I'm two fences on Firefox doing "too many unrelated things" as the article suggests.
Firefox OS has been pretty much unsuccessful, but it sort of made sense? It started to be made when Firefox was still on top on desktop, but mobile started eating its lunch; and it was clear that Firefox need to do something about it, or the future will be all Chrome and Safari, on the two locked-down platforms.
Which eventually happened, of course, and Firefox share is neglible nowadays on mobile.
The identity management with Persona or what was the name also made sense. People at that time started using Google and Facebook for unified identity, and it made sense to make a decentralized identity.
None of these project ultimately worked, but they made sense?
What never made sense to me was Pocket or Send, or even the teleconferencing they had, but it seems that Firefox doubles down on Pocket now.
We can’t even get developers to use FF, the times I read about it here (and maybe it is a vocal minority idk) that a developer doesn’t like a certain feature. Or they are missing feature X from chrome.
I think it would be a valid strategy if you do go after developers and sysadmins. So pour resources in getting parity where devs think they would switch.
In general whenever I help installing software for someone, I install FF, and I think I have installed in at least a couple dozen computers now.
Aka do a Blender. Blender has gained momentum by getting things right, not adding features nobody wants, or Blender sidegigs.
There is also the problem of addon monetization, Chrome has a whole ecosystem of people earning revenue from add ons. That’s a invested network you have to deal with at some point.
> Aka do a Blender. Blender has gained momentum by getting things right, not adding features nobody wants, or Blender sidegigs.
There is a parsimoniousness about Blender that is really quite incredible. I have rarely used an app that has so successfully resisted feature-creep and bloat. E.g. unlike almost all other 3D apps, it has no radial array tool or feature. Why not? Because you can cook your own using a simple linear array.
Screw modifier is similar, but not the best route for a radial array.
I not knocking blender. I love its austere design philosophy. The add-ons are a case in point. Some very important functionality is not loaded by default (e.g. loop tools and copy attributes). But the devs seem to be saying, 'if we can live without something in the default load, then we should'. Huge difference to bloatware like 3DS Max.
That's a side effect of not listening to developers.
---
Dramatization:
Web Developer: I need non-standard feature that works in IE and Chrome
Firefox: But that's non-standard, you'll be able to use standard alternative in the future
Web Developer: When?
Firefox: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ it's still in draft
Web Developer: But I need to finish my project this quarter
Firefox: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Web Developer: -webkit-something: 1
* 3 years later *
Firefox: The web is full of -webkit-something and everyone thinks Firefox is broken because we support the standard something but not -webkit-something
Firefox: Please remove the -webkit- prefix
Web Developer: I don't support that project anymore
Firefox: But you only need to remove the -webkit- prefix
Web Developer: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
* 1 year later *
Firefox: We will support -wekit-something because nobody fixes their websites for Firefox even when they only need to remove the -webkit- prefix
Web Developer: So you're telling me that we can get away with not supporting Firefox and you'll eventually follow suit?
Firefox: That's not what I meant
Web Developer: -webkit-something-something: 1
---
To be honest I think that Firefox has already crossed the point of no return, in the past Firefox used to have a share of about 30% of the market and supporting Firefox was justified even if that meant writing twice the lines of code, but nowadays the share is less than 3%. Firefox doesn't have enough resources to compete against Chrome with features, and people doesn't care enough about security to justify a broken web for the sake of security.
I don't know whether it's a good idea or not, but rather than pitching Firefox for the mainstream web, I would push Firefox to become the de-facto browser for security sensitive scenarios (ex. online shopping, online banking, taxes, etc.). Supporting a subset of the web makes more sense in a resource-constrained scenario especially because the Servo experiment and the Rust project exist to tackle the security issue.
On the contrary I kinda see the point in the pocket and send to bridge the gap between desktop and mobile for the users that own both.
But the small brainless degradations of the UI in Firefox make me worry about its future.
For example it’s not possible to permanently add exclusions to the privacy shield. Because of it the sites are often broken.
And this is a feature that is directly user facing on the main screen!
Formerly known as "Read It Later", it's a reading list service. You save pages for later reference. There's subscriptions to unlock features.
I loved RIL but Pocket is but a shadow of what it once was.
Similar to Evernote web clips, or Instapaper. I now use OneNote instead with the webclipper plugin, mostly because it puts the clips in a place where I can also add my own notes.
I switched to Joplin. It's completely seamless once I authenticate with the service I sync with and toggle the web clipper support in the desktop app. You can even clip those pages where the site blocks the Evernote and OneNote crawler since it all happens in your browser and on the local clip server.
Best of all, it's all in Markdown. There's a beta rich text editor, but the Markdown editor has a preview and a little button bar for common stuff like lists and formatting.
Firefox OS never made sense unless Mozilla was prepared to pay the backroom bribes and incentives to get it preinstalled on hundreds of millions of phones. And they weren't.
Maybe maybe not. But it's also good to keep in mind who else failed in that space from many different angles. MS, Nokia, Blackberry, etc... If MS with infinite cash on hand could not get into that market then it is likely that chances of success were always very low. And it still might have been the right thing to try despite the chance being low.
You are right that it was a very difficult endeavor.
I think the main bottleneck is not the installation by the vendors, but the apps available.
I believe, what is missing is an abstraction layer between the apps and the OS. If it was possible to create apps for Android and Apple in a generic way and, it was easy to add a third OS, so all the apps could be made available to the new system, a new OS would be not so limited. I know, I know, that is itself a very difficult endeavor.
correct me but those features are denied by apple and mozilla for very good reasons (privacy and security) besides beeing anything but 'basic' (midi anyone?)
PWA's do work, but they are hard to install (not available in the appstore, the user has to go through a non-obvious sequence of steps they won't discover unless they Google it). They are slow (because safari refuses to implement caching of compiled JavaScript or webassembly). They can't store persistent data, so the user experience is terrible (yay - who wants a notekeeping app that deletes all your notes every 30 days?). The data doesn't sync to iCloud. It doesn't integrate with the rest of the OS (no way to share a picture to a PWA for example). The Safari browser engine they must run in is ~3 years behind desktop and Android browsers with supporting web standards. There is no way to do background stuff like playing music, using the GPS for directions, etc.
If you're scared of something, sometimes it's best to invent it and then not invest in it than to let someone else invent it and do a decent job of it.
Classic example: Oil companies "investing" in clean tech in the 90's, sucking up government grants and public attention and never really getting anywhere probably slowed down the switch to renewables by 10+ years.
> And it still might have been the right thing to try despite the chance being low.
This is exactly my take on it.
I think timing was a big part of it, too. They were too late to get a foothold on the current market, but too early to take advantage of the more open platforms coming out nowadays like the PinePhone.
While back Twitter recommended me a tweet from one of Firefox female engineers saying that she was responsible for pocket and updating pocket. many people complain that pocket sucked she claimed them all being misogynists so there's clearly cultural issues at Mozilla.
That's a really big leap you're making there, going from a context free anecdote about someone who got wound up on Twitter to that. And she was claiming that everyone complaining about Pocket was misogynistic? I'm not convinced that's completely true
The basic idea of Firefox OS was actually great, they just didn't quite get the market right. Kai OS is a very successful fork which runs on feature phones.
Kai OS is fundamentally irrelevant though, in the great scheme of things. Mozilla can do billions of irrelevant but self-sustainable projects; that’s not the point. The point of Mozilla is to move the needle in the web ecosystem at large.
It was clear from the start that Mozilla did not have enough to move the needle in the mobile market all by itself. FFOS was a massive waste of time, effort, and money, that even resulted in a loss of prestige for the brand. It sucked the air out of more relevant priorities, diverted (and eventually often lost) their best talent, and wasted time and focus at a critical juncture.
I have an LG WebOS television and it runs extremely smoothly. VS Code is an electron app and nobody complains about its performance.
Ultimately webOS didn't lose because it was web tech. It lost because Android and iOS already captured the market. Windows Phone was a .NET runtime with similar performance to Java, but it failed to capture the market even with billions in Microsoft subsidies.
> I have an LG WebOS television and it runs extremely smoothly.
To counter that anecdote, I have an LG WebOS television and it is constantly freezing, I frequently have to power cycle it just to launch Netflix, it automatically updates itself without my consent, and each update seems to make it slower, or break something. Simply navigating the menu is a pain because of how unresponsive and slow it is, and setting it up required me to agree to a bunch of privacy policies.
To be fair, I blame LG for that more than WebOS. I don't really know anything about WebOS and how it relates to web tech, but I do remember using it many years ago on an HP TouchPad tablet. That was a great tablet experience at the time; way better than anything Android had to offer (except for the larger catalog of apps)
WebOS is smooth but it’s also half-dead. Nobody uses it except LG, and I wonder how long even them will bother with it (I mean, to get an app in their marketplace you have to basically send in a slide deck with all sorts of bureaucracy, it looks like something a low-rent manager would come up with, they cannot be serious about long-term success). It effectively recommends not to use its local APIs, but rather consider the device as a dumb kiosk.
Half-dead is a huge stretch, it's one of the best and most popular TV OS's. It might be hard to develop for, but it has all the apps and features 99% of people want with an amazing cursor concept.
It’s actually not hard to develop for, in my experience. What is hard is having to deal with the commercial silliness - Developer Mode disappearing after a few days? A manual submission process for a very mediocre store? A “recommended” payment gateway? I’ve been holding out on investing serious time on it because I have PTSD from Nokia/Maemo and the parallels with the current webos are (sadly) stark.
People don't complain about VSCode because microsoft tried hard with optimizing performance. But see any discussion about Atom, its "predecessor", or Slack (at least the older version, that was really memory hungry).
Out of all the Smart TVs I've tried (Samsung, Sony, LG), webOS is probably the best in user experience. Naturally, more expensive TVs with better processors run smoother, but my budget UHD TV from LG with webOS 3.0 ran pretty great.
Firefox OS kind of make sense, yet could they implemented ecosystem?
* There are Firefox browser users shocked by spyware addons, it is a norm on mobile. There are no paid Firefox addons. This does not work in "pay or product" reality. Open source and freeware is a small (and awesome) niche.
* There is a Mozilla stance against DRM. There is a lot of paid books, movies, music on Google Play.
* DOM is slow. Javascript has good parts. Google decided in favor of Android apps, not Chrome apps. Also Google Fuchsia.
* Bluetooth, Contacts, NFC, SMS, Wifi [1] access can be asked from OS.
Firefox was not default Windows browser, yet it succeeded. The reason I've never tried Firefox on Android is the loss of Firefox reputation on desktop. Memory bloat, falling behind Developer Tools, constant UI changes, not so snappy UI. Firefox was slow on desktop how could one expect it to perform well on mobile?
The problem seems to me, that Mozilla does not have a platform of users to market to, whereas all their competitors do. It's really the marketing part where Firefox is falling short and I am not sure they can ever do much better on that front.
Regarding Send/Teleconferencing, I think that made sense to. In theory you don't need anything as complicated as Skype or Teams or Zoom and lots of people, me including, use VOIP a lot. It would have been nice to have a simple click to call on the browser itself. Same goes for sending files with a click. Utilities that lots of people use and would give the browser a boost. Unfortunately I think these products failed because the sort of person who needs them is the sort of person who does not like learning new things so even if their current method is 8 steps and takes addition software and is not free, they will keep with what is currently working for them.
Again this might also be Mozilla's marketing falling short.
As someone who likes sites like reddit for the content sharing but hates the time sink the comments section becomes I love Pocket for delivering me highish quality articles and news that I don't have to worry about gettin sucked into some flame war over.
I agree FF OS & Persona were tackling the right problems at the time.
I'm not sure about the solutions they proposed, especially for Persona.
Maybe to tamed.
Firefox OS has been pretty much unsuccessful, but it sort of made sense? It started to be made when Firefox was still on top on desktop, but mobile started eating its lunch; and it was clear that Firefox need to do something about it, or the future will be all Chrome and Safari, on the two locked-down platforms.
Which eventually happened, of course, and Firefox share is neglible nowadays on mobile.
The identity management with Persona or what was the name also made sense. People at that time started using Google and Facebook for unified identity, and it made sense to make a decentralized identity.
None of these project ultimately worked, but they made sense?
What never made sense to me was Pocket or Send, or even the teleconferencing they had, but it seems that Firefox doubles down on Pocket now.