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kumar303

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I think they will co-exist as separate languages for separate problem-solving approaches. Go has first class support for channels and duck-type interfaces, for starters.

Also, nothing on Firefox OS would stop developers from using any payment processor they wish to. It's all just web technology running on a mobile device so there are many payment providers to choose from, especially for US and European users.

The main reason Mozilla built a payments service and offered a custom library for developers vs. recommending Stripe (etc.) is because no one supported the direct operator billing we needed in our Firefox OS launch countries with a developer friendly interface.

I'll admit I'm somewhat conflicted. You can arrive at similar conclusions thinking about it as child pornography. In both cases it does seem like censoring the material is the right thing to do.

However, my conflict comes from the fact that censorship doesn't really solve the root problem. In child molesters, the problem is better treated in psychiatric care and in extremism the problem is better treated through education, peace, and tolerance.

Amazon Cognito 12 years ago

Yes. Firebase. I think Firebase is interesting because they focus on realtime data which is crucial for a lot of apps these days.

It won't be integrated into Android very well though; you can't kill the process, you can't check its resources, it's not in the task switcher, etc, etc

If you build an app with Cordova you can easily get stuck in their APIs. If you build a Firefox OS web app you get stuck in Mozilla's APIs :) BUT Mozilla is making a strong effort at standardization and is working with Chrome and others to reach consensus. Cordova strays farther away from stable HTML5 APIs than Mozilla does so in Firefox OS you will definitely be building a more webby app. I.E. some HTML5 APIs work great on mobile, no reason to use a custom Cordova one in many cases.

However, if you need rich cross platform support for your app (like iOS) I'd still suggest going with Cordova. There is a Firefox OS backend! https://github.com/apache/cordova-firefoxos

"The fallout from the Snowden leaks have hurt U.S. technology firms' ability to sell their products overseas"

What an idiotic, capitalistic claim. So Andreeson calls him a traitor because "business is now harder." Huh? Nevermind invasion of privacy and injustice.

"The decision compromises important principles in order to alleviate misguided fears about loss of browser marketshare"

misguided, as in, Firefox wants people to actually use its browser? I'm seriously surprised at some of these idealists failing to understand that normal people just want to watch House of Cards (or whatever) and that's pretty much it. Mozilla can't turn their back on those users.

I had to make this exact same decision in 2001 and I chose PHP!

I subsequently fell in love with Python and am still active with it today. I think a choice as far back as 2001 doesn't matter too much, programming is programming. However, I feel like I became a better programmer by having to deal with a language as shitty as PHP. There were so many pitfalls that I quickly became an expert at working around them -- this took a lot of painstaking investigation into the inner workings of the language.

marketing/PR has been focused on mobile so that we can shift as much focus there as possible. The dilemma is that most devs are not spending time to make their apps work on mobile devices. However, a miniscule amount of people use Firefox OS on their phone so it would have been nice to use desktop apps to bootstrap the ecosystem.

actually, arguing that fraud filters must be private is interesting. Would you make the same argument about keeping encryption algorithms private? :) The two concepts are similar but not exactly the same. Unlike encryption algorithms, a fraud filter is not bullet proof. It is just an alert mechanism. So, yeah, it probably needs to be kept secret.

The idea of a completely open company is interesting. Balanced is not completely open (yet?) because there are still financial info and salary info that is not public. Gittip is an example of a fully open organization http://gittip.com/ where every single aspect is open. Personally I work at Mozilla which is not fully open but we strive to be as open as possible. For example, salary info is only public for board members, not all employees. Also, Mozilla needs to keep severe security bugs private until all patches are out in order to minimize wild exploits. It is definitely a challenge to be a fully open company.

To clarify more: Persona is not "moving in this direction," it has always been designed as a completely decentralized identity solution. The Persona server is just a boostrap to get it started so here's what you can do: create as many identity providers as you can! Seriously, put one in every country.