
Mozilla closes Connected Devices division, lays off 50 - flukus
https://www.cnet.com/news/mozilla-layoff-firefox-device-relevance/
======
fabrice_d
I don't know where journalists get their facts, but this article is terrible.
1) FirefoxOS was killed a year ago. 2) We never attempted to bring FxOS to
other kind of connected devices beyond phones and TVs.

If they had took the time to check the projects being worked on (see
[https://wiki.mozilla.org/Connected_Devices/Projects](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.

~~~
ebbv
Unfortunately Ars Technica is not even a shadow of the site it once was. It
now reprints press releases and rumors like so many other tech sites.

~~~
awqrre
Ars Technica used to be very bad... I thought that it was getting better in
the last year or two but I guess that I was wrong.

~~~
ebbv
When I refer to how it used to be I'm talking like 10+ years ago. It used to
be one of the best tech sites bar none.

------
cpeterso
This article is inaccurate. Mozilla canceled Firefox OS a year ago. Mozilla is
now canceling the Connected Devices project, which was exploring IoT and "Web
of Things" technology outside of a browser:

[https://wiki.mozilla.org/Connected_Devices/Projects](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...](https://www.cnet.com/news/mozilla-layoff-firefox-device-relevance/)

~~~
mintplant
It's worth noting that the title and URL have since been updated.

Original: "Mozilla gives up on Firefox OS, lays off 50"

[https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/02/mozilla-ends-
firefox...](https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/02/mozilla-ends-firefox-os-
connected-device-ambitions-lays-off-50/)

------
remir
Firefox OS should have competed against Chrome OS, not Android and iOS.

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.

~~~
carussell
The thing that's probably second most upsetting about Firefox OS is this:

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.

~~~
BuckRogers
I had perfect omniscience on this one. At least I thought that was the
direction they were taking FirefoxOS. In fact, I sent a product request over
to Panasonic to make a FirefoxBook about 6 years ago[0] and made sure I
mentioned it to Eich as well[1]. Since they were integrating it into their TVs
I figured they were my best bet to push the product idea onto.

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.

[0][https://twitter.com/yenic/status/493525970628771842](https://twitter.com/yenic/status/493525970628771842)

[1][https://twitter.com/yenic/status/502297565199872000](https://twitter.com/yenic/status/502297565199872000)

~~~
pjmlp
No thin-client OS that depends on the web is privacy respecting, as
applications run on other people's computers.

I have to trust them as much as the closed source native applications on my
computer, and I know which ones I would prefer.

~~~
BuckRogers
You're confusing privacy with Free software there, Richard.

------
Brakenshire
Should have been kept as a research project, and only launched for consumer
devices when service workers and PWA's became mainstream, and also the new
rendering techniques from servo are integrated into gecko. If we're lucky, web
apps will be able to cover 50-80% of native app use-cases in the next 2-3
years. When Firefox OS was launched, it was clear they were simply not up to
scratch to make a system like that viable. Especially for low performance
devices.

~~~
rrdharan
> web apps will be able to cover 50-80% of native app use-cases in the next
> 2-3 years

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.

~~~
overcast
I think we're really starting to see the saturation point with native apps,
particularly on phones. I am so sick of having to install yet another mobile
app, for something that basically shows me a bunch of text, pics, and like
buttons. 90% of these shouldn't exist. There is a time and place for it, but I
think there is going to be a shift to the web app with more OS integration
stuff.

~~~
sidlls
Aren't most of those "native" apps just webapps packaged standalone with some
framework anyway?

~~~
pjmlp
Not really, not the majority of the ones that people really care about and
don't drain their battery.

Even those that are, they can access the full spectrum of OS APIs, instead of
a document model bended to be a VM.

------
ianbicking
It is inaccurate that the members of the Connected Devices team (not
FirefoxOS, which was cancelled a while ago) are simply being laid off. Their
positions have (mostly) been eliminated, but there are opportunities for those
individuals to find new positions in Mozilla. That's a challenging position to
be in (I've gone through it myself at Mozilla, frankly it sucks), but it's not
the same as a blanket layoff.

~~~
justin66
> I've gone through it myself at Mozilla, frankly it sucks

Did they pay you while you interviewed for other jobs?

(if not, it'd be crazy to call it anything other than a layoff)

~~~
ianbicking
It sucks psychologically. You still get paid, have benefits, you interview for
the new position but it's not like you put your resume in the stack with
everyone else. Still there's no guarantee you'll be able to find another
position. But people have used this time as a chance to change their career
track, and that probably wouldn't be possible on the open market.

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.

------
Animats
So they're laying off 50 people, yet hiring for roughly comparable jobs.[1]

[1]
[https://careers.mozilla.org/listings/](https://careers.mozilla.org/listings/)

~~~
perryh2
Is it possible that they are collecting resumes online but never hiring or
interviewing the candidates? The resumes would be used as evidence that they
tried to hire Americans but didn't consider any of the applicants to be
qualified. This evidence was used to file visa applications.

~~~
richardwhiuk
I've seen this done for less nefarious reasons, whereby a company will keep
advertising for positions, but just not hire anyone. This is because not
advertising jobs is a strong negative signal that business is in trouble.

~~~
gsnedders
And plenty of places will find a budget, even if there isn't one ordinarily,
for an extraordinary candidate.

But, as was pointed out above, this isn't a money-saving exercise, this is
giving up on a field.

------
flukus
I'm kind of sad about this because I found development for the OS to be better
than for any other mobile OS, even though I've got no love for javascript. It
also ran a lot smoother than android even on the potato quality phone it come
on.

I hope in future they can leverage their rust knowledge and give us a platform
that's open, easy to develop and fast.

~~~
bitmapbrother
>It also ran a lot smoother than android

I find that hard to believe considering the reviews I've read on it.

~~~
flukus
I know, I read the same reviews so I was pleasantly surprised. I even went
back to the store a few days later and bought dad his first smart phone for
Christmas. It really is quite criminal how slow android is on machines that
would have been unimaginably high powered desktops not long ago.

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.

~~~
computerex
To say you are comparing apples to oranges would be an understatement. Your
comparison went from kind of making sense to making no sense at all.

~~~
flukus
Which comparison? I was comparing firefox OS to android and later saying how
good firefox performance is in general.

------
DiThi
They targeted the wrong public for their first devices. There are many
enthusiasts like me that wanted rather powerful FFOS devices, and would have
paid for quality apps. By targeting low end devices and poor countries first,
there was very little demand for app developers to release to this market.

------
Nomentatus
I don't think Mozilla is lost - although they lost a battle. The war
continues, and now it's all about Servo and Rust. Don't be too shocked if a
new browser-based-OS comes out in time, too; with the new tech. The timing for
such a thing is better every day as HTML5 adoption increases, etc. And
remember how far Mozilla fell once upon a time before an independent effort
called Firefox revived them and then some. Rust has massive advantages. I do
wish they'd look over at Chromium's license and change their license terms so
that they could be almost assured that they were building the future because
they were building for everybody, though.

------
Apocryphon
Never mind sufficient adoption to challenge iOS/Android, what are the chances
any of these other OS's even manages to survive?

* Windows Phone

* Tizen

* Ubuntu Touch

* Sailfish OS

Honorable mentions: CyanogenMod, Plasma Mobile

~~~
pjmlp
Tizen is a joke, no serious developer would ever care about it.

\- 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.

~~~
flukus
So many (ubuntu, sailfish, tizen) seem to be going down the Qt path which
really only ever works well with c++ (and a particular dialect at that),
bindings for other languages have always been unstable to non-existent. I wish
they'd either go with GTK or something else in pure C.

~~~
pjmlp
Tizen went that way and no one really wanted to go back to using pure C for
GUI apps, hence the revamped C++ SDK, followed by the adoption of .NET.

~~~
flukus
I don't really mean for app development to be in raw c, just the core
libraries so that bindings can be made available for a number of languages
(go, rust, c++, .net).

Lately I've been playing with gtk in c and now rust and it's fantastic how
simple gui development is.

~~~
pjmlp
You can see the C APIs here,

[https://developer.tizen.org/development/training/native-
appl...](https://developer.tizen.org/development/training/native-application)

[https://developer.tizen.org/development/api-
references/nativ...](https://developer.tizen.org/development/api-
references/native-application)

And the upcoming .NET SDK here

[https://developer.tizen.org/development/tizen-.net-
preview/i...](https://developer.tizen.org/development/tizen-.net-
preview/introduction)

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/](http://mikeasoft.com/~mike/tizen2-native-dev-draft/)

[https://developer.tizen.org/ko/forums/native-application-
dev...](https://developer.tizen.org/ko/forums/native-application-
development/it-possible-use-c-development?langswitch=ko)

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.

~~~
flukus
Thanks, I'll take a look over the weekend.

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.

------
stymaar
I use to have a Firefox OS phone (the Flame), but since I broke it last july,
I switched to Android and 7 month in I still miss my FFOS phone :/.

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 …)

~~~
markcerqueira
What Android phone are you using? Stock Android is pretty good in my opinion
but the manufacturer and carrier-flavored versions of Android can get pretty
disgusting.

~~~
5ilv3r
Unless you are running AOSP, you are not using stock android. FirefoxOS WAS
FAST. I demo'd it on single core 400mhz device and it ran circles around my
dual core 1.5Ghz android with cyanogenmod 11.

------
maxlybbert
The original announcement that Netscape would release Mozilla as open source
included some FAQs, including one question along the lines of "are you going
to release your own operating system?" The answer was that there was no good
reason to build an operating system on a browser. If only they had remembered
that!

~~~
mevile
> The answer was that there was no good reason to build an operating system on
> a browser.

Because Chromebooks are such a failure right.

~~~
BoysenberryPi
Are you comparing the web now to the web then? I would even argue that
Chromebooks are a pretty big flop.

~~~
DannyBee
By what metric?

~~~
BoysenberryPi
Chromebooks are successful as school computers, children's laptops and
literally nothing else. If that was the goal then great but I've never seen
someone who wasn't under 14 or a student using one.

------
unstatusthequo
My Panasonic TV from fall 2015 shipped with this crap. Number of updates since
then: 0

------
icebraining
Seems weird (out of character) to be reading this from a news site rather than
from the Mozilla blog.

~~~
papayawhip
Mozilla is a global company. It would have been nice to do the right thing and
inform all the people affected before a public announcement, but people love
to leak when they've already been let go. Shame that people might have learned
they lost their job from a news site because their colleagues didn't respect a
confidential memo.

~~~
fabrice_d
> people love to leak when they've already been let go

Where do you get that from? If you are a MoCo employee, email me. My email is
in my profile.

------
epx
I rooted for the success of Firefox OS. They treated the developer very well
-- sent me a Keon, even paid for the custom fees, just over a verbal promise
that I would port my app to the platform. And the idea was fantastic - pure
HTML5, like WebOS was.

(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.

------
dang
Url changed from [https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/02/mozilla-ends-
firefox...](https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/02/mozilla-ends-firefox-os-
connected-device-ambitions-lays-off-50), which points to this.

------
toyg
Mercifully done after Christmas, but I guess the writing had been on the wall
for some time.

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.

