Yesterday we share here on the blog the news of the abandonment of the PWA support (not yet official, but that is more than affirmed) by the developers of Firefox for the desktop version of the browser.
And even if such a note that we share for many is one more of the bunch, the truth is that the decisions Mozilla has made about projects related to the Firefox web browser and also to the brand, they have not been the best.
All this bad streak that has come to torment Mozilla and Firefox developers are not only due to the ravages of the pandemic, but it is also a cause of monetary losses due to the great loss on the part of the user.
We can see the precariousness into which Mozilla has fallen and we can see this from the moment in which it let Rust go from its hands and this passage into the hands of the Rust Foundation (created by Mozilla in order to continue with the project).
Another of the great losses that Mozilla has had is the Servo project, which he transferred to the Linux Foundation.
On the other hand, we can remember the dismissal of around 250 employees and this due to the great economic problem it faces and one of its solutions was to reduce your staff around the world in a quarter.
Among the divisions that were affected were: MDN WebDocs (formerly Mozilla Developer Center or MDC, then Mozilla Developer Network or MDN) and that also The entire team responsible for Servo development was fired.
On the other hand, in more recent news and the one that we shared here on the blog yesterday wherein the Firefox team explains with limited resources they cannot afford to spend them on tasks that seem to have less impact on their mission.
And now one of the new news that has leaked, is that Mozilla has warned users about the impending shutdown of the Speech Proxy server, which provides the Voice Fill and Firefox Voice plugins.
Mozilla disclosed that the service will close on February 28, while the source code of the plugin will remain in the repositories and will continue to be delivered under the free MPL license.
In addition to that I also mention that in the near future, it is planned to publish an update of the Voice Fill and Firefox Voice plugins, in which a notification about the completion of their development and support will be displayed.
In addition, On February 19, the automatic removal process of these add-ons will begin, which will be uninstalled from browsers without explicit user participation.
For those unaware of firefoxvoice, you should know that this is a Mozilla product that was developed for the purpose of creating a implementation of an experimental voice navigation system, that allows you to use voice commands to perform various actions in the browser.
The addition differed from typical voice control systems in its orientation not to create a voice replacement for a mouse and keyboard, but to process natural language questions, that is, it acted as a voice assistant. For example, a user could send commands such as "what the weather is now", "find Gmail tab", "mute sound", "save as PDF", "open Mozilla site", and so on.
The complement Voice Fill offers a voice input system that allows you to fill out forms on websites and enter text using Mozilla's speech recognition system. The recognition was carried out on the Mozilla server, to which the data recorded by the microphone was sent.
Furthermore, it can be noted that the decommissioned server was also used to support the experimental WebSpeech API, with which it was possible to manipulate voice data in web applications and perform operations such as speech synthesis and recognition.
Finally if you are interested in knowing more about it, you can consult the following link.
While the software declines, the salary of its managers increases ... this has happened before.
And what are we going to have in Linux, Chrome? It is as if the Google offices decided to use Edge.
In Mozilla they got into assholes with political correctness and preferred to focus on gender ideology rather than the technological solutions provided by their staff. A lot of honest people left, now fuck them
If getting rid of a few voice services that are silly like a piano, is going into decline…. They simply focus on what is really important, their browser, which has been the only mistake mozilla has ever made, wanting to cover other things, when it has never had, nor will it have the potential to do so, if instead of focusing on a lot of nonsense that they are worth nothing, they would have always focused solely and exclusively on enhancing their browser, today they would have unseated Chrome. They are the only ones who could have achieved such a thing. The issue of money is not about, or nonsense of that, it is about knowing what you have and managing what you have and that is the problem, not having known how to manage it.
I could say that your comment would be very successful, except for the fact that thanks to the fact that Mozilla did not focus on a single thing, very good projects were born and the most important of them besides Firefox is Rust, from there on out you are right for Mozilla's greatness has also become his Achilles heel.
I think Rust was initially a personal project of one of their employees and then Mozilla went on to sponsor it. It is not your own project.
I agree, except for the fact that Mozilla claimed that it could maintain several projects at the same time, the best solution to further incentivize the development of these projects was by having the programmers in charge design them so that they could also function as programs other than the browser , making these projects develop and finance themselves (both the programmers and the foundation); as if the Foundation itself created for-profit affiliates whose existence Mozilla has a stake (as by way of action) as its initial investor. Thus, many projects would continue to be active independent of Mozilla but with the addition that they were created with the intention that they could be used in the firefox browser. I fear that the reason Mozilla seems to be slowly dying is precisely because it has failed to change its business model.