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These are more because they basically fizzled out or the company they were working with decided to stop working with them rather than just shutting down services that people use unlike Google. Once again seems like a Firefox hit piece similar to others that have been cropping up everywhere
Most of the services Google kills are also because they “fizzled out”. If you scroll through the Killed by Google site, a lot of the stuff listed there were test apps or small-scale experiments that most people never heard about or cared to try, like all the apps under Area 120. There are a few high-profile examples (Reader, Stadia, etc) but they’re definitely not the majority, same as Mozilla.
I remember seeing some of this stuff when it came out and thinking “why are they doing this?” A bunch of it I never heard of, and a handful I wish had seen success (Firefox OS). Not sure how this counts as a hit piece, it didn’t seem mean spirited and definitely didn’t seem to be misrepresenting anything.
I’m not saying it’s a direct hit piece but it feels like people are being incentivized to write articles that paint Firefox in a negative light. Also I think a lot of these were attempts at making money outside of Google
FxOS only targeting low–mid-range phones in developing markets only seemed a bit odd. Basically no one had heard of it & these places largely choose used/old version of premium products to buying budget unless they have to. There was hype in the dev community about getting a B2G device, but there was hardly availability & specs were abysmal for an OS running a non-fast interpreted language like JavaScript. Not only that but the marketing was around openness & developer-friendliness—things average consumers don’t care about (even if they should).
Imagine in a parallel universe where the idea was managed properly & B2G left the phone sphere too—where school kids were required to get a FxBook instead of Chromebooks… 😶
They also had a “fire” stick, didn’t they? Not to be confused with Amazon’s fire stick
Edit: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matchstick_TV
matchstick
I got one of those Firefox OS phones for work once, very cool idea but the performance just wasn’t good enough to be comfortable.
Don’t donate money to Mozilla they don’t deserve it, much less need it after getting 500M from Google every year.
It’s “funny”, because without that injection from Google, Mozilla would surely die. And the only reason Google hasn’t stopped doing that is because then Chrome (Blink) would be more likely to be treated as a monopoly.
That makes sense. And the leaders of Mozilla probably know this, so they have no incentive to be better, just to exist and pocket the money. Firefox won’t get better unless another competitor appears and becomes a danger to it: danger meaning Google might give the competitor money instead of Mozilla.
