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Firefox OS's story from a Mozilla insider not working on the project (2024)

197 points by todsacerdoti 1y ago

deleted 1y ago
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i80and 1y ago
I had a Firefox OS phone for hobby development. The initial release wasn't amazing, but 2.0 was actually surprisingly smooth and snappy on the anemic-even-for-the-time hardware! Great little device, genuinely. EDIT: It was a ZTE Open
- tecleandor 1y ago
  I had two development devices, one was the Geeksphone Peak, and the other one (IIRC) was the Geeksphone Keos. One of them developed battery problems quickly (or something like that) and I think I didn't get to test v2 in the other one. I have to check if I still have it around...
  - Qem 1y ago
    I still keep my Alcatel One Touch Fire, from circa 2014, as a keepsake. One funny detail I noticed recently was that its battery was made by BYD, back then an unremarkable brand. So its operating system stalled, but at least the maker of another component became immensely successful since then.
    - owebmaster 1y ago
      Now you got me hoping for a BYD phone
- Groxx 1y ago
  Yeah, honestly I still like some things about it better than other OSes. And the web/native fusion was much better than anything similar that iOS or Android have tried (though not perfect either). Though I am very unhappy to see that its bounce-and-stretch animation at the end of scrolling is appearing everywhere :/ It was uncomfortable and weird looking then, and it still is now.
this_user 1y ago
Sadly, this doesn't go into too much detail, but it does mention a few things that explain how Mozilla ended up becoming the bloated mess it is now. > They hired someone from the mobile industry to run the company, this led to some culture changes : no more a flat org, but a pyramidal one with middle managers. Culture became way less engineering centric, and started being a bit more top -> down. > Besides becoming more like a normal company, the new CEO grew the size of our teams, added project managers, Sales people, to make sure B2G would reach a huge audience.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- resource_waste 1y ago
  I'm a bit less critical on the management thing than most. As an engineer, we all want to think engineers are all that is needed. However sales and management are needed. Too many layers are a real problem, but it doesnt say much when its coming from people at the bottom. They can't see what is happening above them.
  - owebmaster 1y ago
    > but it doesnt say much when its coming from people at the bottom. They can't see what is happening above them. Oh they could and the results show it. The new people made a lot more money including the Google deal. While destroying Firefox
  - this_user 1y ago
    I depends on what kind of company you are what and who you need. That may be the problem with Mozilla that they don't really know what they are. They started out as a vehicle for the browser, but then they broadened their mission to some vague notion of "defending the open Internet" or something like that. And since they had enough free cash flow, they were able to get into all kinds of areas and projects where they had no real expertise and set themselves up to fail. And this is a common management mistake: "We have the money, we need to grow." Meta have basically been doing that for years now, launching all kinds of projects that were mostly failures. But their ad income from FB and IG is more than enough to compensate for that. Google are in a similar position. When was the last time they actually launched a truly successful new product? Maybe it would be better to let it be. In the case of Mozilla, focus on Firefox on all of the different platforms. On the other hand, not trying to grow is a career risk for management. If you are not implementing a growth strategy, why exactly are we paying you millions per year?
fidotron 1y ago
The real reason Firefox OS was doomed was the timing was all wrong with the explosion in graphics capability of the devices, as anyone that worked on anything performance sensitive during the iPhone 3GS -> 4 will tell you: the same GPUs were being asked to drive 4x the number of pixels. Users didn't care, they just expected it to work. FFOS was doomed because the pixel explosion wasn't just stretching the GPUs of that time, it had also made CPU rendering a serious bottleneck, a fact the Android team also struggled to accept. Mozilla lacked the resources to do anything about it, although I didn't get the impression they actually understood the problem at all (as shown by it not being mentioned here), while the Googlers resorted to that most Googly of activities: arguing via walls of text that try to deny the obvious truth. I have long maintained that what Mozilla should have done was a Firefox OS based e-reader. The mania that exists for all things e-ink in the tech industry is real, and if you combined that with a proper open platform you could leverage it into being a self sustaining business.
- lipowitz 1y ago
  I don't think video mattered at all to their failure. FirefoxOS was never going to eat Apple's lunch it was going to eat Google's. If thousands of vendors had made something Android 2.X level for the entry level market and the technical people who actually want what Google engineers wanted the ecosystem by volume would have been mostly FirefoxOS instead of mostly out of date Android and the ecosystem by revenue still Apple's.
  - fidotron 1y ago
    > FirefoxOS was never going to eat Apple's lunch it was going to eat Google's. Aside from all else, and what about the very responsive Windows Phone 7 or similarly flawed WebOS? Let alone all the feature phones, Blackberry etc. This was an enormously competitive era, and Google had to do some serious fighting to secure the future of Android at that time. Phone manufacturers do not exist to serve the bidding of the software builders, they actually have to make money, and doing that requires looking at least superficially competitive. The primary way users experience that is through the graphical interface on the device, hence why my then employer made incredible amounts of money selling game builds for all these other devices to demonstrate how close to iPhone equivalent they were. It's no accident that the Android golden age began with fusing the UI concepts of WebOS that worked with a rendering pipeline that started to make sense for the hardware it was on.
owebmaster 1y ago
I had a FirefoxOS phone and loved it! That thing was the future I wanted for mobile :(
- fsflover 1y ago
  Was it somehow more promising than today's GNU/Linux phones (Librem 5 and Pinephone)?
  - owebmaster 1y ago
    Much more! Because there was a big brand behind it. I got mine for free in a hackathon (maybe that's why it didn't work well). The support for web apps was great too, it was so easy to code for it. The hardware was bad and the touchscreen awful tho. But nothing too worse than Android during the time
    - fsflover 1y ago
      Web apps work fine on my Librem 5 and the touchscreen is fine, too. So the difference I see is only in the big brand, which is indeed important. I wish Mozilla tried to adapt Firefox OS for the newer libre-friendly hardware.
      - owebmaster 1y ago
        in this case the biggest difference is distribution. If I could easily have access to a librem 5, my opinion would be different.
        fsflover 1y ago
        Librem 5 might be too expensive, but Pinephone is cheap and easily accesible, isn't it?
        owebmaster 1y ago
        No Linux phone is easily accessible, unfortunately.
cosmodev 1y ago
When I was just starting to learn programming years ago, I wanted to build apps for mobile devices. But my computer couldn’t handle Android Studio, so I started exploring alternatives and that’s when I discovered Firefox OS. The idea of building apps with JavaScript was really exciting. All I wanted back then was to make a simple WebView app. It’s fascinating to learn the story behind Firefox OS all these years later
nicoburns 1y ago
> With retrospect, I think B2G was a good idea - challenging Apple would also have been a good idea, as we had an internal demo of gecko powered Firefox for iOS. Owning the complete stack was the right approach. It gives you the power to have something that work nicely on the devices you support. I think the development approach we took was the wrong one. We were too in a hurry and that ended up neglecting Desktop. I believe we should have engaged potential partners way later, with a better, more finished and more QAed product. I think this is basically correct. I also think: - Targeting low end devices first was a huge mistake. The web stack they were building on was simply too inefficient for that to work with the devices at the time. If they'd targeted high end devices then it would likely have worked on low-end devices by the time they were ready to ship it anyway (perhaps this plays into them rushing and having unrealistic timescales) - It's really unfortunate that Rust wasn't a bit further along during the Firefox OS era. A lot of the Rust UI pieces that are now being developed would make a really strong foundation for something like Firefox OS. And could perhaps also have enabled a better story for "breaking out" of the confines of the web platform.
- woodrowbarlow 1y ago
  but did they choose the correct path for their org to get there? > [Mozilla] hired someone from the mobile industry to run the company, this led to some culture changes : no more a flat org, but a pyramidal one with middle managers. Culture became way less engineering centric, and started being a bit more top -> down. Focus was now solely on B2G. when i think about the occasional anti-user decisions Mozilla has been making in the past several years (most recently, AI training policies) i wonder now if it's all residual from this structural shift.
  - nicoburns 1y ago
    > when i think about the occasional anti-user decisions Mozilla has been making in the past several years (most recently, AI training policies) i wonder now if it's all residual from this structural shift. I don't know enough about Mozilla to say, but the OP certainly makes it sound that way.
  - khuey 1y ago
dmurray 1y ago
> Owning the complete stack was the right approach. It gives you the power to have something that work nicely on the devices you support. Imagine every application developer thought this way! For every app I want to use, I would have a different device running a different OS?
- acdha 1y ago
  Web browsers are unusual in that they were traditionally applications but quickly became platforms in their own right, and they have a role as an intermediary between the user and untrusted third-parties which makes the UI and performance challenges more complicated. Most other applications don't have those needs so they’d never want to take on the extra work – Adobe foundered under the weight, and they had a much better starting point than almost anyone else.
- protocolture 1y ago
  >Imagine every application developer thought this way! Supply chain attacks eradicated overnight.
seba_dos1 1y ago
My biggest gripe with Firefox OS was that it just wasn't all that different from Android - both technically and philosophically. Aside of a bunch of selected developer-targeted devices, it was usually being just as locked down as Android was. This was done because of the strategy of partnerships with carriers and vendors, but ultimately it just made it uninteresting for the broader FLOSS community to embrace, as it just boiled down to replacing Java-based stack with Web-based one without making any significant progress in device openness and user freedom. It didn't even help Linux, as B2G was made to use Android-specific layers to ensure compatibility with blobs and unmaintainable vendor-provided kernel trees.
- akdev1l 1y ago
  There is literally no way Firefox could have fixed the entire OEM landscape. OEMs are not going to release the driver source code. They simply will not, at best they do random code dumps of whatever kernel version they were using at the time. This is still true today and even Google tried to make it better with Project Treble. If Google cannot fix this even after all these years with total market dominance then literally Mozilla couldn’t do a single thing about it
  - seba_dos1 1y ago
    Nobody can "fix the entire OEM landscape". Mozilla could have nudged it in the right direction. They didn't try. Not even a step forwards. The entire value proposition from non-technical standpoint was "we're not Google". Others are trying with much less leverage or resources and actually progressing. Firefox OS was born, lived and died without making a dent.
rjsw 1y ago
Firefox OS is available on phones today, just rebranded as KaiOS. I have a Nokia 6300 4G, it works fine for what I want: A small dual SIM phone with good call quality and a 4G router when away from home. Any apps are a bonus though Meta recently withdrew the WhatsApp one.
- mdaniel 1y ago
  heh https://github.com/kaiostech/gecko-b2g https://github.com/kaiostech/gecko-b2g says > This branch is 400945 commits ahead of, 15894 commits behind mozilla-b2g/gecko-b2g:b2g48_v2_6 and it seems they're still using bugzilla, so they're obviously hard-core Here are the list of their 74 supported devices https://www.kaiostech.com/explore/devices/ https://www.kaiostech.com/explore/devices/
- bandoti 1y ago
  Nice I would like to explore KaiOS more. I have been thinking these days: what is the bare minimum people need today in a mobile digital experience. Browser, phone, email/contacts, maps, payment, authentication, file manager, networking (NFC, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, cellular). Seems like with the progression of web APIs and WASM, most of this functionality can live in the browser.
  - owebmaster 1y ago
    What I know is that nowadays, having less apps is a feature. A lot of people would buy a phone that does not have TikTok and Instagram
  - Aeglaecia 1y ago
    kaios is disappointing , feature poor , and buggy - dumb phones running it are mere echoes of their predecessors
  - qingcharles 1y ago
    I see and use these devices when I help newly released parolees, who are sometimes prohibited from having any apps while on parole, and these are the "dumbest" phones you can currently buy. They're honestly pretty horrible. Everything is just so much effort on them. Nothing makes sense. And I'm no dummy. I worked for Nokia for a while on prototypes in the mid-2000s, which is the kind of era these Kai phones hark back to.
afavour 1y ago
I have no insider knowledge but from my perspective the reason Firefox OS failed is the same reason WebOS failed and the same reason Windows Phone failed: apps. If you didn't have the apps users wanted they wouldn't buy into your platform, it really was as simple as that. That said I think Mozilla were right to try. The phone ecosystem we live in today is locked down and tightly controlled by tech giants. Leveraging web tech to bridge that gap made sense, even if it had drawbacks. But it was a competitive environment where they needed to nail absolutely everything first time and just couldn't pull it off.
- arcbyte 1y ago
  I actually think Windows Phone was close to a breakthrough when Microsoft shut it down. Apps were always important, yes, but wayyy less so outside the tech blogger circle for everyday users. Normal people loved the hub experiences and it had enough apps for them, with missing ones eventually coming out by the time normal people knew they wanted them. Tech Bloggers couldn't stand that a startup would launch on Apple (not even Android) and they couldn't download them and write about them. They made a lot of noise about this. But it was always nonsense.
  - mort96 1y ago
    Sorry but nobody is going to use a phone where they can't chat with their friends via whatever chat app they're already using or transfer money via whatever money transfer apps their social group is already using or transfer money between their existing bank accounts with their bank's apps or check in with their flights or use their city's public transport infrastructure apps or parking payment apps or car charging apps or taxi hauling apps or food delivery apps. I think the average non-technical user uses a whole lot more apps than what you give them "credit" for. The technology industry has pushed for more and more everyday services to be app-based. And most of these apps work only on iOS and Android.
  - sillystu04 1y ago
    In hindsight, it would've been worthwhile for Microsoft to tolerate heavy losses for a decade on Windows phone. Like they did with Bing or Azure. In the 2020s every serious app developer from Epic to Spotify to Facebook to Tinder is desperately concerned by the platform policies of Apple/Google, and would gladly support Windows phone as first class platform. And so would consumers - enterprises would love to have their AD groups work neatly on employee devices and many individual buyers would love to have more open freedom too.
KingOfCoders 1y ago
"We were struggling with Chrome and the massive investment by Google to take market share." So we decided to start a competitor to Android to win in an even more difficult market against both Apple AND Google because we could not win the easier market.
- jeroenhd 1y ago
  FirefoxOS was eventually forked into KaiOS, which was the second most common mobile OS in India for a while, selling millions of phones. It was never going to beat iOS, but it could've had Google's (and at the time Microsoft's lunch) for cheaper phones. On the browser front, Google only had a third of the market at that point. Firefox was losing users, but the situation wasn't nearly as dire as it is right now.
  - panick21_ 1y ago
    And what would having millions of cheap phones meant for Mozilla? Not much if you ask me. Basically just Indian and Chinese ultra cheap phones that pay very little back and do little development. Chrome might have only had a third of the market, but anybody around at the time could see that this was only a matter of time. Chrome was just better in so many ways. Mozilla needed to buckle down and focus all their engineer on the browser.
numpad0 1y ago
The bad idea was HTML/CSS. As much as I hate "site hijacking my scroll" type contents, it's annoying that browsers can't fully commit to it either. HTML is always the document inside a window, never had been a GUI toolkit of more than bare minimum quality. That has to be the problem with the "browser is the OS" approach.
exiguus 1y ago
I remember owning one, but I gave it to my wife after six months because it was too slow.
panick21_ 1y ago
I would have prefer pushing forward MeeGo and have a great Firefox ontop of it. Not sure how that lines up with their timeline.
- thisislife2 1y ago
  Meego morphed into Sailfish OS ( https://sailfishos.org/info/ https://sailfishos.org/info/ ). Jolla sells it as a subscription service on mobile devices for €59.88 / year :( https://commerce.jolla.com/products/jolla-community-phone https://commerce.jolla.com/products/jolla-community-phone ) ... the future for computing is really gonna suck.
  - jeroenhd 1y ago
    Jolla seems to be dying but you can still get Sailfish for free (the comparison table at the bottom of https://shop.jolla.com/details/12596a34-597b-47d4-a502-c0ef15d2a4de/ https://shop.jolla.com/details/12596a34-597b-47d4-a502-c0ef1... shows what you'll be missing out on).
kjkjadksj 1y ago
I’ve been using firefox since one of the first few versions and somehow even I missed out on the fact there was ever a firefoxOS phone. Yeah. I’d put the blame squarely on marketing. Shit can ship if it’s sold well.
NetOpWibby 1y ago
This basically confirms my suspicions that: — Firefox OS would've worked — Mozilla leadership has always been interested in chasing fads — Letting smart, motivated people work on cool shit is necessary to create the future. cries in Bell Labs
- dblohm7 1y ago
  I worked at Mozilla during this time, originally on desktop and later on mobile. I think the fundamental problem then (and still a problem today) is that Mozilla only ever had the budget to do Desktop XOR Mobile. Not both. They basically mortgaged Desktop Firefox to build Firefox OS, but when things didn't pan out was quickly as they liked, they had to revert back to Desktop to save the cash cow. After that experience, upper management became averse to mobile, to the extent that it was (and probably still is) very difficult to get resources allocated to mobile implementations of Gecko features that are supposed to be cross-platform. In practice many of those features are never implemented with mobile in mind.
- qingcharles 1y ago
  Firefox OS would not have worked, IMO. It fitted a specific place and time (cheap, crappy phones) that quickly evaporated and users demanded a lot more than Mozilla would ever have had the resources to provide. I wish there was a (good) third option. I actually liked Windows Phone and was sad it was canned.
ksec 1y ago
Tidbits from when I was still heavily involved as what the post described as Mozilla community. Even during B2G and Firefox OS Mozilla still believe Google were their Friends. And will somehow continue to fund them, because Google is a search company, not a Chrome / Android company. B2G announced in 2011, but I remember some idea / hints of it started floating around before then. Probably somewhere along the way of developing PDF.js if I remember correctly. Dont bet against Javascript. Anything could be done in Javascript should be done in Javascript. Practically speaking that means apart from Kernel and drivers all things should be javascript. Even when it is easier for it to be done in C++. Hardware is cheap. Software is expensive. Moore's Law meant hardware cost will half every 2 years and eventually so cheap it will be subsidised by software. That is why by aiming at low cost smartphone they meant $35 dollar smartphones. I think this thought disease was actually started by Bill Gate. That was the time I learned Silicon Valley have absolutely no idea about anything supply chain and hardware. Apple being an absolute outliner and exception. Firefox was slow the day Chrome was born. Because everything is comparative. And e10s ( Electrolysis ) took 7 years before it was shipped on Desktop. It was originally targeted for Firefox 4. And took another 1 - 2 years for additional tuning and ironing out rough edges. As the article suggested. Everything at the time was mobile and B2G. It took a while before they realise Desktop Firefox, their cash cow wasn't competing and need some attention. ( It was too late ) I dont remember if Memshrink was started because of B2G. But Firefox at the time definitely have memory issues. Memshrink is ultimately is what leads to Firefox being the best browser to handle thousands of tabs. And About:memory was born out of it. B2G as an idea wasn't wrong per se. But it was wrong timing and execution. Mozilla as a company was way too idealistic. From technological, marketing, strategy to execution. Ultimately as the article suggest, it was a management issue. And if Mozilla have taken those lessons and learned from it in 2016. I believe they could still have had Firefox OS windows of opportunity in 2021. When somehow both Google and Apple became evil. Instead they wasted money on AI and many other initiatives. I believe the downfall of Mozilla was when they won the war against IE. And that perhaps planted the seed they could really achieve everything. To this day I am not sure if they realised they won because of the Mozilla community being their evangelist ( Not being a negative thing at the time of 00s ) and perhaps more importantly. Microsoft IE wasn't even competing. I still remember the New York Times Ads. Good Old Days.
bgirard 1y ago
I worked on the rendering team at Mozilla during that time and contributed a lot to improving performance and reducing memory usage for B2G. I remember I was optimizing the experience for 256 MB devices, then one day we're told to start optimizing for a 128 MB reference phone. The very next day I open up HN to see Ars Technica reviewing a Firefox OS 64 MB phone. Predictably I knew that the experience would be terrible because I was still optimizing rendering for 256 MB two days priors. Us shipping devices that our software wasn't tuned for shot the very little remaining faith I had in the project. Coincidentally I was profiling and tuning the keyboard pop-open for 256 MB devices at the time. Profiling and tuning the trade-offs of when to render and animate the graphical layers. Knowing that these trade-offs would be very different and incorrect for a 64 MB device.
- khuey 1y ago
  I was also there for the memory usage side of things. B2G management was driven by a mix of "the web is the platform" ideology[0] and a willingness to promise whatever carriers and OEMs wanted to close a distribution deal regardless of whether it was feasible or made any sense. My own personal "this project is hopelessly doomed" moment was roughly 48 hours before the 1.4 code freeze when I was contacted by a colleague asking how feature X was coming along. Feature X was needed to fix Bug Y, and Bug Y was in the critical bug list for the code freeze. But it turned out the B2G project managers had decided to manually track their critical bug list outside of Bugzilla, and didn't make any effort to track the transitive dependencies of those bugs, or notify anyone that they should be working on these. "ngmi" hadn't been popularized yet but that was very much my feeling at that moment. Active development ceased by the end of the year. [0] which I think could have panned out at least technically, given sufficient resources, time, etc
  - dcminter 1y ago
    > ... a willingness to promise whatever carriers and OEMs wanted to close a distribution deal... That always struck me as one of the more impressive things that Jobs achieved with the original iPhone - getting buy-in from Cingular to do things Apple's way and not Cingular's. Pre-iPod Apple probably couldn't have done it.
neilv 1y ago
I had a few Firefox OS devices to eval, and I really wanted to adopt it, but concerns at the time: * The build process was atop Android, and pulled in a massive bulk of dependencies (open and closed), in various ways, and was effectively unauditable. * I was turned off by it looking like they might be selling out the home screen in a way that threatened privacy&security. https://techcrunch.com/2014/02/05/firefox-launcher/ https://techcrunch.com/2014/02/05/firefox-launcher/ * I wanted a trustworthy, sustainable, open platform, and unfortunately it didn't look like Firefox OS was headed in that direction.
- rickdeckard 1y ago
  > I was turned off by it looking like they might be selling out the home screen in a way that threatened privacy&security This was honestly a realistic risk, not because of the link you shared but because over the course of development, the success of FFOS became increasingly dependant on the commitment of carriers, and the main interest of those carriers was to create a OS under their control...
  - neilv 1y ago
    If only carriers had never learned that even ringtones were a cash cow. Trying to develop software for pre-iPhone phones seemed to be a mess of barriers to ISVs, like "BREW" and carrier approval. It makes sense that carriers still want the phone locked down as much as possible, so they can extract more money from their captive customer. (Also, it's still an expensive chore to get Pixels on which a carrier hasn't locked the bootloader against alternative firmware like GrapheneOS. Lawmakers/regulators should say that carriers may only provide voice and data service, for a fee, and aren't allowed to use their position to extract money other ways.)
Benjamin_Dobell 1y ago
This takes me back. Whilst I was studying at university, I developed Heimdall, open source firmware flashing software for Samsung Android phones. I don't know that it was ever official, but I remember being pretty stoked when I realised some Mozilla employees were using Heimdall to flash Firefox OS onto Samsung devices: https://developer.mozilla.org.cach3.com/my/docs/Mozilla/B2G_OS/Installing_on_a_mobile_device https://developer.mozilla.org.cach3.com/my/docs/Mozilla/B2G_...
- fabrice_d 1y ago
  Yes, thanks for Heimdall! Indeed we did a lot of the initial dev on Samsung Galaxy S2 devices flashed with your tool!
trhway 1y ago
Working with Mozilla code in 1999 and seeing NSPR (Netscape Portable Runtime) I thought back then - that would soon bring the golden age that Java OS was intended to yet had failed for the performance among the other reasons. Somehow it didn’t happen - Firefox OS was too little too late.
soapdog 1y ago
I was there. Firefox OS devices outsold all predictions in target markets in South America. They were a lot cheaper than the competition and worked well enough. What caused it to fail was, I kid you not, the lack of WhatsApp. People in South America rely heavily on that messaging app for everything. SMS and other messaging apps were not viable options cause the people whom Firefox OS users needed to message were all on WhatsApp.
- hiAndrewQuinn 1y ago
  This doesn't actually surprise me, WhatsApp is fantastic at what it does. I seem to recall another story about a company which got a desktop browser running in a mobile browser and getting flooded with Indians using the site because it let them access WhatsApp without a data surcharge or something.
- mmsimanga 1y ago
  WhatsApp is the Internet in two countries I reside in Africa. South Africa and Zimbabwe. Anecdotally this is true for most African countries. Businesses and families depend on WhatsApp.
  - alfiedotwtf 1y ago
    Unless you are Russian or have worked in crypto, you can’t fathom how many people and businesses rely on Telegram too
- potato-peeler 1y ago
  The entire thread is debating on reasons for fos failure, even attributing that rust could have saved it, while the actual reason is right here! Normal folks just want to use phone to help them with their lives, and as such if they can’t find apps which helps them, they won’t use that phone as their daily driver. They don’t care if it was built with rust or js or java or anything obscure.
- jeroenhd 1y ago
  I always found it very interesting how WhatsApp kept its Symbian app alive for so long but didn't build an application for FFOS. They had a KaiOS app but it seems like they dropped KaiOS too. I do wonder, though, did Mozilla ever try to convince Facebook to build a FirefoxOS build of WhatsApp?
masfoobar 1y ago
I was a Firefox OS user around the 2011-2016 era -- somewhere around there. I was using it for about 5 years.. and very happy! To me it was money well spent. About £50 (CTE Open???) for a firefox phone and it covered all I needed at that time. Calls, Text, Games.. and allowed html5 projects, which I created to do things with my home server. At the time, it was just a WIN-WIN as I could not be asked to create Android apps. I was sad when Firefox no longer supported it. Evenutally, I finally jumped in the Android world. I dont think my reasons were entirely about Firefox, but because I was changing my roles and resposibilities at work and had to make/answer more calls that ever. My Pay as you go scheme was not suitable anymore so decided to buy contract. I was proud holding off for as long as I could but in todays world where I need WhatsApp, MSTeams, VPN, etc.. I doubt I would have stayed on FirefoxOS if still going strong today. Alternatively I could just ask for a Company Phone. LOL. Overall, the Firefox phone was nice. A bit quirky in places but for the hardware at the time (compared to what was on the market) it was pretty cool. Some people laughed at me with their IPhone of Galaxy.. but I didn't care. I do keep my eye on other Open Source/Free phones. Honestly, if there is a performant phone that is affordable and runs GNOME smoothly (and nice experience) I honestly would consider it.. as long as the apps mentioned above can run.
moondowner 1y ago
I remember when ZTE Open was released in Europe in 2013, it was a decent Firefox OS phone. The downside for me was that it didn't feel premium. Compared to the 2012 HTC One S that I had back then, which was very slim, with aluminum finish and great screen, it didn't stood the chance.

197 points by todsacerdoti 1y ago

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

I had a Firefox OS phone for hobby development. The initial release wasn't amazing, but 2.0 was actually surprisingly smooth and snappy on the anemic-even-for-the-time hardware! Great little device, genuinely. EDIT: It was a ZTE Open

tecleandor 1y ago
I had two development devices, one was the Geeksphone Peak, and the other one (IIRC) was the Geeksphone Keos. One of them developed battery problems quickly (or something like that) and I think I didn't get to test v2 in the other one. I have to check if I still have it around...
- Qem 1y ago
  I still keep my Alcatel One Touch Fire, from circa 2014, as a keepsake. One funny detail I noticed recently was that its battery was made by BYD, back then an unremarkable brand. So its operating system stalled, but at least the maker of another component became immensely successful since then.
  - owebmaster 1y ago
    Now you got me hoping for a BYD phone
Groxx 1y ago
Yeah, honestly I still like some things about it better than other OSes. And the web/native fusion was much better than anything similar that iOS or Android have tried (though not perfect either). Though I am very unhappy to see that its bounce-and-stretch animation at the end of scrolling is appearing everywhere :/ It was uncomfortable and weird looking then, and it still is now.

this_user 1y ago

Sadly, this doesn't go into too much detail, but it does mention a few things that explain how Mozilla ended up becoming the bloated mess it is now. > They hired someone from the mobile industry to run the company, this led to some culture changes : no more a flat org, but a pyramidal one with middle managers. Culture became way less engineering centric, and started being a bit more top -> down. > Besides becoming more like a normal company, the new CEO grew the size of our teams, added project managers, Sales people, to make sure B2G would reach a huge audience.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
resource_waste 1y ago
I'm a bit less critical on the management thing than most. As an engineer, we all want to think engineers are all that is needed. However sales and management are needed. Too many layers are a real problem, but it doesnt say much when its coming from people at the bottom. They can't see what is happening above them.
- owebmaster 1y ago
  > but it doesnt say much when its coming from people at the bottom. They can't see what is happening above them. Oh they could and the results show it. The new people made a lot more money including the Google deal. While destroying Firefox
- this_user 1y ago
  I depends on what kind of company you are what and who you need. That may be the problem with Mozilla that they don't really know what they are. They started out as a vehicle for the browser, but then they broadened their mission to some vague notion of "defending the open Internet" or something like that. And since they had enough free cash flow, they were able to get into all kinds of areas and projects where they had no real expertise and set themselves up to fail. And this is a common management mistake: "We have the money, we need to grow." Meta have basically been doing that for years now, launching all kinds of projects that were mostly failures. But their ad income from FB and IG is more than enough to compensate for that. Google are in a similar position. When was the last time they actually launched a truly successful new product? Maybe it would be better to let it be. In the case of Mozilla, focus on Firefox on all of the different platforms. On the other hand, not trying to grow is a career risk for management. If you are not implementing a growth strategy, why exactly are we paying you millions per year?

fidotron 1y ago

The real reason Firefox OS was doomed was the timing was all wrong with the explosion in graphics capability of the devices, as anyone that worked on anything performance sensitive during the iPhone 3GS -> 4 will tell you: the same GPUs were being asked to drive 4x the number of pixels. Users didn't care, they just expected it to work. FFOS was doomed because the pixel explosion wasn't just stretching the GPUs of that time, it had also made CPU rendering a serious bottleneck, a fact the Android team also struggled to accept. Mozilla lacked the resources to do anything about it, although I didn't get the impression they actually understood the problem at all (as shown by it not being mentioned here), while the Googlers resorted to that most Googly of activities: arguing via walls of text that try to deny the obvious truth. I have long maintained that what Mozilla should have done was a Firefox OS based e-reader. The mania that exists for all things e-ink in the tech industry is real, and if you combined that with a proper open platform you could leverage it into being a self sustaining business.

lipowitz 1y ago
I don't think video mattered at all to their failure. FirefoxOS was never going to eat Apple's lunch it was going to eat Google's. If thousands of vendors had made something Android 2.X level for the entry level market and the technical people who actually want what Google engineers wanted the ecosystem by volume would have been mostly FirefoxOS instead of mostly out of date Android and the ecosystem by revenue still Apple's.
- fidotron 1y ago
  > FirefoxOS was never going to eat Apple's lunch it was going to eat Google's. Aside from all else, and what about the very responsive Windows Phone 7 or similarly flawed WebOS? Let alone all the feature phones, Blackberry etc. This was an enormously competitive era, and Google had to do some serious fighting to secure the future of Android at that time. Phone manufacturers do not exist to serve the bidding of the software builders, they actually have to make money, and doing that requires looking at least superficially competitive. The primary way users experience that is through the graphical interface on the device, hence why my then employer made incredible amounts of money selling game builds for all these other devices to demonstrate how close to iPhone equivalent they were. It's no accident that the Android golden age began with fusing the UI concepts of WebOS that worked with a rendering pipeline that started to make sense for the hardware it was on.

owebmaster 1y ago

I had a FirefoxOS phone and loved it! That thing was the future I wanted for mobile :(

fsflover 1y ago
Was it somehow more promising than today's GNU/Linux phones (Librem 5 and Pinephone)?
- owebmaster 1y ago
  Much more! Because there was a big brand behind it. I got mine for free in a hackathon (maybe that's why it didn't work well). The support for web apps was great too, it was so easy to code for it. The hardware was bad and the touchscreen awful tho. But nothing too worse than Android during the time
  - fsflover 1y ago
    Web apps work fine on my Librem 5 and the touchscreen is fine, too. So the difference I see is only in the big brand, which is indeed important. I wish Mozilla tried to adapt Firefox OS for the newer libre-friendly hardware.
    - owebmaster 1y ago
      in this case the biggest difference is distribution. If I could easily have access to a librem 5, my opinion would be different.
      - fsflover 1y ago
        Librem 5 might be too expensive, but Pinephone is cheap and easily accesible, isn't it?
        owebmaster 1y ago
        No Linux phone is easily accessible, unfortunately.

cosmodev 1y ago

When I was just starting to learn programming years ago, I wanted to build apps for mobile devices. But my computer couldn’t handle Android Studio, so I started exploring alternatives and that’s when I discovered Firefox OS. The idea of building apps with JavaScript was really exciting. All I wanted back then was to make a simple WebView app. It’s fascinating to learn the story behind Firefox OS all these years later

nicoburns 1y ago

> With retrospect, I think B2G was a good idea - challenging Apple would also have been a good idea, as we had an internal demo of gecko powered Firefox for iOS. Owning the complete stack was the right approach. It gives you the power to have something that work nicely on the devices you support. I think the development approach we took was the wrong one. We were too in a hurry and that ended up neglecting Desktop. I believe we should have engaged potential partners way later, with a better, more finished and more QAed product. I think this is basically correct. I also think: - Targeting low end devices first was a huge mistake. The web stack they were building on was simply too inefficient for that to work with the devices at the time. If they'd targeted high end devices then it would likely have worked on low-end devices by the time they were ready to ship it anyway (perhaps this plays into them rushing and having unrealistic timescales) - It's really unfortunate that Rust wasn't a bit further along during the Firefox OS era. A lot of the Rust UI pieces that are now being developed would make a really strong foundation for something like Firefox OS. And could perhaps also have enabled a better story for "breaking out" of the confines of the web platform.

woodrowbarlow 1y ago
but did they choose the correct path for their org to get there? > [Mozilla] hired someone from the mobile industry to run the company, this led to some culture changes : no more a flat org, but a pyramidal one with middle managers. Culture became way less engineering centric, and started being a bit more top -> down. Focus was now solely on B2G. when i think about the occasional anti-user decisions Mozilla has been making in the past several years (most recently, AI training policies) i wonder now if it's all residual from this structural shift.
- nicoburns 1y ago
  > when i think about the occasional anti-user decisions Mozilla has been making in the past several years (most recently, AI training policies) i wonder now if it's all residual from this structural shift. I don't know enough about Mozilla to say, but the OP certainly makes it sound that way.
- khuey 1y ago

dmurray 1y ago

> Owning the complete stack was the right approach. It gives you the power to have something that work nicely on the devices you support. Imagine every application developer thought this way! For every app I want to use, I would have a different device running a different OS?

acdha 1y ago
Web browsers are unusual in that they were traditionally applications but quickly became platforms in their own right, and they have a role as an intermediary between the user and untrusted third-parties which makes the UI and performance challenges more complicated. Most other applications don't have those needs so they’d never want to take on the extra work – Adobe foundered under the weight, and they had a much better starting point than almost anyone else.
protocolture 1y ago
>Imagine every application developer thought this way! Supply chain attacks eradicated overnight.

seba_dos1 1y ago

My biggest gripe with Firefox OS was that it just wasn't all that different from Android - both technically and philosophically. Aside of a bunch of selected developer-targeted devices, it was usually being just as locked down as Android was. This was done because of the strategy of partnerships with carriers and vendors, but ultimately it just made it uninteresting for the broader FLOSS community to embrace, as it just boiled down to replacing Java-based stack with Web-based one without making any significant progress in device openness and user freedom. It didn't even help Linux, as B2G was made to use Android-specific layers to ensure compatibility with blobs and unmaintainable vendor-provided kernel trees.

akdev1l 1y ago
There is literally no way Firefox could have fixed the entire OEM landscape. OEMs are not going to release the driver source code. They simply will not, at best they do random code dumps of whatever kernel version they were using at the time. This is still true today and even Google tried to make it better with Project Treble. If Google cannot fix this even after all these years with total market dominance then literally Mozilla couldn’t do a single thing about it
- seba_dos1 1y ago
  Nobody can "fix the entire OEM landscape". Mozilla could have nudged it in the right direction. They didn't try. Not even a step forwards. The entire value proposition from non-technical standpoint was "we're not Google". Others are trying with much less leverage or resources and actually progressing. Firefox OS was born, lived and died without making a dent.

rjsw 1y ago

Firefox OS is available on phones today, just rebranded as KaiOS. I have a Nokia 6300 4G, it works fine for what I want: A small dual SIM phone with good call quality and a 4G router when away from home. Any apps are a bonus though Meta recently withdrew the WhatsApp one.

mdaniel 1y ago
heh https://github.com/kaiostech/gecko-b2g https://github.com/kaiostech/gecko-b2g says > This branch is 400945 commits ahead of, 15894 commits behind mozilla-b2g/gecko-b2g:b2g48_v2_6 and it seems they're still using bugzilla, so they're obviously hard-core Here are the list of their 74 supported devices https://www.kaiostech.com/explore/devices/ https://www.kaiostech.com/explore/devices/
bandoti 1y ago
Nice I would like to explore KaiOS more. I have been thinking these days: what is the bare minimum people need today in a mobile digital experience. Browser, phone, email/contacts, maps, payment, authentication, file manager, networking (NFC, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, cellular). Seems like with the progression of web APIs and WASM, most of this functionality can live in the browser.
- owebmaster 1y ago
  What I know is that nowadays, having less apps is a feature. A lot of people would buy a phone that does not have TikTok and Instagram
- Aeglaecia 1y ago
  kaios is disappointing , feature poor , and buggy - dumb phones running it are mere echoes of their predecessors
- qingcharles 1y ago
  I see and use these devices when I help newly released parolees, who are sometimes prohibited from having any apps while on parole, and these are the "dumbest" phones you can currently buy. They're honestly pretty horrible. Everything is just so much effort on them. Nothing makes sense. And I'm no dummy. I worked for Nokia for a while on prototypes in the mid-2000s, which is the kind of era these Kai phones hark back to.

afavour 1y ago

I have no insider knowledge but from my perspective the reason Firefox OS failed is the same reason WebOS failed and the same reason Windows Phone failed: apps. If you didn't have the apps users wanted they wouldn't buy into your platform, it really was as simple as that. That said I think Mozilla were right to try. The phone ecosystem we live in today is locked down and tightly controlled by tech giants. Leveraging web tech to bridge that gap made sense, even if it had drawbacks. But it was a competitive environment where they needed to nail absolutely everything first time and just couldn't pull it off.

arcbyte 1y ago
I actually think Windows Phone was close to a breakthrough when Microsoft shut it down. Apps were always important, yes, but wayyy less so outside the tech blogger circle for everyday users. Normal people loved the hub experiences and it had enough apps for them, with missing ones eventually coming out by the time normal people knew they wanted them. Tech Bloggers couldn't stand that a startup would launch on Apple (not even Android) and they couldn't download them and write about them. They made a lot of noise about this. But it was always nonsense.
- mort96 1y ago
  Sorry but nobody is going to use a phone where they can't chat with their friends via whatever chat app they're already using or transfer money via whatever money transfer apps their social group is already using or transfer money between their existing bank accounts with their bank's apps or check in with their flights or use their city's public transport infrastructure apps or parking payment apps or car charging apps or taxi hauling apps or food delivery apps. I think the average non-technical user uses a whole lot more apps than what you give them "credit" for. The technology industry has pushed for more and more everyday services to be app-based. And most of these apps work only on iOS and Android.
- sillystu04 1y ago
  In hindsight, it would've been worthwhile for Microsoft to tolerate heavy losses for a decade on Windows phone. Like they did with Bing or Azure. In the 2020s every serious app developer from Epic to Spotify to Facebook to Tinder is desperately concerned by the platform policies of Apple/Google, and would gladly support Windows phone as first class platform. And so would consumers - enterprises would love to have their AD groups work neatly on employee devices and many individual buyers would love to have more open freedom too.

KingOfCoders 1y ago

"We were struggling with Chrome and the massive investment by Google to take market share." So we decided to start a competitor to Android to win in an even more difficult market against both Apple AND Google because we could not win the easier market.

jeroenhd 1y ago
FirefoxOS was eventually forked into KaiOS, which was the second most common mobile OS in India for a while, selling millions of phones. It was never going to beat iOS, but it could've had Google's (and at the time Microsoft's lunch) for cheaper phones. On the browser front, Google only had a third of the market at that point. Firefox was losing users, but the situation wasn't nearly as dire as it is right now.
- panick21_ 1y ago
  And what would having millions of cheap phones meant for Mozilla? Not much if you ask me. Basically just Indian and Chinese ultra cheap phones that pay very little back and do little development. Chrome might have only had a third of the market, but anybody around at the time could see that this was only a matter of time. Chrome was just better in so many ways. Mozilla needed to buckle down and focus all their engineer on the browser.

numpad0 1y ago

The bad idea was HTML/CSS. As much as I hate "site hijacking my scroll" type contents, it's annoying that browsers can't fully commit to it either. HTML is always the document inside a window, never had been a GUI toolkit of more than bare minimum quality. That has to be the problem with the "browser is the OS" approach.

exiguus 1y ago

I remember owning one, but I gave it to my wife after six months because it was too slow.

panick21_ 1y ago

I would have prefer pushing forward MeeGo and have a great Firefox ontop of it. Not sure how that lines up with their timeline.

thisislife2 1y ago
Meego morphed into Sailfish OS ( https://sailfishos.org/info/ https://sailfishos.org/info/ ). Jolla sells it as a subscription service on mobile devices for €59.88 / year :( https://commerce.jolla.com/products/jolla-community-phone https://commerce.jolla.com/products/jolla-community-phone ) ... the future for computing is really gonna suck.
- jeroenhd 1y ago
  Jolla seems to be dying but you can still get Sailfish for free (the comparison table at the bottom of https://shop.jolla.com/details/12596a34-597b-47d4-a502-c0ef15d2a4de/ https://shop.jolla.com/details/12596a34-597b-47d4-a502-c0ef1... shows what you'll be missing out on).

kjkjadksj 1y ago

I’ve been using firefox since one of the first few versions and somehow even I missed out on the fact there was ever a firefoxOS phone. Yeah. I’d put the blame squarely on marketing. Shit can ship if it’s sold well.

NetOpWibby 1y ago

This basically confirms my suspicions that: — Firefox OS would've worked — Mozilla leadership has always been interested in chasing fads — Letting smart, motivated people work on cool shit is necessary to create the future. cries in Bell Labs

dblohm7 1y ago
I worked at Mozilla during this time, originally on desktop and later on mobile. I think the fundamental problem then (and still a problem today) is that Mozilla only ever had the budget to do Desktop XOR Mobile. Not both. They basically mortgaged Desktop Firefox to build Firefox OS, but when things didn't pan out was quickly as they liked, they had to revert back to Desktop to save the cash cow. After that experience, upper management became averse to mobile, to the extent that it was (and probably still is) very difficult to get resources allocated to mobile implementations of Gecko features that are supposed to be cross-platform. In practice many of those features are never implemented with mobile in mind.
qingcharles 1y ago
Firefox OS would not have worked, IMO. It fitted a specific place and time (cheap, crappy phones) that quickly evaporated and users demanded a lot more than Mozilla would ever have had the resources to provide. I wish there was a (good) third option. I actually liked Windows Phone and was sad it was canned.

ksec 1y ago

Tidbits from when I was still heavily involved as what the post described as Mozilla community. Even during B2G and Firefox OS Mozilla still believe Google were their Friends. And will somehow continue to fund them, because Google is a search company, not a Chrome / Android company. B2G announced in 2011, but I remember some idea / hints of it started floating around before then. Probably somewhere along the way of developing PDF.js if I remember correctly. Dont bet against Javascript. Anything could be done in Javascript should be done in Javascript. Practically speaking that means apart from Kernel and drivers all things should be javascript. Even when it is easier for it to be done in C++. Hardware is cheap. Software is expensive. Moore's Law meant hardware cost will half every 2 years and eventually so cheap it will be subsidised by software. That is why by aiming at low cost smartphone they meant $35 dollar smartphones. I think this thought disease was actually started by Bill Gate. That was the time I learned Silicon Valley have absolutely no idea about anything supply chain and hardware. Apple being an absolute outliner and exception. Firefox was slow the day Chrome was born. Because everything is comparative. And e10s ( Electrolysis ) took 7 years before it was shipped on Desktop. It was originally targeted for Firefox 4. And took another 1 - 2 years for additional tuning and ironing out rough edges. As the article suggested. Everything at the time was mobile and B2G. It took a while before they realise Desktop Firefox, their cash cow wasn't competing and need some attention. ( It was too late ) I dont remember if Memshrink was started because of B2G. But Firefox at the time definitely have memory issues. Memshrink is ultimately is what leads to Firefox being the best browser to handle thousands of tabs. And About:memory was born out of it. B2G as an idea wasn't wrong per se. But it was wrong timing and execution. Mozilla as a company was way too idealistic. From technological, marketing, strategy to execution. Ultimately as the article suggest, it was a management issue. And if Mozilla have taken those lessons and learned from it in 2016. I believe they could still have had Firefox OS windows of opportunity in 2021. When somehow both Google and Apple became evil. Instead they wasted money on AI and many other initiatives. I believe the downfall of Mozilla was when they won the war against IE. And that perhaps planted the seed they could really achieve everything. To this day I am not sure if they realised they won because of the Mozilla community being their evangelist ( Not being a negative thing at the time of 00s ) and perhaps more importantly. Microsoft IE wasn't even competing. I still remember the New York Times Ads. Good Old Days.

bgirard 1y ago

I worked on the rendering team at Mozilla during that time and contributed a lot to improving performance and reducing memory usage for B2G. I remember I was optimizing the experience for 256 MB devices, then one day we're told to start optimizing for a 128 MB reference phone. The very next day I open up HN to see Ars Technica reviewing a Firefox OS 64 MB phone. Predictably I knew that the experience would be terrible because I was still optimizing rendering for 256 MB two days priors. Us shipping devices that our software wasn't tuned for shot the very little remaining faith I had in the project. Coincidentally I was profiling and tuning the keyboard pop-open for 256 MB devices at the time. Profiling and tuning the trade-offs of when to render and animate the graphical layers. Knowing that these trade-offs would be very different and incorrect for a 64 MB device.

khuey 1y ago
I was also there for the memory usage side of things. B2G management was driven by a mix of "the web is the platform" ideology[0] and a willingness to promise whatever carriers and OEMs wanted to close a distribution deal regardless of whether it was feasible or made any sense. My own personal "this project is hopelessly doomed" moment was roughly 48 hours before the 1.4 code freeze when I was contacted by a colleague asking how feature X was coming along. Feature X was needed to fix Bug Y, and Bug Y was in the critical bug list for the code freeze. But it turned out the B2G project managers had decided to manually track their critical bug list outside of Bugzilla, and didn't make any effort to track the transitive dependencies of those bugs, or notify anyone that they should be working on these. "ngmi" hadn't been popularized yet but that was very much my feeling at that moment. Active development ceased by the end of the year. [0] which I think could have panned out at least technically, given sufficient resources, time, etc
- dcminter 1y ago
  > ... a willingness to promise whatever carriers and OEMs wanted to close a distribution deal... That always struck me as one of the more impressive things that Jobs achieved with the original iPhone - getting buy-in from Cingular to do things Apple's way and not Cingular's. Pre-iPod Apple probably couldn't have done it.

neilv 1y ago

I had a few Firefox OS devices to eval, and I really wanted to adopt it, but concerns at the time: * The build process was atop Android, and pulled in a massive bulk of dependencies (open and closed), in various ways, and was effectively unauditable. * I was turned off by it looking like they might be selling out the home screen in a way that threatened privacy&security. https://techcrunch.com/2014/02/05/firefox-launcher/ https://techcrunch.com/2014/02/05/firefox-launcher/ * I wanted a trustworthy, sustainable, open platform, and unfortunately it didn't look like Firefox OS was headed in that direction.

rickdeckard 1y ago
> I was turned off by it looking like they might be selling out the home screen in a way that threatened privacy&security This was honestly a realistic risk, not because of the link you shared but because over the course of development, the success of FFOS became increasingly dependant on the commitment of carriers, and the main interest of those carriers was to create a OS under their control...
- neilv 1y ago
  If only carriers had never learned that even ringtones were a cash cow. Trying to develop software for pre-iPhone phones seemed to be a mess of barriers to ISVs, like "BREW" and carrier approval. It makes sense that carriers still want the phone locked down as much as possible, so they can extract more money from their captive customer. (Also, it's still an expensive chore to get Pixels on which a carrier hasn't locked the bootloader against alternative firmware like GrapheneOS. Lawmakers/regulators should say that carriers may only provide voice and data service, for a fee, and aren't allowed to use their position to extract money other ways.)

Benjamin_Dobell 1y ago

This takes me back. Whilst I was studying at university, I developed Heimdall, open source firmware flashing software for Samsung Android phones. I don't know that it was ever official, but I remember being pretty stoked when I realised some Mozilla employees were using Heimdall to flash Firefox OS onto Samsung devices: https://developer.mozilla.org.cach3.com/my/docs/Mozilla/B2G_OS/Installing_on_a_mobile_device https://developer.mozilla.org.cach3.com/my/docs/Mozilla/B2G_...

fabrice_d 1y ago
Yes, thanks for Heimdall! Indeed we did a lot of the initial dev on Samsung Galaxy S2 devices flashed with your tool!

trhway 1y ago

Working with Mozilla code in 1999 and seeing NSPR (Netscape Portable Runtime) I thought back then - that would soon bring the golden age that Java OS was intended to yet had failed for the performance among the other reasons. Somehow it didn’t happen - Firefox OS was too little too late.

soapdog 1y ago

I was there. Firefox OS devices outsold all predictions in target markets in South America. They were a lot cheaper than the competition and worked well enough. What caused it to fail was, I kid you not, the lack of WhatsApp. People in South America rely heavily on that messaging app for everything. SMS and other messaging apps were not viable options cause the people whom Firefox OS users needed to message were all on WhatsApp.

hiAndrewQuinn 1y ago
This doesn't actually surprise me, WhatsApp is fantastic at what it does. I seem to recall another story about a company which got a desktop browser running in a mobile browser and getting flooded with Indians using the site because it let them access WhatsApp without a data surcharge or something.
mmsimanga 1y ago
WhatsApp is the Internet in two countries I reside in Africa. South Africa and Zimbabwe. Anecdotally this is true for most African countries. Businesses and families depend on WhatsApp.
- alfiedotwtf 1y ago
  Unless you are Russian or have worked in crypto, you can’t fathom how many people and businesses rely on Telegram too
potato-peeler 1y ago
The entire thread is debating on reasons for fos failure, even attributing that rust could have saved it, while the actual reason is right here! Normal folks just want to use phone to help them with their lives, and as such if they can’t find apps which helps them, they won’t use that phone as their daily driver. They don’t care if it was built with rust or js or java or anything obscure.
jeroenhd 1y ago
I always found it very interesting how WhatsApp kept its Symbian app alive for so long but didn't build an application for FFOS. They had a KaiOS app but it seems like they dropped KaiOS too. I do wonder, though, did Mozilla ever try to convince Facebook to build a FirefoxOS build of WhatsApp?

masfoobar 1y ago

I was a Firefox OS user around the 2011-2016 era -- somewhere around there. I was using it for about 5 years.. and very happy! To me it was money well spent. About £50 (CTE Open???) for a firefox phone and it covered all I needed at that time. Calls, Text, Games.. and allowed html5 projects, which I created to do things with my home server. At the time, it was just a WIN-WIN as I could not be asked to create Android apps. I was sad when Firefox no longer supported it. Evenutally, I finally jumped in the Android world. I dont think my reasons were entirely about Firefox, but because I was changing my roles and resposibilities at work and had to make/answer more calls that ever. My Pay as you go scheme was not suitable anymore so decided to buy contract. I was proud holding off for as long as I could but in todays world where I need WhatsApp, MSTeams, VPN, etc.. I doubt I would have stayed on FirefoxOS if still going strong today. Alternatively I could just ask for a Company Phone. LOL. Overall, the Firefox phone was nice. A bit quirky in places but for the hardware at the time (compared to what was on the market) it was pretty cool. Some people laughed at me with their IPhone of Galaxy.. but I didn't care. I do keep my eye on other Open Source/Free phones. Honestly, if there is a performant phone that is affordable and runs GNOME smoothly (and nice experience) I honestly would consider it.. as long as the apps mentioned above can run.

moondowner 1y ago

I remember when ZTE Open was released in Europe in 2013, it was a decent Firefox OS phone. The downside for me was that it didn't feel premium. Compared to the 2012 HTC One S that I had back then, which was very slim, with aluminum finish and great screen, it didn't stood the chance.