Mozilla's Incredible Speech-To-Text Engine Is At Risk Following Layoffs

[pal666]

And I know a lot of people who share my opinion.

and i know that 85% of people prefer android instead of your opinion

[pal666]

Google took Linux and other FOSS bits and bobs and ALSO have become a 1 Trilllion dollar valuated company and now makes THE MOST ACTIVELY USED Linux kernel based OS in the world and the MOST ACTIVELY USED OS based around ANY kernel with Android and ChromeOS.

moron, google is one of largest linux contributors

IBM, once a huge UNIX player has BORGED the most successful Linux OS company the world has ever produce, that namely being Red Hat.

ibm did nothing to redhat outside of your imagination

Oracle has jettisoned Solaris to the backwaters of legacy products to release "Unbreakable Linux" for their OS platform.

surely oracle should be praised for promoting and developing linux instead of proprietary solaris

I could go on.

yes, there's no shortage of stupidity

But BSD is still the devil....right ??

bsd is irrelevant, why do you bring it up here?

[pal666]

Not in my experience, and my Android hardware is pretty powerful. But my main gripe, as I said, is the entire OS experience and workflow

do you use google android or something completely different? i mean, is your hardware called "google pixel" ?

[jo-erlend]

mozilla is non-profit btw

Well, no, not from the development point of view. It's a for profit corporation _owned_ by a non-profit organization.

[AmericanLocomotive]

Mozilla made a lot of bad choices in the past twelve years, but the key thing is that between technical excellence and massive promotion marketing campaigns, Chrome started eating away at Firefox's market share by millions of users per month early on and never stopped.

I think the Mozilla leaders just started flailing around desperately trying to find ways to keep Firefox relevant.

Yes they made a lot of dumb decisions - for example I love what FirefoxOS was trying to do, but clearly it was a poor investment of their resources. But I doubt many other leaders could have done better if they were put in charge of Firefox.

I don't even understand how Chrome's marketing was even legal. I'm thinking it really wasn't, considering that Microsoft and others have been penalized for similar behavior. It was during the peak of Google-Is-The-Internet's-Darling era, where Google could do no wrong. Every single Google web-product would pop up with gigantic scary warning messages making it seem like you had to download Chrome to continue using G-Mail, Google Maps, YouTube, etc... YouTube had a gigantic DOWNLOAD CHROME button plastered to the home page forever. At one point it seemed like every single piece of freeware, shareware, FOSS and even some commercial software for Windows came bundled with a Chrome installer. It was utter insanity. I can't tell you how many people who have told me they have no idea how Chrome ended up on their

Chrome's dominance has very little to do with it being a "better performing" browser, and everything to do with Google's aggressive and and anti-competitive marketing tactics. How is a small non-profit going to compete with that? They can't. I'm not going to say Mozilla hasn't made some poor business decisions, but they were put in a very bad situation, very quickly. Over nearly a decade they achieved 30% of the browser market share largely by goodwill and word-of-mouth. Then Chrome basically sledge-hammered half of FireFox's market share away in like 4 years, while simultaneously replacing nearly all IE's marketshare as well.

[zeehio]

They should really change "speech-to-text" to "voice recognition" since the former could be confused with text-to-speech....

Or they could change text-to-speech to "speech synthesis"

[onicsis]

Google can't be trusted more than Facebook or Microsoft, this with or without their contribution to open source, because their "fuel" - users data.

[Citan]

I disagree with many posts ... it's not Chromium's fault (by the way it's an open source project) that Mozilla is in trouble. If it hadn't been Chromium it would have been another and nothing would have changed! It is also wrong to blame Google for Mozilla's problems, also because I understand that Google is somehow funding Mozilla. Companies obviously look after their own interests, but companies like Google are also a great asset to Linux, does anyone really think Linux is developed by some hackers in their spare time?
I think Mozilla has made wrong choices, that together with the difficult period we are all experiencing is in difficulty, blaming others for their own misfortunes is absurd.

I'm sorry but you seem oblivious to the reality of things.
YES, it's majoritarily Chrome's (not Chromium) fault, because that's the piece of crappy software Google pushed to be automatically installed like traditional spywares by being embedded in free (costless) software's installers (and of course setting itself as default browser too).

Considering the vast proportion of users that don't know how to avoid/remove that (or simply don't care), it was easy for Google to eat martket share that way.
If someone could have been done at the time to force Google to stop that, Chrome would have never rised as fast as it did. It would have probably earned 50% anyways because regular Google marketing was powerful enough, but two or three years later... Years that could have been enough for Mozilla to set up a defensive strategy.

[Citan]

LOL. ChromeOS and Chrome are great, but calling Android "performant" and "useable" is a long stretch IMHO. Performance is good, but not optimal, even on high-end hardware and I find it a very confusing OS with stuff and different workflows all over the place. And I know a lot of people who share my opinion.

That are, in a completely coincidental manner, all on iOS devices.

I'm sorry to say your comment is completely irrelevant. Besides the fact you provide no argument explaining what and how pieces of interfaces are confusing, or how performance is not optimal, one-man example is hardly a solid fundation to generalize.

Otherwise, how can you explain that I have the same smartphone since 2016, which still works flawless?
Even the battery still goes fair, although I bought a replacement so I'm ready when it finally dies because I definitely saw a drop in ~25% duration those last months.
Plus honestly I'd thought the internal RAM (which is the one thing you can't replace) would get used much faster, but apparently it still goes strong enough that I don't feel any sensible speed loss compared to first months...
And if you go on that ground, what to say about iOS's forced system upgrade that made old phones/tablets sluggish and ultimately unusable?

There are quite a few drawbacks in using Android (just the fact you're so tightly integrated with Google), and I hope one day I can migrate to a fully free OS on my smartphone... But it's a solid piece of sofware.
It just requires using and managing it in a reasonable way, like every software (installing myriad of apps is rarely a good idea).

My one big gripe, which may be better on iOS, is having to always keep attentive to how apps actually behave once installed so I remove anyone irrespectful (like keeping alive in background when you clearly asked for it to shutdown).

[tildearrow]

Google can't be trusted more than Facebook or Microsoft, this with or without their contribution to open source, because their "fuel" - users data.

Actually, I trust Google the least.