After the December announcement made by Mozilla’s senior vice president of connected devices, Ari Jaaksi, Mozilla shared its decisions about Firefox OS, with changes to Marketplace, foxfooding, and the product innovation process.

Mozilla will be focusing on exploring new product innovations in Internet of Things, according to an e-mail that was shared to the Firefox community. As such, four decisions have been made:

  • Mozilla will end development on Firefox OS for smartphones after version 2.6 is released.
  • As of March 29, Marketplace will no longer accept submissions for Android, Desktop and Tablet. It will remove all apps that don’t support Firefox OS. Firefox OS apps will continue to be accepted into 2017.
  • The connected devices team is testing a new product.
  • The foxfooding program will continue and focus on these new products.

The main reason for these decisions is to ensure Mozilla is focusing its energy and resources on bringing Web capabilities to IoT, according to the e-mail.

Latest Apache Mesos release
Apache Mesos 0.27.0 was released earlier this week. It comes with improved performance for the state endpoint for large clusters. Multiple disk support will allow for disk IO-intensive applications to achieve reliable performance. Additionally, more than 167 bugs were fixed.

There are some minor backward-compatibility deprecations.

GitHub addresses January incident
Last week, GitHub was unavailable for two hours and six minutes. The organization released an incident report yesterday expressing apologies to the community, as well as detailing what happened on Jan. 28 that made GitHub unavailable.

According to the report, the primary data center experienced a brief disruption in the systems that supply power to the servers and equipment. Slightly more than 25% of its servers and several network devices rebooted as a result. This left the infrastructure in a partially operational state. Later investigation revealed that a DDoS attack was not the underlying problem.

Over the past week, GitHub has devoted some time to understanding the nature of the failure, and it wrote that it plans to take steps to “mitigate the negative impact of these events on our users.” GitHub will be updating the applications’ test suite to make sure the application processes start even when certain external systems are unavailable. It is also improving its circuit breakers so they can degrade functionality when back-end services are down.