Well Apple just released a bunch of Agent Skills. I tried it on my macOS apps and I noticed some improvements codewise and updated some deprecations I didn’t know existed in Swift.
> because if you use AI to write, you are a waste of biomass
Damn, that is so hurtful. I'm sorry if English is my third language. But for my project documents I would love to read it like a proper documentation so I'm thankful for AI.
It’s a crutch, it’s rarely as good as from an experienced translator or native speaker, and often distorts the original to some extent. It can be the lesser evil when someone doesn’t know the language well, but it still tends to be a subpar experience.
Nobody cared if you translated using Google Translate in the past. People don't care if you use claude to translate now. But people are clearly doing more than they claim when they just translate their text, since their "translations" end up full of AI-isms.
> To this day, I am still kind of confused with that move.
I do not think that this was that confusing. People [1] looked around at the beginning of the 2010's and saw
1) Mobile usage was growing exponentially and desktop was... not [2].
2) Every mobile OS shipped their own browser by default, or even went so far as to prevent other browsers from being used at all (iOS) [3].
3) Because Android and iOS both had non-trivial marketshare, neither could be called a "monopoly" so there was no way to use anti-trust law to get Firefox on devices as was done with Windows (not that this would have been a compelling strategy even if it were possible).
People took that set of facts and concluded Mozilla needed its own mobile OS in order to stay relevant.
What they underestimated was the amount of investment needed to make such an OS and get it on devices and the amount of time it would have to exist in a state of not being very good before it could compete with the established players (who were not standing still... people forget how bad Android was in the beginning). But if you look at the actual world we ended up in, with no mobile OS from Mozilla and a total Firefox marketshare that is less than desktop Safari's, it is hard to say that initial conclusion was incorrect.
[1] Full disclosure: I was a Mozilla employee at the time, though not involved in any of these decisions.
[2] I would say "desktop was shrinking", but to everyone's surprise it actually remained fairly steady in absolute numbers, although it did become a smaller slice of a much larger pie. In 2010 everyone expected it to shrink, though.
[3] Mozilla did ship a re-skin around mobile Safari to try to get some brand presence, but was still at the mercy of what web standards Safari chose to implement, and you could hardly call it a first-class experience. Eventually iOS loosened their rules, but no one could have predicted that back then.
> 3) Because Android and iOS both had non-trivial marketshare, neither could be called a "monopoly" so there was no way to use anti-trust law to get Firefox on devices as was done with Windows (not that this would have been a compelling strategy even if it were possible).
I don't think its true that there was no way but rather there was no will.
Thanks for the explanation, and thank you for your work at Mozilla. I guess what I'm saying is that I wish Mozilla could have just focused on the browser.
I think Firefox OS was great, and too early for its time, combined with the mistake of "let's run on extremely terrible hardware" (rather than designing for the flagships of the time, which wouldn't be flagships by the time it shipped).
I mean the fact that a fork of FirefoxOS KaiOS is still around and being used shows that there was some merit to the idea but yeah it was executed as a start-up without a long-term plan but thanks to the open nature of the code its still in use.
It would be great if Mozilla as an organization tool the opposite approach of Google and if they started a project you knew it would be supported for the long run and if not internally it was handed over to the community of users and stewarded along, sort of how Apache seems to adopt projects but mostly for corporate/enterprise users.
Firefox OS was amazing and, sadly, would STILL be amazing today.
Boot-to-Gecko is brilliant because honestly most apps today... are Web pages packaged in an "app". Most PWA with desktop shortcuts (and ideally offline responsive mode) show that. Very few "apps" genuinely need to be apps.
Consequently being "just" a phone with basic connectivity and delegating the rest to the browser made perfect sense.
I didn't work because it didn't make sense or wasn't technically feasible. It didn't work because anybody who made a mobile OS wanted THEIR own walled gardens. The fact that today we are stuck with Android an iOS shows how needed it was and still is.
Firefox OS was a brilliant idea. Imagine cross platform and open apps based on HTML/JavaScript that feel native and polished. 2026 would have been amazing if Mozilla executed it right.
I also had a remote interview for an Australian agency company. I went to their website and it was all Australian folks, name, photos, etc. Their website also has a video of them working inside the office, having a meeting.
When I joined the call it was just a couple of Indian persons, with the video resolution of one fella so low, it was hard to make up his face. The other one was a female which did not turned on her camera for reasons she mentioned something she was sick and don't like turning it on.
I had lots of remote interview, but this one is just borderline creepy.
That sounds quite scammy, like it could have been designed to scam applicants or people that wanted to hire that agency.
Then again maybe giving an image of a more normal "white/multicultural" Australian office might make it easier to sell services into the Australian market.
I’m currently working on an API-first identity verification backend built with FastAPI. It is made for handling ID documents, selfies, OCR data, biometric signals, API keys, webhooks, and tenant billing data.
Hopefully I can find an investor in the future, still in the early stages.
It is really something and I'm very grateful for their emails.
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