Mozilla shut down Firefox Send on September 17, 2020 and plans to shut down Firefox Notes no November 1, 2020. Firefox Send was launched as an experiment in 2017 to improve the sending of files on the Internet. It was the first experiment that Mozilla created that was created as a web service and not an add-on or feature for Firefox.
The service launched officially in 2019; it allowed anyone to share files with a size of up to 1 Gigabyte and Firefox account users to share files up to 2.5 Gigabyte in size. Users with a Firefox account got extra features such as the managing of all files uploaded to the service or changing expiration times.
One of the main features of Firefox Send was that files uploaded to the service expired after a certain number of downloads or an expiration time.
Mozilla pulled the service earlier this year promising that it would return at a later point in time. The main reason for the taking down was that bad actors used the platform to distribute malware and other unwanted files. The free nature of the service coupled with automatic deletions of files after a number of downloads or a set expiration time benefited bad actors significantly.
Firefox Send's homepage redirects to the main Mozilla homepage. A support article on Mozilla's support website provides confirmation that the service has been retired for good. A blog post on Mozilla's official blog reveals additional information.
According to the post on the blog, Firefox Send is being retired as part of Mozilla's restructuring. The company laid off 250 employees this year and announced that it would "tighten and refine its product focus".
Firefox Send was a promising tool for encrypted file sharing. Send garnered good reach, a loyal audience, and real signs of value throughout its life. Unfortunately, some abusive users were beginning to use Send to ship malware and conduct spear phishing attacks. This summer we took Firefox Send offline to address this challenge.
In the intervening period, as we weighed the cost of our overall portfolio and strategic focus, we made the decision not to relaunch the service.
Firefox Notes was launched as an experiment in 2017 as well. Unlike Firefox Send, which was a web service decoupled from Firefox, Firefox Notes was an internal feature of Firefox that added note taking to the browser. Most browsers rely on third-party extensions for note taking functionality; Vivaldi is an exception to that as it launched with note taking support.
Notes was updated several times to improve functionality. The latest version supports multiple notes, formatting options, and the exporting of notes as HTML files.
Mozilla will shut down Firefox Notes on November 1, 2020. The Firefox browser extension will remain installed but it won't be available anymore for installation. Mozilla won't provide updates, security or otherwise, for the browser extension anymore, and Notes syncing will not be available. The Notes application for Android won't work anymore at that time.
Firefox users who do use Notes may use the Export All Notes option of the extension to save all notes as HTML. All that is required for that is to click on the three dots in the notes extension interface and select the option. Individual notes can also be exported.
Now You: Have you used Firefox Send or Notes? What is your take on the termination of these services?
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