Some of these are a bit spurious. I mean, Venkman was replaced by Firebug, which was much better. MXR was similarly replaced by DXR.<p>Unlike Google, which look much more arbitrary in their shutdowns, Mozilla typically kill projects that are already on their last leg, or replace them with something objectively better.
I’m not sure “killed” is the correct term as most of Mozilla’s offerings have been free and often open source. I think “discontinued” or something like “stopped internal development of” would be more sensible, but I guess that wouldn’t make a good domain name or get the clicks.
Thanks for putting the list together! There are a few that you may want to include:<p>1. Mozilla Labs (first iteration)<p>2. Mozilla Ubiquity (which we are seeing the concept re-emerge in Google Chrome)<p>3. Mozilla Prism<p>4. Mozilla Bespin (which sorta-lives-on)<p>5. XULRunner<p>6. Mozilla Test Pilot (1st and 2nd iterations)<p>I'm likely missing a few more. But a lot of these were experiments, and not concrete product offerings, so take with a grain of salt.
I'm still sad to this day that FirefoxOS got axed. Doubly so now since I'm trying to find a new phone after my Nexus 5X stopped getting official builds of LineageOS.<p>I really hope that there's some diabolical plan within Mozilla to bring it back once the wasm world is more established and makes having a fully browser based OS less of a performance hit.
Wasn't there some kind of firefox hello, messaging thing ?
<a href="https://support.mozilla.org/fr/products/firefox/chat-and-share/firefox-hello-webrtc" rel="nofollow">https://support.mozilla.org/fr/products/firefox/chat-and-sha...</a>
Killing projects isn't bad. I've worked places that simply could not kill off their zombie projects. It was hell. None of these killed projects evokes any kind of wistfulness, nostalgia, or resentment in me. (Edit: Except Persona. Agreeing with another reply.)<p>Certainly nothing like when Autodesk killed Generic CADD.<p>What Google, Microsoft, Autodesk, others do is altogether different. The projects they snuff are often economically important to their customers and partners. That's sabotage.
Absent from this list: the shader editor.<p><a href="https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Tools/Shader_Editor" rel="nofollow">https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Tools/Shader_Editor</a><p>I really enjoyed using this.
The project I am most salty about being dropped is <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matchstick_TV" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matchstick_TV</a>. Of course they are probably right that without Netflix support it wouldn't find widespread adoption, however I would have loved to have an open Chromecast.
Hi HN, this is a quick website I made this weekend. It was super fun reading about older projects and digging up links in the Internet Archive! The list is far from complete (I still have a long list of services I stumbled across to add), please let me know if you have any feedback, or find anything I missed or got wrong. It was difficult to find info on the older items on the list!
These are amazing efforts. I wish they would open source Firefox Send, I would love to continue the project. Let someone else take it over.<p>Many of these projects seem like they may have been funded by a specific donor, then when the donor got what they needed from the project, ended the funding?
Not sure I understand the intent. The Google page had an obvious implied message: don't use google products, they will abandon them even if they are wildly popular, and not even open source the project so someone else can keep it alive. None of these were ever very popular in the first place, and most of them (if not all?) were open source even from the very beginning.