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.
Yes, they made some mistakes and adoption was poor. But it worked well and the underlying protocols are something the internet still desperately needs.
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.
It was DELIGHTFUL, and while I understand the rationales for why it was canned, I still harbor some sour grapes.
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.
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!
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"
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.
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.
https://divestos.org/index.php?page=devices&base=LineageOS https://github.com/Divested-Mobile/DivestOS-Build/blob/maste...
I've still never seen a good retrospective on what went wrong, do you happen to have any links/stories?
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.
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.
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?
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".
- Webapp & hosting costs
- Data storage & transfer costs
- Copyright & Abuse response costs
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.
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.
ActiveState IDEs and Zotero come to mind.
I haven't noticed this, can you explain more?
Maybe that'll change once Google kills Google Analytics
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.
Damn you, Google.
Feedly is almost as good though. Its the first replacement that I stuck with.
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)
*its
Also, was Camino ever officially a Mozilla product?
> 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
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.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Tools/Shader_Editor
I really enjoyed using this.
