5 ms·

i'm glad Mozilla had the foresight to abandon this project right before it became a profitable enterprise.

by xj9 7y ago

konschubert 7y ago
KaiOS takes a significantly different approach in bringing FirefoxOS to market than Mozilla did. For starters, they targeted feature phones instead of Smartphones
- phh 7y ago
  I've been in commercial contact with FirefoxOS people, and they were definitely targeting phones that are the same specs as what KaiOS currently supports. (512MB RAM, 4GB storage, which is half the RAM and half the storage of Android Go) I don't really know they were calling it smartphones or feature phones though, that might change things.
  - synchronise 7y ago
    FirefoxOS was also exclusively targeting the touchscreen market, which by that point was already totally saturated. Their partner deals weren't the best either, and they really launched their product before it was ready which sullied their image quite a bit. KaiOS had the benefit of hindsight to see where Mozilla fell over, put in mitigations, and then shift focus to non-touchscreen devices to lower costs even further. A lot of their stack is still open source under the MPLv2, however there are rumours that Google is 'encouraging' KaiOS to shift their rendering engine over to Blink. Whether this happens or not remains to be seen.
    - StudentStuff 7y ago
      Switching to Blink would be a huge undertaking, ditto for moving off classic Gecko. Mozilla ditched Firefox OS & Thunderbird over the huge amount of work that would need to be redone to move to newer Gecko (as Servo components were ported over and swapped in via Project Quantum), but that would likely be less work than getting Blink to be responsive with minuscule amounts of RAM, then go app by app and optimize the crap out of it (which Mozilla had dozens to hundreds of devs doing for Firefox OS while they were developing it).
    - fabrice_d 7y ago
      Mozilla started a feature phone project, that was later canceled. One issue at the time was that the carrier partner was Verizon, and that was a huge gap of values due to how VZ was fighting against Net Neutrality.
- omnifischer 7y ago
  KaiOS is run by "Operators and device manufactureres" like Reliance, by bundling proprietary code. Not truly OSS.
mosdl 7y ago
Mozilla has always had trouble getting anything off the ground that isn't tied to Firefox being used by consumers.
rchaud 7y ago
Firefox OS was pitched as a direct competitor to iOS and Android, which itself was a death sentence when you saw the kind of hardware it was launched on. "Severely underpowered" would be generous. Plus they launched at a time when mobile web (that FF OS depended on for app delivery) features were awful compared to native apps. Their timing was poor too. The market was saturated with alternative OSes back then and not enough PR oxygen to go around. - Nokia Meego OS - Windows Phone - Blackberry Playbook OS/BB10 OS - Sailfish OS (ex-Nokia people) - Ubuntu Touch OS - WebOS
- StudentStuff 7y ago
  The point was to eat the bottom of the cellular phone market, as Mozilla saw Blackberry dying, Ubuntu Touch & Android requiring way too much resources, and Windows Phone killing Meego yet not succeeding in retaining Nokia's marketshare. What Mozilla built was an OS that could run on very basic hardware (eg: what an OEM can build for $5 to $10) and be more usable than the alternatives out there that were even more expensive. A price war led by Mozilla was never going to pan out without buy-in from the OEMs and cell carriers, but after Mozilla ditched the project, Qualcomm seems to have decided KaiOS is the only reasonable thing for basic phones to run, and Google is funding it just enough to encourage integration of some Google services.
  - petra 7y ago
    Let's say KaiOS today is owned by Mozilla with it's current user base. How does it help Mozilla ? Does it help to keep the web open? Does it bring revenues to justify the risk and loss of focus ?
    - yumraj 7y ago
      Same as Google. KaiOS ships with Firefox by default, they get eyeballs, they get search revenue from default search engine and so and so forth.
  - abacadaba 7y ago
    I'll admit to being critical of the effort at the time, wanting focus to be on the browser. Ahead of it's time maybe. In 2019 making PWA's first class citizen doesn't seem so crazy, and might allow it to get to a viable ecosystem.
jackbravo 7y ago
sarcasm?
- RandomBacon 7y ago
  I think so.
- agumonkey 7y ago
  injustice
javagram 7y ago
As a total outsider it was my impression that Brendan Eich was one of FirefoxOS’ biggest boosters and when he got kicked from the company for other reasons instead of promoted from CTO->CEO, the project lost its backing.
- geoelectric 7y ago
  I worked at Mozilla on Firefox OS until shortly before the project was killed. I wouldn't say that's the case at all. Andreas Gal was considerably more influential on Boot2Gecko and FxOS than Brendan, at least once it came out of Labs. Mozilla really just got caught in between being an OSS organization and working with proprietary phone companies, carriers, baseband developers, etc. We were used to working transparently on wiki, Github and IRC, and suddenly had NDAs and confidential code that partners insisted on. There was a large culture clash, and the effort both took a bunch of momentum from the browser side and ended up putting unique technical constraints on Gecko and the Firefox Browser, both in terms of necessary functionality and on the development cycle. That last could be a killer because you couldn't do anything quickly as everything had to be tested at length for interoperability, etc. FxOS was usually pinned to something older than the browser development (consider the security bug implications there) for extended periods of time, and teams had to shuttle fixes back and forth. Given that some of the changes were basically hacks to get the phone going and had no benefit to the browser, I'm sure that caused a lot of friction. Partners also wanted to see formal processes guaranteeing their stake, and that was at odds with the more "steer don't plan" way Mozilla tended to run. The people that were brought in that were more familiar with formal process and could make partners happy weren't as familiar with Mozilla's community or culture, and that also churned things a bit. Basically, it was a perfect storm of issues to deal with--Brendan leaving was just one of them, and possibly the least important. Morale wasn't awesome, and the window of opportunity for a new smartphone OS was closing--if it was even open in the first place. While there was some talk around shifting to feature phones as a focus/market gap (basically what Kai has done), it was very late in the game. After a point, I think a decision was simply made to cut bait and get back behind the browser again. Quantum was the (IMO very good) result of that focus. Honestly, Mozilla did as well as I'd expect any organization of its type and size--which is not as well as I'd expect a greenfield organization tightly concentrated on the goal to do. KaiOS is that latter thing.
seppin 7y ago
They didn't have a hardware distribution network like the one described, so they were right to kill it.
omnifischer 7y ago
Mozilla wanted really FOSS. KaiOS never released source code. When asked they always tell me that contact vendor (who do not want to release). You cannot compile and install your own KaiOS

i'm glad Mozilla had the foresight to abandon this project right before it became a profitable enterprise.

by xj9 7y ago

i'm glad Mozilla had the foresight to abandon this project right before it became a profitable enterprise.

KaiOS takes a significantly different approach in bringing FirefoxOS to market than Mozilla did. For starters, they targeted feature phones instead of Smartphones

phh 7y ago
I've been in commercial contact with FirefoxOS people, and they were definitely targeting phones that are the same specs as what KaiOS currently supports. (512MB RAM, 4GB storage, which is half the RAM and half the storage of Android Go) I don't really know they were calling it smartphones or feature phones though, that might change things.
- synchronise 7y ago
  FirefoxOS was also exclusively targeting the touchscreen market, which by that point was already totally saturated. Their partner deals weren't the best either, and they really launched their product before it was ready which sullied their image quite a bit. KaiOS had the benefit of hindsight to see where Mozilla fell over, put in mitigations, and then shift focus to non-touchscreen devices to lower costs even further. A lot of their stack is still open source under the MPLv2, however there are rumours that Google is 'encouraging' KaiOS to shift their rendering engine over to Blink. Whether this happens or not remains to be seen.
  - StudentStuff 7y ago
    Switching to Blink would be a huge undertaking, ditto for moving off classic Gecko. Mozilla ditched Firefox OS & Thunderbird over the huge amount of work that would need to be redone to move to newer Gecko (as Servo components were ported over and swapped in via Project Quantum), but that would likely be less work than getting Blink to be responsive with minuscule amounts of RAM, then go app by app and optimize the crap out of it (which Mozilla had dozens to hundreds of devs doing for Firefox OS while they were developing it).
  - fabrice_d 7y ago
    Mozilla started a feature phone project, that was later canceled. One issue at the time was that the carrier partner was Verizon, and that was a huge gap of values due to how VZ was fighting against Net Neutrality.
omnifischer 7y ago
KaiOS is run by "Operators and device manufactureres" like Reliance, by bundling proprietary code. Not truly OSS.

mosdl 7y ago

Mozilla has always had trouble getting anything off the ground that isn't tied to Firefox being used by consumers.

rchaud 7y ago

Firefox OS was pitched as a direct competitor to iOS and Android, which itself was a death sentence when you saw the kind of hardware it was launched on. "Severely underpowered" would be generous. Plus they launched at a time when mobile web (that FF OS depended on for app delivery) features were awful compared to native apps. Their timing was poor too. The market was saturated with alternative OSes back then and not enough PR oxygen to go around. - Nokia Meego OS - Windows Phone - Blackberry Playbook OS/BB10 OS - Sailfish OS (ex-Nokia people) - Ubuntu Touch OS - WebOS

StudentStuff 7y ago
The point was to eat the bottom of the cellular phone market, as Mozilla saw Blackberry dying, Ubuntu Touch & Android requiring way too much resources, and Windows Phone killing Meego yet not succeeding in retaining Nokia's marketshare. What Mozilla built was an OS that could run on very basic hardware (eg: what an OEM can build for $5 to $10) and be more usable than the alternatives out there that were even more expensive. A price war led by Mozilla was never going to pan out without buy-in from the OEMs and cell carriers, but after Mozilla ditched the project, Qualcomm seems to have decided KaiOS is the only reasonable thing for basic phones to run, and Google is funding it just enough to encourage integration of some Google services.
- petra 7y ago
  Let's say KaiOS today is owned by Mozilla with it's current user base. How does it help Mozilla ? Does it help to keep the web open? Does it bring revenues to justify the risk and loss of focus ?
  - yumraj 7y ago
    Same as Google. KaiOS ships with Firefox by default, they get eyeballs, they get search revenue from default search engine and so and so forth.
- abacadaba 7y ago
  I'll admit to being critical of the effort at the time, wanting focus to be on the browser. Ahead of it's time maybe. In 2019 making PWA's first class citizen doesn't seem so crazy, and might allow it to get to a viable ecosystem.

jackbravo 7y ago

sarcasm?

RandomBacon 7y ago
I think so.
agumonkey 7y ago
injustice

javagram 7y ago

As a total outsider it was my impression that Brendan Eich was one of FirefoxOS’ biggest boosters and when he got kicked from the company for other reasons instead of promoted from CTO->CEO, the project lost its backing.

geoelectric 7y ago
I worked at Mozilla on Firefox OS until shortly before the project was killed. I wouldn't say that's the case at all. Andreas Gal was considerably more influential on Boot2Gecko and FxOS than Brendan, at least once it came out of Labs. Mozilla really just got caught in between being an OSS organization and working with proprietary phone companies, carriers, baseband developers, etc. We were used to working transparently on wiki, Github and IRC, and suddenly had NDAs and confidential code that partners insisted on. There was a large culture clash, and the effort both took a bunch of momentum from the browser side and ended up putting unique technical constraints on Gecko and the Firefox Browser, both in terms of necessary functionality and on the development cycle. That last could be a killer because you couldn't do anything quickly as everything had to be tested at length for interoperability, etc. FxOS was usually pinned to something older than the browser development (consider the security bug implications there) for extended periods of time, and teams had to shuttle fixes back and forth. Given that some of the changes were basically hacks to get the phone going and had no benefit to the browser, I'm sure that caused a lot of friction. Partners also wanted to see formal processes guaranteeing their stake, and that was at odds with the more "steer don't plan" way Mozilla tended to run. The people that were brought in that were more familiar with formal process and could make partners happy weren't as familiar with Mozilla's community or culture, and that also churned things a bit. Basically, it was a perfect storm of issues to deal with--Brendan leaving was just one of them, and possibly the least important. Morale wasn't awesome, and the window of opportunity for a new smartphone OS was closing--if it was even open in the first place. While there was some talk around shifting to feature phones as a focus/market gap (basically what Kai has done), it was very late in the game. After a point, I think a decision was simply made to cut bait and get back behind the browser again. Quantum was the (IMO very good) result of that focus. Honestly, Mozilla did as well as I'd expect any organization of its type and size--which is not as well as I'd expect a greenfield organization tightly concentrated on the goal to do. KaiOS is that latter thing.

seppin 7y ago

They didn't have a hardware distribution network like the one described, so they were right to kill it.

omnifischer 7y ago

Mozilla wanted really FOSS. KaiOS never released source code. When asked they always tell me that contact vendor (who do not want to release). You cannot compile and install your own KaiOS