You can charge for free software if you like.

Thanks for putting the list together! There are a few that you may want to include:

1. Mozilla Labs (first iteration)

2. Mozilla Ubiquity (which we are seeing the concept re-emerge in Google Chrome)

3. Mozilla Prism

4. Mozilla Bespin (which sorta-lives-on)

5. XULRunner

6. Mozilla Test Pilot (1st and 2nd iterations)

I'm likely missing a few more. But a lot of these were experiments, and not concrete product offerings, so take with a grain of salt.

I guess I still have the O'Reilly XUL book somewhere. XULRunner was the precursor to Atom. It was the way mozilla bootstraped firefox long time ago ¿before gecko? and they made public the tool to do it by yourself.

They eventually abandoned XUL entirely because it was hard to maintain and extend.

I wonder how many XUL projects were out there not from mozilla.

> I wonder how many XUL projects were out there not from mozilla.

ActiveState IDEs and Zotero come to mind.

Songbird while it was alive as well [0]

(Anyone here work on that? I have great nostalgia for it and the cute black bird logo)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Songbird_(software)

Oh man, I had completely forgotten about that. I was so excited about the project when it was announced (I was at pretty much the perfect age to get into following free software projects), and used it on Windows for years. It was actually a pretty decent alternative to using iTunes for a while, which was pretty slow and flaky on Windows, at least at the time.

Pretty sure I contributed an add-on or some code, or something. Also followed Nightingale for a while, mentioned by a sibling comment.

I created a few addons and worked on the application itself, continuing with the fork called Nightingale after POTI discontinued Songbird.

One of the addons I created was TagNinja [0] which let you automatically tag, rename and download cover art for entire albums. It tried to match your naming to an online database and used the best match to automatically update your local files. Worked pretty well, but sadly there are no screenshots left :(

I later created an application on XULRunner that let you search for music which was then searched on various online music sites and played immediately. Kind of like Spotify.

The development experience was awesome. Thanks to XULRunner, there was an integrated update mechanism (there was a program to create a binary diff between two versions of the application, and you needed to place an XML file on the server specifying the path to the update file. This was automatically detected by the application and it would update in the same way Firefox does). You could also use Firefox' download manager. Everything was just ready to use and had a really nice UI. I'm definitely missing it :)

[0] http://wiki.getnightingale.com/doku.php?id=add-on:tagninja

I definitely used TagNinja! Loved SongBird and used it quite a bit throughout high school.

> In January 2010, Philips announced they would ship a personalized version of Songbird with some of their line of portable audio/video players.

I used Philips Songbird quite a bit in the early '10s. I really loved it. It was so much better than iTunes, IMO.

Ubiquity is one of the best extensions I've used. I hope it makes a good comeback (atleast with this resurgence on chrome).

> Ubiquity (which we are seeing the concept re-emerge in Google Chrome)

I haven't noticed this, can you explain more?

+ Tilt (an addon that added 3d visualization of web-pages and their elements using Canvas).

Thank you, I'll look into these!

I'm still sad to this day that FirefoxOS got axed. Doubly so now since I'm trying to find a new phone after my Nexus 5X stopped getting official builds of LineageOS.

I really hope that there's some diabolical plan within Mozilla to bring it back once the wasm world is more established and makes having a fully browser based OS less of a performance hit.

It still lives on as KaiOS. My old flip phone runs it.

what model? How did you manage to install it on an old device?

Shamless plug: I provide heavily patched 8.1 builds for bullhead with over 250+ kernel CVE patches.

https://divestos.org/index.php?page=devices&base=LineageOS https://github.com/Divested-Mobile/DivestOS-Build/blob/maste...

Performance is not on the top 5 list of things that killed FirefoxOS...

I mean, that's probably true. But if I tell myself that the problem was technical I can still hold out hope that they're secretly solving those problems and will try again. :P

I've still never seen a good retrospective on what went wrong, do you happen to have any links/stories?

tl;dr: we could not get some apps officially supported. This creates a chicken and egg situation where app editors wants to see market traction to invest in your platform, but users are not buying devices because their must-have app is not available.

KaiOS managed to break this cycle thanks to the large device shipments sold by Jio in India.

What would FirefoxOS have brought to the average consumer or phone manufacturer?

If your selling points are “it’s all web apps and open source, isn’t that great!”, that is a…marketing challenge, to be sure.

I think a big appeal is having a second vendor to keep the market leader honest.

Google selling their own hardware and trying to stiffen requirements on Android devices are probably making most vendors feel a little nervous. Not necessarily that they'll be driven out of the market, but more that it will be ever harder to differentiate via software. App developers are clearly champing at the 30% tax bit.

So I'd expect the push to come from manufacturers and devs first, dragging consumers along. They might pick niches like low-cost devices where it's "this or a flip phone", like when the cheap Lumias outsold the entire rest of the Windows Phone market.

Comparable would be Samsung's tail-chasing with Tizen and Huwaei's forced embrace of its own OS.

Wasn't there some kind of firefox hello, messaging thing ? https://support.mozilla.org/fr/products/firefox/chat-and-sha...

Better Mozilla products being discontinued than Mozilla being discontinued.

But at what point does it pretty much become the same thing?

When it's Firefox.

Killing projects isn't bad. I've worked places that simply could not kill off their zombie projects. It was hell. None of these killed projects evokes any kind of wistfulness, nostalgia, or resentment in me. (Edit: Except Persona. Agreeing with another reply.)

Certainly nothing like when Autodesk killed Generic CADD.

What Google, Microsoft, Autodesk, others do is altogether different. The projects they snuff are often economically important to their customers and partners. That's sabotage.

I knew someone was going to make/post this when Mozilla discontinued Firefox Send, lol

I'd really have loved to have a brand-associated file sending service next to WeTransfer. Any other suggestions?

Doesn't have quite the same effect as the Google one.

The funny thing is the Google one has google trackers on it and requires JS to view whilst this one has neither.

> The funny thing is the Google one has google trackers

Maybe that'll change once Google kills Google Analytics

Google Analytics must Google loads, or they wouldn't push it so much.

Haha, the Google one definitely looks better than my 30 lines of CSS though.

If anyone is interested, I'm using a very simple Hugo setup, just one template that reads from a yaml file with all the services. I'm using BunnyCDN to host (first time), cache hit rate is currently sitting at 70% which I'm happy with.

I'm still bitter over Google Reader.

Damn you, Google.

RIP Google Reader

Feedly is almost as good though. Its the first replacement that I stuck with.

The Old Reader looks and feels pretty much the same.

Google deleted a bunch of archived blogs that are no longer accessible though.

Absent from this list: the shader editor.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Tools/Shader_Editor

I really enjoyed using this.

I really liked pastebin.mozilla.org and used it a lot back in the day.

It collected a lot of garbage data and was quite the headache to manage. https://paste.mozilla.org/ is fairly similar but there is no longer an option to persist data for more than 21 days.

The project I am most salty about being dropped is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matchstick_TV. Of course they are probably right that without Netflix support it wouldn't find widespread adoption, however I would have loved to have an open Chromecast.

This was not a Mozilla project.

You can also add 3D View to the list, that was so handy. Funny that Mozilla killed it and inspired MS and now it's in Edge :-D

3D View taught me that Bootstrap layouts are maniac and ridiculously convoluted, with layouts deeper than they are wide on default settings.

To this day I always try to keep the element tree as shallow as possible (turns out this also has performance benefits in most cases)

Missing remote xul!

Hi HN, this is a quick website I made this weekend. It was super fun reading about older projects and digging up links in the Internet Archive! The list is far from complete (I still have a long list of services I stumbled across to add), please let me know if you have any feedback, or find anything I missed or got wrong. It was difficult to find info on the older items on the list!

Great list! But some of the last few entries seem like a bit of stretch to call "killed by Mozilla". They look like Netscape leftovers that were simply open sourced.

"A walkthrough of Venkman shows off many of it’s features."

*its

Also, was Camino ever officially a Mozilla product?

Thank you, will fix that! I really should hook up a spell/grammar checker on post-commit or something...

> Also, was Camino ever officially a Mozilla product?

It was until at least late 2004/early 2005, when the website was hosted at mozilla.org/projects/camino [0]. The project's website moved to caminobrowser.org in March 2005 [1], but it's unclear if it remained a Mozilla project after that.

[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20041117091214/http://www.mozill... [1]: http://caminobrowser.org/blog/2005/#itsofficial

These are amazing efforts. I wish they would open source Firefox Send, I would love to continue the project. Let someone else take it over.

Many of these projects seem like they may have been funded by a specific donor, then when the donor got what they needed from the project, ended the funding?

It is already open source https://github.com/mozilla/send

Thanks, very cool!

> Many of these projects seem like they may have been funded by a specific donor,

Uhm, that's not the impression I got, as a total outsider. Things like FFSend or FFNotes were thought up as extensions to the browser model; others were attempts to cook up de-facto web standards (Persona, deuxdrop); others were just moonshots (FFOS).

In the early years, Netscape's needs definitely played a large part; after they got the Google money, though, they've mostly done things "because they could".

Persona was also known as BrowserID. I've never heard of deuxdrop before though!

Firefox Send is open source: https://github.com/mozilla/send

The costs of running a Send server probably exceed those of its source code alone, which makes it a tricky proposition to say "here's the source code" alone. I'm not familiar myself, but I imagine it looks the same as any other public non-P2P file sharing service:

- Webapp & hosting costs

- Data storage & transfer costs

- Copyright & Abuse response costs

Yes, but those are business challenges. Some handle it better than others, Mega seems to be doing it with a fairly small staff.

https://github.com/mozilla/send

They really do try to compete with Google at every level they can :)

Nice list! Glad Killed by Google was an inspiration. :)

Not sure I understand the intent. The Google page had an obvious implied message: don't use google products, they will abandon them even if they are wildly popular, and not even open source the project so someone else can keep it alive. None of these were ever very popular in the first place, and most of them (if not all?) were open source even from the very beginning.

I mean, it's clearly a tu quoque for Google (although apparently a inadvertant one according to the author's comments here?), but it falls a bit flat since Mozilla doesn't have a multi-billion dollar malware business with which to bankroll its projects, and thus has nontrivial opprotunity costs for continuing any given project, as well as for the reasons you mentioned.

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