20 dead Mozilla and Firefox products
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People talk about dead Google products, but a lot of them have just been superceded by other products.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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
