Past-projects

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Past projects is a list of past Mozilla projects that have either been spunout or turned into community projects or in some cases closed down.

Summary

This section is a stub. Please expand this summary table with specific links and dates when available. Alphabetical:

Product Transition Date Destination
Firefox Reality 2022 February Igalia Wolvic
Mozilla WebThings 2020 WebThings Community
...

Full Table

More information, background, and reasons for various past projects:

Product Brief Description Transition Date Why sunset? Current Status
Mozilla WebThings Open source code for creating one’s own smart platform, gateway, and things using web protocols. Successor of FirefoxOS > Connected Devices. 2020 The market, router product ecosystem, and our Gateway implementation wouldn’t together yield something compelling commercially even though we felt it might offer distinctive value to end users. open letter from dbryant, 2020 Transferring ownership to volunteer community. Will remove Mozilla naming/branding as part of that transition. Project lives on under WebThings
[DATA] Location services
[EM] ChecknShare
[ET] Firefox Listen (Scout) 2018 Project lead (Jack Moffitt) left Mozilla https://www.instagram.com/p/Bj-vWdfFaMu/
Firefox OS Marketplace Discovery and distribution platform for web apps (on top of Firefox OS). 2018 Once Firefox OS was discontinued, Firefox OS Marketplace stopped receiving many submissions.
Hopscotch A creative toolkit, empowering people of any skill level to create and remix bite-sized, visually rich content for the open web using their mobile. 2018 https://www.instagram.com/p/BcsrtvBH6EP/
Connected Devices Renamed Firefox OS organization to Connected Devices to reflect the pivot to IoT connected device solutions. Prototyping the future and exploring how we can make the biggest impact in IoT. 2017(?)
Mozilla Home Router Possibility of making a Mozilla Home Router. 2017 It became clear (at the time) that a pure router play is unlikely to be a success, for various reasons, including strong competition and technology. [Jkaye, 2017]
FirefoxOS Open source operating system on smartphone and smartTV. In early December, 2015 a decision was made to stop offering smartphones through operator channels, as we failed to deliver a phone that could win in the commercial smartphone marketplace. Despite the amazing work of our team and community in creating an impressive OS, we weren't in a competitive enough position to gain the necessary market share. [JMcCracken, 2016] The b2g platform will remain available for volunteers, contributors and enthusiasts to improve and submit patches for further advancement of the OS stack. Some cleanup and repackaging of Firefox OS was done to create “B2G OS”, which was forked and commercialized by KaiOS.

KaiOS and Mozilla partnership

Thunderbird Free and open-source cross-platform email client, news client, RSS, and chat client developed by the Mozilla Foundation. The project strategy was modeled after that of the Mozilla Firefox web browser. 2015 Thunderbird developers spent large efforts responding to changes to Mozilla technologies, while Firefox was paying a tax to support Thunderbird development. Baker said that she does not believe Thunderbird has the potential for "industry-wide impact" that Firefox does. [MBaker, 2015] As of January 2020, the Thunderbird project will be operating from a new wholly owned subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation, MZLA Technologies Corporation.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BYWLpxjHlgR/

MozStumbler 2020? Retiring Mozilla Stumbler - Q3 2020 Example
Firefox Send Encrypted file-sharing tool 2020 Update on Firefox Send and Firefox Notes Example
Firefox Notes Encrypted note-taking tool 2020 Update on Firefox Send and Firefox Notes Example
Project Shumway Javascript-based runtime for SWF files 2015 Example Example
Deep Speech Open source speech recognition engine (“speech to text” or “STT”). Sep 2020 Impacted by Mozilla restructuring and layoffs Being evaluated by (new) Applied Machine Learning team for potential reuse or application outside speech-based machine learning.
Rav1e AV1 Encoder Sep 2020 Impacted by Mozilla restructuring and layoffs Mozilla was a major contributor to a broader open source community effort that is continuing, though Mozilla is no longer an active participant.
Common Voice Voice Data Contribution Site 2020 Transitioned from Mozilla Corporation to Mozilla Foundation Project lives on at Mozilla Foundation
Firefox for Amazon Fire TV and Echo Show Firefox Browser on Amazon products Apr 2021 End of Support Example
Firefox Rocket/Lite https://www.instagram.com/p/Bcxdb8JnQvE/
Firefox Hello Video calls / chat using FF & WebRTC 2016. Removed in FF 49 Lots here https://wiki.mozilla.org/Loop and in subpages https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/hello-status
Iodide An in-browser data science IDE Sep 2020 Example Example
MozCast
A-Frame Spun out to be maintained by Supermedium https://aframe.io/docs/1.2.0/introduction/#what-is-a-frame
Rust A modern systems programming language Feb 1, 2021 Spun out to the Rust Foundation https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2021/02/08/mozilla-welcomes-the-rust-foundation/
Persona Allow people to authenticate with websites in a more private way. November 30, 2016 Never really got the momentum it needed to be viable?
Test Pilot A way for people to opt in to experiments Jan 15th, 2019 The team transitioned into service and app development, and it made less sense to maintain the separate experimentation platform. https://medium.com/firefox-test-pilot/adios-amigo-51bec2a00072 https://web.archive.org/web/20190123184254/https://testpilot.firefox.com/
WebReplay Record and replay debugging for websites. https://www.instagram.com/p/BrNwkoBg1tm/
Firefox Aurora We used to have a whole ‘nother train between Nightly and Beta! April 2017 We decided we didn’t really need it, and it was only slowing things down https://www.instagram.com/p/BYERwjTH2yP/
Mozilla Labs
Better Web https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-better-web 2020 https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2020/03/24/try-our-latest-test-pilot-firefox-for-a-better-web-offering-privacy-and-faster-access

Past groups

See Also