[glossyscr]

This is great.

Mozilla is focussing on its core competency. No mobile OS, no identity built in the browser, no distractions—no, it's just about the browser and how to make it better. What this guy showed is just impressive, well done and please more of such achievements.

[jallmann]

> No mobile OS, no identity built in the browser, no distractions—it's just about the browser and how to make it better

That's a rather narrow view of what the open Internet should be. Declaring failure with FirefoxOS and Persona was a blow for the Internet at large: it solidifies the status quo, which is growing more closed and proprietary by the day.

Resources are understandably finite and Mozilla can't do everything at once, but there is a still lot of good they can do adjacent to the strict confines of the browser.

[EGreg]

What if I told you that we are releasing a successor to Personas but that accomplishes a lot more and in a different way?

You can have accounts at various different communities and have your experience instantly personalized when you arrive, without the sites knowing anything about you or being able to track you across sites. When you are ready, you can use oAuth to build up your profiles in different communities and use them to authenticate with each other. Finally, you have full control over which of our contacts in a community can see when you join another community -- that whole thing of "Your Facebook friend Frank Smith is on Instagram as Bunnyman123". With our protocol and reference implementation, as soon as you arrive on a site you see all the friends in your communities that also used that site -- if they decided to share this -- and your social graph is instantly connected everywhere you go. When a friend joins chess.com you'll get a notification from the friend, that they joined. If they want you to know. Maybe they wanted to check it out anonymously.

Truly decentralized identity and contacts that works seamlessly across sites.

If you liked what you just read, tell me -- how can we best position it for those people who were sad to see Personas not take off?

[jallmann]

> If you liked what you just read, tell me

No, that sounds terrible, sorry. Persona did one thing: authentication. I don't want to drag in a social graph along with identity auth, but YMMV.

[PavlovsCat]

> I don't want to drag in a social graph along with identity auth, but YMMV.

As I read it, that's completely optional, and I think since that doesn't exist yet (right?), having that option sounds great. I'm probably naive to dream of diaspora etc. and Facebook getting along, but even just smaller sites playing nice could make this very useful.

[EGreg]

Right, it's completely optional.

Jallmann, I am not sure who you think will be doing the dragging. The community? The developer of the app they install on their local copy of the platform? The friend who wants you to know that they're on there? You?

The app developer benefits from this feature for free, just by integrating with the platform's decentralized identity system. The app or community host can turn it off, or simply not implement it (eg ignore your social graph). The friend could simply not grant you the permission to see them. Or you could sign up and see your friends (who wanted you to see them) but not let your friends see you. Finally, you could turn even the social experience off and see the containing site as if you have no friends. So it's totally optional. But there are so many stakeholders in a decentralized system that ehen you said "I don't want to drag my friends" they have a choice too.

[jallmann]

I know it's optional.

An extraneous social overlay simply isn't on my list of desirable properties for an auth system (aside from WoT type mechanisms, which is clearly not the sell here). I'm thinking SSL client certs, you're thinking Facebook Connect. Different strokes.

Anyway talking about your social login system is getting quite off topic.

[PavlovsCat]

> how can we best position it for those people who were sad to see Personas not take off

Can you elaborate on what "positioning" means? I kind of read it as how it's explained or "sold", but I'm not sure. And I really like all I read here, and though I'm not sure I could helpfully answer it I would love to at least understand the question fully :)

[odinho]

Oh, can you point to something here? Some vision document, brainstorming, back-of-napkin spec? Anything?

[EGreg]

http://qbix.com/platform

[_ea1k]

I'm not sure that adding another OS was the thing to do to fight the ongoing trend towards a proprietary internet.

A better browser, including a better mobile browser is much more useful than Firefox OS every could be, IMO. In fact, this is part of what makes pure OSS Android a practical environment to work in.

I am very glad that they are continuing to put a lot of effort into Firefox on mobile.

[jallmann]

There is a lot to be said for having choice. Just because the dominant browser today is OSS (Chrome) doesn't mean Mozilla should declare victory and pack its bags with Firefox. Likewise, Android is hardly the ideal torch bearer for a Free mobile OS -- while AOSP is open-source, the development process is certainly not open, apps are not open, and that's ignoring other problems of abysmal performance, locked down hardware, and vendor crapware.

The reason that Firefox had the impact it did was because the browser is the gateway to the Internet. Firefox came of age just as the Internet was maturing as a platform, and because of that, Mozilla was able to play an important role in influencing the semblance of openness that we do have on the Internet today.

There was a similar platform shift to mobile, and Mozilla totally missed the boat. Now, please tell me, how will a FOSS (mobile) browser help open up the greater mobile ecosystem? The OS is the gateway to mobile, not the browser, and we need a better gatekeeper.

[atopal]

> There is a lot to be said for having choice. Just because the dominant browser today is OSS (Chrome) doesn't mean Mozilla should declare victory and pack its bags with Firefox.

Just since this is repeated so often: Chrome is not and never has been open source software in any shape or form. Chromium is OSS, but has only a tiny fraction of Chrome's market share and AFAIK nobody really knows what the differences between those two are (outside of the obvious: Flash player, pdf reader, etc.). Btw, Firefox is still the only major browser that's OSS, neither Safari nor Edge/IE are open source.

This isn't academic nitpicking either. Mozilla had to build a PDF reader from scratch (pdf.js), it couldn't just reuse what Chrome was using to display pdfs, since it wasn't open source. However everyone can now use pdf.js for the same task.

[comex]

Note that Chrome's PDF reader was open sourced almost two years ago as pdfium - it was closed source prior to that because it was licensed from Foxit rather than written from scratch.

[pekk]

Chromium behave so similarly to Chrome that it makes no difference to me to use one instead of the other, except for my feelings about the Google brand. It is not a terrible mystery what the differences are. If Chrome were really a proprietary product on the same order as Microsoft Windows, it would not be practically or legally possible to have Chromium at all.

[rplnt]

Does Chromium include all the spyware features found in Chrome?

[jallmann]

I know, but then claiming Chromium as the most popular browser would invite pedantry the other way around, "Hardly anybody uses Chromium, they use Chrome!"

And the analogy holds with AOSP versus the Android that is distributed with Google apps. In any case, comparing the development of Android to Chrom(ium), it is night and day in terms of openness.

[acdha]

Hyperbole does not lead to anything useful.

You might not consider Chrome to be open-source by your personal definition of the term but that's fine hair splitting: you can submit a patch to Chromium and some weeks later millions of Chrome users are running it; you're similarly free to fork chromium and make significant changes while still pulling in code from upstream. Yes, license nerds can argue about philosophical meanings but it's far from the closed-source world of IE/Trident, Opera, etc.

> Mozilla had to build a PDF reader from scratch (pdf.js), it couldn't just reuse what Chrome was using to display pdfs, since it wasn't open source

That's a single, separate component which, as comex pointed out, was licensed from a third-party vendor and nicely illustrates that Chrome is in fact open-source: the only reason it wasn't an option is because it wasn't part of the open source Chrome codebase.

You're also leaving out a key part of the pdf.js (and Shumway for Flash) story which was people at Mozilla trying to demonstrate that you could write complex renderers inside the JavaScript environment and sharply reduce the amount of exposed C/C++ code. I suspect they would have gone with pdfium had it been available but the security improvements would still have made that decision non-trivial.

[wfunction]

> There is a lot to be said for having choice.

Yes there is: https://www.ted.com/talks/barry_schwartz_on_the_paradox_of_c...

[jallmann]

That's a really lazy rebuttal. Having another option that would be superior along multiple dimensions leads to analysis paralysis? We're not talking about Javascript frameworks here.

[astrodust]

Maybe Mozilla isn't a big enough company to tackle it, or it diffuses their focus, but it's important to do.

Ubuntu is still trying, so there's that, and that's great.

http://www.ubuntu.com/phone

[chrisdew]

I am looking forward to using an 8GB RAM 8-core 64-bit ARM phone with 2560x1440 HDMI, running Ubuntu desktop as my main PC in a year or two.

Currently only the quantity of phone RAM and the display resolution are hardware issues.

[azinman2]

Waste of effort. It's never going to work -- the gap is so far and the network effect of apps and ecosystem are so entrenched that Ubuntu would have to do something revolutionary versus an incomplete copy of what other's already have invented and are still improving with massive (collective) resources. Add a dedicated hardware requirement and you've got the nail in the coffin.

[bryanlarsen]

It'll work the same way it happened in PC land.

1: Microsoft will ensure that capable hardware (both phones and peripherals) exists so that Continuum succeeds.

2: Ubuntu will leverage the hardware so that it's usable by the 1% who actually want it. 1% of a really big number is still a big number, so it'll be viable, if only barely.

[azinman2]

Except that's not how this can work.

First Microsoft is going to fail. They already are. Eventually they'll stop producing hardware, but I'll just assume you mean Samsung or whatever.

The hardware is specific to what each phone provides (which changes per device), and usually the hardware vendor ships the drivers closed source integrated with the rest of the OS. In the PC land we had a neutral Microsoft that packaged drivers and distributed them since anyone might want to change their video card. That's not what happens with phones. So Ubuntu will most likely need a very specific phone just as they are currently doing and selling. Which means random people can't just try it out, since the phone they already have and like isn't compatible (let alone "dual boot.")

Now Ubuntu and their partners have stock that needs to get sold, and everything unsold is a loss. I can't install their OS on my iPhone, so there's no community support to be building this in an open and decentralized way. My galaxy won't be supported well because of driver issues, and since android is already open source enough there's no big momentum there to change things either.

Microsoft with all their resources and power can't manage to keep their marketshare and is around 1.7%. 1% of smartphones is huge -- you think Microsoft's billions of dollars and a known name couldn't do it, but Ubuntu can on their own hardware that you now have to buy?

I wouldn't hold my breath.

[bobajeff]

I'm not sure, but I think that on Android resources are restricted in ways that give first priority to Dalvik vs other runtimes. I also suspect Chrome is given priority when it comes to integration with it.

There's also something to be said about the advantages that default browser's get in terms of market share.

Mozilla's move to making their own OS might have come too late but the reasoning behind it was both strategically and technically sound.

[_ea1k]

Android doesn't run Dalvik any more and Chrome doesn't appear to be given "priority" in any meaningful sense.

Their reasons may have seemed sound technically, but the business of building a phone ecosystem on a completely new OS were well beyond their abilities.

[bobajeff]

You seem to have ignored the strategic reason for having a platform. It's very hard to compete with a default application.

Sure it may not have been in their wheelhouse but they certainly had reason to try.

[Touche]

They had to build another OS because they couldn't build a better browser on iOS.

[usrusr]

Perspectives for building a better OS running on iPhones weren't that rosy either...

[erikpukinskis]

The problem is Apple and Google have financial incentives to drag their feet on things like WebRTC to prevent the web from eating into app sales in their walled gardens.

VR will be a fascinating glimpse at where we stand in this power struggle. Do I have the right to distribute software to my iPhone owning friend? No. Only Apple has that right.

A web OS would bring us back to the age of decentralized distribution we once had with PCs and boxed software sales. It would offer a check to Google and Apple's attempt to own centralized centralized control of software distribution. An escape valve for the users who Apple and Google are currently preventing from writing the software they'd like to write (like web VR).

Without an open source web OS such apps are gated by what perhaps a few hundred engineers at these two companies can imagine, implement, and push through internal politics.

---

Sent from my iPhone.

[greggman]

In what sense as Google dragged their feet on WebRTC?

[erikpukinskis]

It wasn't supported on Android until December.

But regardless, I didn't say "Google dragged their feet" I said "Google has an incentive to drag their feet". It's the incentive that scares me. I still trust Google to some degree, but not unconditionally.

[ultramancool]

And as a bonus they're building all this in Rust, probably the first language to seriously compete with C++ (for the things C++ is good at, like web browsers and game engines, where complexity and speed rule out most other languages).

[narag]

Not sure if you have noticed but... you are agreeing to a comment that celebrates Mozilla focusing in, and only in, its core competency and adding that they used a new language they created :-)

[DasIch]

Browsers are already highly specialized and complex VMs. If you have the ability to build a browser and work on all parts of it, you have the ability to create new languages.

So creating a new language is not at all that far away from their core competency. They are also working in a space where they have a strong need for a good systems language, so the motivation is there as well.

[s986s]

I think them building it in rust is a good thing. But rust is a mozilla project so its not as though theyre doing people favors. What it certainly does is showcase the strength of the language considering they have proven to be so badass

[ultramancool]

That's sort of what I meant to get at - building Rust is a huge service to other people, and an important one too. Servo is showing that they're really putting the effort into optimizing it and making things work as best as possible.

[clouddrover]

> probably the first language to seriously compete with C++

How about Object Pascal? I think Object Pascal is a better C++ than C++. It's too bad it isn't more widely used. Here are a couple of interesting perspectives from people who have done some recent development with Object Pascal:

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11005203 (see also https://github.com/whatwg/wattsi)

2. http://ziotom78.blogspot.com/2015/01/lfi-data-analysis-with-...

[rtpg]

I think the comment isn't really about the technical merits, but more about the fact that Rust has gotten some major traction, not just in Mozilla but elsewhere.

[clouddrover]

Where else? Rust usage is quite small at the moment relative to Object Pascal and definitely to C++. The new language that's rapidly gaining marketshare is Swift, mostly because Apple's pushing it.

[Crespyl]

The most notable one I'm aware of is Dropbox, who are reportedly using Rust in production for some low-level parts of their storage platform.

[clouddrover]

Do you have a link to the reports? Python and Go seem to be used a lot at Dropbox. Blog post on their Go usage: https://blogs.dropbox.com/tech/2014/07/open-sourcing-our-go-...

I could only find two Rust repositories on their github page, both of which are library bindings forked from other projects, so that seems to indicate some Rust usage. But then again there are more Haskell repositories than Rust repositories: https://github.com/dropbox

[drzaiusapelord]

>no identity built in the browser

Except a non-commercial identity provider would be wonderful. The status quo of Google/Facebook providing identity is insane. They can also use this as leverage against Mozilla politically. Hell, I get pissed when I can't google login to a site nowadays. Shame Mozilla couldn't be the ones providing this. I certainly see it as important to the web. Mozilla shouldn't be just a browser maker.

I do agree about mobile OS and other things. I don't think every organization should have its own OS. There are way too many right now, if anything, and its a non-trivial project.

[warbiscuit]

Yeah, I was saddened by them abadoning Persona. It was a really great idea, even if there were some flaws related to how one was supposed to change username if you shift emails. I feel like they never gave it the effort it deserved... never even saw a FF addon providing the browser integration they targeting :(

[epoch1970]

> Except a non-commercial identity provider would be wonderful.

We've had that all along. It's called email. It's decentralized. There are already numerous free providers. There are already numerous commercial providers. You can even be your own provider, if you want. You can have multiple identities, and they can be as loosely or as tightly tied to your actual identity as you want. Many services or web site will already let you use an email address, along with a password, to authenticate. What you're asking for already exists!

[Certhas]

And we all use it all the time. But the user experience of google log in or facebook log in is manifestly much much superior.

The fact that the inferior legacy solution is still around lessens the pain, but it's still a tragedy that Mozilla did not succeed to establish a competitive modern solution.

I think it is merely a matter of time until email log in is no longer ubiquitous.

[knappe]

I'm 100% for this. I used to use Firefox for everything. But then Chrome was released which had a much better developer experience (and still does, in my eyes). I'd rather go back to Firefox but each time I do, I find a feature or performance issue that keeps me going back to Chrome. I _really_ wish this wasn't the case.

[JohnBooty]

I wonder how much of that is just familiarity. FF is my main browser, and I always feel a little hamstrung when I use Chrome's dev tools.

People obviously do great work with Chrome's dev tools, though, so I'm pretty sure it's just my familiary with FF and my lack of familiarity with Chrome.

[digi_owl]

The mobile OS as basically android with a UI rendered in gecko.

I find it more troubling seeing them continually locking down the ability to customize the browser to my liking, and instead chase Chrome's design language.

Never mind that Mozilla, like much of FOSS as of late, have been conducting all kind of "social consciousness"(or should i say "social justice"?) projects that has crap all to do with writing good code.

Projects that end up being a time and money sink for already small (compared to the various corporate entities they are competing with) orgs.

If i was the conspiratorial kind i would wonder if they had been infiltrated. But more likely they are being "infected" by a "victim" culture that has been brewing in on college campuses for some time.