13 ms·

End of support for Firefox on Amazon devices

185 points by cozzyd 6y ago

dig1 6y ago
This is a sad story. From a desire to have a genuinely open-source browser (with proper open development) present almost everywhere, we now have Firefox present on fewer and fewer platforms. I think, in the end, it will be "officially supported" only on Windows and macOS. I understand that web browser is a complex business, but TBH, I don't want VR, Pocket, and tons of half-baked junk in my browser. Google poured millions of dollars into Mozilla (which is cheaper than battling with anti-trust commission), and yet, most of their projects failed. I think they need to rethink their management and strategy before everything goes to the ground.
- otabdeveloper4 6y ago
  > Google poured millions of dollars into Mozilla (...), and yet, most of their projects failed. Perhaps it's actually working as intended.
  - lightgreen 6y ago
    Don’t blame Google for that. It’s Mozilla management failure.
    - consumer451 6y ago
      > Don’t blame Google for that. It’s Mozilla management failure. Is there any reading material online supporting this position? I would tend to agree but my opinion is fairly uninformed.
      - gjsman-1000 6y ago
        https://calpaterson.com/mozilla.html https://calpaterson.com/mozilla.html
        consumer451 6y ago
        Thank you. I have often thought that leading a shining beacon like Mozilla should and would be done by a previously successful executive who doesn't need the money and would like a challenge. Compensation would be $1/year, everlasting respect, and a true legacy to leave behind. But that's just my vision of panacea I suppose. I respect Mitchell Baker's history at Mozilla but is it time for a change? reference: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/leadership/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/leadership/ edit: changed phrasing and tone
        boomboomsubban 6y ago
        She's only been CEO for roughly a year now, and your hope that someone would do that work for free is unrealistic.
        consumer451 6y ago
        Yeah.. > that's just my vision of panacea I suppose.
        boomboomsubban 6y ago
        Sorry, it does seem far harsher than I intended it, I'll change it. People often have extremely idealistic views of Mozilla that puts then in a position where they can do no right, and I'll end up debating that idealism while ignoring what was said.
        consumer451 6y ago
        No worries. I understand that his is complex topic and I am coming to it with little knowledge. The reason I thought she had been CEO for years is that I saw in the official bio that she was a co-founder and CEO. I didn't realize the timeline. I should probably learn a lot more prior to making statements like I had previously about change. I also do have the baggage of an anti-administrative bloat bias/agenda which I am may be applying here inappropriately. I was just really disapointed with some of the teams that were removed like Security. I know that money has to come from somewhere and seeing exec compensation go up at the same time was a hard pill to swallow.
    - otabdeveloper4 6y ago
      I'm guessing the management failure was engineered from the start. Follow the money.
      - boomboomsubban 6y ago
        So blame Yahoo, the ones paying them during the "management failure?"
    - staticman2 6y ago
      Mozilla is competing with the world's biggest advertisement company who can advertise their competition 24/7 and is also competing with the biggest phone company in America who has banned their product and forced their customers to use the phone company's product. This all might have something to do with it.
    - lallysingh 6y ago
      Agreed. Google just wrote the check.
    - st3fan 6y ago
      If only it was so simple that you need great (product) management to have a successful product. Mozilla tries hard and like every other startup or company out there, many ideas or products fail or turn out to not be profitable. There is no magic here. If there was then all startups and all ideas would work.
- simias 6y ago
  I'm generally worried for the future of Firefox, but this particular decision doesn't really sound all that significant to me. I don't really think it's reasonable for Firefox to officially support every single proprietary platform out there, especially when it must have had a tiny number of users. I'd rather Firefox focused on improving the browser where it matters than supporting some niche proprietary environment.
- kbrosnan 6y ago
  Firefox on Amazon devices uses the Android Webview. Fire Sticks have specs that are comparable to several year old phones when they were released. This makes them poor targets for general use computing.
- orra 6y ago
  > most of their projects failed. I think they need to rethink their management and strategy before everything goes to the ground. Lots of projects fail. It's the nature of R&D. You should see the number of products Google has shut down. Besides, the project that Mozilla gets the most flack for? Firefox OS. Turned out to be a great idea? Why? Because Apple and Google anti competitively bundle their own browsers with their own mobile OSes. Yes, sadly Firefox OS failed. But the future (now, present) of web is mobile: Mozilla had to try.
  - input_sh 6y ago
    Not to mention a fork of Firefox OS is probably the 3rd most used mobile operating system now: https://www.kaiostech.com/ https://www.kaiostech.com/
  - hkt 6y ago
    Firefox OS didn't fail: it is now known as KaiOS and is present on vast, vast quantities of "smart feature" phones in places like India. I recall Mozilla specifically talking about how to approach the next billion people to come online. It is admittedly a nuanced reading, but I think they succeeded on those terms. Still, the experience is very different to the one on Firefox OS as-was in 2015 or so. Apologies for no citations, but I recall a talk from 2014 or so at Mozfest in London and not much else. I've also owned a KaiOS phone - the Nokia 8110 and can say aside from a lack of apps it is great.
ZoF 6y ago
I think this is a terrible choice and wish they would explain why the decision was made. Was it something that amazon imposed(ostensibly)? If so, please share.
- Pfhreak 6y ago
  It costs them to support it. How many Firefox users on Amazon fire TVs do you think there were? I would guess it just looks like a bad return on time invested.
  - cozzyd 6y ago
    https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/firefox-tv/issues https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/firefox-tv/issues enough to file this many issues, but probably not enough to fix them?
    - st3fan 6y ago
      There are always enough technical users with a github account to file issues. They represent a tiny tiny tiny fraction of product users though :-)
- simias 6y ago
  Maybe it was just too small a market share to warrant supporting? That was my first guess.
- CodeGlitch 6y ago
  Yes if they were transparent about why I think people would be understanding and less critical of the decision. As it stands, the announcement says nothing like that.
caslon 6y ago
Honestly, there's barely a reason for Firefox to exist anywhere outside of the desktop after they eliminated extensions one more time for every other platform. The "Firefox anywhere but desktop" package nowadays is "Here's a sub-par, slower, poorly-optimized browser without an ad-blocker; you'll be happy to know we have Pocket and Ads built-in! Why even bother with those icky websites? Just click our links! Addons? I mean, we have four. We no longer allow you to use the rest of the AMO addons." Firefox on desktop is nice, except for their most recent design update (coming in a month or two, already on Nightly), which makes compact mode massive and normal mode gigantic. But you can get around that by simply going out of your way to write CSS to eliminate tabs entirely, and replace them with an extension.
- vesinisa 6y ago
  I honestly have no idea what are you talking about. I really enjoy uBlock Origin on my phone, and that's the primary reason I use Firefox for Android. On iOS Firefox is just an UI to Apple WebView, but that's a matter for antitrust courts and not a fault of Mozilla.
  - caslon 6y ago
    They recently limited the Android (and derivatives', like FR) build's access to AMO; there are less than fifty there, now. uBO is one, but there's very few other than that. Kind of defeats a major selling-point of WebExtensions.
    - AndrewDucker 6y ago
      Yup! I'm still using the old version of Firefox on Android because I need the extensions I have. Which really sucks
      - input_sh 6y ago
        You can install all extensions available on desktops on new Firefox for quite some time, it's just clunky: https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2020/09/29/expanded-extension-support-in-firefox-for-android-nightly/ https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2020/09/29/expanded-extensio... Might convince you to upgrade, I generally would never run an outdated browser.
vntok 6y ago
How much longer to the day of the "Incredible journey" post on Mozilla's blog?
mastrsushi 6y ago
Firewho?
Causality1 6y ago
Firefox is dying because they switched their target audience from people who like Firefox to people who don't like Chrome. They act like they're going to come up with some wiz-bang feature and wake up with a 50% market share while ignoring everything that got them a 25% share. It does not and will never work that way.
- qzw 6y ago
  True to an extent, but don’t forget that for quite a while Chrome was genuinely far ahead in technology, so the number of people who liked Firefox was dropping rather precipitously. They probably felt immense pressure to come up with ways to not just stop the loss of users but to reverse the trend. A pretty tall order for anyone. Microsoft couldn’t do it either.
sigmar 6y ago
Lots of doom and gloom comments here, but the post only refers to ending support on amazon echo and fire tv. The experience of using a(ny) browser on those devices was terrible. They probably saw usage numbers on those two devices were so low that support made no sense.
- bdcravens 6y ago
  The UI is really weird; I only use the browser for videos where no app option exists.
- brundolf 6y ago
  Isn't the echo voice-only? How does that even work?
  - popey 6y ago
    The article says "Echo Show" which is a device with an integral display.
- cozzyd 6y ago
  I wouldn't browse HN on my FireTV, but it's great for live streams of various events, which seem to exist on a zillion different websites (I just watched a wedding this morning on my FireTV using Firefox)
- fencepost 6y ago
  The most important and easy thing to miss is probably that this is on "DEVICES" not on "Tablets." You can still run it just fine on the color Amazon Android-based handhelds, it's the "IoT" category devices where it's going away. Honestly I wouldn't have predicted better than a 50% chance that Firefox ran on those anyway.
wpietri 6y ago
I'd love to hear the story behind this. Are Amazon devices drifting too far from Android to be easily supported? I'm fine with Firefox dropping niche platforms and focusing resources on actual users. (Most stats don't even cover the Amazon devices; the only mention I could find of Silk usage was 0.02% of traffic.) But it surprises me that Amazon's devices are now far enough off from regular Android that there's a support burden. Anybody here shipping apps for Fire who can explain?
- voxadam 6y ago
  Fire OS 7 is based on Android 9 with API level 28. So, yeah, it's not exactly cutting edge.
  - rock_artist 6y ago
    But isn't Firefox even supports Android 5 devices?
    - scaladev 6y ago
      The latest version works fine on my x86 phone with Android 5.
      - jldl805 6y ago
        Why do you live your life like this?!?
        molasses 6y ago
        I get this. I have a low spec phone by today's standards, and it has android 10, it is pretty useless practically. It is pretty much stock. And I would gladly go back some versions for speed hikes.
      - brundolf 6y ago
        > x86 phone Sorry, what? I think I need to know more...
jgrowl 6y ago
This seems more like a bad omen for the future of firesticks than it is firefox. I say that as someone that uses a firetv and a firestick every day. They become unresponsive to input, freeze, and lag constantly. Even for amazon's own shows. It has only gotten worse over time. I'm slowly just moving towards getting a windows instance to every tv in house.
- bdcravens 6y ago
  Yes, I've noticed the same, as well as software getting buggier over time (I have a 1st gen Fire TV 4k, and the Disney+ app doesn't respond to pause)
  - maxerickson 6y ago
    I botched the password input the first time I tried to log into the Disney+ app. It apparently stored that password to use for subsequent runs, as I was prompted for the password every time I ran it. Resetting the app data fixed the problem, so that's where the assumption about storing the wrong password is from. (I'm saying, don't necessarily blame only the hardware)
  - noneeeed 6y ago
    Oh god, the Disney+ app is a complete dumpster fire. There is a fix for the Disney+ pause issue: Got to Settings -> Display -> Sounds -> Audio -> Dolby Digital Output and turn it off. Obviously that's crap if you want Dolby Digital Output, but for some reason it fixes the issue. I don't actually have a problem with the Firestick as a whole, seems responsive enough for the services I use, but Disney really needs to up their game, it's the only one I have an issue with.
- Sebb767 6y ago
  I've actually looked into buying one recently, but between general slowness (a friend of mine has one), price and lacking an Alexa-less option if you need 4k, I'm actually considering an used AppleTV 4k now.
  - 6y ago
londons_explore 6y ago
I wonder if this might be a play to try and get some money from Amazon to reverse course...?
londons_explore 6y ago
The main reason to drop support for Amazon devices is you want to start using some Google Play Services API's. They include everything from fitness tracking to push notifications to face/voice recognition. I wonder which they want to use?
- caturopath 6y ago
  Push notifications seem like something a browser would want -- is it a thing on any platform? I tried searching, but I suspect there are a lot of subtleties to the technologies involved (with similar names and such) that I don't know how to connect whether this fills a gap.
  - londons_explore 6y ago
    All major Web browsers on Android and iOS provide push notifications to websites (if granted permission). Most webpages use it for spammy notifications of little value to most users sadly...
    - lights0123 6y ago
      > All major Web browsers on Android and iOS provide push notifications to websites No browsers on iOS allow push notifications on websites. https://onesignal.com/blog/the-state-of-ios-web-push-in-2020/ https://onesignal.com/blog/the-state-of-ios-web-push-in-2020...
      - kiwijamo 6y ago
        That is good news. Such a user hostile idea so hopefully it never comes.
        GranPC 6y ago
        I disagree. I'm currently building a live webapp, and all of my users want to receive notifications when shows are going to start, so they don't miss anything. Since WebPush is pretty much unusable (unsupported on iOS, useless on Android) I had to resort to sending SMS to each of my users, which is expensive and a worse experience. Just because the API is often used for evil, it doesn't mean that the API itself is hostile. I can think of many usecases where a properly functioning web push notification API would be desirable - the unfortunate truth is that the current implementation makes it useless for most real world scenarios.
dal 6y ago
Firefox is not available on my Nvidia Shield Android TV either. So seems like Mozilla just does not want to have a browser on TVs.
- vetinari 6y ago
  There would be something other at play, as no other browser - Chrome, Opera, Edge, Vivaldi, Brave - is available for Nvidia Shield either.
- Wintereise 6y ago
  FWIW, it works fine if you grab the apk and install it yourself. I use the Chrome Canary channel on my Shield, and it works OK.
franklyt 6y ago
Unpopular opinion: Firefox is allowing itself to be phased out, and contributing to a less free internet, with their business moves. It was hugely upsetting when they axed their dev team mid-pandemic.
- sgt 6y ago
  They said they did the axing due to the long term viability of Firefox. So it would be ironic if this axing had such bad PR that it had a worse effect than having too many heads.
- the_duke 6y ago
  Mozilla really can't do that much to prevent it. Firefox only got popular because it was so much better than IE at the time. Now Chrome and Safari are the preinstalled on most devices or are pushed on you if they are not. They are also good enough or better that users don't have enough incentive to switch, especially with ad blockers working just fine on the competition (for now...). And Google won't allow Chrome to fall behind in a meaningful way. There is not much market opportunity to compete against the monopolistic distribution channels that Apple and Google can leverage.
  - franklyt 6y ago
    This would be a decent point if nobody had any interest in chromium alternatives and Firefox was a new upstart brand, neither of which are true. Usually, when a CEO heads an explicitly sinking ship, the CEO will be removed and someone will be brought in to turn around the company. No idea why that hasn’t happened.
    - throwaway3699 6y ago
      They already replaced their last CEO due to outrage. Another replacement would signal disaster.
      - franklyt 6y ago
        Was the last CEO let go for performance reasons?
varispeed 6y ago
If Apple can pull off its walled garden thing and there are many people defending it, then why should Amazon be any different? They jump on the bandwagon and will milk it until regulators ban the practice (hopefully). It's all about money.
shawnz 6y ago
Firestick users can also connect a USB mouse with a USB-OTG adapter and sideload the Firefox mobile APK (the one for phones). In my opinion it gives a much better experience than the Firefox for Fire TV app, although as noted it's basically unusable without a mouse. You can get updates by sideloading the F-Droid APK (which works great on Fire TV).
yosito 6y ago
Are there any organizations talking about forking Firefox and taking the software in a different direction than Mozilla is taking it?
psim1 6y ago
This sucks. Firefox actually works great on FireTV Stick, unlike many other apps available for the device. It is useful for loading stream sites that don’t have apps; e.g. Stanford Puffer.
tyingq 6y ago
Amazon's list of apps in the "web browser" category: https://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/mobile-apps/9408941011?tf=1/ref=pd_zg_hrsr_mobile-apps https://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/mobile-apps/9408941011... Looks like Firefox would be a pretty big loss for them. I don't recognize much on the list other than Opera.

185 points by cozzyd 6y ago

dig1 6y ago

This is a sad story. From a desire to have a genuinely open-source browser (with proper open development) present almost everywhere, we now have Firefox present on fewer and fewer platforms. I think, in the end, it will be "officially supported" only on Windows and macOS. I understand that web browser is a complex business, but TBH, I don't want VR, Pocket, and tons of half-baked junk in my browser. Google poured millions of dollars into Mozilla (which is cheaper than battling with anti-trust commission), and yet, most of their projects failed. I think they need to rethink their management and strategy before everything goes to the ground.

otabdeveloper4 6y ago
> Google poured millions of dollars into Mozilla (...), and yet, most of their projects failed. Perhaps it's actually working as intended.
- lightgreen 6y ago
  Don’t blame Google for that. It’s Mozilla management failure.
  - consumer451 6y ago
    > Don’t blame Google for that. It’s Mozilla management failure. Is there any reading material online supporting this position? I would tend to agree but my opinion is fairly uninformed.
    - gjsman-1000 6y ago
      https://calpaterson.com/mozilla.html https://calpaterson.com/mozilla.html
      - consumer451 6y ago
        Thank you. I have often thought that leading a shining beacon like Mozilla should and would be done by a previously successful executive who doesn't need the money and would like a challenge. Compensation would be $1/year, everlasting respect, and a true legacy to leave behind. But that's just my vision of panacea I suppose. I respect Mitchell Baker's history at Mozilla but is it time for a change? reference: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/leadership/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/leadership/ edit: changed phrasing and tone
        boomboomsubban 6y ago
        She's only been CEO for roughly a year now, and your hope that someone would do that work for free is unrealistic.
        consumer451 6y ago
        Yeah.. > that's just my vision of panacea I suppose.
        boomboomsubban 6y ago
        Sorry, it does seem far harsher than I intended it, I'll change it. People often have extremely idealistic views of Mozilla that puts then in a position where they can do no right, and I'll end up debating that idealism while ignoring what was said.
        consumer451 6y ago
        No worries. I understand that his is complex topic and I am coming to it with little knowledge. The reason I thought she had been CEO for years is that I saw in the official bio that she was a co-founder and CEO. I didn't realize the timeline. I should probably learn a lot more prior to making statements like I had previously about change. I also do have the baggage of an anti-administrative bloat bias/agenda which I am may be applying here inappropriately. I was just really disapointed with some of the teams that were removed like Security. I know that money has to come from somewhere and seeing exec compensation go up at the same time was a hard pill to swallow.
  - otabdeveloper4 6y ago
    I'm guessing the management failure was engineered from the start. Follow the money.
    - boomboomsubban 6y ago
      So blame Yahoo, the ones paying them during the "management failure?"
  - staticman2 6y ago
    Mozilla is competing with the world's biggest advertisement company who can advertise their competition 24/7 and is also competing with the biggest phone company in America who has banned their product and forced their customers to use the phone company's product. This all might have something to do with it.
  - lallysingh 6y ago
    Agreed. Google just wrote the check.
  - st3fan 6y ago
    If only it was so simple that you need great (product) management to have a successful product. Mozilla tries hard and like every other startup or company out there, many ideas or products fail or turn out to not be profitable. There is no magic here. If there was then all startups and all ideas would work.
simias 6y ago
I'm generally worried for the future of Firefox, but this particular decision doesn't really sound all that significant to me. I don't really think it's reasonable for Firefox to officially support every single proprietary platform out there, especially when it must have had a tiny number of users. I'd rather Firefox focused on improving the browser where it matters than supporting some niche proprietary environment.
kbrosnan 6y ago
Firefox on Amazon devices uses the Android Webview. Fire Sticks have specs that are comparable to several year old phones when they were released. This makes them poor targets for general use computing.
orra 6y ago
> most of their projects failed. I think they need to rethink their management and strategy before everything goes to the ground. Lots of projects fail. It's the nature of R&D. You should see the number of products Google has shut down. Besides, the project that Mozilla gets the most flack for? Firefox OS. Turned out to be a great idea? Why? Because Apple and Google anti competitively bundle their own browsers with their own mobile OSes. Yes, sadly Firefox OS failed. But the future (now, present) of web is mobile: Mozilla had to try.
- input_sh 6y ago
  Not to mention a fork of Firefox OS is probably the 3rd most used mobile operating system now: https://www.kaiostech.com/ https://www.kaiostech.com/
- hkt 6y ago
  Firefox OS didn't fail: it is now known as KaiOS and is present on vast, vast quantities of "smart feature" phones in places like India. I recall Mozilla specifically talking about how to approach the next billion people to come online. It is admittedly a nuanced reading, but I think they succeeded on those terms. Still, the experience is very different to the one on Firefox OS as-was in 2015 or so. Apologies for no citations, but I recall a talk from 2014 or so at Mozfest in London and not much else. I've also owned a KaiOS phone - the Nokia 8110 and can say aside from a lack of apps it is great.

ZoF 6y ago

I think this is a terrible choice and wish they would explain why the decision was made. Was it something that amazon imposed(ostensibly)? If so, please share.

Pfhreak 6y ago
It costs them to support it. How many Firefox users on Amazon fire TVs do you think there were? I would guess it just looks like a bad return on time invested.
- cozzyd 6y ago
  https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/firefox-tv/issues https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/firefox-tv/issues enough to file this many issues, but probably not enough to fix them?
  - st3fan 6y ago
    There are always enough technical users with a github account to file issues. They represent a tiny tiny tiny fraction of product users though :-)
simias 6y ago
Maybe it was just too small a market share to warrant supporting? That was my first guess.
CodeGlitch 6y ago
Yes if they were transparent about why I think people would be understanding and less critical of the decision. As it stands, the announcement says nothing like that.

caslon 6y ago

Honestly, there's barely a reason for Firefox to exist anywhere outside of the desktop after they eliminated extensions one more time for every other platform. The "Firefox anywhere but desktop" package nowadays is "Here's a sub-par, slower, poorly-optimized browser without an ad-blocker; you'll be happy to know we have Pocket and Ads built-in! Why even bother with those icky websites? Just click our links! Addons? I mean, we have four. We no longer allow you to use the rest of the AMO addons." Firefox on desktop is nice, except for their most recent design update (coming in a month or two, already on Nightly), which makes compact mode massive and normal mode gigantic. But you can get around that by simply going out of your way to write CSS to eliminate tabs entirely, and replace them with an extension.

vesinisa 6y ago
I honestly have no idea what are you talking about. I really enjoy uBlock Origin on my phone, and that's the primary reason I use Firefox for Android. On iOS Firefox is just an UI to Apple WebView, but that's a matter for antitrust courts and not a fault of Mozilla.
- caslon 6y ago
  They recently limited the Android (and derivatives', like FR) build's access to AMO; there are less than fifty there, now. uBO is one, but there's very few other than that. Kind of defeats a major selling-point of WebExtensions.
  - AndrewDucker 6y ago
    Yup! I'm still using the old version of Firefox on Android because I need the extensions I have. Which really sucks
    - input_sh 6y ago
      You can install all extensions available on desktops on new Firefox for quite some time, it's just clunky: https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2020/09/29/expanded-extension-support-in-firefox-for-android-nightly/ https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2020/09/29/expanded-extensio... Might convince you to upgrade, I generally would never run an outdated browser.

vntok 6y ago

How much longer to the day of the "Incredible journey" post on Mozilla's blog?

mastrsushi 6y ago

Firewho?

Causality1 6y ago

Firefox is dying because they switched their target audience from people who like Firefox to people who don't like Chrome. They act like they're going to come up with some wiz-bang feature and wake up with a 50% market share while ignoring everything that got them a 25% share. It does not and will never work that way.

qzw 6y ago
True to an extent, but don’t forget that for quite a while Chrome was genuinely far ahead in technology, so the number of people who liked Firefox was dropping rather precipitously. They probably felt immense pressure to come up with ways to not just stop the loss of users but to reverse the trend. A pretty tall order for anyone. Microsoft couldn’t do it either.

sigmar 6y ago

Lots of doom and gloom comments here, but the post only refers to ending support on amazon echo and fire tv. The experience of using a(ny) browser on those devices was terrible. They probably saw usage numbers on those two devices were so low that support made no sense.

bdcravens 6y ago
The UI is really weird; I only use the browser for videos where no app option exists.
brundolf 6y ago
Isn't the echo voice-only? How does that even work?
- popey 6y ago
  The article says "Echo Show" which is a device with an integral display.
cozzyd 6y ago
I wouldn't browse HN on my FireTV, but it's great for live streams of various events, which seem to exist on a zillion different websites (I just watched a wedding this morning on my FireTV using Firefox)
fencepost 6y ago
The most important and easy thing to miss is probably that this is on "DEVICES" not on "Tablets." You can still run it just fine on the color Amazon Android-based handhelds, it's the "IoT" category devices where it's going away. Honestly I wouldn't have predicted better than a 50% chance that Firefox ran on those anyway.

wpietri 6y ago

I'd love to hear the story behind this. Are Amazon devices drifting too far from Android to be easily supported? I'm fine with Firefox dropping niche platforms and focusing resources on actual users. (Most stats don't even cover the Amazon devices; the only mention I could find of Silk usage was 0.02% of traffic.) But it surprises me that Amazon's devices are now far enough off from regular Android that there's a support burden. Anybody here shipping apps for Fire who can explain?

voxadam 6y ago
Fire OS 7 is based on Android 9 with API level 28. So, yeah, it's not exactly cutting edge.
- rock_artist 6y ago
  But isn't Firefox even supports Android 5 devices?
  - scaladev 6y ago
    The latest version works fine on my x86 phone with Android 5.
    - jldl805 6y ago
      Why do you live your life like this?!?
      - molasses 6y ago
        I get this. I have a low spec phone by today's standards, and it has android 10, it is pretty useless practically. It is pretty much stock. And I would gladly go back some versions for speed hikes.
    - brundolf 6y ago
      > x86 phone Sorry, what? I think I need to know more...

jgrowl 6y ago

This seems more like a bad omen for the future of firesticks than it is firefox. I say that as someone that uses a firetv and a firestick every day. They become unresponsive to input, freeze, and lag constantly. Even for amazon's own shows. It has only gotten worse over time. I'm slowly just moving towards getting a windows instance to every tv in house.

bdcravens 6y ago
Yes, I've noticed the same, as well as software getting buggier over time (I have a 1st gen Fire TV 4k, and the Disney+ app doesn't respond to pause)
- maxerickson 6y ago
  I botched the password input the first time I tried to log into the Disney+ app. It apparently stored that password to use for subsequent runs, as I was prompted for the password every time I ran it. Resetting the app data fixed the problem, so that's where the assumption about storing the wrong password is from. (I'm saying, don't necessarily blame only the hardware)
- noneeeed 6y ago
  Oh god, the Disney+ app is a complete dumpster fire. There is a fix for the Disney+ pause issue: Got to Settings -> Display -> Sounds -> Audio -> Dolby Digital Output and turn it off. Obviously that's crap if you want Dolby Digital Output, but for some reason it fixes the issue. I don't actually have a problem with the Firestick as a whole, seems responsive enough for the services I use, but Disney really needs to up their game, it's the only one I have an issue with.
Sebb767 6y ago
I've actually looked into buying one recently, but between general slowness (a friend of mine has one), price and lacking an Alexa-less option if you need 4k, I'm actually considering an used AppleTV 4k now.
- 6y ago

londons_explore 6y ago

I wonder if this might be a play to try and get some money from Amazon to reverse course...?

londons_explore 6y ago

The main reason to drop support for Amazon devices is you want to start using some Google Play Services API's. They include everything from fitness tracking to push notifications to face/voice recognition. I wonder which they want to use?

caturopath 6y ago
Push notifications seem like something a browser would want -- is it a thing on any platform? I tried searching, but I suspect there are a lot of subtleties to the technologies involved (with similar names and such) that I don't know how to connect whether this fills a gap.
- londons_explore 6y ago
  All major Web browsers on Android and iOS provide push notifications to websites (if granted permission). Most webpages use it for spammy notifications of little value to most users sadly...
  - lights0123 6y ago
    > All major Web browsers on Android and iOS provide push notifications to websites No browsers on iOS allow push notifications on websites. https://onesignal.com/blog/the-state-of-ios-web-push-in-2020/ https://onesignal.com/blog/the-state-of-ios-web-push-in-2020...
    - kiwijamo 6y ago
      That is good news. Such a user hostile idea so hopefully it never comes.
      - GranPC 6y ago
        I disagree. I'm currently building a live webapp, and all of my users want to receive notifications when shows are going to start, so they don't miss anything. Since WebPush is pretty much unusable (unsupported on iOS, useless on Android) I had to resort to sending SMS to each of my users, which is expensive and a worse experience. Just because the API is often used for evil, it doesn't mean that the API itself is hostile. I can think of many usecases where a properly functioning web push notification API would be desirable - the unfortunate truth is that the current implementation makes it useless for most real world scenarios.

dal 6y ago

Firefox is not available on my Nvidia Shield Android TV either. So seems like Mozilla just does not want to have a browser on TVs.

vetinari 6y ago
There would be something other at play, as no other browser - Chrome, Opera, Edge, Vivaldi, Brave - is available for Nvidia Shield either.
Wintereise 6y ago
FWIW, it works fine if you grab the apk and install it yourself. I use the Chrome Canary channel on my Shield, and it works OK.

franklyt 6y ago

Unpopular opinion: Firefox is allowing itself to be phased out, and contributing to a less free internet, with their business moves. It was hugely upsetting when they axed their dev team mid-pandemic.

sgt 6y ago
They said they did the axing due to the long term viability of Firefox. So it would be ironic if this axing had such bad PR that it had a worse effect than having too many heads.
the_duke 6y ago
Mozilla really can't do that much to prevent it. Firefox only got popular because it was so much better than IE at the time. Now Chrome and Safari are the preinstalled on most devices or are pushed on you if they are not. They are also good enough or better that users don't have enough incentive to switch, especially with ad blockers working just fine on the competition (for now...). And Google won't allow Chrome to fall behind in a meaningful way. There is not much market opportunity to compete against the monopolistic distribution channels that Apple and Google can leverage.
- franklyt 6y ago
  This would be a decent point if nobody had any interest in chromium alternatives and Firefox was a new upstart brand, neither of which are true. Usually, when a CEO heads an explicitly sinking ship, the CEO will be removed and someone will be brought in to turn around the company. No idea why that hasn’t happened.
  - throwaway3699 6y ago
    They already replaced their last CEO due to outrage. Another replacement would signal disaster.
    - franklyt 6y ago
      Was the last CEO let go for performance reasons?

varispeed 6y ago

If Apple can pull off its walled garden thing and there are many people defending it, then why should Amazon be any different? They jump on the bandwagon and will milk it until regulators ban the practice (hopefully). It's all about money.

shawnz 6y ago

Firestick users can also connect a USB mouse with a USB-OTG adapter and sideload the Firefox mobile APK (the one for phones). In my opinion it gives a much better experience than the Firefox for Fire TV app, although as noted it's basically unusable without a mouse. You can get updates by sideloading the F-Droid APK (which works great on Fire TV).

yosito 6y ago

Are there any organizations talking about forking Firefox and taking the software in a different direction than Mozilla is taking it?

psim1 6y ago

This sucks. Firefox actually works great on FireTV Stick, unlike many other apps available for the device. It is useful for loading stream sites that don’t have apps; e.g. Stanford Puffer.

tyingq 6y ago

Amazon's list of apps in the "web browser" category: https://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/mobile-apps/9408941011?tf=1/ref=pd_zg_hrsr_mobile-apps https://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/mobile-apps/9408941011... Looks like Firefox would be a pretty big loss for them. I don't recognize much on the list other than Opera.