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.
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.
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
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.
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.
so you missed the huge amount of effort going into Servo recently?
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 an about:config option to change this but many IDEs (incl. WA Studio, presumably) come with servers for this reason.
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.
At least they tried.
You mean they throw a lot of money at the wall hoping that something will stick?
That's how it works, yes.
You spend money creating something, hoping the market will pick it up.
If you create a good product the market will pick it up, throwing cash at random projects and killing it when it doesn't make huge profit sounds wasteful.
Committing resources to projects then keeping them/killing them depending on how they go really isn't abnormal or a poor business practice, no matter how much you try to make it sound like one.
True, if you have extra money, ...
It just 'feel' bad/wrong like now Google has a brand that they will quickly kill any project they start.
No, if you have any amount of money. Large or small.
Havingess money, if anything, presses you to kill projects more.
Imagine my disappointment when I realized "Firefox advance" wasn't for the Gameboy advance :(
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 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
Panasonic created their own version of firefox tv to use for their tvs
I felt the firefox send death, used all the time to share quick files with friends, thankfully I discovered litterbox after they killed it.
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.
https://killedbygoogle.com/
A few, not a lot.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
so you missed the huge amount of effort going into Servo recently?
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.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.
At least they tried.
You mean they throw a lot of money at the wall hoping that something will stick?
That's how it works, yes.
You spend money creating something, hoping the market will pick it up.
If you create a good product the market will pick it up, throwing cash at random projects and killing it when it doesn't make huge profit sounds wasteful.
Committing resources to projects then keeping them/killing them depending on how they go really isn't abnormal or a poor business practice, no matter how much you try to make it sound like one.
True, if you have extra money, ...
It just 'feel' bad/wrong like now Google has a brand that they will quickly kill any project they start.
No, if you have any amount of money. Large or small.
Havingess money, if anything, presses you to kill projects more.
Imagine my disappointment when I realized "Firefox advance" wasn't for the Gameboy advance :(
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 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
Panasonic created their own version of firefox tv to use for their tvs
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/