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Ian Bicking has confirmed that Mozilla has quietly shut down Mozilla Labs.
This development raises some interesting questions about the future of Mozilla and their products:
With Firefox's usage declining, with Firefox on Android seeing limited uptake, with Firefox not being available on iOS, with Thunderbird stagnating, with SeaMonkey remaining as irrelevant as ever, with Firefox OS suffering from poor reviews and little adoption, and now with a reduction in innovation due to the closure of Mozilla Labs, does Mozilla have any hope of remaining relevant as time goes on?
Will Mozilla be able to reignite the spark that originally allowed them to create products like Firefox and Thunderbird that were, at one time, wildly popular and innovative?
Is Mozilla still capable of innovating without Mozilla Labs, or will they slowly fade into irrelevance as the last remaining users of their products move on to other offerings from competitors?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by opinionated_science on Saturday September 20 2014, @02:58PM
I you look at the projects they closed down, they are incredibly useful. For example, emscripten actually works - well for the one application I tried it with (cross-compiler to scripts), it amazes me this is not important.
I must agree however, that focus is important especially for non-profits, as there is no "consumer" to reign them in...