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Comment by safety1st | Hacker News Reader

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Not every front, they gave us MDN and Rust, both of which will probably outlive them. KaiOS (the continuation of Firefox OS) is very popular in less developed areas of the world. Not that they managed to make anything off that.

MDN was a consolidation of several vendors’ web documentation efforts (I still remember Opera’s Web Fundamentals course fondly), which they collectively decided to put under Mozilla’s stewardship because surely Mozilla, among all of them, would maintain it neutrally and for the public benefit. It was a good run and Mozilla did do a good job at the maintenance for the last decade, but with their recent monetization efforts around MDN, I’m not hopeful for the future. (This is also why I’m incensed by Google’s web.dev—it’s not just the domain name, it’s that they are reneging on that old agreement.)

Their handling of MDN has been disappointing. Laying off their staff, asking for unpaid contributors, and selling more advertising space was greedy business.

They're currently running a REDIS advertisement that looks like a critical error. The ad is a bright red toast!

_Speaking personally_, MDN is Mozilla's most valuable resource. It is the only resource I want to survive Moz's leadership.

I was a cofounder of MDN (originally "DevMo"), and we did not use Opera or other materials, we used Netscape's DevEdge content which was released to us. You may be thinking of a later reformulation to unite with others outside Mozilla. See

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/about#our_journey

Sorry, I probably did not phrase that well: I did not mean to imply that (what ultimately became) MDN was built on others’ materials. Rather, my impression was that other browser developers had agreed on taking down their own web documentation in favour of directing people to MDN, and that the Opera course (itself quite new at the time) was among the casualties.

Checking the Wayback Machine, looks like my subjective time was quite warped then: I had read the course around 2010 (which was actually called the Web Standards Curriculum[1,2], oops) and was sure it had been memory-holed with a redirect to MDN (along with the rest of Dev.Opera) when Presto was still alive (so before 2014), but it turns out that that did not happen[3] until 2018, matching your timeline.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20100119040913/http://dev.opera....

[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20111128034924/http://www.w3.org...

[3] https://web.archive.org/web/20171013125336/https://www.w3.or...

The Mozilla corporation made sure to wash its hands of all those successes.

kaios is basically dead

>Google is a convicted criminal that suppressed competition and is now awaiting sentencing

>Google's illegal monopoly

>Google's criminality is the one mitigating favor

As someone who switched from Firefox to Chrome a while ago, these remarks made me curious enough to research the case.

The judge ruled based on "billions of dollars Google spends every year to install its search engine as the default option on new cellphones and tech gadgets".

The crime of the century laid bare before our eyes. A search engine company caught red-handed paying companies to set its search engine as the default search engine as everyone everywhere knew and saw for decades. Utterly reprehensible.

IMO buying defaults isn't as bad as Google's rigging the ad market. At least others have outbid them for search defaults in the past and in other markets.

That one is definitely a lot worse and a danger of a monopoly/extremely powerful market player. I would argue that a monopoly is not inherently "bad"* but has much more ability to do bad things if it chooses to, with not much potential recourse from others.

https://economictimes.com/news/international/world-news/ad-v...

*Strictly in an ethics and fairness sense. It might (or might not) be worse for consumers. Just worse in a kind of boring rather than nefarious or deeply harmful way.

Okay. If you think they should be above the law, that's who you are. Those are your values. Thanks for letting us know.

I'm of the humble view that it's at least as important to enforce the law when it comes to the most powerful corporations in the world, as it is to enforce it on the average person.

But maybe you see things differently.

Sure, the law should be enforced against them. The law's the law. I wasn't trying to imply they should not face the full penalties the law requires, here. Obviously they should. No one is above the law.

The tone of your post just carried an impression of criminality in the sense of wanton fraud or murder rather than an organization using its money to put itself in a position to make more money via consensual contracts with technology product providers and running afoul of "wait, you can't be too good at running a business" regulations.

Aren't you implying that actual fraud, as well as things like copyright infringement, would be anything more than an organization using its money to put itself in a position to make more money via consensual contracts and running afoul of "wait, you can't be too good at running a business" regulations?

Fraud usually implies deceiving someone or something.

Which is just a company being better at business than you. Selling promises and breaking them is a very good business model, in a free market without government intervention, since it makes a lot of profit. If you were good at business, you wouldn't give money to those companies. Hence, them being better at business than you.

> The tone of your post just carried an impression of criminality in the sense of wanton fraud

Oh, they also did that [1]. If a bank did this kind of stuff, perpetrators would see jail.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jedi_Blue

Well, since this discussion is about the law as well:

>In September 2022, a ruling in the case dismissed claims there was collusion between Google and Facebook regarding the matters covered in the agreement.

The scope of the part of this ruling alluded to by this wikipedia quote is extremely limited. All it says is that facebook didn't explicitly promise to not develop header bidding in the future, so the agreement is not a collusion between fb and google.

In essence, all that it says is that this lawsuit is limited to Google's fraud and monopoly behaviour, and does not extend to Facebook.

In many other matters, the judge allowed the litigation to go forward. Just check out the document below [1] and ctrl-f "the complaint plausibly alleges".

[1]: https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/new-yor...

This is great: https://aframe.io/

That’s very... VRML of them. Not that VRML was bad as a concept, just surprised to see it make a comeback.

Kinda inevitable after we got good VR headsets.

I was in grad school when VRML came out, I used it for things like visualizing 3-d slices of 5-d energy surfaces embedded in a 6-d phase space. I almost went to the VR CAVE to try it out but didn't quite, ironically I work in the social sciences cluster now and the former CAVE is our storage area and still has some big projectors on the floor which were expensive once.

A grad student who sat next to me, who I had endless arguments about "Linux vs Windows" told me that VRML was crap and the evidence was that it wasn't adequate to make 3-d games like Quake.

Today I'd compare A-Frame to Entity Component Systems (ECS) like Unity. A-Frame still has an object graph and it still has the awful primitives that VRML had that Horizon Worlds is stuck with, but you can make complex shapes with textures and import real models.

My one trouble with it as a developer is memory management, if you load too much geometry on an MQ3 it "just doesn't work." I got stuck on a project with it, I've got a good idea how to fix it but it was enough of a setback that I've been working on other things sense.

I did learn a lot more about the ECS paradigm this year when I was in a hackathon and joined up with a good Unity programmer and a designer to make a winning game (brought my mad Project|Product Management skills as well as my startup-honed talent of demonstrating broken software on stage and making it look perfect.) Now I play low-budget games and have a pretty clear idea how you'd implement them with an ECS framework so one day I'll put down the controller and make another crack at my VR project.

A-Frame is awesome; I use it to share all the photospheres I take with friends and family. I'm not aware of another easy, cross platform way to do that.

Thank you for proving my point.

If you think what I said was a vitriolic personal attack, I have no idea what I could say that you wouldn't construe as one, and honestly, don't care enough about Internet debates to try; best of luck.

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