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Mozilla has stopped all commercial development on Firefox OS

271 points by bpierre 10y ago

sohkamyung 10y ago
Not unexpected, but a bummer. I suppose this means my Firefox OS powered Panasonic TV won't get any more updates too.
bionsuba 10y ago
This outcome should have been obvious to everyone involved. The fact that it wasn't raises serious doubts about the Mozilla leadership. You can't compete with Android by being slower, less responsive, and ship with less features.
- tarancato 10y ago
  Seriously... I avoid Firefox on my (rather beefy) desktop because of how much it freezes. I don't want to imagine how it worked on a 50€ phone, which looked like it was their target. Maybe they thought Gecko would be ready by the time the OS was going to ship?
  - teekert 10y ago
    But this a poor, skewing argument always made by at least one person here. For most FF is very responsive and there are no problems what so ever. And FF is not FF-OS.
    - tarancato 10y ago
      If you think FF is responsive, there are two options: 1) you haven't compared it to Chrome/WebKit/Edge, or 2) you don't run heavy applications such as TweetDeck on it. And FF-OS was a complete OS that ran on Gecko, so yes, if Gecko (FF) is slow, the entire FF-OS is slow.
      - dblohm7 10y ago
        A direct Firefox to Firefox OS comparison is not reasonable. For one, FxOS was a greenfield ecosystem, so it was built with multiprocess from the start, whereas the e10s project moves relatively glacially toward a multiprocess world so that nothing gets broken.
    - lloeki 10y ago
      > For most FF is very responsive and there are no problems what so ever. Open dev tools, type `for (;;) {}`. Notice the whole browser becomes unresponsive. This has been improved upon (as in it doesn't block the whole Firefox UI, just merely every single content tab) thanks to Electrolysis partially reaching stable but "there are no problems whatsoever" simply isn't true performance wise (and this is the most obvious one, there are numerous other very well known performance issues with FF)
      - tarancato 10y ago
        I have an easy metric for that: when you're navigating, look at the "loading" spinner on the tab bar, and see how it almost always freezes every time a page is being drawn. DOM painting/manipulation times in Gecko are a joke, probably the worst pain point of Firefox. And it's not the only one...
      - wldcordeiro 10y ago
        Run an infinite for loop and look at the performance degradation is about the dumbest test you could do. That's literally asking it to not stop executing. Yeah tab isolation would mean you only crash a tab but that isn't a good example.
        tarancato 10y ago
        So you tell me it's reasonable that a frozen tab makes the whole browser unresponsive. Nice.
      - syrrim 10y ago
        Open your terminal, type ':(){ :|:& };:'. Notice how the whole OS becomes unresponsive. There is a very simple solution to both these problems, which most people employ to great effect: just don't do that.
        lloeki 10y ago
        Besides that doing `perl -e 'for (;;) {}'` and watching your OS burn down in flames (which it doesn't) is the correct parallel, I'll assume you have overlooked that we have no control on what JS does in whatever page we're presented with, and if it's some heavy handed code it has a significant impact on whatever else I may be doing on an unrelated tab, which feels like going back to plain old cooperative multitasking, upon which the above perl code would effectively be a blight.
  - NoGravitas 10y ago
    I quite like Firefox on Android. It's fast, supports a wide range of plugins (including uBlock Origin), and syncs well with desktop Firefox. The one downside is that it's memory-hungry, so on my very underpowered phone, it gets pushed out of memory a lot when switching apps. On a more powerful device I'd never notice.
- SixSigma 10y ago
  So their product on day 1 should have been faster, more responsive and had more features than Android / iOS ?
  - bionsuba 10y ago
    No, they shouldn't enter a market by trying to out do the established players at their own game. Microsoft didn't dethrone IBM by making a better mainframe.
    - SixSigma 10y ago
      Ah, there are no niches. Got it.
      - bionsuba 10y ago
        Sharp readers will note the tell for cognitive dissonance of deliberately misrepresenting my position twice in a row
  - veeti 10y ago
    How about having acceptable performance to begin with? Even the medium spec Flame developer device feels laggy and generally unresponsive in use. Actual consumer devices like the $35 Firefox phone were literally unusable: http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/10/testing-a-35-firefox-os-phone-how-bad-could-it-be/ http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/10/testing-a-35-firefox-...
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
- dblohm7 10y ago
  The leadership from the Firefox OS era is all gone, FWIW.
GTP 10y ago
Sad news for me
- josteink 10y ago
  While yes, it's kinda sad, I also think this was obvious the second the first Firefox OS phones were shipped. The idea was good, but the execution and result was completely underwhelming. And after the dud launch, whatever momentum had been there, simply dried out. Nothing major has happened since launch for Firefox OS, while Android and iOS have had several major releases. That it took Mozilla this many years after the fact to admit this failure, is (as other comments) a sign of bad leadership. The effort spent here could have been much better spent elsewhere. And these days Mozilla needs to spend its resources efficiently more than ever. IMO the whole "connected devices" initiative which Mozilla also mentions here (I had completely forgotten about it) will suffer the same fate. It's not connected to anything they currently do, or anything they have a natural ability to reach out to. Whatever drives this initiative, it seems completely disconnected from engineering. Unless they kill it now, we'll see a similar announcement in a few years. And that too will be resources that could have been spent more wisely.
  - mintplant 10y ago
    > it took Mozilla this many years after the fact to admit this failure The first Firefox OS phones shipped in early 2013. After spending around two years trying to make the project work, Mozilla stopped releasing new versions in May 2015 and officially started winding down the project by the end of 2015, as mentioned in the linked newsgroup post. So it wasn't really many years at all; also, it's hard to place the blame on "bad leadership" when the current CEO didn't come on board until the middle of 2014.
    - creshal 10y ago
      By middle 2014, many FirefoxOS phones were already months behind on updates and neither Mozilla nor the hardware vendors were putting any effort into supporting their own flagship devices. By that point, the app store was useless, because you couldn't install any apps on most devices due to ABI breakage between versions and a fragmentation worse than Android. Neither CEO did anything to mitigate this issue. I don't know how that's not bad leadership. (Not that updates would have helped much: 1.3.0, the last and only FxOS version my phone received – which is still sold by Alcatel – was much worse than Android 2.0 in terms of UX and stability. I have no idea how anyone thought this was in any way ready to ship.)
yoavm 10y ago
So we had Jolla, Ubuntu, Mozilla and even Microsoft trying to create a new major player in the mobile OSs market - all pretty much failed to do so. Is it practically impossible? Are we stuck with Android and iOS forever? This tiny selection of options worries me.
- nir 10y ago
  As it stands you either give Apple complete control of you software/hardware or you give Google full access to every detail of your life. There should be a sticker "Don't blame me, I supported Firefox OS"
  - maheart 10y ago
    I know you're half-joking, but if this is something you're passionate about, there are things you can do (while there's still alternatives platforms...): 1. Purchase non-Apple, and non-Android devices (e.g. Jolla/SailfishOS, Ubuntu Touch devices) 2. Develop software for the alternative platforms -- that's what I do. It's a lot of fun programming on a GNU/Linux mobile. I write software in Python with 3rd party modules from pypi, and Qt/QML. 3. Spread the word. Tell other like-minded developers about how fun it is to work on your alternative platform of choice. Plus since there's only 10s of thousands of users, your software actual gets used (and people appreciate it!).
    - supergreg 10y ago
      What GNU/Linux mobile? Can you elaborate on that?
      - maheart 10y ago
        I develop for SailfishOS. As I described in one of my other comments, it really is just "regular" GNU/Linux underneath: >> I develop software for SailfishOS. It's like the Linux desktop. I SSH into my phone. zypper/pkcon install some dev tools (e.g. gcc, make, git). I initialise a Python virtualenv, pull down some libraries (e.g. Flask). I want to query SMS messages? I open an sqlite database on the filesystem. I can define services using systemd files. It really is "just Linux" underneath.
cryptolect 10y ago
I was really hopeful for a ChromeOS competitor. Guess I'll have to wait. Maybe Ubuntu's mobile OS?
- Sylos 10y ago
  ...why not just regular Ubuntu? Or well, any lightweight Linux distro, really. There's also this, in case that comes closer to what you see as ChromeOS competitor: https://cublinux.com/ https://cublinux.com/
  - pix64 10y ago
    I don't want to use the terminal on a phone
    - Sylos 10y ago
      ChromeOS isn't on phones, is it? Ubuntu also doesn't really require terminal usage either way...
proton1h1 10y ago
I really loved the idea of it, it was so intutive. Really sad to see firefox os go :(
- andromeduck 10y ago
  Wtf hoe was it on any way intuitive?!
  - proton1h1 10y ago
    webapps running on firefox os is intuitive,in the end, all the apps we used are web-apps, trello, stackoverflow, facebook. Using similar web technology for webapp development seems intuitive, unlike java or C# or swift for app development.
franze 10y ago
I still love my FirefoxOS Geeks Phone Keon 2013, it still is my go-to backpacking phone. ongoing long battery runtime, a decent browser for the https://mbasic.facebook.com/ https://mbasic.facebook.com/, gmail HTML, hacker news. necessary apps are there and work fine: For me that's HERE maps & alarm function. I love it, because it's un-addicting. android and ios are designed to get your attention, all the time. FirefoxOS ist a tool that is there for you when you need it. I wish they had succeeded, I even ran an FirefoxOS meetup in Vienna, I will miss it. Now back to my Android Phone, I think it beeped, vibrated or needs me in some other way.
- creshal 10y ago
  Yes, thanks Mozilla for making a timer app that by default neither beeps nor vibrates. Thankfully I only lost one oven load of food before I noticed. And thanks Mozilla for making an OS that glitches out if you use the power button in the wrong moment, nothing wakes you up better than having to reboot your phone to stop the damn alarm clock. FirefoxOS is such an unfinished shitfest. I have no idea how 1.3 passed QA. (Nor why Alcatel still isn't releasing any update, even though they're still selling the phone in question.)
  - zbraniecki 10y ago
    And for that reason, it's worth recognizing how much work ahead there is for the web platform to be capable of delivering full OS experience. Only now, pieces of the HTML/DOM/JS spec that have been kickstarted out of need when FxOS was being developed start landing in the spec. Whoever will try next, will have an easier job because of the FxOS experience. source: I'm an engineer who worked on FxOS in 2014-2016
    - wmf 10y ago
      Or it's worth recognizing that trying to deliver full OS experience with Web technology is a waste of time.
      - zbraniecki 10y ago
twelvechairs 10y ago
A major shame that we are moving our technology from open playforms built to empower to walled gardens built to consume. One day maybe it will shift towards something more progressive again.
- godzillabrennus 10y ago
  The PC world was never really "open" it just didn't have DRM like Apple and Google want to. Are into their walled gardens. The market will force a correction at some point if the value is there for an open platform.
  - userbinator 10y ago
    The PC was sure "open"... ever since IBM released the complete schematics and BIOS source code for the PC, XT, and AT. Maybe not in the OSHW/FOSS sense, but it was certainly open enough for tons of clones to flood the market. It's only been getting more closed since then.
    - pjmlp 10y ago
      They never released anything, Compaq reversed engineered them. IBM tried to close the PC again with the PS/2 models but it was too late for them.
      - carussell 10y ago
        Compaq, on the other hand, was the first “PC clone” company. It’s a term that sounds rather quaint today. At the time, though, Compaq sent a shudder through the industry. Compaq reverse-engineered the IBM PC BIOS without ever looking at the BIOS code. That was harder than you might think, because IBM actually published the assembly code for the PC BIOS in its technical reference manuals. Compaq was able to prove that its engineers never looked at the code or disassembled the original BIOS to come up with their own. http://www.extremetech.com/computing/57702-hewlettpackard-compaq-a-trip-down-memory-lane http://www.extremetech.com/computing/57702-hewlettpackard-co...
wott 10y ago
> While work at Mozilla on Firefox OS has ceased, we very much need to continue to evolve the underlying code that comprises Gecko, our web platform engine, as part of the ongoing development of Firefox. So, according to the history of past announcements, if I translate from Mozilla speak to normal English, Gecko will be abandoned in March 2017.
- creshal 10y ago
  I don't think Servo is mature enough yet.
  - bobajeff 10y ago
    However, WebKit and Chromium are. They are already experimenting on an Electron based browser called Tolfino and on iOS Firefox is built using the WebView.
    - freehunter 10y ago
      Mozilla experiments with a lot of stuff, and on iOS any browser has to be built with Webview. None of that means anything.
      - bobajeff 10y ago
        It means it's not impossible for them to consider.
        Sylos 10y ago
        Right, but your comment made it sound like they would be experimenting with an Electron-based browser as a replacement for Firefox and that they were using WebKit on iOS voluntarily, which is both not true. You might not have meant it like that, but it's how misinformation is born.
        bobajeff 10y ago
beardicus 10y ago
This makes me sad, not because I wanted to use Firefox OS, but because JanOS[1] (a hacked up FFOS) turned cheap Firefox phones into really powerful Javascript-based hardware hacking platforms. It's really quite fun, and I love the idea of abusing the economies of scale of cheap consumer electronics to make creative hardware tools. Most dedicated hardware development boards with all the features of a phone would cost 4 times as much. [1]: http://janos.io/ http://janos.io/
vamur 10y ago
Good move by Mozilla. Hopefully they continue to aggresively cut other non-core products and concentrate on improving Firefox.
makomk 10y ago
Not only that, they're ripping out support for it from the Gecko code base, which means that the only way to get security updates for it will be to fork Gecko. I doubt anyone has the resources to do that. It's basically dead. (Every non-Firefox consumer of Gecko has met the same fate so far.)
- FuriouslyAdrift 10y ago
  The Palemoon browser project forked gecko a while back. Their forked engine is called goanna.
- adamc 10y ago
  Mozilla of course has every right to determine how it wants to allocate its resources... but to me, this action speaks loudly that you cannot really count on them to stay the course. So, from an outsider perspective, every initiative must be analyzed skeptically, since they may leave you holding the bag. This is always true to a degree, but the more true you think it is, the less likely you are to jump onto said initiatives.
  - coldtea 10y ago
    >This is always true to a degree, but the more true you think it is, the less likely you are to jump onto said initiatives. While I'm sad since I can't now run Firefox OS on my OpenMoko phone, while listening to my ogg vorbis files and rocking Chandler, the revolutionary PIM app and posting updates to Diaspora, this should have been the conclusion from the beginning. It was pretty clear that nothing much was ever gonna come out of it.
    - sutro 10y ago
      This comment is a stone cold classic.
    - walterbell 10y ago
      Chandler (epic distraction) may have wandered off into the sunset but people are still running predecessors Lotus Agenda (DOS era) and Ecco Pro (Win 95 era) to this day. Ecco Pro has even been binary patched to enable Lua scripting. The computer industry has many commercial failures that shipped elements of technical excellence.
mhd 10y ago
I've had a developer phone and was quite disappointed with the system. If you really want to sell the advantages of HTML/JS apps, the default ones should've been a lot nicer and full-featured. I still miss WebOS and my Pre.
- contingencies 10y ago
  I bought two of them. Different. They never worked, and were both slow. Mailed one to a fellow HN'er in India, used the other for awhile but was unable to recompile the OS to get things fixed and received zero support online. Felt like the whole thing was compromised from the word go by business people, from my perspective. I will repeat my take here, for the last time, on where they screwed up: They screwed up by pretending to target low end devices but still only supporting centralized communications. They should have had Ad-hoc/Mesh Wifi as a requirement, and designed the OS API to give those features to developers. Developing world people want to send things between one another, not huddle around shared wifi or pay premiums to carriers. I wrote this up in some detail at https://bug945047.bugzilla.mozilla.org/attachment.cgi?id=8407268 https://bug945047.bugzilla.mozilla.org/attachment.cgi?id=840... ... nobody bothered to reply, except for "wifi supports in FFOS is relied on wpa_supplicant which is provided by partner mostly", ie. the business setup within Mozilla was that the actual device manufacturers were the ones who had control of the wpa_supplicant build, and there was no way for the developers to rely on, require or enforce features in that software being present. Nobody took ownership, everyone lost.
justincormack 10y ago
There goes the chance of any updates on my Panasonic TV I guess... I wonder if there will even be security updates.
- ascagnel_ 10y ago
  Maybe not security updates, but you may get some advertising updates[0]. [0]: http://www.flatpanelshd.com/news.php?subaction=showfull&id=1416894724 http://www.flatpanelshd.com/news.php?subaction=showfull&id=1...
  - lagadu 10y ago
    And there was much rejoicing. yay.
  - justincormack 10y ago
    Don't get those in this model/country...
lamarkia 10y ago
Ubuntu phone is still on.
azimuth11 10y ago
So when I signed up for FF sync last night that was a waste of my life? The only reason I was giving them a shot is Chrome's goofiness. It crashes my GFX card on Win10 (constantly) and always has threads open for hardly-ever-used extensions.
- gpribeiro 10y ago
  Firefox OS is getting discontinued, not Firefox the browser.
gwbas1c 10y ago
What was the point of Firefox OS? I never really saw any kind of marketing around it beyond "Mozilla decided to make a phone OS." From what I've gleaned, the only differentiating factor was that all apps are Javascript. Like my mom cares what languages her apps are written in.
- addicted 10y ago
  A real open source OS? Youd equally well have asked what the point of Linux was before it picked up steam. Of course the big difference is that Linux succeeded while Firefox OS failed. But thats after the fact. I think something like Firefox OS is important, but probably wasnt something Mozilla should have undertaken when their key asset was under massive threat and it keeps dropping other stuff that, admittedly small numbers of people are using, were still successful in Theur niche and could have continued with minimal effort (examples of projects that affected me directly are Thunderbird and Prism).
  - coldtea 10y ago
    >Of course the big difference is that Linux succeeded while Firefox OS failed. But thats after the fact. The relevant big difference is that Linux filled a need and had a particular niche that had nothing to do with being "libre": it was good and costed nothing to run servers on. Big UNIX vendors charged an arm and a leg (and often required their own hw platforms to run), and their software was behind the times (to the point that loading the GNU userland was necessary for getting them remotely comfortable to admin/program on). Otherwise, Linux has been a failure on the Desktop too (statistically, nobody cares if someone here personally uses it -- the original idea of most Linux advocates was that it would conquer the desktop, overtaking Microsoft. Not that "it would get good enough to be used by some users on their desktops". It was already that, back in 1999).
    - qplex 10y ago
      Actually being "free/open/libre" software has had everything to do with the success of Linux. However, I've heard the high cost of UNIX licenses in the early 90s was the reason why Linus decided to start his project. Also, Linux has never been "a failure" on the desktop: you seem to think that the definition of being successful is to have a complete monopoly.
mynameislegion 10y ago
https://wiki.debian.org/Mobile https://wiki.debian.org/Mobile
Thaxll 10y ago
Another dead project by Mozilla, not sure when they will understand they don't have resources like Google
- sp332 10y ago
  Google has plenty of dead projects too.
transfire 10y ago
When they ditched the Firefox phone I new it was over. They didn't really give it an earnest try. Smells a lot like HP's destruction of webOS. I would not be surprised if powerful players in the industry pressured them to drop it.
- aikah 10y ago
  Yeah, the "FirefoxOS for internet of things" speech was complete bullshit. It was obvious. The worst is the lack of honesty from Mozilla.
ksec 10y ago
Number 1 reason why I didn't pick up an Panasonic 4K TV, because i knew Firefox OS will be dead some day. And number one reason why I REALLY want an APPLE TV Set rather then Apple TV STB. Most of the Smart TV on the market today are total piece of Junk. They are what "Smart"phones were before the iPhone came out. As a matter of fact, SmartTV from China are pretty good on the software front, and lacking ( price cutting too much ) on the hardware. Just wanted to mention about Mozilla leadership. And so call leadership in general, HOW DID these *&@^$% ever got to their position? This is speaking from a user who has been with them before the Firefox era.
- vollmond 10y ago
  I want a dumb display and a smart STB -- because I don't want to have to replace a thousand-dollar display just to get new STB hardware. It's why I have a TV and a Roku, rather than a Roku TV. Why combine them when their upgrade cycles don't match up?
  - emodendroket 10y ago
    AFAIK at this point the dumb TVs all have worse displays.
    - Twirrim 10y ago
      Which is why I just ignore the smart stuff and use a capable STB instead.
      - wyldfire 10y ago
        emodendroket is stating that "ignoring the smart stuff" means disregarding high-quality imaging available on the top-of-line products.
        khedoros 10y ago
        Twirrim is stating that "ignoring the smart stuff" doesn't necessarily mean buying a dumb TV, and that they buy a smart TV, ignore a bunch of the TV's features, and replace them by using a separate set-top box.
BuckRogers 10y ago
While I was very excited for FFOS and it's sad to see it go because I generally follow Mozilla endeavors. I prefer my phone to be a phone and not a general purpose computer. The less complexity the less problems incurred. Few vendors are willing to put in the really hard optimization to make a lowend device work well. The lowend target of FFOS was an additional concern because it meant the software had to be that much better.
emodendroket 10y ago
Maybe they could work on Thunderbird again; that's a product actually used that doesn't have many real competitors.
- hamhamed 10y ago
  They have way more competitors in that space, but I still use it because it's clean and bloat free.
  - emodendroket 10y ago
    Really? What are all these desktop e-mail clients other than Thunderbird, Outlook, and Mail.app? And how many of them are cross-platform? I remember looking into whether there were alternatives for a while and really not being able to find anything.
    - hamhamed 10y ago
      Nylas, Polymail.. just to name a few
      - emodendroket 10y ago
        So a tool specialized for sales professionals (apparently) and a Mac-only product. Well, you can see what I mean.
erikpukinskis 10y ago
I'm super grateful to Mozilla for trying. I think we'll eventually get to an open source web phone, but we're not quite there yet. It's a tough market because as soon as you release something, there is a ticking clock until all of the low cost manufacturers release something cheaper and faster. Moore's law is not your friend when you're trying to differentiate a mobile product. Beyond that general difficulty, a web phone faces some specific inevitable challenges: 1) No access to the "app world" of Instagram, Snapchat, etc 2) Can't optimize performance to the same degree 3) Web app access to hardware devices is limited I think those are things you can't fight, you just have to accept them, but they are really hard to accept. This is the key psychological hurdle in any new web phone design project. But let's get over them for a second and see what we're left with. The web also has some indominable advantages: 1) Instantaneous installation/startup of new "apps" 2) Long tail of web content can be a first class citizen in the UI 3) Novice-friendly development platform, i.e. "show source", embeddable HTML widgets, etc 4) Cloud-based by default 5) A community who will deploy infrastructure for free, so long as it is open source and decentralized If I squint my eyes, I can imagine a web browser that really tries to capitalize on these things. From first principles, I think a development platform where the infrastructure for getting started is free-ish, apps and development environments all load instantaneously, data is never lost because it always lives in the cloud, emerging standards allow data to federate freely between services... you just float around allowing app access to your cloud data... such a platform would have substantial advantages over something like iOS or Android. Those advantages may or may not be able to outweigh the inherent platform weaknesses I mentioned, but I can at least imagine it becoming a major player on mobile. I think the trouble for Mozilla is there are still quite a few research projects there: How do you federate data between services? How do you host open source web apps in such a way that neither the programmer nor the end user has to be a sysadmin? How do you make it easy to write performant, mobile friendly apps? How do you organize a decentralized global community to adopt good usability practices? How do you design a web browser so that web developers can make simple, fully integrated apps that fit into a more unified mobile experience? I think if you could design something that at least solved all of these problems in a simplistic way—not fully robust, but a proof of concept with a few core apps, messaging, video, etc—and you really leaned in to the kinds of experiences that become uniquely possible on a platform like this, and then refine the shit out of it in an empirical Apple-style user-centered design tsunami, I think you might have a leapfrog product that could put Android and iOS on their heels. Maybe. If you could make it fundamentally easier to build and deploy web apps, you could get a huge store of long tail apps, which would form a kind of exclusive content moat. Not because those apps would be inaccessible on iOS or Android, but because they would be second-class citizens there. To different extents Google and Mozilla have both been trying to tackle some or all of these research projects in different ways. But I'm not even sure if it's time yet. Maybe we just need to wait a little until some more of these answers shake out. Or maybe Mozilla just lacked the strategic vision to really know what to hammer hard on here. But I am totally grateful to them (and Google) for trying. I still am drinking the Kool-aid. I still think the web is the future. Thousands of people are working on these problems all over the world. I think as Ethereum matures, it will fill in a lot of the gaps. So, I think the Firefox can rise again. We'll see.
fabrice_d 10y ago
The title here is really misleading. Commercial development stopped a while ago. What was announced today is the removal of some code from Mozilla's codebase that will make it impossible for the community to keep working on b2g OS.
sebringj 10y ago
So the pattern seems that zippy-compiled-modern-language-strongly-typed stuff works as a basis for a framework on devices, No? Why not just go with that paradigm for a new Firefox OS but call it "Phoenix OS" or something? Would be cool if they abstracted that for JS developers with ReactNative-like developer experience on top of it so it was more approachable as well or just let Facebook do that. Dumb idea? Good? This is probably not taking into account the cash buckets raining from the two ivory towers that already did it though.
z3t4 10y ago
i would like ff to implement commonjs modules and support nodejs lib and modules in a elevated mode. users would be able to host a chat server by visiting an url, settings could be saved in localstorage or local db.
themihai 10y ago
The main issue with FirefoxOS was the performance(of the devices and perhaps also the OS itself). I had the first firefox phones(I think the brand was ZTE) and they were basically rubbish(i.e. they had a 1sec or more lag). I would take a Nokia 6600 over that any day. Mozilla tried to market it as a low cost alternative but nobody wants low cost rubbish. You are better of with a feature phone. I think the biggest mistake was the reliance of the OS on javascript. It was dead on arrival or better said from start.
endemic 10y ago
The problem with FirefoxOS was that you could already run web apps on iOS/Android; there was no compelling value besides the "privacy" component, as low-cost Android phones already existed. And as I've noticed on other Moz-centric threads, privacy is not enough of a benefit for people (even the tech savvy!) to use a poorly-performing product.

271 points by bpierre 10y ago

Not unexpected, but a bummer. I suppose this means my Firefox OS powered Panasonic TV won't get any more updates too.

This outcome should have been obvious to everyone involved. The fact that it wasn't raises serious doubts about the Mozilla leadership. You can't compete with Android by being slower, less responsive, and ship with less features.

tarancato 10y ago
Seriously... I avoid Firefox on my (rather beefy) desktop because of how much it freezes. I don't want to imagine how it worked on a 50€ phone, which looked like it was their target. Maybe they thought Gecko would be ready by the time the OS was going to ship?
- teekert 10y ago
  But this a poor, skewing argument always made by at least one person here. For most FF is very responsive and there are no problems what so ever. And FF is not FF-OS.
  - tarancato 10y ago
    If you think FF is responsive, there are two options: 1) you haven't compared it to Chrome/WebKit/Edge, or 2) you don't run heavy applications such as TweetDeck on it. And FF-OS was a complete OS that ran on Gecko, so yes, if Gecko (FF) is slow, the entire FF-OS is slow.
    - dblohm7 10y ago
      A direct Firefox to Firefox OS comparison is not reasonable. For one, FxOS was a greenfield ecosystem, so it was built with multiprocess from the start, whereas the e10s project moves relatively glacially toward a multiprocess world so that nothing gets broken.
  - lloeki 10y ago
    > For most FF is very responsive and there are no problems what so ever. Open dev tools, type `for (;;) {}`. Notice the whole browser becomes unresponsive. This has been improved upon (as in it doesn't block the whole Firefox UI, just merely every single content tab) thanks to Electrolysis partially reaching stable but "there are no problems whatsoever" simply isn't true performance wise (and this is the most obvious one, there are numerous other very well known performance issues with FF)
    - tarancato 10y ago
      I have an easy metric for that: when you're navigating, look at the "loading" spinner on the tab bar, and see how it almost always freezes every time a page is being drawn. DOM painting/manipulation times in Gecko are a joke, probably the worst pain point of Firefox. And it's not the only one...
    - wldcordeiro 10y ago
      Run an infinite for loop and look at the performance degradation is about the dumbest test you could do. That's literally asking it to not stop executing. Yeah tab isolation would mean you only crash a tab but that isn't a good example.
      - tarancato 10y ago
        So you tell me it's reasonable that a frozen tab makes the whole browser unresponsive. Nice.
    - syrrim 10y ago
      Open your terminal, type ':(){ :|:& };:'. Notice how the whole OS becomes unresponsive. There is a very simple solution to both these problems, which most people employ to great effect: just don't do that.
      - lloeki 10y ago
        Besides that doing `perl -e 'for (;;) {}'` and watching your OS burn down in flames (which it doesn't) is the correct parallel, I'll assume you have overlooked that we have no control on what JS does in whatever page we're presented with, and if it's some heavy handed code it has a significant impact on whatever else I may be doing on an unrelated tab, which feels like going back to plain old cooperative multitasking, upon which the above perl code would effectively be a blight.
- NoGravitas 10y ago
  I quite like Firefox on Android. It's fast, supports a wide range of plugins (including uBlock Origin), and syncs well with desktop Firefox. The one downside is that it's memory-hungry, so on my very underpowered phone, it gets pushed out of memory a lot when switching apps. On a more powerful device I'd never notice.
SixSigma 10y ago
So their product on day 1 should have been faster, more responsive and had more features than Android / iOS ?
- bionsuba 10y ago
  No, they shouldn't enter a market by trying to out do the established players at their own game. Microsoft didn't dethrone IBM by making a better mainframe.
  - SixSigma 10y ago
    Ah, there are no niches. Got it.
    - bionsuba 10y ago
      Sharp readers will note the tell for cognitive dissonance of deliberately misrepresenting my position twice in a row
- veeti 10y ago
  How about having acceptable performance to begin with? Even the medium spec Flame developer device feels laggy and generally unresponsive in use. Actual consumer devices like the $35 Firefox phone were literally unusable: http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/10/testing-a-35-firefox-os-phone-how-bad-could-it-be/ http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/10/testing-a-35-firefox-...
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
dblohm7 10y ago
The leadership from the Firefox OS era is all gone, FWIW.

GTP 10y ago

Sad news for me

josteink 10y ago
While yes, it's kinda sad, I also think this was obvious the second the first Firefox OS phones were shipped. The idea was good, but the execution and result was completely underwhelming. And after the dud launch, whatever momentum had been there, simply dried out. Nothing major has happened since launch for Firefox OS, while Android and iOS have had several major releases. That it took Mozilla this many years after the fact to admit this failure, is (as other comments) a sign of bad leadership. The effort spent here could have been much better spent elsewhere. And these days Mozilla needs to spend its resources efficiently more than ever. IMO the whole "connected devices" initiative which Mozilla also mentions here (I had completely forgotten about it) will suffer the same fate. It's not connected to anything they currently do, or anything they have a natural ability to reach out to. Whatever drives this initiative, it seems completely disconnected from engineering. Unless they kill it now, we'll see a similar announcement in a few years. And that too will be resources that could have been spent more wisely.
- mintplant 10y ago
  > it took Mozilla this many years after the fact to admit this failure The first Firefox OS phones shipped in early 2013. After spending around two years trying to make the project work, Mozilla stopped releasing new versions in May 2015 and officially started winding down the project by the end of 2015, as mentioned in the linked newsgroup post. So it wasn't really many years at all; also, it's hard to place the blame on "bad leadership" when the current CEO didn't come on board until the middle of 2014.
  - creshal 10y ago
    By middle 2014, many FirefoxOS phones were already months behind on updates and neither Mozilla nor the hardware vendors were putting any effort into supporting their own flagship devices. By that point, the app store was useless, because you couldn't install any apps on most devices due to ABI breakage between versions and a fragmentation worse than Android. Neither CEO did anything to mitigate this issue. I don't know how that's not bad leadership. (Not that updates would have helped much: 1.3.0, the last and only FxOS version my phone received – which is still sold by Alcatel – was much worse than Android 2.0 in terms of UX and stability. I have no idea how anyone thought this was in any way ready to ship.)

yoavm 10y ago

So we had Jolla, Ubuntu, Mozilla and even Microsoft trying to create a new major player in the mobile OSs market - all pretty much failed to do so. Is it practically impossible? Are we stuck with Android and iOS forever? This tiny selection of options worries me.

nir 10y ago
As it stands you either give Apple complete control of you software/hardware or you give Google full access to every detail of your life. There should be a sticker "Don't blame me, I supported Firefox OS"
- maheart 10y ago
  I know you're half-joking, but if this is something you're passionate about, there are things you can do (while there's still alternatives platforms...): 1. Purchase non-Apple, and non-Android devices (e.g. Jolla/SailfishOS, Ubuntu Touch devices) 2. Develop software for the alternative platforms -- that's what I do. It's a lot of fun programming on a GNU/Linux mobile. I write software in Python with 3rd party modules from pypi, and Qt/QML. 3. Spread the word. Tell other like-minded developers about how fun it is to work on your alternative platform of choice. Plus since there's only 10s of thousands of users, your software actual gets used (and people appreciate it!).
  - supergreg 10y ago
    What GNU/Linux mobile? Can you elaborate on that?
    - maheart 10y ago
      I develop for SailfishOS. As I described in one of my other comments, it really is just "regular" GNU/Linux underneath: >> I develop software for SailfishOS. It's like the Linux desktop. I SSH into my phone. zypper/pkcon install some dev tools (e.g. gcc, make, git). I initialise a Python virtualenv, pull down some libraries (e.g. Flask). I want to query SMS messages? I open an sqlite database on the filesystem. I can define services using systemd files. It really is "just Linux" underneath.

cryptolect 10y ago

I was really hopeful for a ChromeOS competitor. Guess I'll have to wait. Maybe Ubuntu's mobile OS?

Sylos 10y ago
...why not just regular Ubuntu? Or well, any lightweight Linux distro, really. There's also this, in case that comes closer to what you see as ChromeOS competitor: https://cublinux.com/ https://cublinux.com/
- pix64 10y ago
  I don't want to use the terminal on a phone
  - Sylos 10y ago
    ChromeOS isn't on phones, is it? Ubuntu also doesn't really require terminal usage either way...

proton1h1 10y ago

I really loved the idea of it, it was so intutive. Really sad to see firefox os go :(

andromeduck 10y ago
Wtf hoe was it on any way intuitive?!
- proton1h1 10y ago
  webapps running on firefox os is intuitive,in the end, all the apps we used are web-apps, trello, stackoverflow, facebook. Using similar web technology for webapp development seems intuitive, unlike java or C# or swift for app development.

franze 10y ago

I still love my FirefoxOS Geeks Phone Keon 2013, it still is my go-to backpacking phone. ongoing long battery runtime, a decent browser for the https://mbasic.facebook.com/ https://mbasic.facebook.com/, gmail HTML, hacker news. necessary apps are there and work fine: For me that's HERE maps & alarm function. I love it, because it's un-addicting. android and ios are designed to get your attention, all the time. FirefoxOS ist a tool that is there for you when you need it. I wish they had succeeded, I even ran an FirefoxOS meetup in Vienna, I will miss it. Now back to my Android Phone, I think it beeped, vibrated or needs me in some other way.

creshal 10y ago
Yes, thanks Mozilla for making a timer app that by default neither beeps nor vibrates. Thankfully I only lost one oven load of food before I noticed. And thanks Mozilla for making an OS that glitches out if you use the power button in the wrong moment, nothing wakes you up better than having to reboot your phone to stop the damn alarm clock. FirefoxOS is such an unfinished shitfest. I have no idea how 1.3 passed QA. (Nor why Alcatel still isn't releasing any update, even though they're still selling the phone in question.)
- zbraniecki 10y ago
  And for that reason, it's worth recognizing how much work ahead there is for the web platform to be capable of delivering full OS experience. Only now, pieces of the HTML/DOM/JS spec that have been kickstarted out of need when FxOS was being developed start landing in the spec. Whoever will try next, will have an easier job because of the FxOS experience. source: I'm an engineer who worked on FxOS in 2014-2016
  - wmf 10y ago
    Or it's worth recognizing that trying to deliver full OS experience with Web technology is a waste of time.
    - zbraniecki 10y ago

twelvechairs 10y ago

A major shame that we are moving our technology from open playforms built to empower to walled gardens built to consume. One day maybe it will shift towards something more progressive again.

godzillabrennus 10y ago
The PC world was never really "open" it just didn't have DRM like Apple and Google want to. Are into their walled gardens. The market will force a correction at some point if the value is there for an open platform.
- userbinator 10y ago
  The PC was sure "open"... ever since IBM released the complete schematics and BIOS source code for the PC, XT, and AT. Maybe not in the OSHW/FOSS sense, but it was certainly open enough for tons of clones to flood the market. It's only been getting more closed since then.
  - pjmlp 10y ago
    They never released anything, Compaq reversed engineered them. IBM tried to close the PC again with the PS/2 models but it was too late for them.
    - carussell 10y ago
      Compaq, on the other hand, was the first “PC clone” company. It’s a term that sounds rather quaint today. At the time, though, Compaq sent a shudder through the industry. Compaq reverse-engineered the IBM PC BIOS without ever looking at the BIOS code. That was harder than you might think, because IBM actually published the assembly code for the PC BIOS in its technical reference manuals. Compaq was able to prove that its engineers never looked at the code or disassembled the original BIOS to come up with their own. http://www.extremetech.com/computing/57702-hewlettpackard-compaq-a-trip-down-memory-lane http://www.extremetech.com/computing/57702-hewlettpackard-co...

wott 10y ago

> While work at Mozilla on Firefox OS has ceased, we very much need to continue to evolve the underlying code that comprises Gecko, our web platform engine, as part of the ongoing development of Firefox. So, according to the history of past announcements, if I translate from Mozilla speak to normal English, Gecko will be abandoned in March 2017.

creshal 10y ago
I don't think Servo is mature enough yet.
- bobajeff 10y ago
  However, WebKit and Chromium are. They are already experimenting on an Electron based browser called Tolfino and on iOS Firefox is built using the WebView.
  - freehunter 10y ago
    Mozilla experiments with a lot of stuff, and on iOS any browser has to be built with Webview. None of that means anything.
    - bobajeff 10y ago
      It means it's not impossible for them to consider.
      - Sylos 10y ago
        Right, but your comment made it sound like they would be experimenting with an Electron-based browser as a replacement for Firefox and that they were using WebKit on iOS voluntarily, which is both not true. You might not have meant it like that, but it's how misinformation is born.
        bobajeff 10y ago

beardicus 10y ago

This makes me sad, not because I wanted to use Firefox OS, but because JanOS[1] (a hacked up FFOS) turned cheap Firefox phones into really powerful Javascript-based hardware hacking platforms. It's really quite fun, and I love the idea of abusing the economies of scale of cheap consumer electronics to make creative hardware tools. Most dedicated hardware development boards with all the features of a phone would cost 4 times as much. [1]: http://janos.io/ http://janos.io/

vamur 10y ago

Good move by Mozilla. Hopefully they continue to aggresively cut other non-core products and concentrate on improving Firefox.

makomk 10y ago

Not only that, they're ripping out support for it from the Gecko code base, which means that the only way to get security updates for it will be to fork Gecko. I doubt anyone has the resources to do that. It's basically dead. (Every non-Firefox consumer of Gecko has met the same fate so far.)

FuriouslyAdrift 10y ago
The Palemoon browser project forked gecko a while back. Their forked engine is called goanna.
adamc 10y ago
Mozilla of course has every right to determine how it wants to allocate its resources... but to me, this action speaks loudly that you cannot really count on them to stay the course. So, from an outsider perspective, every initiative must be analyzed skeptically, since they may leave you holding the bag. This is always true to a degree, but the more true you think it is, the less likely you are to jump onto said initiatives.
- coldtea 10y ago
  >This is always true to a degree, but the more true you think it is, the less likely you are to jump onto said initiatives. While I'm sad since I can't now run Firefox OS on my OpenMoko phone, while listening to my ogg vorbis files and rocking Chandler, the revolutionary PIM app and posting updates to Diaspora, this should have been the conclusion from the beginning. It was pretty clear that nothing much was ever gonna come out of it.
  - sutro 10y ago
    This comment is a stone cold classic.
  - walterbell 10y ago
    Chandler (epic distraction) may have wandered off into the sunset but people are still running predecessors Lotus Agenda (DOS era) and Ecco Pro (Win 95 era) to this day. Ecco Pro has even been binary patched to enable Lua scripting. The computer industry has many commercial failures that shipped elements of technical excellence.

mhd 10y ago

I've had a developer phone and was quite disappointed with the system. If you really want to sell the advantages of HTML/JS apps, the default ones should've been a lot nicer and full-featured. I still miss WebOS and my Pre.

contingencies 10y ago
I bought two of them. Different. They never worked, and were both slow. Mailed one to a fellow HN'er in India, used the other for awhile but was unable to recompile the OS to get things fixed and received zero support online. Felt like the whole thing was compromised from the word go by business people, from my perspective. I will repeat my take here, for the last time, on where they screwed up: They screwed up by pretending to target low end devices but still only supporting centralized communications. They should have had Ad-hoc/Mesh Wifi as a requirement, and designed the OS API to give those features to developers. Developing world people want to send things between one another, not huddle around shared wifi or pay premiums to carriers. I wrote this up in some detail at https://bug945047.bugzilla.mozilla.org/attachment.cgi?id=8407268 https://bug945047.bugzilla.mozilla.org/attachment.cgi?id=840... ... nobody bothered to reply, except for "wifi supports in FFOS is relied on wpa_supplicant which is provided by partner mostly", ie. the business setup within Mozilla was that the actual device manufacturers were the ones who had control of the wpa_supplicant build, and there was no way for the developers to rely on, require or enforce features in that software being present. Nobody took ownership, everyone lost.

justincormack 10y ago

There goes the chance of any updates on my Panasonic TV I guess... I wonder if there will even be security updates.

ascagnel_ 10y ago
Maybe not security updates, but you may get some advertising updates[0]. [0]: http://www.flatpanelshd.com/news.php?subaction=showfull&id=1416894724 http://www.flatpanelshd.com/news.php?subaction=showfull&id=1...
- lagadu 10y ago
  And there was much rejoicing. yay.
- justincormack 10y ago
  Don't get those in this model/country...

lamarkia 10y ago

Ubuntu phone is still on.

azimuth11 10y ago

So when I signed up for FF sync last night that was a waste of my life? The only reason I was giving them a shot is Chrome's goofiness. It crashes my GFX card on Win10 (constantly) and always has threads open for hardly-ever-used extensions.

gpribeiro 10y ago
Firefox OS is getting discontinued, not Firefox the browser.

gwbas1c 10y ago

What was the point of Firefox OS? I never really saw any kind of marketing around it beyond "Mozilla decided to make a phone OS." From what I've gleaned, the only differentiating factor was that all apps are Javascript. Like my mom cares what languages her apps are written in.

addicted 10y ago
A real open source OS? Youd equally well have asked what the point of Linux was before it picked up steam. Of course the big difference is that Linux succeeded while Firefox OS failed. But thats after the fact. I think something like Firefox OS is important, but probably wasnt something Mozilla should have undertaken when their key asset was under massive threat and it keeps dropping other stuff that, admittedly small numbers of people are using, were still successful in Theur niche and could have continued with minimal effort (examples of projects that affected me directly are Thunderbird and Prism).
- coldtea 10y ago
  >Of course the big difference is that Linux succeeded while Firefox OS failed. But thats after the fact. The relevant big difference is that Linux filled a need and had a particular niche that had nothing to do with being "libre": it was good and costed nothing to run servers on. Big UNIX vendors charged an arm and a leg (and often required their own hw platforms to run), and their software was behind the times (to the point that loading the GNU userland was necessary for getting them remotely comfortable to admin/program on). Otherwise, Linux has been a failure on the Desktop too (statistically, nobody cares if someone here personally uses it -- the original idea of most Linux advocates was that it would conquer the desktop, overtaking Microsoft. Not that "it would get good enough to be used by some users on their desktops". It was already that, back in 1999).
  - qplex 10y ago
    Actually being "free/open/libre" software has had everything to do with the success of Linux. However, I've heard the high cost of UNIX licenses in the early 90s was the reason why Linus decided to start his project. Also, Linux has never been "a failure" on the desktop: you seem to think that the definition of being successful is to have a complete monopoly.

mynameislegion 10y ago

https://wiki.debian.org/Mobile https://wiki.debian.org/Mobile

Thaxll 10y ago

Another dead project by Mozilla, not sure when they will understand they don't have resources like Google

sp332 10y ago
Google has plenty of dead projects too.

transfire 10y ago

When they ditched the Firefox phone I new it was over. They didn't really give it an earnest try. Smells a lot like HP's destruction of webOS. I would not be surprised if powerful players in the industry pressured them to drop it.

aikah 10y ago
Yeah, the "FirefoxOS for internet of things" speech was complete bullshit. It was obvious. The worst is the lack of honesty from Mozilla.

ksec 10y ago

Number 1 reason why I didn't pick up an Panasonic 4K TV, because i knew Firefox OS will be dead some day. And number one reason why I REALLY want an APPLE TV Set rather then Apple TV STB. Most of the Smart TV on the market today are total piece of Junk. They are what "Smart"phones were before the iPhone came out. As a matter of fact, SmartTV from China are pretty good on the software front, and lacking ( price cutting too much ) on the hardware. Just wanted to mention about Mozilla leadership. And so call leadership in general, HOW DID these *&@^$% ever got to their position? This is speaking from a user who has been with them before the Firefox era.

vollmond 10y ago
I want a dumb display and a smart STB -- because I don't want to have to replace a thousand-dollar display just to get new STB hardware. It's why I have a TV and a Roku, rather than a Roku TV. Why combine them when their upgrade cycles don't match up?
- emodendroket 10y ago
  AFAIK at this point the dumb TVs all have worse displays.
  - Twirrim 10y ago
    Which is why I just ignore the smart stuff and use a capable STB instead.
    - wyldfire 10y ago
      emodendroket is stating that "ignoring the smart stuff" means disregarding high-quality imaging available on the top-of-line products.
      - khedoros 10y ago
        Twirrim is stating that "ignoring the smart stuff" doesn't necessarily mean buying a dumb TV, and that they buy a smart TV, ignore a bunch of the TV's features, and replace them by using a separate set-top box.

BuckRogers 10y ago

While I was very excited for FFOS and it's sad to see it go because I generally follow Mozilla endeavors. I prefer my phone to be a phone and not a general purpose computer. The less complexity the less problems incurred. Few vendors are willing to put in the really hard optimization to make a lowend device work well. The lowend target of FFOS was an additional concern because it meant the software had to be that much better.

emodendroket 10y ago

Maybe they could work on Thunderbird again; that's a product actually used that doesn't have many real competitors.

hamhamed 10y ago
They have way more competitors in that space, but I still use it because it's clean and bloat free.
- emodendroket 10y ago
  Really? What are all these desktop e-mail clients other than Thunderbird, Outlook, and Mail.app? And how many of them are cross-platform? I remember looking into whether there were alternatives for a while and really not being able to find anything.
  - hamhamed 10y ago
    Nylas, Polymail.. just to name a few
    - emodendroket 10y ago
      So a tool specialized for sales professionals (apparently) and a Mac-only product. Well, you can see what I mean.

erikpukinskis 10y ago

I'm super grateful to Mozilla for trying. I think we'll eventually get to an open source web phone, but we're not quite there yet. It's a tough market because as soon as you release something, there is a ticking clock until all of the low cost manufacturers release something cheaper and faster. Moore's law is not your friend when you're trying to differentiate a mobile product. Beyond that general difficulty, a web phone faces some specific inevitable challenges: 1) No access to the "app world" of Instagram, Snapchat, etc 2) Can't optimize performance to the same degree 3) Web app access to hardware devices is limited I think those are things you can't fight, you just have to accept them, but they are really hard to accept. This is the key psychological hurdle in any new web phone design project. But let's get over them for a second and see what we're left with. The web also has some indominable advantages: 1) Instantaneous installation/startup of new "apps" 2) Long tail of web content can be a first class citizen in the UI 3) Novice-friendly development platform, i.e. "show source", embeddable HTML widgets, etc 4) Cloud-based by default 5) A community who will deploy infrastructure for free, so long as it is open source and decentralized If I squint my eyes, I can imagine a web browser that really tries to capitalize on these things. From first principles, I think a development platform where the infrastructure for getting started is free-ish, apps and development environments all load instantaneously, data is never lost because it always lives in the cloud, emerging standards allow data to federate freely between services... you just float around allowing app access to your cloud data... such a platform would have substantial advantages over something like iOS or Android. Those advantages may or may not be able to outweigh the inherent platform weaknesses I mentioned, but I can at least imagine it becoming a major player on mobile. I think the trouble for Mozilla is there are still quite a few research projects there: How do you federate data between services? How do you host open source web apps in such a way that neither the programmer nor the end user has to be a sysadmin? How do you make it easy to write performant, mobile friendly apps? How do you organize a decentralized global community to adopt good usability practices? How do you design a web browser so that web developers can make simple, fully integrated apps that fit into a more unified mobile experience? I think if you could design something that at least solved all of these problems in a simplistic way—not fully robust, but a proof of concept with a few core apps, messaging, video, etc—and you really leaned in to the kinds of experiences that become uniquely possible on a platform like this, and then refine the shit out of it in an empirical Apple-style user-centered design tsunami, I think you might have a leapfrog product that could put Android and iOS on their heels. Maybe. If you could make it fundamentally easier to build and deploy web apps, you could get a huge store of long tail apps, which would form a kind of exclusive content moat. Not because those apps would be inaccessible on iOS or Android, but because they would be second-class citizens there. To different extents Google and Mozilla have both been trying to tackle some or all of these research projects in different ways. But I'm not even sure if it's time yet. Maybe we just need to wait a little until some more of these answers shake out. Or maybe Mozilla just lacked the strategic vision to really know what to hammer hard on here. But I am totally grateful to them (and Google) for trying. I still am drinking the Kool-aid. I still think the web is the future. Thousands of people are working on these problems all over the world. I think as Ethereum matures, it will fill in a lot of the gaps. So, I think the Firefox can rise again. We'll see.

fabrice_d 10y ago

The title here is really misleading. Commercial development stopped a while ago. What was announced today is the removal of some code from Mozilla's codebase that will make it impossible for the community to keep working on b2g OS.

sebringj 10y ago

So the pattern seems that zippy-compiled-modern-language-strongly-typed stuff works as a basis for a framework on devices, No? Why not just go with that paradigm for a new Firefox OS but call it "Phoenix OS" or something? Would be cool if they abstracted that for JS developers with ReactNative-like developer experience on top of it so it was more approachable as well or just let Facebook do that. Dumb idea? Good? This is probably not taking into account the cash buckets raining from the two ivory towers that already did it though.

z3t4 10y ago

i would like ff to implement commonjs modules and support nodejs lib and modules in a elevated mode. users would be able to host a chat server by visiting an url, settings could be saved in localstorage or local db.

themihai 10y ago

The main issue with FirefoxOS was the performance(of the devices and perhaps also the OS itself). I had the first firefox phones(I think the brand was ZTE) and they were basically rubbish(i.e. they had a 1sec or more lag). I would take a Nokia 6600 over that any day. Mozilla tried to market it as a low cost alternative but nobody wants low cost rubbish. You are better of with a feature phone. I think the biggest mistake was the reliance of the OS on javascript. It was dead on arrival or better said from start.

endemic 10y ago

The problem with FirefoxOS was that you could already run web apps on iOS/Android; there was no compelling value besides the "privacy" component, as low-cost Android phones already existed. And as I've noticed on other Moz-centric threads, privacy is not enough of a benefit for people (even the tech savvy!) to use a poorly-performing product.