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Firefox appeared at a time when there was huge potential being stifled by a stagnant monopoly in the space, and people were desperate for something good. It fil

Firefox appeared at a time when there was huge potential being stifled by a stagnant monopoly in the space, and people were desperate for something good. It filled a real need, and people loved it. FirefoxOS appeared at a time when there was huge potential being actively being pushed forward and innovated on by the two largest tech companies in the space, and people already had two great options to choose from. It filled no real need, and nobody wanted it. For Mozilla to stay alive, they need to pick a space that is currently desperately needed but being ignored by large corporations and the government: privacy and identity. Mozilla could be the champion of the Snowden era, yet instead they're distracting themselves with IoT, VR and other shiny new toys. (And yes, I realize that users don't care about privacy. But nobody cared about web standards, either: it's all about packaging. That's Mozilla's strength.) Mozilla is a non-profit with a mission (https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/). It's time they start acting like one again.

bpicolo 11y ago
Outside of hacker news, I haven't heard of Firefox OS even once. They had no marketing to speak of, and you have to complete HARD on marketing to get into that market. "If you build it they will come" isn't a valid benchmark when there's already two options with massive market share that consumers are more or less happy with. (Since it's talked about in some replies, I live in the US).
- mootothemax 11y ago
  Just as a counterpoint, I regularly saw Firefox os+phone ads on giant billboards in central Warsaw. If there was to be any market interest, I thought their targeting and marketing efforts like this were pretty spot-on.
  - gedrap 11y ago
    Oh yeah, I've read about them targeting some specific countries (Spain, Brazil, Poland, etc). So it might be that the parent commentator lives elsewhere and didn't get targeted :)
    - mahouse 11y ago
      Telefónica, the major carrier in Spain, sold some Firefox OS phones years ago under the promise that there would be a version of WhatsApp for Firefox OS soon. That never happened. They eventually stopped selling them. (Not implying there is any correlation between those two last facts.)
      - niutech 11y ago
        There is Whatsapp client Loqui IM.
    - S4M 11y ago
      I live in Spain, but never saw someone using a Firefox OS phone there.
    - niutech 11y ago
      They were targeting developing countries like Central Eu, South Am, Asia, rather than North Am. The market there is huge. I live in Poland and I was lucky that I could easily find a cheap FxOS phone, which actually I am using now. This is the only truly private phone available here. It is a pity that Mozilla abandoned it. Bigger pity is that people do not give a sht about their privacy and open standards.
  - spyder 11y ago
    Yep: https://www.google.com/search?q=%22firefox+os%22+billboard+ads&tbm=isch https://www.google.com/search?q=%22firefox+os%22+billboard+a...
- gedrap 11y ago
  The last time I checked (about a year ago), their web site said that the project is not ready for public. I bought a firefoxos device in October 2014 which came with FirefoxOS 1.3, and got to agree that it wasn't ready for public. So that explains the lack of marketing.
- quanticle 11y ago
  Not to mention that FirefoxOS wasn't even properly built. I have yet to see (and given today's news, probably will never see) a review of FirefoxOS where the reviewer doesn't mention the OS crashing multiple times.
  - niutech 11y ago
    My Alcatel with FxOS 2 does not crash at all.
  - mgbmtl 11y ago
    I used one as my primary device for 2 years. It worked fine. All I needed was voice, sms, a browser, mail reader and a modem (wifi tethering). I had bought a dev device for $75. Somewhere in the FF OS 2.x series, an upgrade seriously made the keyboard unusable, and I never knew where to turn for bug trackers / support. I had also tried to make IPv6 work, experimented a bit with the app system.. I'm an average programmer, but I participate in a few large projects.. Firefox has always been a mystery to me, with lots of code names and hard to use bug tracker. Huge fan of Mozilla otherwise, so hurts a bit to say this.. other than that, it was a functional phone for 2 years.
- Raed667 11y ago
  They have done a lot of marketing with their partner Orange in Africa. They promoted 40$ phones. It didn't get much traction because users in Africa already had good viable Android phones for that price tag.
- on_and_off 11y ago
  >"If you build it they will come" The feedback I received from the people that tested the platform development wise was that they had not built it yet.
- petercooper 11y ago
  They didn't seem to make any effort to get it into the hands of people who might actually talk about it either. I follow a ton of hardware reviewer types and never once saw Firefox OS phones come up. I know literally one person who bought one out of curiosity.
- agumonkey 11y ago
  Also, I wonder how the public would react by hearing "Firefox""OS". The browser running the computer, would the idea inspired or confused them ? ChromeOS is from Google, they're known to make smartphones and Android so it's less strange to jump the shark. But Mozilla ...
yenda 11y ago
FirefoxOS was a perfect fit for me on the paper but I never got how to buy one here in France. I'm stucked with Android and I don't like it.
- gedrap 11y ago
  ZTE was selling their ZTE Open C which came with FirefoxOS 1.3 on ebay.co.uk, that's where I bought it from. I lived in the UK at the moment but I believe they were shipping it worldwide. Checked the ebay listings again, there are a few sellers from Australia, the USA but seems like the ZTE listing is gone.
  - untothebreach 11y ago
    Don't buy the ZTE Open, it was a terrible phone
    - gedrap 11y ago
      I had it. As far as I remember, it was a reasonable phone, especially for the price tag. The hardware was working ok and most of the issues were OS-related. The USB socket broke down after a bit more than half a year, however, I dropped the phone quite a few times, so couldn't blame the manufacturer.
      - holyoly 11y ago
        The problem I had with it was when it was in my pocket for a couple hours, I would pull it out and it would be off. I'd have to pop the cover and pull the battery to get it to boot back up. If it wasn't for that, it wouldn't have been totally terrible.
- quentinp 11y ago
  Many Leclerc stores sold ZTE Open C phones in France. You can also use the ZTE online store: they're now at 50 euros, not 80 euros + discount. See http://www.ztefrance.com/smartphones/open-c/ http://www.ztefrance.com/smartphones/open-c/.
Certhas 11y ago
But when they tried to pioneer privacy respecting ads in the new tab window, they were repeatedly and roundly criticised here, too...
- epoch1970 11y ago
  That's not the kind of innovation that users want, nor is it the kind that they truly benefit from. In general, users don't want any ads at all showing in their browser. They don't want them as part of web pages, they don't want them embedded in videos, and they surely don't want them as part of the browser itself! This should have been obvious given the popularity of various ad-blocking extensions for Firefox. Going against the obvious wishes of a product's users is something that's deserving of criticism.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - rockdoe 11y ago
    Users want to have their cake and eat it too. Following the users wishes when they're self-destructive is bad, and you should feel bad. Ads are enormously important for a lot of quality content out there to exist. Destroying them now, without good alternatives, is destructive to the web.
    - rmxt 11y ago
      Call the desire to rid the web of ads "destructive" if you please, but don't call those wishes "self-destructive" from the user's perspective. It is completely within the user's prerogative to filter whatever content they wish to filter before it hits their eyeballs. Why should anyone feel bad about choosing what they want to look at it? For a sort of analogy, the presence of pay-to-read newspapers hasn't precluded the presence of free-to-read newspapers (New York Times vs. Metro [1]), nor has free-to-read papers killed off pay-to-read newspapers, which are generally higher quality. Savvy digital content providers will find a way to still make money, even if it's not ads as they exist today. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metro_International https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metro_International
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
frik 11y ago
According to IDC the Worldwide Smartphone Market in 2015: Android ... 81.2% iOS ... 15.8% Windows Phone ... 2.2% Others ... 0.8% Worldwide Smartphone Forecast by OS for 2019: Android ... 82.6% iOS ... 14.1% Windows Phone ... 2.3% Others ... 0.9% Source: http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS40664915 http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS40664915 @downvoter: it's a forcast by the well known IDC, also the current market share (2015) is interesting on its own
- sremani 11y ago
  Will Windows Phone/ Windows Mobile be around 2019, as a die-hard WP user, I hope so. I just do not like those icon based OSes.
  - wvenable 11y ago
    Windows Phone, if it survives, will eventually become very much like those icon based OSes.
  - MawNicker 11y ago
    I suspect the Universal Windows Platform will have a significant impact. Especially the ability to dock your phone with an external display/keyboard/mouse. For a large portion of the market it displaces the need for a second computing device. Microsoft is much further along on this front than both Android and iOS.
    - kybernetikos 11y ago
      I've been able to (and have done so) plug my android phone into a usb hub with mouse and keyboard and into a 1080p screen for quite a few years now. Of course, there's relatively little that truly takes advantage of that set up, and making the user experience more pleasant would make a huge difference, but android understands mouse and keyboard input just fine. Microsoft may be somewhat further along on this front, but I don't think it's as much as you think - the apps that can run in this way are not full windows applications, and there are relatively few of them at present.
lewisl9029 11y ago
Completely agree that they should turn their focus towards solving privacy and identity management. I'm hoping that this might mean they can direct some resources towards Persona development again. Or at least experiment with something new in this area.
- seanp2k2 11y ago
  +1 for Persona. Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10436123 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10436123 Re: privacy / security, I really wish they hadn't dropped Thunderbird.
  - wamatt 11y ago
    It's a shame really, but as an outsider, it wasn't clear that Persona was even given a chance to fail.
    - StavrosK 11y ago
      That's my impression as well. A friend and I created a pastebin as a fun weekend project this weekend (https://www.pastery.net/ https://www.pastery.net/) and we used Persona for auth, since it's so damn convenient. The only problem is that it loads a bunch of files on every request, and my questions about lazy-loading went unanswered. I really wish Mozilla would change their mind and start developing this again. It feels like they expected all major websites to support it on the first year, and, when that didn't happen, they decided to drop it.
      - click170 11y ago
        With Thunderbird at least, the repo is open and available. Does the same stand for Persona? Perhaps instead of asking Firefox to do the legwork we should be contributing some of our own time to the projects we want to see succeed.
        StavrosK 11y ago
mei0Iesh 11y ago
Phoenix appeared at a time when web browsers were bloated, and it was refreshing to have a minimalist app that simply browsed the web. It wasn't that potential was being stifled; other browsers had too many features. It was that we could download a small binary on dial-up, that opened up quickly and just did what we needed without any fluff. Notice that last part about downloading? That's the key. We could download Phoenix, and run it. I can't download FirefoxOS, and run it. My devices are locked to what they can run. If mobile appliances were like personal computers, then a Phoenix could rise. But it's a completely different situation, so there is no way to compete like you could with web browsers.
- yenda 11y ago
  Good point, maybe a hack that would be runnable from android to override it on the phone would have done the trick
- andrewaylett 11y ago
  Actually you can, just about. I've got b2gdroid[0] installed on my Android phone, which gives you the Gaia experience as your home screen, and access to the built-in applications as well as being a launcher for your Android apps. It's not ideal, as the integration points don't appear to be fully worked out and it doesn't always perform very well, but I'm sure it could be turned into essentially a downloadable FirefoxOS as a hook to try to get people to get a native device next time, if some development effort was available. [0]: https://github.com/fabricedesre/b2gdroid https://github.com/fabricedesre/b2gdroid
digi_owl 11y ago
I dunno. From what i am seeing, Apple and Google are busy rearranging UI deck chairs. The major problem of FirefoxOS though was trying to pitch the whole "everyone can (re)write apps" to a market that is all about user lock-in. Every OEM and carrier wants to be the landlord of the phone "owner", taking a bite out of everything the user does with the device. But if every app is a web page, and all the code is out in the open, it is quite easy for the user to disable and strip out rent extraction code. And yes your right about Mozilla being distracted. And sadly they are not alone. The whole FOSS world seem hell bent on wasting energy doing all kinds of shiny projects and social outreach. I'm tempted to call it the curse of SXSW.
- rimantas 11y ago
  > But if every app is a web page, and all the code is out in > the open, it is quite easy for the user to disable and > strip out rent extraction code. No. There should be more than a billion smartphones/tablets sold, what do you think is the ratio of those who can do what you told to those who have no idea? And what is the ratio of those who can willing to do it instead of just using the app? And there is also the issue that if your app is just the web page, it is either universal and thus crap on all devices, or highly customized for each platform at which point it would be easier and less messy just to write it natively.
  - detaro 11y ago
    How big is the ratio of people using adblockers/YouTube downloader add-ons etc vs. those capable of writing them?
    - jay_kyburz 11y ago
      Yeah right, I was excited by the idea that we might be able to download all kinds of cool UI's for our phones. I was thinking of developing a really minimalistic almost commandline interface for my notes, address book, dialer and calendar. I would love to see what cool creative people could come up with.
  - 11y ago
callmeed 11y ago
and mobile email
johncolanduoni 11y ago
> And yes, I realize that users don't care about privacy. But nobody cared about web standards, either: it's all about packaging. That's Mozilla's strength. The difference with browsers was that improvements in the browser led to clear improvements in web browsing experience, which even the least technically minded could notice. What changes in privacy and identity are Mozilla going to pioneer that result in obvious benefits that those who don't know anything about these issues (i.e. the majority) will notice and clearly attribute to Mozilla's products? I really wish there were such things but I have yet to see any presented.
- zmmmmm 11y ago
  The clearest and simplest thing they could do is implement ad blocking in an ethical manner. All the other players have commercial agendas either for or against advertising. Mozilla is really the only player that can come to the table with clean hands and implement a solution that is fair to all sides.
  - coldtea 11y ago
    Why would the user care about "ethical" manner (especially since it still allows ads) over crude, remove all ads, manner?
    - kefka 11y ago
      I care. I will always use the "remove all ads" answer, no matter what. I'm still on metered bandwidth. And when I'm not at work, ads are another vector for malware. I'll pass.
    - zmmmmm 11y ago
      Are you asking why do people care about ethics? That's a philosophical question almost. But at some point people do. We agree to laws that people shouldn't murder each other, even if you find it might be manifestly in your interests to knock someone off. I think most "ordinary" people do feel at least a tiny bit guilty about nuking every single ad on web sites that they use regularly. I know I do.
funkyy 11y ago
Or maybe instead they could just make completely new, unique product. Something like Iphone was in its first release. Firefox OS seems to be something between Android and IOS. They are trying to solve all the problems of those two but on the end are just average. Just another OS that really looks like Android for regular user. Redesign everything and rethink the basics - go the way Windows Phone went, but with open environment and much more developer friendly space. Widnows Phone is an amazing piece of UIX and with great ideas, but it failed regarding supporting developers and making its store user friendly. This is where Firefox should aim, not another "better" version of something everyone knows to well.
- zanny 11y ago
  They shouldn't be off doing their own thing in the "not Google / Apple / Microsoft" phone scene. Canonical, the now dieing Jolla, and Mozilla were all doing their own thing and years later Ubuntu Touch is still an unfinished mess with no forseeable legit launch worth mentioning (3rd parties have sold Ubuntu Touch phones, and the UX was awful), Jolla is bankrupt, and Mozilla just gave up. Plasma Mobile has the right idea. Build the platform, let communities form around the layers above it (and below it) and just try to get people working together on one goal (especially since all these mobile OS projects are all using Qt, all using Wayland, all using Linux). Lets just hope the KDE guys don't vaporware this one like Plasma Active, it sure would be lovely if Unity 8 got rebased on top of it, and used xdg-app like the community is pushing towards. Firefox could even get in on it as the default browser with great integrated webapp support.
  - funkyy 11y ago
    Once again, average user when first in touch with Plasma Phone will say "Oh, is this new Android?". All of them unique mobile OS's look the same at first glance. And first glance is most important. Windows Phone did amazing job in that, to bad they screwed almost everything else. Also it sounds like your comment is technical point of view. Users dont care of that. If mobile system cannot attract regular users, then it is dead.
    - 11y ago
notsony 11y ago
Bring back Brendan Eich ?
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
KuhlMensch 11y ago
All good points. "it's all about packaging. That's Mozilla's strength." On this we start to deviate. I think its all about platform. And you only get mainstream users on your platform if its awesome in the "mainly used" ways. Its like the difference between a doctorate of psychology vs medicine. With one you can help people who really want to be helped, the other, you can give someone a flu shot and they are treated.
caskance 11y ago
Privacy is a poor angle to pursue. It's old, and so we know, as you said, that people don't care. They have a real chance if they ride the social justice and progressivism train, though. It's hot and unlike privacy, people care about it a lot. They've already set the precedent with the Eich controversy. They just need to double down and start promoting it better. Take initiative instead of being reactive. Not too hard when the organizations you're up against are gigantic multi-billion-dollar companies who can't afford to fire every conservative employee, not comply with government regulations their audience views negatively, or kowtow too hard to diversity for fear of angering the technolibertarians.
- bobajeff 11y ago
  I'm pretty sure people do still care about privacy. It just might not be readily obvious how to profit from such people.
  - caskance 11y ago
    And some people are "pretty sure" the hyper advanced alien Xenu used hydrogen bombs to detonate all volcanoes on earth simultaneously and capture everyone's thetans. Unless you have any evidence, you're just going to have to resign yourself to the idea that most people won't believe you.
  - nickpsecurity 11y ago
    It's obvious: you sell them the tools that enhance their privacy with solid reviews and advertisements in right places. If people don't buy, they either didn't care enough about privacy or were poor. There's security companies selling hardened phone OS's, browsers, desktops... you name it. Most individuals or businesses, even with the money, just don't buy them or even research them much.
    - bobajeff 11y ago
      I bet they just don't deliver on their promise or do so at the expense of some fundamental use case. Security and privacy are very hard issues to address. So any solution will be temporary, very restrictive or fall short of it's promise. For instance you can't have total privacy even if you never use Google and use tracker blockers, erase your browser's fingerprint etc. you are still sharing information with servers you're visiting.
nothis 11y ago
Hear, hear. Instead of pushing for an alternative against data vampires like Google, they push their own weird cloud services ("Firefox Sync") and... videochat? Didn't they suddenly have some weird, pop-up-by-default videochat thing in one of their recent releases? I actually always liked the idea of a FirefoxOS. Linux style operating system alternatives could need a proper fucking GUI and general average-user-oriented design. Firefox is amazing at that for a non-profit, they could actually pull it off.
- mgbmtl 11y ago
  "Hello" (videochat) is pretty neat, imho. You can share tabs, video/voice and chat. It's great for training users. All you have to do is send an URL, and it works in Chrome too. It's based on HTML5, but because of how webrtc has to punch through firewalls, it uses one of their partners to initiate the connection (Telefonica?). After that it's mostly peer to peer.
detroitcoder 11y ago
e-mail
nickpsecurity 11y ago
Their income source is the advertising industry that works via surveillance of their users. I mean, their money comes mainly from search traffic but it's something to factor in when considering them being a private browser.
_nedR 11y ago
To be fair , the market niche for a phone that doesn't try to imprison you or ransom you to the highest bidder, hasn't yet been served. In the internet-landscape, Mozilla is the one that tries to intervene on the user's behalf against commercial interests. Maybe they thought they could do the same for the much more competitive mobile market. The bigger problem i think is that Mozilla didn't make a phone that appealed to influencers - the high tech crowd similar to the early adopters for Firefox. Instead they tried to go for the emerging markets that was already well served by other alternatives, and who aren't ideal early adopters. From what i saw the user experience and quality of their Platform wasn't top notch either (and html apps still suck in 2015). Ubuntu was on the right track with Ubuntu Edge (the Indiegogo campaign showed that there was definitely a demand for it), but they set their goals too high and since then they seem to be dragging their feet in getting into the market.
- bad_user 11y ago
  The stock Android on my Nexus 6 does a pretty good job actually. In a sense FirefoxOS is more limited than Android. You can't run an alternative browser on it for example. On Android you can install a custom launcher to get rid of that annoying Google Search bar, you can replace Google Search with DuckDuckGo's app, you can install Firefox for Android on it and completely replace Chrome, you can install apps from third party sources like F-Droid or Amazon's Appstore. In Marshmallow the previously broken permissions system has been finally redesigned. Chrome for Android is pretty cool lately, as it also does push notifications, the app manifest and it does a much better job for making web apps first class citizens than Safari on iOS or Firefox on Android or whatever Opera is doing. You can actually run Facebook in your Android browser now and pretend that it's a native app. And Android is also open source, I mean yes, while it's dependent on Google's Play services, like for push notifications or its location services, those can be replaced and Android is very much fork-able. Hey, Amazon did it. Ubuntu was doomed from the start and Android is light years away from its competition imho. I mean, experiments are cool, but if your mobile OS is less usable than Android from 5 years ago, that's a failed experiment.
  - _nedR 11y ago
    Android seems to be getting better with each new release from a security & privacy perspective, but still has a long ways to go. As a long time rose-tinted-glasses-wearing FOSS fan and android user, i have to say that iOS is still far ahead of Android in terms of security and privacy. Furthermore Apple seems to keep innovating in that regard. You could go with custom launcher/mod/rom/ route but that brings its own possible set of problems - performance, battery life, broken functionality (some banking apps wont run on rooted phones), more spyware(from launchers), etc. It is not an acceptable solution for the masses. Amazon - well they are just another company trying to ransom/loot you. Cyanogen mod is promising if they can overcome challenges (how many apps work without google play services?). Furthermore Google play services is deeply embedded into android, whose key purpose is to ransom you to the highest bidder. Android is fundamentally compromised by the conflicting business interests of its primary developer (Google). edit: I wouldn't say that Ubuntu was doomed from the start, but they certainly missed the boat.

bpicolo 11y ago

Outside of hacker news, I haven't heard of Firefox OS even once. They had no marketing to speak of, and you have to complete HARD on marketing to get into that market. "If you build it they will come" isn't a valid benchmark when there's already two options with massive market share that consumers are more or less happy with. (Since it's talked about in some replies, I live in the US).

mootothemax 11y ago
Just as a counterpoint, I regularly saw Firefox os+phone ads on giant billboards in central Warsaw. If there was to be any market interest, I thought their targeting and marketing efforts like this were pretty spot-on.
- gedrap 11y ago
  Oh yeah, I've read about them targeting some specific countries (Spain, Brazil, Poland, etc). So it might be that the parent commentator lives elsewhere and didn't get targeted :)
  - mahouse 11y ago
    Telefónica, the major carrier in Spain, sold some Firefox OS phones years ago under the promise that there would be a version of WhatsApp for Firefox OS soon. That never happened. They eventually stopped selling them. (Not implying there is any correlation between those two last facts.)
    - niutech 11y ago
      There is Whatsapp client Loqui IM.
  - S4M 11y ago
    I live in Spain, but never saw someone using a Firefox OS phone there.
  - niutech 11y ago
    They were targeting developing countries like Central Eu, South Am, Asia, rather than North Am. The market there is huge. I live in Poland and I was lucky that I could easily find a cheap FxOS phone, which actually I am using now. This is the only truly private phone available here. It is a pity that Mozilla abandoned it. Bigger pity is that people do not give a sht about their privacy and open standards.
- spyder 11y ago
  Yep: https://www.google.com/search?q=%22firefox+os%22+billboard+ads&tbm=isch https://www.google.com/search?q=%22firefox+os%22+billboard+a...
gedrap 11y ago
The last time I checked (about a year ago), their web site said that the project is not ready for public. I bought a firefoxos device in October 2014 which came with FirefoxOS 1.3, and got to agree that it wasn't ready for public. So that explains the lack of marketing.
quanticle 11y ago
Not to mention that FirefoxOS wasn't even properly built. I have yet to see (and given today's news, probably will never see) a review of FirefoxOS where the reviewer doesn't mention the OS crashing multiple times.
- niutech 11y ago
  My Alcatel with FxOS 2 does not crash at all.
- mgbmtl 11y ago
  I used one as my primary device for 2 years. It worked fine. All I needed was voice, sms, a browser, mail reader and a modem (wifi tethering). I had bought a dev device for $75. Somewhere in the FF OS 2.x series, an upgrade seriously made the keyboard unusable, and I never knew where to turn for bug trackers / support. I had also tried to make IPv6 work, experimented a bit with the app system.. I'm an average programmer, but I participate in a few large projects.. Firefox has always been a mystery to me, with lots of code names and hard to use bug tracker. Huge fan of Mozilla otherwise, so hurts a bit to say this.. other than that, it was a functional phone for 2 years.
Raed667 11y ago
They have done a lot of marketing with their partner Orange in Africa. They promoted 40$ phones. It didn't get much traction because users in Africa already had good viable Android phones for that price tag.
on_and_off 11y ago
>"If you build it they will come" The feedback I received from the people that tested the platform development wise was that they had not built it yet.
petercooper 11y ago
They didn't seem to make any effort to get it into the hands of people who might actually talk about it either. I follow a ton of hardware reviewer types and never once saw Firefox OS phones come up. I know literally one person who bought one out of curiosity.
agumonkey 11y ago
Also, I wonder how the public would react by hearing "Firefox""OS". The browser running the computer, would the idea inspired or confused them ? ChromeOS is from Google, they're known to make smartphones and Android so it's less strange to jump the shark. But Mozilla ...

yenda 11y ago

FirefoxOS was a perfect fit for me on the paper but I never got how to buy one here in France. I'm stucked with Android and I don't like it.

gedrap 11y ago
ZTE was selling their ZTE Open C which came with FirefoxOS 1.3 on ebay.co.uk, that's where I bought it from. I lived in the UK at the moment but I believe they were shipping it worldwide. Checked the ebay listings again, there are a few sellers from Australia, the USA but seems like the ZTE listing is gone.
- untothebreach 11y ago
  Don't buy the ZTE Open, it was a terrible phone
  - gedrap 11y ago
    I had it. As far as I remember, it was a reasonable phone, especially for the price tag. The hardware was working ok and most of the issues were OS-related. The USB socket broke down after a bit more than half a year, however, I dropped the phone quite a few times, so couldn't blame the manufacturer.
    - holyoly 11y ago
      The problem I had with it was when it was in my pocket for a couple hours, I would pull it out and it would be off. I'd have to pop the cover and pull the battery to get it to boot back up. If it wasn't for that, it wouldn't have been totally terrible.
quentinp 11y ago
Many Leclerc stores sold ZTE Open C phones in France. You can also use the ZTE online store: they're now at 50 euros, not 80 euros + discount. See http://www.ztefrance.com/smartphones/open-c/ http://www.ztefrance.com/smartphones/open-c/.

Certhas 11y ago

But when they tried to pioneer privacy respecting ads in the new tab window, they were repeatedly and roundly criticised here, too...

epoch1970 11y ago
That's not the kind of innovation that users want, nor is it the kind that they truly benefit from. In general, users don't want any ads at all showing in their browser. They don't want them as part of web pages, they don't want them embedded in videos, and they surely don't want them as part of the browser itself! This should have been obvious given the popularity of various ad-blocking extensions for Firefox. Going against the obvious wishes of a product's users is something that's deserving of criticism.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- rockdoe 11y ago
  Users want to have their cake and eat it too. Following the users wishes when they're self-destructive is bad, and you should feel bad. Ads are enormously important for a lot of quality content out there to exist. Destroying them now, without good alternatives, is destructive to the web.
  - rmxt 11y ago
    Call the desire to rid the web of ads "destructive" if you please, but don't call those wishes "self-destructive" from the user's perspective. It is completely within the user's prerogative to filter whatever content they wish to filter before it hits their eyeballs. Why should anyone feel bad about choosing what they want to look at it? For a sort of analogy, the presence of pay-to-read newspapers hasn't precluded the presence of free-to-read newspapers (New York Times vs. Metro [1]), nor has free-to-read papers killed off pay-to-read newspapers, which are generally higher quality. Savvy digital content providers will find a way to still make money, even if it's not ads as they exist today. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metro_International https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metro_International

deleted 11y ago

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frik 11y ago

According to IDC the Worldwide Smartphone Market in 2015: Android ... 81.2% iOS ... 15.8% Windows Phone ... 2.2% Others ... 0.8% Worldwide Smartphone Forecast by OS for 2019: Android ... 82.6% iOS ... 14.1% Windows Phone ... 2.3% Others ... 0.9% Source: http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS40664915 http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS40664915 @downvoter: it's a forcast by the well known IDC, also the current market share (2015) is interesting on its own

sremani 11y ago
Will Windows Phone/ Windows Mobile be around 2019, as a die-hard WP user, I hope so. I just do not like those icon based OSes.
- wvenable 11y ago
  Windows Phone, if it survives, will eventually become very much like those icon based OSes.
- MawNicker 11y ago
  I suspect the Universal Windows Platform will have a significant impact. Especially the ability to dock your phone with an external display/keyboard/mouse. For a large portion of the market it displaces the need for a second computing device. Microsoft is much further along on this front than both Android and iOS.
  - kybernetikos 11y ago
    I've been able to (and have done so) plug my android phone into a usb hub with mouse and keyboard and into a 1080p screen for quite a few years now. Of course, there's relatively little that truly takes advantage of that set up, and making the user experience more pleasant would make a huge difference, but android understands mouse and keyboard input just fine. Microsoft may be somewhat further along on this front, but I don't think it's as much as you think - the apps that can run in this way are not full windows applications, and there are relatively few of them at present.

lewisl9029 11y ago

Completely agree that they should turn their focus towards solving privacy and identity management. I'm hoping that this might mean they can direct some resources towards Persona development again. Or at least experiment with something new in this area.

seanp2k2 11y ago
+1 for Persona. Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10436123 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10436123 Re: privacy / security, I really wish they hadn't dropped Thunderbird.
- wamatt 11y ago
  It's a shame really, but as an outsider, it wasn't clear that Persona was even given a chance to fail.
  - StavrosK 11y ago
    That's my impression as well. A friend and I created a pastebin as a fun weekend project this weekend (https://www.pastery.net/ https://www.pastery.net/) and we used Persona for auth, since it's so damn convenient. The only problem is that it loads a bunch of files on every request, and my questions about lazy-loading went unanswered. I really wish Mozilla would change their mind and start developing this again. It feels like they expected all major websites to support it on the first year, and, when that didn't happen, they decided to drop it.
    - click170 11y ago
      With Thunderbird at least, the repo is open and available. Does the same stand for Persona? Perhaps instead of asking Firefox to do the legwork we should be contributing some of our own time to the projects we want to see succeed.
      - StavrosK 11y ago

mei0Iesh 11y ago

Phoenix appeared at a time when web browsers were bloated, and it was refreshing to have a minimalist app that simply browsed the web. It wasn't that potential was being stifled; other browsers had too many features. It was that we could download a small binary on dial-up, that opened up quickly and just did what we needed without any fluff. Notice that last part about downloading? That's the key. We could download Phoenix, and run it. I can't download FirefoxOS, and run it. My devices are locked to what they can run. If mobile appliances were like personal computers, then a Phoenix could rise. But it's a completely different situation, so there is no way to compete like you could with web browsers.

yenda 11y ago
Good point, maybe a hack that would be runnable from android to override it on the phone would have done the trick
andrewaylett 11y ago
Actually you can, just about. I've got b2gdroid[0] installed on my Android phone, which gives you the Gaia experience as your home screen, and access to the built-in applications as well as being a launcher for your Android apps. It's not ideal, as the integration points don't appear to be fully worked out and it doesn't always perform very well, but I'm sure it could be turned into essentially a downloadable FirefoxOS as a hook to try to get people to get a native device next time, if some development effort was available. [0]: https://github.com/fabricedesre/b2gdroid https://github.com/fabricedesre/b2gdroid

digi_owl 11y ago

I dunno. From what i am seeing, Apple and Google are busy rearranging UI deck chairs. The major problem of FirefoxOS though was trying to pitch the whole "everyone can (re)write apps" to a market that is all about user lock-in. Every OEM and carrier wants to be the landlord of the phone "owner", taking a bite out of everything the user does with the device. But if every app is a web page, and all the code is out in the open, it is quite easy for the user to disable and strip out rent extraction code. And yes your right about Mozilla being distracted. And sadly they are not alone. The whole FOSS world seem hell bent on wasting energy doing all kinds of shiny projects and social outreach. I'm tempted to call it the curse of SXSW.

rimantas 11y ago
> But if every app is a web page, and all the code is out in > the open, it is quite easy for the user to disable and > strip out rent extraction code. No. There should be more than a billion smartphones/tablets sold, what do you think is the ratio of those who can do what you told to those who have no idea? And what is the ratio of those who can willing to do it instead of just using the app? And there is also the issue that if your app is just the web page, it is either universal and thus crap on all devices, or highly customized for each platform at which point it would be easier and less messy just to write it natively.
- detaro 11y ago
  How big is the ratio of people using adblockers/YouTube downloader add-ons etc vs. those capable of writing them?
  - jay_kyburz 11y ago
    Yeah right, I was excited by the idea that we might be able to download all kinds of cool UI's for our phones. I was thinking of developing a really minimalistic almost commandline interface for my notes, address book, dialer and calendar. I would love to see what cool creative people could come up with.
- 11y ago

callmeed 11y ago

and mobile email

johncolanduoni 11y ago

> And yes, I realize that users don't care about privacy. But nobody cared about web standards, either: it's all about packaging. That's Mozilla's strength. The difference with browsers was that improvements in the browser led to clear improvements in web browsing experience, which even the least technically minded could notice. What changes in privacy and identity are Mozilla going to pioneer that result in obvious benefits that those who don't know anything about these issues (i.e. the majority) will notice and clearly attribute to Mozilla's products? I really wish there were such things but I have yet to see any presented.

zmmmmm 11y ago
The clearest and simplest thing they could do is implement ad blocking in an ethical manner. All the other players have commercial agendas either for or against advertising. Mozilla is really the only player that can come to the table with clean hands and implement a solution that is fair to all sides.
- coldtea 11y ago
  Why would the user care about "ethical" manner (especially since it still allows ads) over crude, remove all ads, manner?
  - kefka 11y ago
    I care. I will always use the "remove all ads" answer, no matter what. I'm still on metered bandwidth. And when I'm not at work, ads are another vector for malware. I'll pass.
  - zmmmmm 11y ago
    Are you asking why do people care about ethics? That's a philosophical question almost. But at some point people do. We agree to laws that people shouldn't murder each other, even if you find it might be manifestly in your interests to knock someone off. I think most "ordinary" people do feel at least a tiny bit guilty about nuking every single ad on web sites that they use regularly. I know I do.

funkyy 11y ago

Or maybe instead they could just make completely new, unique product. Something like Iphone was in its first release. Firefox OS seems to be something between Android and IOS. They are trying to solve all the problems of those two but on the end are just average. Just another OS that really looks like Android for regular user. Redesign everything and rethink the basics - go the way Windows Phone went, but with open environment and much more developer friendly space. Widnows Phone is an amazing piece of UIX and with great ideas, but it failed regarding supporting developers and making its store user friendly. This is where Firefox should aim, not another "better" version of something everyone knows to well.

zanny 11y ago
They shouldn't be off doing their own thing in the "not Google / Apple / Microsoft" phone scene. Canonical, the now dieing Jolla, and Mozilla were all doing their own thing and years later Ubuntu Touch is still an unfinished mess with no forseeable legit launch worth mentioning (3rd parties have sold Ubuntu Touch phones, and the UX was awful), Jolla is bankrupt, and Mozilla just gave up. Plasma Mobile has the right idea. Build the platform, let communities form around the layers above it (and below it) and just try to get people working together on one goal (especially since all these mobile OS projects are all using Qt, all using Wayland, all using Linux). Lets just hope the KDE guys don't vaporware this one like Plasma Active, it sure would be lovely if Unity 8 got rebased on top of it, and used xdg-app like the community is pushing towards. Firefox could even get in on it as the default browser with great integrated webapp support.
- funkyy 11y ago
  Once again, average user when first in touch with Plasma Phone will say "Oh, is this new Android?". All of them unique mobile OS's look the same at first glance. And first glance is most important. Windows Phone did amazing job in that, to bad they screwed almost everything else. Also it sounds like your comment is technical point of view. Users dont care of that. If mobile system cannot attract regular users, then it is dead.
  - 11y ago

notsony 11y ago

Bring back Brendan Eich ?

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

KuhlMensch 11y ago

All good points. "it's all about packaging. That's Mozilla's strength." On this we start to deviate. I think its all about platform. And you only get mainstream users on your platform if its awesome in the "mainly used" ways. Its like the difference between a doctorate of psychology vs medicine. With one you can help people who really want to be helped, the other, you can give someone a flu shot and they are treated.

caskance 11y ago

Privacy is a poor angle to pursue. It's old, and so we know, as you said, that people don't care. They have a real chance if they ride the social justice and progressivism train, though. It's hot and unlike privacy, people care about it a lot. They've already set the precedent with the Eich controversy. They just need to double down and start promoting it better. Take initiative instead of being reactive. Not too hard when the organizations you're up against are gigantic multi-billion-dollar companies who can't afford to fire every conservative employee, not comply with government regulations their audience views negatively, or kowtow too hard to diversity for fear of angering the technolibertarians.

bobajeff 11y ago
I'm pretty sure people do still care about privacy. It just might not be readily obvious how to profit from such people.
- caskance 11y ago
  And some people are "pretty sure" the hyper advanced alien Xenu used hydrogen bombs to detonate all volcanoes on earth simultaneously and capture everyone's thetans. Unless you have any evidence, you're just going to have to resign yourself to the idea that most people won't believe you.
- nickpsecurity 11y ago
  It's obvious: you sell them the tools that enhance their privacy with solid reviews and advertisements in right places. If people don't buy, they either didn't care enough about privacy or were poor. There's security companies selling hardened phone OS's, browsers, desktops... you name it. Most individuals or businesses, even with the money, just don't buy them or even research them much.
  - bobajeff 11y ago
    I bet they just don't deliver on their promise or do so at the expense of some fundamental use case. Security and privacy are very hard issues to address. So any solution will be temporary, very restrictive or fall short of it's promise. For instance you can't have total privacy even if you never use Google and use tracker blockers, erase your browser's fingerprint etc. you are still sharing information with servers you're visiting.

nothis 11y ago

Hear, hear. Instead of pushing for an alternative against data vampires like Google, they push their own weird cloud services ("Firefox Sync") and... videochat? Didn't they suddenly have some weird, pop-up-by-default videochat thing in one of their recent releases? I actually always liked the idea of a FirefoxOS. Linux style operating system alternatives could need a proper fucking GUI and general average-user-oriented design. Firefox is amazing at that for a non-profit, they could actually pull it off.

mgbmtl 11y ago
"Hello" (videochat) is pretty neat, imho. You can share tabs, video/voice and chat. It's great for training users. All you have to do is send an URL, and it works in Chrome too. It's based on HTML5, but because of how webrtc has to punch through firewalls, it uses one of their partners to initiate the connection (Telefonica?). After that it's mostly peer to peer.

detroitcoder 11y ago

e-mail

nickpsecurity 11y ago

Their income source is the advertising industry that works via surveillance of their users. I mean, their money comes mainly from search traffic but it's something to factor in when considering them being a private browser.

_nedR 11y ago

To be fair , the market niche for a phone that doesn't try to imprison you or ransom you to the highest bidder, hasn't yet been served. In the internet-landscape, Mozilla is the one that tries to intervene on the user's behalf against commercial interests. Maybe they thought they could do the same for the much more competitive mobile market. The bigger problem i think is that Mozilla didn't make a phone that appealed to influencers - the high tech crowd similar to the early adopters for Firefox. Instead they tried to go for the emerging markets that was already well served by other alternatives, and who aren't ideal early adopters. From what i saw the user experience and quality of their Platform wasn't top notch either (and html apps still suck in 2015). Ubuntu was on the right track with Ubuntu Edge (the Indiegogo campaign showed that there was definitely a demand for it), but they set their goals too high and since then they seem to be dragging their feet in getting into the market.

bad_user 11y ago
The stock Android on my Nexus 6 does a pretty good job actually. In a sense FirefoxOS is more limited than Android. You can't run an alternative browser on it for example. On Android you can install a custom launcher to get rid of that annoying Google Search bar, you can replace Google Search with DuckDuckGo's app, you can install Firefox for Android on it and completely replace Chrome, you can install apps from third party sources like F-Droid or Amazon's Appstore. In Marshmallow the previously broken permissions system has been finally redesigned. Chrome for Android is pretty cool lately, as it also does push notifications, the app manifest and it does a much better job for making web apps first class citizens than Safari on iOS or Firefox on Android or whatever Opera is doing. You can actually run Facebook in your Android browser now and pretend that it's a native app. And Android is also open source, I mean yes, while it's dependent on Google's Play services, like for push notifications or its location services, those can be replaced and Android is very much fork-able. Hey, Amazon did it. Ubuntu was doomed from the start and Android is light years away from its competition imho. I mean, experiments are cool, but if your mobile OS is less usable than Android from 5 years ago, that's a failed experiment.
- _nedR 11y ago
  Android seems to be getting better with each new release from a security & privacy perspective, but still has a long ways to go. As a long time rose-tinted-glasses-wearing FOSS fan and android user, i have to say that iOS is still far ahead of Android in terms of security and privacy. Furthermore Apple seems to keep innovating in that regard. You could go with custom launcher/mod/rom/ route but that brings its own possible set of problems - performance, battery life, broken functionality (some banking apps wont run on rooted phones), more spyware(from launchers), etc. It is not an acceptable solution for the masses. Amazon - well they are just another company trying to ransom/loot you. Cyanogen mod is promising if they can overcome challenges (how many apps work without google play services?). Furthermore Google play services is deeply embedded into android, whose key purpose is to ransom you to the highest bidder. Android is fundamentally compromised by the conflicting business interests of its primary developer (Google). edit: I wouldn't say that Ubuntu was doomed from the start, but they certainly missed the boat.