The Mozilla Graveyard
The Mozilla Graveyard
A look back at 20 dead Mozilla and Firefox products, from smartphones to VR games.
Seeing "the source is available here on GitHub", "the project was forked and is now maintained as (other name)", etc. after most of these really helps show the difference with Google. Well that and the length of the article, Google has far more deaths under their belt.
I felt the firefox send death, used all the time to share quick files with friends, thankfully I discovered litterbox after they killed it.
There's also https://send.vis.ee/
Panasonic created their own version of firefox tv to use for their tvs
A forgotten one is webassembly.studio, an in-browser IDE for creating WASM projects with way less pain than other methods. It got discontinued the year I needed it for my school project. It was open source but I failed to rehost it myself and public mirrors only appeared after I spent days trying to make Emscripten work, tore my hair out over WebGL and then finally painfully built the whole thing with CSS (and a bit of JS; yes, it was indeed a disaster).
Do you still use WASM? I've been exploring the space and wasn't sure what the best tools are for developing in that space.
Nope. But I guess a mirror of WebAssembly Studio would still be the best starting point despite its slow development lately. The WAsm plugin for VSCodium was broken for me too.
Note that unlike JS, WASM won't run from
file://URLs; you need to run a local http server or commit to an online repo to run your code. There might be anabout:configoption to change this but many IDEs (incl. WA Studio, presumably) come with servers for this reason.
20 dead Mozilla and Firefox products
Those are rookie numbers!
--A single Google product manager, probably
People talk about dead Google products, but a lot of them have just been superceded by other products.
Besides the 13 messaging platforms I’d say most of them haven’t.
A few, not a lot.
Imagine my disappointment when I realized "Firefox advance" wasn't for the Gameboy advance :(
Another day, more Mozilla FUD. I just saw the switched on Linux guy posted some too. They arent a perfect company, but lets not pretend they're exactly like google or a mini google. It feels almost coordinated to get you to feel like all companies are compromised, so you should just use the popular thing and forget about privacy and security.
It feels almost coordinated to get you to feel like all companies are compromised, so you should just use the popular thing and forget about privacy and security.
People are criticizing Mozilla for the ads, tracking, and AI stuff. The stuff Google does. Criticizing Mozilla is not an endorsement of Google, in fact quite the opposite.
Their ad metrics thing is 100% private. Nobody, not even Mozilla, can tie the data back to you. Each data point is packaged separately (so that you can't get all of it and easily work out who it is). Mozilla created an effective way to have genuinely privacy-respecting and metrics and they're hated for it.
I don't like ads, I use an adblock, but the internet runs on ads. Ads unfortunately have to exist if we still want all this online content, and if they do exist, they should be private.
With any hope, the likes of the EU will push for this over the kinds of ad systems that Google and Meta push.
As for the AI integration in Firefox - it runs locally and does stuff like offline translation (i.e not sending the contents of the page to Google translate), as well as enhanced screen reader functionality for blind people. Stop trying to equate it to the likes of ChatGPT.
It is not really FUD to point out that Mozilla wastes ungodly amounts of money on projects of dubious utility instead of investing it into their browser. Their current trajectory doesn't inspire much confidence either. Mozilla started to waste even more money on 'AI' features nobody asked for.
Mozilla doesn't exist to fund Firefox. Firefox exists to fund Mozilla. It's been that since the very fucking beginning: Mozilla is a general internet charity that makes money with a browser. It's always been that way. It never has been any different. I may have to repeat myself: The purpose of Mozilla isn't to fund Firefox the purpose of Firefox is to be a money-maker for Mozilla's charitable causes.
You're right, they aren't google. Not for lack of trying though.
You see posts putting some shade over Mozilla, and your immediate reaction is "it feels almost coordinated". Well, that may be. But it would be hard to distinguish a "coordinated attack" from a "that's just the things they're doing, and there's report on it" article, no? Especially when most of it can be fact-checked.
In this particular case, those abandoned projects got picked up by other… sometimes. And sometimes not. But they were abandoned. There's no denying that.
If you want some more hot water for Mozilla, since you're talking about privacy and security, you'd be interested in their recent switch regarding these points. Sure, the PR is all about protecting privacy and users, but looking into the acts, the message is a bit more diluted. And there's always a fair amount of people that are ready to do the opposite of what you claims; namely discarding all criticism because "Mozilla", when the same criticism are totally fair play when talking about other big companies.
Being keen on maintaining user privacy, system security, and trust, is not the same as picking a "champion" and sticking to it until the end. Mozilla have been doing shady things for half a decade now, and they should not get a free pass because they're still the lesser evil for now.
Enshittification isn't an overnight thing, red flags are building and it's important to call it out.
The Mozilla FUD where I said I like Firefox and pointed out how many of the projects continued in some form after Mozilla ended them?
Honestly a number of these were abandoned for reasons that are fair enough.
Additionally, lots of these are open source and either have been or can be forked.
Many of these have public, archived repositories, differently from hundreds of dead Google projects.
The loss of FirefoxOS was quite a shame at the time, but i can’t say i miss the rest. Servo, on the other hand, is all but dead. Cannot wait to see what the future holds for the project
Servo isn't dead it's just on slow burn. Also, under the umbrella of the Linux Foundation Europe. As far as Mozilla is concerned it has served its purpose: Prototype stuff that then got included in Firefox to get rid of a quite large amount of technical debt.
The long and short of it is: Firefox is supposed to make money for Mozilla's charitable causes. It's not an end in itself, but a means to an end.
I think Firefox OS could have a successful reboot today. JavaScript frameworks were not what they are now, and between react, vue, svelte, and angular, I think we are in a good place.
I feel electron and tauri have demonstrated how well JavaScript can be used for interface while allowing it to access system resources in a safe way.
Perhaps it should not be run by Mozilla, though, IMO they should focus on Firefox.
it did. it lives on as the proprietary KaiOS, used in cheap feature phones.
so you missed the huge amount of effort going into Servo recently?
Twenty things Mozilla the company killed and they didn't mention ITS OWN NAMESAKE APP. It's didn't 'evolve' into Firefox: they split the baby in half and cut away the connective tissue.
Seamonkey is still kinda alive.
I wonder if Mozilla would've benefitted if something like Hello was still around when the pandemic hit. Hello was a Firefox feature that made video chatting easy. You just needed to click the link.
I used the Notes quite a bit and thought it was a mistake to get rid of it. People pay for notes and tasks related sync services, so it could have been a revenue source. I also miss Firefox Panorama