5 ms·

They did in a way, just after they had given up. There's a whole series of popular phones in India that ship FirefoxOS. I think they're sold by Jio, a carrier

They did in a way, just after they had given up. There's a whole series of popular phones in India that ship FirefoxOS. I think they're sold by Jio, a carrier there.

rjsw 3y ago
Not just India, there are several Nokia/HMD models that run the same fork [1] of FirefoxOS, I am thinking of buying one in Europe. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KaiOS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KaiOS
- fabrice_d 3y ago
  Unfortunately KaiOS is not in great shape currently.
  - rjsw 3y ago
    I was looking at the phone mainly to use it as a 4G WiFi hotspot. What is wrong with KaiOS itself?
    - fabrice_d 3y ago
      KaiOS is struggling because business on the low-end segment is very hard. Which means that the technical side is cutting corners and you end up with a lacking product in important areas like security. (disclaimer: I worked there and left recently)
  - mardifoufs 3y ago
    It basically got pushed out by android as even very low end devices can now mostly run android sort of ok, right?
  - qingcharles 3y ago
    It's not great at all. Convicted persons on parole are often disallowed from Internet use or smartphone ownership, so I see a lot of parolees with KaiOS flip-phones. The text entry is really, really horrible. That's probably the worst bit. The OS is pretty unintuitive and inconsistent in the UX. No-one is really developing apps for it as far as I know. It's definitely way worse than c. 2007 Nokia Symbian devices.
ksec 3y ago
The idea of Mobile WebOS wasn't bad on itself, but execution at Mozilla, both management direction and workload just wasn't up to the speed of Google Android or Apple iOS. They were targeting Smartphone of $35, thinking in the future most of the smartphone sold, the entry level phone will be at that price range. Falling into the same fallacy as Bill Gates, all hardware will eventually cost next to nothing, software is expensive. [Note] Bill said that in 00s and Mozilla thought of it in early 10s. So somewhat 20-30 years later Silicon Valley still has zero understanding of how Hardware and Supply Chains works. Not only did that $35 dollars phone never happened, average selling price of iPhone was $700+ selling at hundreds of millions of unit every year. Mozilla later had to revise the target to $50 phone which was still wrong. It just shows software people simply dont get it. And they had the vision of running the OS, preferably with Javascript only. Writing all modules in JS if possible. It was the early days before asm.js or WASM. And they spend a lot of time battling this. One engineers even wrote the culture was so JS-focused no one dare to ask why some of these aren't written in C++. All that combine with rapid pace of development in Smartphone software. They lost out and it is now forked into KaiOS. Which is doing surprisingly well without Mozilla. Mozilla kind of feels like Xerox in many ways. A lot of great "ideas" came out of it. But they never manage to capture much value. [Note] It does seems counterintuitive, but 20 years later may be ChatGPT / LLM will make software cheaper faster than hardware getting cost reduction.

They did in a way, just after they had given up. There's a whole series of popular phones in India that ship FirefoxOS. I think they're sold by Jio, a carrier there.

rjsw 3y ago

Not just India, there are several Nokia/HMD models that run the same fork [1] of FirefoxOS, I am thinking of buying one in Europe. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KaiOS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KaiOS

fabrice_d 3y ago
Unfortunately KaiOS is not in great shape currently.
- rjsw 3y ago
  I was looking at the phone mainly to use it as a 4G WiFi hotspot. What is wrong with KaiOS itself?
  - fabrice_d 3y ago
    KaiOS is struggling because business on the low-end segment is very hard. Which means that the technical side is cutting corners and you end up with a lacking product in important areas like security. (disclaimer: I worked there and left recently)
- mardifoufs 3y ago
  It basically got pushed out by android as even very low end devices can now mostly run android sort of ok, right?
- qingcharles 3y ago
  It's not great at all. Convicted persons on parole are often disallowed from Internet use or smartphone ownership, so I see a lot of parolees with KaiOS flip-phones. The text entry is really, really horrible. That's probably the worst bit. The OS is pretty unintuitive and inconsistent in the UX. No-one is really developing apps for it as far as I know. It's definitely way worse than c. 2007 Nokia Symbian devices.

ksec 3y ago

The idea of Mobile WebOS wasn't bad on itself, but execution at Mozilla, both management direction and workload just wasn't up to the speed of Google Android or Apple iOS. They were targeting Smartphone of $35, thinking in the future most of the smartphone sold, the entry level phone will be at that price range. Falling into the same fallacy as Bill Gates, all hardware will eventually cost next to nothing, software is expensive. [Note] Bill said that in 00s and Mozilla thought of it in early 10s. So somewhat 20-30 years later Silicon Valley still has zero understanding of how Hardware and Supply Chains works. Not only did that $35 dollars phone never happened, average selling price of iPhone was $700+ selling at hundreds of millions of unit every year. Mozilla later had to revise the target to $50 phone which was still wrong. It just shows software people simply dont get it. And they had the vision of running the OS, preferably with Javascript only. Writing all modules in JS if possible. It was the early days before asm.js or WASM. And they spend a lot of time battling this. One engineers even wrote the culture was so JS-focused no one dare to ask why some of these aren't written in C++. All that combine with rapid pace of development in Smartphone software. They lost out and it is now forked into KaiOS. Which is doing surprisingly well without Mozilla. Mozilla kind of feels like Xerox in many ways. A lot of great "ideas" came out of it. But they never manage to capture much value. [Note] It does seems counterintuitive, but 20 years later may be ChatGPT / LLM will make software cheaper faster than hardware getting cost reduction.