Mozilla closes Connected Devices division, lays off 50
cnet.com
cnet.com
If they had took the time to check the projects being worked on (see https://wiki.mozilla.org/Connected_Devices/Projects) they would have understood the activities a bit better. For instance, the device built for SensorWeb was based on a cortex-m4 CPU, running bare metal code written in Rust on top of freeRTOS.
The only thing I do miss are the articles written by Jon Stokes: https://arstechnica.com/author/hannibal/
But all things change, and the heady era of technological advances that we saw in the 90s and early 2000s are long gone, at least in the desktop and server computer world.
Electronics has now become mainstream-consumer oriented and the sites reflect that interest, since after all, they only exist due to advertising funds.
[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2016/02/04/next-step...
Mozilla has basically ignored Firefox for the past few years and let it languish as a single threaded browser in a multi-threaded world, where the other 3 major competitors are highly optimizing their browsers to the respective laptop/tablet/phones. Google with Chromebooks (shipping more than Macbooks[1]) & Android, Microsoft with Surface, Apple with iOS (where they have an illicit monopoly) & on Macbooks.
Mozilla can fight this battle and provide a better user experience, but as it stands a few years have been sunk down the drain on Firefox OS and Mozilla isn't even trying to leverage it into a Chromebook killer!
Sure, trying to win on price (which is what Moz tried with Firefox OS) isn't going to be a battle that can be won. Google and others already have the relationships with manufacturers who know they can drive volume, but what they don't have is the community support & buy in that Mozilla has. Create a compelling user experience! Netscape won the war against the monoculture of a decade ago by creating a user experience that people loved, in spite of the IE6 monoculture of the time.
Today, we have a Webkit monoculture, with Edge nipping at its heels. This is a very similar situation to a decade ago, where Deer Park Alpha lead the way out of the shadowy darkness, with flash free video & audio and performance and protocol support that ran circles around the others.
1 - http://www.theverge.com/2016/5/19/11711714/chromebooks-outso...
I'm far from an expert, but the switch to multithreading has been perilous to not break everyone's favourite plugins, likewise the switch from XUL
Electrolysis is basically here and working, slowly rolling out
- it's a hard problem
- they don't have the resources of MS or Google
- they have a much bigger extension culture and must support it
- the current work is not sexy and visible and hence get little advertisement
Mozilla created an entire freaking language to level up their game. And in a few years it became one of the most promising technology of the decade, with a vibrant community.
If it was a movie, this period of their life would be the scene with a small outsider named "Moz" training by night in a dirty gym or during the night under the rain.
Next one will be the training paying off and him kicking the other guy's ass in the ring.
But you need the unsexy and hard training first.
Most of your favorite extensions will die, and it is directly forcing me to drop firefox for chromium at work, which I abhor. Sadly the feature I need (decent kiosk mode) will die in its current form (as a XUL addon) only a year after deploying this solution, versus with chromium its built in, and not going away any time soon.
I'll the tab group extension though. I loved it and it won't be possible with webextensions.
isn't/wasn't that the point of firefox though.
>a very good browser doing browser things.
Chrome is the competition. Quite good at 'browser' things
Do I need it to be at least as fast as chrome ? Yes.
I've switched to Firefox a few times over the past years, but usually I'd switch back to Chrome because, whether true or not, it felt more performant/cleaner/better. The main reason I bothered trying to switch back to Firefox was always the versatility or 'freedom'. Stuff like the tree-style tab plugin.
Realistically, for me to break my usual patterns and try Firefox again would have to involve at least one of the following:
- equal (perceived) performance to Chrome - freedom/versatility in regards to plugins - some as-of-yet not seen before advantage
With all else being equal, or even ever so slightly worse than Chrome, I'd go for Firefox simply because I distrust Google.
Thing is, I'd characterize myself as much more security- and privacy-conscious than most people, and yet I'm still on Chrome despite giving Firefox a shot at least once a year for the past few years or so. I catch myself forgetting to test the stuff I make on FF occasionally (I'm a web developer). While I'm by no means a paragon of sticking with my beliefs, I'm still a bit of a privacy-weenie. The fact that I'm not using Firefox worries me a bit.
The fact that I can't quite explain it frustrates me. If I had to give a reason as to why I use Chrome instead of Firefox, I'd say there are two primary reasons and a very vague third one:
1. Chrome is just more familiar at this point, especially its dev tools 2. Firefox feels like one of those Java applets: slow to boot and alien to my OS (moreso than Chrome). 3. Chrome feels snappier
This is just FUD. Especially as Mozilla is working closely with the developers of the most popular add ons to make sure all capabilities they need will be available (see also webextension experiments).
Of course not all capabilities of XUL will make it, but as Chrome has a vibrant extensive add on community around WebExtension the idea that most usecases are affected is implausible.
The one that bother me the most is tab group:
https://github.com/Quicksaver/Tab-Groups/issues/535
It was an feature of Firefox that I loved. They removed it. So I now use the extension. And the author is now announcing he won't be able to port it.
I get that Mozilla wants to dump all the cruft added by XUL based extensions, and that they offed all the Firefox OS bits ASAP, but there are still markets for both those things. The latter prolly had more life in it if it were targeted as a Firefox chromebook type deal to give to the parents/kids, as that is eating into laptops marketshare in the double digits, and that on a Pinebook could easily make it the year of the Linux Laptop.
Unless you use extensions, which used to be one of Firefox's biggest advantages.
I gave Firefox on Ubuntu a try for a week last month because I was looking for a replacement for Chrome and if I wasn't tech savvy I wouldn't have been able to figure out that Firefox was running in single-process mode and how to fix that.
E.g. the default "Ubuntu integration" extension that Firefox ships with on Ubuntu (where it is the default browser) is not compatible with electrolysis. Additionally the (now outdated) Lastpass extension from the Firefox addon shop isn't compatible. I think the Trello Scrum extension also isn't compatible. The React developer tools also only just experimentally enabled compatibility.
I'm not nitpicking -- users don't care why Firefox is slow or why electrolysis is disabled. If an extension is available for Firefox, especially if it's available on the official addon shop, users expect it to work and not to make Firefox slow to a crawl.
That said, even with multiprocess mode I found that Firefox would often be considerably slower when having many tabs open (it's normal for me to keep 30-40 tabs open and this isn't rare, even among my non-developer friends). And as a developer the dev tools are still lightyears behind.
Not in any legal sense of the word.
Today, I can build a SIP client for the browser and it will work well on every major platform except iOS, where Apple is still dragging ass years after WebRTC was standardized and implemented by every other browser.
No, Microsoft was a monopoly on the OS market.
You cannot be a monopoly with < 50% share like iOS has (and it's not a monopoly to have 100% share on your OWN platform and dictate terms there, as long as your platform is not a monopoly on the overall market).
In other words, people and devs dissatisfied with how iOS does things, can always go to Android (or Windows Phone).
People couldn't do that when Windows had 95%+ of the desktop and enterprise market, because there was no escaping it.
You're assuming "iOS" and "iOS apps" are the same market, which they aren't in the same way that LibreOffice is in the same market with Microsoft Office but not with Microsoft Windows.
The argument you could be trying to make is that Android apps and iOS apps, or Google Play and the iOS App Store, are the same market. But you can't install Android apps on iOS and you can't get iOS apps from Google Play.
And iOS app developers are the customers of the iOS App Store. They pay Apple for it and have no alternative. "Switch to Android" doesn't work because it is the device customer who would have to switch to Android, not the app developer. The app developer is already in both. It's like facing a retail monopoly in California and what you're saying is to go buy retail space in Texas. That's not the same market.
You are a monopoly when you have pricing power over some good or service (the ability, in some range, to raise prices without losing sales to a competitor). Having less than 50% share in some market using the market boundaries usually drawn by analysts does not prove or imply the absence of pricing power.
The good or service being "mobile phones" or "mobile apps" -- e.g. the whole market they belong to.
Not "iPhones" or "iOS apps".
Any company has "pricing power" over their own products and marketplace.
>Having less than 50% share in some market using the market boundaries usually drawn by analysts does not prove or imply the absence of pricing power.
No, it just makes it irrelevant as to the law.
No, it doesn't work that way. If you have pricing power on, say, iPhones -- you can raise the price and sales don't move to someone else -- you have a monopoly because price power demonstrates that whatever putative competitors exist are in a functionally separate market, not substitute products in the same market.
> Any company has "pricing power" over their own products and marketplace.
No, companies in competitive markets lose sales to competitors when they raise prices, which is exactly what pricing power means doesn't happen.
Call me cynical, but Mozilla is made of people. People don't mind making a name for themselves: no one works at Mozilla for life. One might as well prepare for life at tech giants or startups. Firefox is printing money so they can afford the Jonesing (for now).
A less cynical reason is that Mozilla shares the same hiring pool as startups and tech giants and people go back and forth; changing mindsets is hard.
Another perspective a friend recently shared with me is that perhaps it is time for Firefox to go the way of Icedove, Mozilla has taken it pretty far, but it is not its main focus even now, and it can be picked up and developed on into the future (not that there haven't been forks already).
Is that a fact? FWIW, I have little to no interest in working for any other tech company.
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Connected_Devices/Projects
This CNET article more accurately describes the affected Connected Devices project:
https://www.cnet.com/news/mozilla-layoff-firefox-device-rele...
Original: "Mozilla gives up on Firefox OS, lays off 50"
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/02/mozilla-ends-firefox...
Chrome OS is the perfect OS for the masses; lightweight, very secure and stable. A lot of things that used to require dedicated apps can be done in the browser now. Chromebooks are also great machines for schools, much more practical than iPads (in my opinion) and very easy to manage. Mozilla missed the boat.
If you say what you've just said right now, you'll be told you have the benefit of hindsight working in your favor.
On the other hand, if you had the ability to go back in time to make your argument back then, even with perfect omniscience about how things would turn out, then you would have been subjected to claims that there is no market for such a thing, that you're trying to satisfy your own nerd niche itch, and whatever post hoc rationale that the Firefox product team could have (and regularly did) come up with to reassure themselves that their track is the right one.
You don't need hindsight to realise that competing in the phone markplace is the wrong place to start. You start with the desktop and then make gradual adaptions that allow your operating environment work well on tablets, phones and laptops.
The penetration Chromebooks have made in education is huge. And even if it were an entirely no-profit/break-even situation, the idea of millions of students and public library patrons doing work on a "Firebook", and that it would be a serious contender to Windows-based PCs in a number of IT departments, is so perfectly aligned with Mozilla's ideals that it makes me sick to think about, especially juxtaposed with the hundreds of millions that Mozilla Corp has thrown away in the go-nowhere endeavors that it did pursue.
When we do happen to see one, if it is a store we visit regularly, what we see is the same device on display being discounted to death until the store finally manages to get rid of it.
I must have seen around 5 like that, so I don't get where Gartner is getting their values from.
So where are those units that Gartner states were sold over here?
Until recently, the highest marketshare desktop OS, Windows, was a utility and not a content-monetizing platform, but Windows 10 brought it up to the level that was long standard on mobile. Google Search, Chrome the Browser, Chrome OS and Chromebooks are Google's progressively vertical takes on inviting a user into the Google data ecosystem in a non-mobile form factor, proving that Windows's weakness was that Google could monetize these users without having to control the hardware, but getting cheap first-party hardware into the hands of people is always a plus.
In all likelihood, the same would've happened to Firefox OS anyway if it had become successful -- the celebrated 'open' mobile OS would be just another entry point into the same exact platforms that managed to rise to prominence on Windows -- a proprietary but laissez-faire ecosystem where anyone could run an application to do just about anything. Over time, a few players bubbled to the top, and now they're shipping their own hardware to cut out the middleman.
[1] http://www.smartinsights.com/mobile-marketing/mobile-marketi... [2] http://www.pewinternet.org/2015/10/29/technology-device-owne...
I'm a Mozilla fan and wanted a privacy respecting, libre thin-client that kept advertising money coming into Mozilla's coffers so they can continue their mission.
Focusing on that and Firefox was the way. Unfortunately, Mozilla is a little lost.
I have to trust them as much as the closed source native applications on my computer, and I know which ones I would prefer.
Feels like this has been 2-3 years out for almost as long as "native apps" have existed.
Reminds me of the first scene in "Snatch" -
Turkish: What's happening with them sausages, Charlie?
Sausage Charlie: Five minutes, Turkish.
Turkish: It was two minutes five minutes ago.
The part I'm still concerned about is UI performance - it's still miles off native.
Many times needlessly low expectations of both developers and managers are the blame for this. Yes, there are certain elaborate UI effects that are genuinely difficult to do well on web. But when there's a full second lag after pressing a button, or a menu slides into view at 3fps, the platform is not the problem.
A native app that has incredibly choppy, laggy UI for simple interactions wouldn't make it past many engineering managers or PMs. But when there's needlessly a full second lag after pressing a button on a web app everyone shrugs, inaccurately blames it on the web platform (instead of piss poor engineering), and it's out to production furthering the stereotype that web apps are inherently jank.
As a web development community we need to stop this cycle. Web engineers need to stop building, and engineering managers need to stop approving, web apps with needlessly janky, laggy UI for even rudimentary interactions.
This 2014 recap [2] of a comScore report notes that more than half of all smartphone users download 0 new apps a month -- this started the catchphrase that "the average user downloads 0 new apps a month", which has both been supported and challenged by additional analyses on old and new data every year since. Whether it's 0 or 1.5 [3] isn't the point -- the growth is measly.
Aside from a select runaway hits, most of today's most used apps are the same as 4, 5 years ago. The app boom has been over for a long time. Occasionally, one can still strike it rich, but it's the exception, and not the norm.
[1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/parmyolson/2014/02/19/exclusive-...
[2] https://www.quora.com/How-was-WhatsApp-built
[3] https://www.tune.com/blog/no-the-average-american-does-not-d...
Even those that are, they can access the full spectrum of OS APIs, instead of a document model bended to be a VM.
Yup. I've been reading about the imminent demise of native apps forever, but even Steve Jobs couldn't sell that vision. Web apps on mobile are the way of the future, and always will be.
If service workers were invented, PWAs were a thing, or Servo had been built, Mozilla's actions around Firefox OS would probably have been much different.
What really killed Firefox OS was the lack of ecosystem. VP of Apps Rick Fant put all the emphasis on apps for Firefox OS instead of Firefox for Android. Firefox OS could run any app built for F4A, but not the other way around. Why would I, as an engineer, write an app for a device that I can hardly get my hands on, running an operating system almost nobody uses, with customers who (in many cases) don't want to pay $0.99 for an app, using APIs that don't work on anything else, and translate it to a language you don't speak? There were millions of F4A users at the time, and Mozilla made no effort to get folks to build for it at all. A real shame.
Did they pay you while you interviewed for other jobs?
(if not, it'd be crazy to call it anything other than a layoff)
Exact employment status during this interim time is confusing because Mozilla is international and the people affected fall under different labor laws. In the U.S. where there's almost nothing is mandatory you can describe these arrangements any way you want. In Europe if you want to establish a time limit I think you have to actually give the person notice that they are laid off.
But, as was pointed out above, this isn't a money-saving exercise, this is giving up on a field.
So spare me the baseless accusations. ---
By the way, most employees and jobs at Mozilla are distributed. Nobody on my team shares time zone with more than one co-worker on a team of 7 engineers :)
In Mozilla you usually get hired for a specific position; programmers (or anyone, really) aren't liquid resources to be moved around randomly between teams. Larger companies have enough going on that if a project is shut down there's usually some other project to shift to that works for both the team and the programmer. Mozilla only has a thousand employees, so there will be very few openings to choose from based on your experience level, field, and interests.
From the original CNet article:
> Some affected employees are getting new roles in Mozilla, but those losing jobs get severance and job-hunting benefits, Mozilla said. Although about 50 people are affected by the cut, some might stay at Mozilla since they can apply for new positions, some of which Mozilla opened early to ease the pain of the layoffs.
Also, from the CNet article:
> "We have shifted our internal approach to the internet-of-things opportunity," Mozilla said in a statement, "to step back from a focus on launching and scaling commercial products to one focused on research and advanced development, dissolving our connected devices initiative and incorporating our internet-of-things explorations into an increased focus on emerging technologies."
The "layoffs" aren't because of money reasons, it's just a project being shut down.
I hope in future they can leverage their rust knowledge and give us a platform that's open, easy to develop and fast.
I find that hard to believe considering the reviews I've read on it.
Firefox/gecko has always been great on "underpowered" hardware though. A few years ago I bought an unusably slow android tablet. This thing couldn't play an MP3 without long pauses every 5 seconds. Chrome was absolutely useless but with Firefox it became a half decent web browsing machine.
* Windows Phone
* Tizen
* Ubuntu Touch
* Sailfish OS
Honorable mentions: CyanogenMod, Plasma Mobile
If I was in charge of either Tizen or the Surface Phone, I'd make one really nice piece of hardware for my phone OS to fight Android at the fragmentation and developer experience level.
- Branched from MeeGo
- Got the BADA SDK, with its C++ dialect similar to the horrible Symbian C++
- After the Enlightenment guys joined in, the SDK was thrown away and replaced by C one
- A new C++ SDK was created to appease the crowds that in spite of Symbian C++ like experience wouldn't touch pure C
- Recently they adopted .NET as the new apps tooling besides C
So no serious business will ever considere earning money on Tizen apps.
Salfish, nice idea but didn't learn from OS/2 and BlackBerry.
People don't want Qt/C++ and freedom. They want the apps their friends are using.
No point in getting an OS that emulates Android when they can get the real deal.
Windows Phone similarly to Tizen, suffered from the SDK changes between 7, 8, 8.1 and 10.
However Microsoft has the muscle to still push them as enterprise device. Apparently some companies are actually doing that.
Lately I've been playing with gtk in c and now rust and it's fantastic how simple gui development is.
https://developer.tizen.org/development/training/native-appl...
https://developer.tizen.org/development/api-references/nativ...
And the upcoming .NET SDK here
https://developer.tizen.org/development/tizen-.net-preview/i...
Here you can have a look how C++ SDK used to look like, before the Enlightenment guys took over the show on Tizen 2.3.
http://mikeasoft.com/~mike/tizen2-native-dev-draft/
https://developer.tizen.org/ko/forums/native-application-dev...
Nice for you to enjoy doing GUIs in C, but having been coding since the 80's and exposed to so many more productive ways to do GUI development, I don't enjoy it at all, and many that do UI/UX as part of their daily job think the same way.
I've use qt, gtk, win32, swing, winforms, etc, right up to more modern approaches like wpf with mvvm and similar JavaScript ones. After going back to c and gtk I think we've really lost our way and made some really simple problems really complicated.
Android UX is just terrible, and the interface looks so slow (my new phone is a $400 phone from 2016, compared to a 180$ phone from 2014 …)
Because Chromebooks are such a failure right.
The fact that many people believed the dream -- including myself twenty years ago -- doesn't make the dream any more realistic. Eventually, people notice that they would like to do more things than their browser allows them to.
So, yes it is true that people have been willing to migrate to cheaper, limited computers (but mainly tablets and phones; not tiny laptops). But those computers are not generally modeled after using the browser for everything.
I might have seen around 5 total, on sale across European consumer stores, since they exist.
"4.1) How about a Mozilla Operating System?
"Mozilla is positioned well as an application software. However, it makes very little sense to try to make Mozilla into an operating [system], almost as little sense as it would to make a Word Processor or a MP3 player into one. Beyond technical reasons, the operating system market is currently glutted, and a new entry would be unlikely to attract enough users to ensure the writing of drivers for a new system, a critical mass point. People who want to work on an operating system no doubt would be welcomed by the BSD teams, the Linux team, the Freedows team, or any of the many other open source operating system groups out there."
That analysis appears to have applied to webOS just as clearly as it had applied to the desktop and laptop market a decade earlier.
And just to twist the knife a little more, the last sentence in the answer to 4.2 is "Reinvention of the wheel is a poor use of volunteers."
Where do you get that from? If you are a MoCo employee, email me. My email is in my profile.
(At that time I was talking with some manufacturers, they had a need of including locally-made apps in their phones - their proposals were essentially giving over the app, and I would have to guarantee that it worked on their phone, and they would not give one to me!)
IMHO a huge mistake was to pursue the mythical "$25 phone for the poor people". Poor people buy iPhones because this is the primary computing device they have. Lisa Simpson-like deeds, like the "bro" file extension discussion.
Now let's see if Mozilla can break through the bubble and focus on what web developers really need, rather than blindly following "valleyist" fashions.