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back to article Mozilla axes IoT project, cuts staff, backs off from commercial stuff

Mozilla is ending its Connected Devices initiative, the flailing software maker's effort to influence the design and development of networkable things. "IoT is clearly an emerging technology space, but it's still early," a company spokesperson told The Register in an emailed statement. "We have shifted our internal approach to …

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  1. Brian Miller

    IoT emerging like Nylanderia Fulva

    "IoT is clearly an emerging technology space ..."

    It isn't emerging, it has emerged, and has become a serious plague o'er all the lands, like tawny crazy ants. What the Mozillans have done is admit defeat, and thrown in the towel. Look at their wiki:

    1. Build internet-connected devices that empower individuals, enrich their lives, and magnify the public benefit of the internet;

    2. Leverage our experience building devices to develop an open-source platform for the Internet of Things that promotes security, privacy, decentralization, interoperability, accessibility and openness; and

    3. Engage commercial partners to bring our products to market and to drive widespread adoption of our platform.

    It's all about rainbow unicorn ponies! Or garden gnome business plans.

    6 0 Reply
    1. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: IoT emerging like Nylanderia Fulva

      You forgot

      4. Shamelessly overpromote IoT "seminars".

      Cough.

      7 0 Reply
  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Botnet association

    In my opinion that's all the whole IoT is to companies. Most people refuse to see it or look the other way, but in the end it's a massive threat to the Internet because of all the caveats.

    I can't help think that those companies who do align themselves with IoT are in for a big surprise once regular users start to realize just how much collateral damage is being done without any of the involved company "experts" to try and do a thing about it.

    Sword of Damocles anyone?

    2 0 Reply
    1. mhenriday
      Reply Icon
      Pint

      Re: Botnet association

      On the other hand : if your refrigerator has been clamouring for years to be connected to the internet, and occasionally goes on strike and refuses to cool the beer until you allow such, IoT might just be what the doctor botmaster ordered....

      Henri

      0 0 Reply
  3. Anonymous Coward
    Meh

    "Firefox has seen its overall share of the browser market slide since 2010"

    Perhaps if they did One Thing Well, instead of Everything Badly.

    7 0 Reply
    1. DropBear
      Reply Icon

      Re: "Firefox has seen its overall share of the browser market slide since 2010"

      Well they don't seem to be doing much of anything at all anymore, except Firefox which they do exceedingly, howlingly badly for quite a while now (mostly power-grabs telling the users what they can't do anymore, for their own good of course).

      5 0 Reply
  4. Anonymous Coward
    WTF?

    Botnet support has already landed

    Christ almighty. If you go to about:config and turn on "dom.flyweb.enabled", websites can run Javascript-powered webservers on your LAN, in Firefox.

    What could possibly go wrong?

    0 0 Reply
  5. Badger Murphy

    In a tailspin

    I remember that Mozilla's Firefox browser was once the only mainstream one that was usable. Once they got to the top of the heap there, they systematically began taking a hatchet to that software, making it objectively worse with every release and update. They gave in to bloat for no reason, in the form of things like "Pocket" and "Hello", which made no sense to literally anyone outside the involved companies, since they already had a robust extensions architecture for such things, but felt the need to bake them into the core browser so everyone had to load them, rather than just those that wanted those things (i.e. nobody).

    Unfortunately, they do not seem to show any signs of correcting course. I remember some rumblings about this new "Great or Dead" design philosophy, which they seem to be implementing on some of their projects, including Firefox to a small degree. Unless they SERIOUSLY prune the bloat and sources of instability (Australis UI overlay among others), the software simply is not stable enough to recommend or use.

    We're now in a sad situation where all of the mainstream browsers are terrible in different ways, and nobody but small players are interested in making a program that is just a browser, and that's it. This would be fine normally, since we could just go to alternative browsers, as I have done. Unfortunately, that is complicated to a novice because doing so has been hamstrung by companies and people writing web pages to specific browsers, and use of onerous user agent sniffing behavio[u]r that requires me to lie and say I'm Firefox in order to get some pages to let me in.

    1 1 Reply

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