Mozilla Labs

» see labs.mozilla.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

The Mozilla Labs blog is still online. Last post December 2013, tagline still reading Updates from the edge of the Web, archive pages running back to August 2006. There is no farewell post and no notice of any kind. The thing stopped being updated and nobody turned the lights off.

Labs opened in the summer of 2006 as labs.mozilla.com, a place to put experiments that were not ready to be Firefox and might never be. Chris Beard ran it as Chief Innovation Officer from 2007 to 2010. The stated pitch was a virtual lab open to anyone who wanted to build on the web, and for a few years it genuinely worked that way, with outside contributors shipping things under the Labs banner.

The output was strange and occasionally excellent. Ubiquity let you type commands into Firefox instead of clicking, a natural-language command line for the browser years before anyone thought to call that an assistant. There was also Bespin, a code editor that ran in the browser back when that sounded ridiculous, which became Skywriter and then folded into Ace. The one piece still running on hundreds of millions of machines started in Labs as a sync experiment called Weave, and you know it now as Firefox Sync.

I was a Firefox user from the 1.0 days, so Labs was in my orbit in the sense that its output kept turning up in the extensions list and the release notes. Very little of it ever became something I needed. That was most of Labs from the outside: interesting to read about, hard to find a use for.

~ the dossier ~

~ what came out of it ~

The graduation record is better than the reputation. Weave became Firefox Sync. Jetpack became the Add-on SDK and set the shape of Firefox extensions for the next decade. Personas became the lightweight themes that shipped in the browser itself. Test Pilot outlived Labs entirely and got relaunched twice under other management.

The failures were louder. Ubiquity was put on the back burner in 2010 to free people up for Weave and Jetpack, and never came back. Bespin got renamed, absorbed, and quietly ended as somebody else's codebase. Prism, which tried to give web apps their own desktop windows, was right about roughly everything and about eight years early.

~ how a lab closes without closing ~

Ian Bicking, who worked there, wrote the closest thing to an obituary in September 2014, on his own blog, in a post mostly about changing jobs. His line was that Labs was definitely shut down, and that he did not believe it had been effective. Slashdot picked it up on 18 September under a headline about open source pitfalls, and that was the extent of the coverage.

His diagnosis is the useful part. Labs sat too far from the rest of Mozilla, and a project only ever took off when someone in the actual organization committed to it. So the model was reorganized away rather than shut down: the experiments moved into product teams, Mozilla Research took the long-horizon work under Brendan Eich and David Herman, and the building nobody was in anymore stayed standing.

~ the site that outlived the org ~

Twelve years after the last post, labs.mozilla.org still resolves. It redirects now, to a page about new products, which is a tidier ending than the blog got. The blog itself sits at blog.mozilla.org/labs with its 2013 screenshots and its dead links to TowTruck and Together.js, indexed, reachable, and finished.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »