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Mozilla unveils Firefox OS based IoT projects (LinuxGizmos.com)

[Posted March 3, 2016 by jake]

Over at LinuxGizmos, Eric Brown notes some new "Internet of Things" (IoT) projects from Mozilla that were described in a recent blog post by Ari Jaaksi, Mozilla Senior VP for Connected Devices. "The first projects include a Project Start Home framework for a home automation system, as well as a Project Link personal user agent and Vaani voice interface that would work within such a framework. Finally, there’s a crowdsourced Project SensorWeb for tracking air pollution. Interestingly, the term “Firefox OS” is not used in the latest announcement, despite the reference to Firefox OS Connected Devices in the previous post. Still, all the projects appear to use Firefox OS or Mozilla’s underlying Boot to Gecko (b2g) codebase. Mozilla is seeking testers, developers, and advisers, for all these open source projects."
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But for how long?

Posted Mar 4, 2016 14:31 UTC (Fri) by cwillu (guest, #67268) [Link]

Given their recent track record, I'm pretty hesitant to start relying on mozilla projects for infrastructure that I expect to work in ten years. Will support be cut or the project dropped completely if they have a slow year or two, or decide that IOT is no longer a good fit for their current strategy?

Even a nonprofit needs strong leadership

Posted Mar 4, 2016 17:31 UTC (Fri) by b7j0c (guest, #27559) [Link] (33 responses)

This is why I don't donate funds to Mozilla anymore....they squander their momentum with awful projects that have no hope whatsoever of establishing themselves or benefiting users. They need a real leader who can focus their efforts and close-out distractions like this.

Nothing is more telling than the awful phone project which was doomed from day one but distracted Mozilla for years

The IoT stuff is just a way to retread that work while capturing some of the zeitgeist.

Meanwhile they killed the Persona stuff that actually dovetailed nicely into their web strategy.

Firefox is no longer in favor and continues to show declining market share

I would be surprised if Mozilla is still around in 2021

Even a nonprofit needs strong leadership

Posted Mar 4, 2016 18:01 UTC (Fri) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link] (2 responses)

>I would be surprised if Mozilla is still around in 2021

I think they'll stick around a lot longer than that. They've got an established brand and an open core browser full of value-adds and promotional offers that consumers will just love! After all, the exact same business model worked great for Netscape and AOL, right?

Even a nonprofit needs strong leadership

Posted Mar 7, 2016 10:33 UTC (Mon) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link] (1 responses)

>>I would be surprised if Mozilla is still around in 2021
>I think they'll stick around a lot longer than that.

They're ripe for someone to do a Firefox to them. They're so focused on pivoting out of the FLOSS browser segment that anyone that took it up seriously could capture their userbase in a couple of years.

Even a nonprofit needs strong leadership

Posted Mar 7, 2016 13:00 UTC (Mon) by cortana (subscriber, #24596) [Link]

I don't think it's possible for a new browser to gain significant marketshare without an enormous investment in marketing.

Even a nonprofit needs strong leadership

Posted Mar 4, 2016 20:57 UTC (Fri) by malor (guest, #2973) [Link] (29 responses)

Yeah, I gave up on Firefox when they recently dropped the ability to have session-only cookies. I had it set to 'prompt' on all websites, and with most, I said "allow for session", meaning their cookies were accepted, and then discarded when Firefox exited. It remembered that setting, so it never had to ask me again for a given site. For sites that I cared about and used routinely, like LWN, I clicked on "Accept", and those cookies were stored permanently.

So they just... stripped out that feature. Silently. Without warning me. They just stopped honoring the setting, and started accumulating cookies like crazy. I happened to notice within a couple weeks, and just... oh man, when I found out this was deliberate, I was *steamed*. It is SO disrespectful to just stop honoring a privacy setting like that, without even warning the user.

Yeah, maybe it should be better handled with an addon, but the sheer disrespect in just turning that off and silently leaving me hanging... screw Mozilla.

I'm using Chromium now. It took awhile for me to find a combination of settings and extensions that felt comfortable, and didn't retain more data than I like, but at this point, I'm in real good shape. (the primary settings being a combination of 'don't store any data permanently' and "Vanilla Cookie Manger', which backs up and restores specific, whitelisted cookies, plus an extension for live feeds (to duplicate Firefox's default BBC bookmark), and uBlock and uMatrix for adblocking and script blocking.)

And I was a donator, too. I sent Mozilla money because, despite how I had been disliking many of their decisions (that Pocket bullshit being the primary example), I figured that they needed cash, and that donating was the way to stop crap like Pocket.

Well, no more money coming from me. I would have been okay with them making that change if there had been some warning, and a gentle nudge toward fixing things properly, but as is? I'm done. They're not here for me anymore.

I'm not sure who they're serving, but it isn't me.

Even a nonprofit needs strong leadership

Posted Mar 4, 2016 22:16 UTC (Fri) by morksigens (guest, #92681) [Link] (10 responses)

Uh, if you ever want to return to Firefox, set the cookie policy to "allow only for session" globally and add permanent exceptions via right-click on page -> "page information" or something -> permissions -> cookies -> allow. Why would you go through the pain of being prompted on every site?!

Even a nonprofit needs strong leadership

Posted Mar 5, 2016 5:39 UTC (Sat) by malor (guest, #2973) [Link] (7 responses)

I don't think they honor that setting at all, anymore.

Even a nonprofit needs strong leadership

Posted Mar 5, 2016 19:03 UTC (Sat) by morksigens (guest, #92681) [Link] (6 responses)

I've been doing it that way for years and Firefox *still* correctly forgets cookies for sites where I don't intervene (I'm used to clicking those popups on Google sites away that want to tell me about some changes I don't care about). I'm not sure where your experience is coming from.

Even a nonprofit needs strong leadership

Posted Mar 5, 2016 19:15 UTC (Sat) by malor (guest, #2973) [Link] (5 responses)

This article is a quick summary of the problem:

http://tech.slashdot.org/story/16/02/04/2221204/firefox-4...

Even a nonprofit needs strong leadership

Posted Mar 6, 2016 1:37 UTC (Sun) by morksigens (guest, #92681) [Link] (4 responses)

Hm, okay. I still think the feature only seems interesting to people with an OCD to feed. Delete on exit with custom exceptions is all the vast majority ever needs, if at all. And it works fine in 44.

I honestly don't understand the reactions to this. But then again, I don't understand most of the hostility flung at Mozilla in recent times.

Even a nonprofit needs strong leadership

Posted Mar 6, 2016 9:27 UTC (Sun) by malor (guest, #2973) [Link]

>Delete on exit with custom exceptions is all the vast majority ever needs, if at all.

Okay, fine. Then they should have converted all my settings, instead of silently ignoring the preferences I'd spent years building up.

Silently ceasing to obey a security restriction is *bullshit*.

Even a nonprofit needs strong leadership

Posted Mar 6, 2016 10:22 UTC (Sun) by hitmark (guest, #34609) [Link] (2 responses)

"Hm, okay. I still think the feature only seems interesting to people with an OCD to feed."

And that attitude is a perfect example of whats wrong with FOSS these days.

Who cares if it is only an interest for some, they used it, they liked it, so why mess with it?

Torvalds have the right idea, "do not break user space". Thus means that once an API (or driver) is in place it stays in place, unchanged, until they can verify that nobody uses it any more.

I think one of the recent releases had a bit of email traffic about a driver for a storage controller, and once they had established that it was still in use in some observatory somewhere it was left in place.

But thats the kernel. Linux user space itself seems all too happy to through out the whole family with the bathwater and start over again every few years or so.

Cluebat people, MS didn't get big just because of underhanded tactics. They also made damn sure that some decade old program was able to run on the latest Windows.

And similarly, you can still run old system/360 binaries on the latest out of IBMs portfolio.

Thats why we see Linux the kernel crop up everywhere, while Linux the user land is maintained in house over and over and over. They simply can't trust the devops monkeys running user space to not shit in the salad on a whim.

Even a nonprofit needs strong leadership

Posted Mar 6, 2016 12:10 UTC (Sun) by morksigens (guest, #92681) [Link] (1 responses)

You may consider my opinion rude, and it probably is, but I see it like this: The majority of FOSS is neither the Linux kernel nor IBM nor Microsoft. It has neither the commercial backing/interest and therefore direction nor the manpower the kernel has. Don't mistake yourself for a paying customer or profiteer of commercial interest. If a feature can't be maintained for lack of interest or because it stands against a design approach, it may get the axe. It's easy to argue the other way if someone else would have to do the work. As I see it, most FOSS exists to serve itself and those who participate and that's okay to me. If it accidentally serves your interests, good for you. If not, tough luck. Such is life. It's unfortunate that the feature malus and maybe others were depending on was pulled from under them, but I personally would not assume ill will.

I often wonder at the bile when I read comment sections to topics like Firefox, GNOME, systemd, Unity and other projects that implement controversial changes. I find them mostly agreeable.

Even a nonprofit needs strong leadership

Posted Mar 7, 2016 7:32 UTC (Mon) by malor (guest, #2973) [Link]

>As I see it, most FOSS exists to serve itself and those who participate and that's okay to me. If it accidentally serves your interests, good for you. If not, tough luck.

And, yet, Mozilla is getting increasingly panicky about Firefox's evaporating market share.

Can't have it both ways.

As I said, elsewhere in the thread: I'm not sure who the Firefox team is serving, these days, but I don't think it's me anymore. It used to be, but I think my welfare is no longer especially high on their internal priority list.

And I was a donator; that's not quite the same as a paying customer, but I did give them money.

Even a nonprofit needs strong leadership

Posted Mar 5, 2016 12:56 UTC (Sat) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link]

Leaving aside the matter of the feature being silently destroyed: sometimes, "seeing how the sausage is made" is a good idea even if you like sausage.

Even a nonprofit needs strong leadership

Posted Mar 5, 2016 13:54 UTC (Sat) by malor (guest, #2973) [Link]

>Why would you go through the pain of being prompted on every site?!

By the way, this was mostly because I wasn't aware of a better way to do it. It was typically once per site, which wasn't too bad, although some sites would have an initial 'cookie storm' that was kind of crazy. Most of the time, I just routinely clicked "Allow for session" without even noticing. If I changed my mind later, and wanted to keep cookies for a site, I'd have to go digging in settings, not knowing that it was anywhere on the right-click context menu. This was a real pain, but fortunately was something I very rarely had to do.

Regardless, however you set the policy, the easy way or the hard way, Firefox doesn't seem to honor it anymore. And it did so without any warning at all, not even a pop up dialog warning you that your prior settings were going to be ignored. That's just ... god, that pisses me off SO MUCH. If it needed to be removed, fine, but you don't take that kind of feature out silently. You just do. not. do. that.

So, Firefox's market share drops just that tiny bit more, another 0.00001%. And I've been using it since before it was Firefox.

Even a nonprofit needs strong leadership

Posted Mar 5, 2016 15:44 UTC (Sat) by TRS-80 (guest, #1804) [Link] (7 responses)

I have never used it, but Self-Destructing Cookies might be useful for you.

Even a nonprofit needs strong leadership

Posted Mar 5, 2016 16:04 UTC (Sat) by malor (guest, #2973) [Link] (6 responses)

That might work for the technical issue, but the real problem is that I no longer trust Mozilla's management.

They've been flailing ever since Brendan Eich left. It may have been PC to give him the boot, but it's sure looking like it was slow-motion suicide for the corporation.

Even a nonprofit needs strong leadership

Posted Mar 5, 2016 16:16 UTC (Sat) by TRS-80 (guest, #1804) [Link] (1 responses)

The rot goes back well before Eich got the boot; he's a technical guy, not a leader, but since they couldn't find a proper CEO it got foisted on him. Perhaps all the other candidates they looked at realised it was a poisoned chalice.

I'll still use Firefox over Chrome, if for no other reason than Chrome extensions a) require a Google account to install and b) are a cesspool of privacy violation.

Even a nonprofit needs strong leadership

Posted Mar 5, 2016 16:20 UTC (Sat) by malor (guest, #2973) [Link]

I'm using Chromium, which I build myself locally, omitting API keys (so it doesn't talk to Google, hopefully, except when I explicitly initiate the connection), and including H.264, so it works better with video sites. I haven't needed a Google account to add extensions.

The privacy violation parts are entirely possible, but hopefully I've chosen good offerings.

Even a nonprofit needs strong leadership

Posted Mar 5, 2016 17:17 UTC (Sat) by kvaml (guest, #61841) [Link] (2 responses)

I'm using Firefox with essentially the same cookie settings. I have NOT noticed any evidence of extra cookies getting accepted. It's quite possible I failed to look in the correct places.

Would you please provide some guidance? I hope this is a reasonable forum for such a request. Thanks.

Even a nonprofit needs strong leadership

Posted Mar 5, 2016 17:25 UTC (Sat) by malor (guest, #2973) [Link]

Well, the writeup on the specific thing that bit me is nicely summarized here:

http://tech.slashdot.org/story/16/02/04/2221204/firefox-4...

Even a nonprofit needs strong leadership

Posted Mar 10, 2016 21:41 UTC (Thu) by mstefani (guest, #31644) [Link]

I see it too with FF 44 and I was relying on that feature.
Great to see that I had a ton of crap cookies having accumulated now with the silent automatic change.
Way to go Mozilla, looks like I need a new browser.

Even a nonprofit needs strong leadership

Posted Mar 6, 2016 10:23 UTC (Sun) by hitmark (guest, #34609) [Link]

I wonder how much Seamonkey is affected by all this.

Session-only cookies are working okay for me

Posted Mar 5, 2016 16:47 UTC (Sat) by sdalley (subscriber, #18550) [Link] (9 responses)

Session-only cookies seem to work fine for me in Firefox v44.0.2 (without add-ons), so I'm scratching my head wondering what you're talking about. The Edit Preferences layout changes from time to time, to be sure, but I found it quite easily.

It's under Edit / Preferences / Privacy / History / Use custom settings for history / Keep (cookies) until: and select the option "I close Firefox".

Note however, that there is a legitimate corner case where this collides with the startup option "When Firefox starts | Show my pages and tabs from last time". Cookies loaded from still-open tabs from last time survive, presumably so the state is preserved when you carry on.

Maybe people are feeding off the let's-kick-mozilla meme that seems to be circulating at the moment, and this prejudices them to leap to negative conclusions.

Session-only cookies are working okay for me

Posted Mar 5, 2016 16:53 UTC (Sat) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (6 responses)

It seems to be OP's complaint is really a political/social one characterized as a technical problem. He seems to think Etch was a good leader even though he doesn't like the projects including Firefox OS that Etch was part of.

Session-only cookies are working okay for me

Posted Mar 5, 2016 17:43 UTC (Sat) by malor (guest, #2973) [Link] (4 responses)

If by OP, you mean me, I have no opinion on Eich.... except that he was at least a technical guy, and I don't think the new leadership is.

I didn't have a dog in the fight on whether he should have been their CEO; my only real observation at the time was that the employees have the right to choose who they'll work for, and if they really didn't like Eich, they had the right to push back against his appointment. I wasn't clear then, and still am not clear now, how much of the furore was genuine internal Mozilla dissent, and how much was invented by the media. I just don't know enough to have an opinion about him, but I do know enough to be be quite unhappy with what they've been doing since.

Ever since the new guy took over, I've liked them less and less. I've had a mildly bad reaction to every communication from Mozilla since they got their new CEO, not caring at all for the tone of the political and beg letters they were sending, even though I gave them money anyway. (I just used Firefox too much not to.) I wouldn't care much about those things on their own, but combined with Pocket (which annoyed the hell out of me, was clearly in Mozilla's interest and not mine, and took a bunch of effort to decisively disable), and then this particular issue (which messed me up pretty good), I just gave up on them.

I still use Thunderbird, and am very grateful that they're not interested in doing more than basic maintenance on it. I suspect that if they paid it any attention, they'd screw it up. I pray that it continues to escape their corporate gaze.

Session-only cookies are working okay for me

Posted Mar 5, 2016 19:31 UTC (Sat) by joedrew (guest, #828) [Link] (3 responses)

Chris Beard, Mozilla's current CEO, is an extremely technical person, who among many other things was one of the people who ported Linux to HP's PA-RISC (hppa) processor.

The problem with Mozilla, and I'm speaking here as a person who used to work for Mozilla, is that they let people with good technical ideas run the show for far too long. B2G and this new IoT effort doesn't seem to be starting with "why", but rather "what"—i.e., we've got this Gecko thing, and wouldn't it be nice if we could use it for more purposes. I think having fewer technical people in charge would help a lot, not hinder.

Session-only cookies are working okay for me

Posted Mar 5, 2016 21:31 UTC (Sat) by malor (guest, #2973) [Link]

You could very well be right. From my perspective, it's simply this: Mozilla doesn't seem to be focused on my benefit very much, anymore. They don't owe me anything, of course, but for a very long time, I felt like they were focused on improving my computing life, and helping to preserve an open Internet. But the last few years have had some really high-profile decisions that strike me as alien to what I thought Mozilla was about. Two examples that come to mind are accepting the DRM in HTML5, and then the Pocket thing. And then just the sheer disrespect for user preferences and privacy in the specific change that infuriated me.... it's like they don't realize that even obscure features might be useful.

And it's not like I'm insisting on spacebar heating; transient cookies that *look* permanent to sites is a genuinely useful feature. If they want to push that to extensions, okay, fine, but understand that people are using this stuff, and need some warning, not just silent feature removal.

And that's even with their ridiculous six-week turnaround time. They couldn't even wait *six goddamn weeks*.

I dunno. They just seem like they're flailing. Maybe it is too many techies rather than too few, but I don't feel like they're in my corner anymore. Maybe it's managerial, maybe it's just organizational inertia, possibly it's growing institutional incompetence. I can't diagnose it well from here, but something's rotten in the state of Mozilla.

Session-only cookies are working okay for me

Posted Mar 6, 2016 10:28 UTC (Sun) by hitmark (guest, #34609) [Link]

As best i can tell, the B2G "why" was user empowerment.

This because as much as possible was done using HTML5 and JS, thus allowing the user to bring up the source and tweak it right on the device.

Sadly this went over like a lead balloon in a mobile market where carriers wants to nickle and dime everything done on anything connected to their networks.

I think Mozilla had gotten further had they tried to pitch a PDA/PMP or tablet rather than some phone for the third world.

Session-only cookies are working okay for me

Posted Mar 22, 2016 17:25 UTC (Tue) by gerv (guest, #3376) [Link]

I don't think very many of the IoT projects are based on Firefox OS code or even on Gecko; Ari certainly told me that "using Gecko" was explicitly not a criterion.

Gerv

Session-only cookies are working okay for me

Posted Mar 5, 2016 17:54 UTC (Sat) by malor (guest, #2973) [Link]

Oh, and: no, my complaint is absolutely a technical one. The Eich thing was an observation in passing.

My irritation is because they deliberately and silently broke a feature I'd literally spent years training up. I had an enormous list of sites that shouldn't have been allowed to set cookies, and suddenly were, without warning.

It was a pile of unadulterated crap, and they lost me, probably permanently. And I was an actual paying customer, which I gather isn't exactly common.

Session-only cookies are working okay for me

Posted Mar 6, 2016 15:15 UTC (Sun) by ballombe (subscriber, #9523) [Link]

> Maybe people are feeding off the let's-kick-mozilla meme that seems to be circulating at the moment, and this prejudices them to leap to negative conclusions.

I much prefer firefox to chromium. But with each new version, they make firefox looking more like chromium even in minor aesthetic aspect like slanted tabs, and removing feature that chromium does not have. It really feel like they are preparing us to a forced switch to chromium due the abandonment of firefox. Nobody need a chromium copycat when they can just use the original.

Session-only cookies are working okay for me

Posted Mar 10, 2016 21:52 UTC (Thu) by mstefani (guest, #31644) [Link]

Unlike the OP I used the feature to block most sites from setting cookies,
Only seldom allow session cookies and very few sites like LWN to store them permanently.
They could have at least detected the setting and offered a choice on how to convert it. Just defaulting to accept forever is just poor judgement, definitely not what the users of that feature would want.

Mozilla unveils Firefox OS based IoT projects (LinuxGizmos.com)

Posted Mar 4, 2016 22:10 UTC (Fri) by trenton (guest, #106520) [Link] (1 responses)

How does it happen that Mozilla removes more and more features from Firefox, and, at the same time, starts more and more side projects? Does Mozilla have two separate and opposite management teams?

Mozilla unveils Firefox OS based IoT projects (LinuxGizmos.com)

Posted Mar 21, 2016 19:03 UTC (Mon) by ksandstr (guest, #60862) [Link]

These days Mozilla is an established company where the people in charge feel they have to reinvent the company as a hip young start-up, somehow. That there's a wave and that Mozilla is in some kind of a position to surf it.

Didn't happen with the Internet Suite. Didn't happen with the Firefox Phone. Likely won't happen with IoT stuff either, until lightbulbs and what-not acquire touchscreen displays good enough to support a smartphone-/tablet-like UI. There's just nothing in Firefox OS that'd fit IoT in any proper sense: lightbulb etc. manufacturers each have their own "hub" devices, every one with a mutually incompatible hub-to-device protocol and secondary (Android-derived) app-store.

But check it out, Meego is going for IoT now. As it was previously going for in-car (flight?) entertainment. And smartphones ("internet tablets" of a dozen years back) before then. That's what assisted respiration of a failed company (or limb thereof) looks like.

For a startup, that's how "one more round" of VC cash is made: failed products get retargeted for the latest Next Big Thing. However, Mozilla has that millstone of a browser around its neck, so these quasi-startup projects are at most competing for VC-equivalent interestbux (i.e. browser ad deal income) within Mozilla, analoguously to what Meego is for Intel.


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