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Re:It’s time to give Firefox another chance by nine_k on Friday September 29, 2017 @10:50PM (#15370939)
You probably forgot to consider how much money / effort have Google wasted on projects that did not pan out. Their flagship products, like Hangouts, still have long-standing issues.

Nobody is perfect, and making a good and desirable product is hard.

Re:It’s time to give Firefox another chance by nikcub on Saturday September 30, 2017 @02:41AM (#15371594)
Since Ruth Porat came in as CFO Google has reduced other projects spending to $3.5B p.a on $80B of revenue - less than 5%

Mozilla has revenue of $420M p.a - I don't know what they spent on Firefox OS but it would have been a big bet (hundreds of millions?). At the same time their Firefox marketshare was reduced.

Re:It’s time to give Firefox another chance by icebraining on Saturday September 30, 2017 @06:02AM (#15372106)
In 2015, they only spent ~$215M on software development in total, so they couldn't have spent hundreds of millions on FxOS alone.

Plus, I think that view - that FF marketshare was reduced, therefore they weren't investing in it enough - is shortsighted. The improvements that have been landing on FF lately are the result of work being done for a long time. And you can't just dump more money into a project and expect it to be finished sooner - see The Mythical Man-Month.

Re:It’s time to give Firefox another chance by seba_dos1 on Saturday September 30, 2017 @06:50AM (#15372240)
Well, most of stuff that make recent Firefoxes better, like Electrolysis or WebExtensions, was either initially made for or a fundamental part of Firefox OS.
Re:It’s time to give Firefox another chance by Osmose on Saturday September 30, 2017 @12:01PM (#15373487)
FirefoxOS produced several useful artifacts, sure, but they were things like device APIs. e10s pre-dates FirefoxOS by many years, and unless there was some very long-term secret plan that they didn't tell the rest of the company about, WebExtensions came after FirefoxOS was shuttered.
Re:It’s time to give Firefox another chance by seba_dos1 on Saturday September 30, 2017 @05:40PM (#15375117)
B2G extensions were already WebExtension-based when its preview release landed in Firefox 42. e10s was indeed introduced way earlier, but Firefox OS and Fennec were its main users for a while, which for sure has sped up the development significantly. Same with things like APZ.
Re:It’s time to give Firefox another chance by bigbugbag on Saturday September 30, 2017 @06:16PM (#15375263)
Not sure how this 2015 figure is relevant as according to Andreas Gal who started the boot to gecko project, the shift back to firefox browser and away from firefox OS happened in 2014.

2011 to 2014, that's 4 years. Enough for firefox OS to gobble hundred millions of dollars.

Re:It’s time to give Firefox another chance by eastWestMath on Saturday September 30, 2017 @01:32AM (#15371412)
Doesn't google have more than one failed social network?
Re:It’s time to give Firefox another chance by ce4 on Saturday September 30, 2017 @03:29AM (#15371722)
Buzz, Wave, Orkut, Talk, Hangouts, Google Plus, Allo, Duo, forced YouTube comments merge to G+
Re:It’s time to give Firefox another chance by mal808 on Saturday September 30, 2017 @03:39AM (#15371755)
Wave was amazing!
Re:It’s time to give Firefox another chance by btschaegg on Saturday September 30, 2017 @06:04AM (#15372109)
Yeah, totally. I'm still puzzled as to why they killed it - at one point they told us "We only want to show it to a couple of invited people" and the next moment the message was that it didn't get enough traction. Go figure.

Edit: Although, thinking about it, it's really ironic how the Google project inspired by Firefly got canceled way too early.

Re:It’s time to give Firefox another chance by CydeWeys on Saturday September 30, 2017 @09:42AM (#15372819)
Duo is certainly not "failed"; it's actually doing very well internationally. It has the best video quality at the least bandwidth.

If I launched an app that got over a hundred million downloads and had many millions of monthly users I certainly wouldn't call that a failure!

Re:It’s time to give Firefox another chance by late2part on Saturday September 30, 2017 @03:50PM (#15374704)
Duo is an MFA. Whatever GOOG did that's called Duo failed because I don't know what it is.
Re:It’s time to give Firefox another chance by CydeWeys on Saturday September 30, 2017 @09:17PM (#15375900)
What's MFA?
Re:It’s time to give Firefox another chance by tedunangst on Sunday October 01, 2017 @01:25AM (#15376536)
multi factor authentication. https://duo.com/ which is not related to the google app.
Re:It’s time to give Firefox another chance by CydeWeys on Sunday October 01, 2017 @09:59AM (#15377834)
That's what I thought MFA meant, I just didn't see the relevance. I've never heard of that Duo.