back to article Mozilla shutters Labs, tells nobody it's been dead for five months

Mozilla has quietly shuttered its Labs, folding people and projects into the main organisation. The closure came to light through a blog post by former Labs staffer Ian Bicking, here. Labs was a separate organisation from Mozilla Reseach, as made clear here. The browser maker confirmed the change to The Register, saying the …

  1. Jad

    Probably Short Sighted ...

    History and Evolution seem to point to the fact that it's not the animals/objects that are ideally suited to their environment that improve ... you need to take a step back and look at it from a different angle, from a small branch of the tree/code and look at making it better, while leaving the original intact ...

    If there is no champion of the Labs, it will not succeed, if they bring labs in house it might be quicker at reacting, but it will not be able to produce things that are not seen as core to the browser, at least not core at the time that they are thought up ...

    just my 2cents.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Probably Short Sighted ...

      Hmm I agree.

      Innovation goes out the window when the bean counters and pointy headed bosses come through the door. (Or in this case, bring the innovators inside the doors).

    2. Charlie Clark Silver badge

      Re: Probably Short Sighted ...

      Mozilla has suffered from feature creep and lack of focus in the past. It's in a pretty privileged position because it doesn't have shareholders to please but it still has a job to do. A couple of years ago Mozilla was hoovering up all kinds of developers and gave them pretty free rein. But you've got to see what works.

  2. Tac Eht Xilef

    Every cloud etc.

    On the plus side maybe it'll mean the end of the Christ-awful PDF.js, which achieves the rare feat of making Adobe's Acrobat Reader plugin seem zippy and stable.

    1. Brewster's Angle Grinder Silver badge

      Haters gonna Hate

      No stability problems. It's a bit slower than Acrobat. But there are fewer security holes. And its certainly not bloated.

      1. Lexxy
        Stop

        Re: Haters gonna Hate

        You see, this is what irks me.

        Criticize something that's not cool to criticize like Acrobat and you get called a hater.

        To lay my cards on the table I agree with the OP: PDF.js just doesn't work for me. I found it slower and less reliable to display the document I wanted correctly than the alternatives - and don't get me started on Mozilla making this the default handler for the mime-type.

        There are fewer security holes - that we know about....

        1. Gene Cash Silver badge

          Re: Haters gonna Hate

          It's not cool to criticize Acrobat?? Really? When the hell did that happen?

          > Mozilla making this the default handler for the mime-type

          Can't be worse than GIMP trying to be the default handler for EVERYTHING including PDFs.

  3. Daniel von Asmuth
    Gimp

    Firefox eats thunderbird

    Does this mean the Mozilla team gives up its attempt to create a web browser?

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    "designed to align the team and their work with Mozilla’s main product groups"

    Management and PR speak seems to have infected the world

    “This allows each team to better sponsor research and innovation for their products. Within those teams, staff are creating faster, reacting more quickly to change and doing their best work.”

    The bit at the end seems to violate English in principle with a vague attempt to embed a compliment into yet more management rubbish

    http://cbsg.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/live

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