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> 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

> 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
  Eh, as someone who was there at the time I would say that these people largely left when B2G was shut down. I don't think there's much of a connection to whatever gripes you have about Mozilla today.
fabrice_d 1y ago
I think you are wrong on both points: - low end devices were the only ones we could start from to get official support from chipset vendors and other partners (because they segment their market). And you need that to get eg. performance fixes in their graphics drivers. On the exact same devices performance was on par with Android overall. - I don't understand how "Rust UI" would have helped with anything, since the whole UI (including the system UI) was web based. Breaking out of the web platform is the opposite of what FxOS aimed at.
- nicoburns 1y ago
  > Breaking out of the web platform is the opposite of what FxOS aimed at. I think this is part of what Mozilla missed: the key value proposition of FxOS wasn't that it was web-based specifically: it was that it was open in the way that Linux and the web are but Chrome and Android aren't (one might also compare RISC V vs ARM). The promise was that it could bring this openness to graphical operating system (mobile/desktop) environments and installable app development.
- ndiddy 1y ago
  Honestly I think the whole Firefox OS idea was a major mistake, especially if the points the article makes about how the project changed Mozilla organizationally are true. Trying to make a new mobile platform in 2014, when iOS and Android were already entrenched, was never going to work out. Even if the performance was on-par with Android, why would anyone buy a Firefox OS phone over an equivalent Android phone with a far larger library of apps? The right time to try a new smartphone platform would have been at least 5 years earlier.
  - fabrice_d 1y ago
    The project started in 2011 and shipped first in 2013.
toast0 1y ago
> - 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) The problem with targeting high end first is sales / production risk. A phone based on a new OS is a risky purchase, and it's hard to convince someone to spend $500 on a high end phone without much software available. A $100 low end phone without much software available is an easier sale. If you can get important software built for your platform, sales are easier, but sales/usage numbers drive developer interest. Also, it helps if the platform offers capabilities developers need; maybe it's my bias, but the number of platforms that launch without everything a messaging app needs was mind bogling --- everyone seems to understand that messaging apps sell phones, but they don't find out the requirements for them until very late. Apple does just fine without targetting low end (although they do sometimes target mid range), but they live in a different world, and it took decades to build that market placement.
- 1oooqooq 1y ago
  except this analysis don't survive the real world. living in California and contributing code to gaia, i could only have a dev phone (not being involved with moz) when i went to an alley in Mexico city known for selling black market (no tax) computers. there i could finally pay usd50 to buy the crumiest bright orange plastic phone to use for dev work. would i have spent usd200-500 on my hobby to get a good phone months before i had a trip to mexico city? probably. would i pay the usd300 retailers in the us were charging for the crummiest low end phone? hell no.
  - roywashere 1y ago
    It’s a balance. I guess they needed to target low end because they were 4 years too late. If they did this around the time of Android 1.5 or even 4, those phones were not so expensive and they could have targeted that or similar hardware. I guess around 2012 I bought a Firefox OS phone from a Spanish company for I believe 150 euros, which was quite reasonable. FirefoxOS was unusable though. Plus it lacked WhatsApp so I could not use it as a daily driver. In 2025 I would also need to have a banking app on mobile so it’s impossible to use an “alternative” phone OS for me
Yoric 1y ago
> - 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. What do you mean, "Rust UI"? In FirefoxOS, the idea was that all applications were developed solely with web technologies. More Rust would have been nice, but would only have made sense with the support for compiling towards wasm (or asm.js, at the time).
- nicoburns 1y ago
  > More Rust would have been nice, but would only have made sense with the support for compiling towards wasm (or asm.js, at the time). Rust would have been used for implementing the web technologies, not by end users. I would note that many of the "web" technologies did not exist before Firefox OS (and Chrome OS) started adding them in a flurry, so really almost anything was on the table. The key thing was that they were open and specified.
  - owebmaster 1y ago
    > The key thing was that they were open and specified. And nowadays Firefox is the only of the "major" browsers that doesn't even support PWA anymore. FireFoxOS could have won the battle by just existing. 5% of the smartphone market would be worth much more than only 5% of the browser market.
    - jcranmer 1y ago
      > FireFoxOS could have won the battle by just existing. 5% of the smartphone market would be worth much more than only 5% of the browser market. "Just existing" isn't enough to get you to 5% of the market. At the time Mozilla started investing in B2G, it wasn't clear if the also-rans of the mobile OS marketplace were chasing, between them, 1% share or 10% share (now, it's clear that you're chasing 1% share). As this postmortem points out (and the linked graphics developer's testimony discusses as well), Mozilla was heavily focused on the smartphone OS development, to the point of letting its existing browser competency atrophy. And despite all of that effort, the result can barely even be qualified as an also-ran. In the counterfactual world where Mozilla didn't focus on trying to build a smartphone OS but instead pushed more for quality in its desktop and mobile browsers, or even invested in ecosystems like Node.js or Electron built on SpiderMonkey and Gecko respectively (which dovetails nicely with their everything-in-JS vision), their relevance would have been far greater, I think.
officeplant 1y ago
>Targeting low end devices first was a huge mistake. Personally it was the only reason I ever gave Firefox OS a try. ZTE started selling the ZTE Open[0] on ebay direct to buyers, super easy for me to obtain even in the US. The phone had miserable specs but still ran fairly well in my opinion, to the point of using it as my daily phone for months. Eventually it was let down by most of the early Firefox phones not getting the updates to add in features like MMS support. It was a sad day when they called it quits, and what remains in KaiOS just reminds me we could have had a strong competitor in the budget market. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZTE_Open https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZTE_Open
extra88 1y ago
> 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 Based on my understanding of Alex Russell's info, that's not how the mobile market works. Low-end device performance in 2023 was at least 8 years behind flagship phones. https://infrequently.org/series/performance-inequality/ https://infrequently.org/series/performance-inequality/

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
Eh, as someone who was there at the time I would say that these people largely left when B2G was shut down. I don't think there's much of a connection to whatever gripes you have about Mozilla today.

fabrice_d 1y ago

I think you are wrong on both points: - low end devices were the only ones we could start from to get official support from chipset vendors and other partners (because they segment their market). And you need that to get eg. performance fixes in their graphics drivers. On the exact same devices performance was on par with Android overall. - I don't understand how "Rust UI" would have helped with anything, since the whole UI (including the system UI) was web based. Breaking out of the web platform is the opposite of what FxOS aimed at.

nicoburns 1y ago
> Breaking out of the web platform is the opposite of what FxOS aimed at. I think this is part of what Mozilla missed: the key value proposition of FxOS wasn't that it was web-based specifically: it was that it was open in the way that Linux and the web are but Chrome and Android aren't (one might also compare RISC V vs ARM). The promise was that it could bring this openness to graphical operating system (mobile/desktop) environments and installable app development.
ndiddy 1y ago
Honestly I think the whole Firefox OS idea was a major mistake, especially if the points the article makes about how the project changed Mozilla organizationally are true. Trying to make a new mobile platform in 2014, when iOS and Android were already entrenched, was never going to work out. Even if the performance was on-par with Android, why would anyone buy a Firefox OS phone over an equivalent Android phone with a far larger library of apps? The right time to try a new smartphone platform would have been at least 5 years earlier.
- fabrice_d 1y ago
  The project started in 2011 and shipped first in 2013.

toast0 1y ago

> - 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) The problem with targeting high end first is sales / production risk. A phone based on a new OS is a risky purchase, and it's hard to convince someone to spend $500 on a high end phone without much software available. A $100 low end phone without much software available is an easier sale. If you can get important software built for your platform, sales are easier, but sales/usage numbers drive developer interest. Also, it helps if the platform offers capabilities developers need; maybe it's my bias, but the number of platforms that launch without everything a messaging app needs was mind bogling --- everyone seems to understand that messaging apps sell phones, but they don't find out the requirements for them until very late. Apple does just fine without targetting low end (although they do sometimes target mid range), but they live in a different world, and it took decades to build that market placement.

1oooqooq 1y ago
except this analysis don't survive the real world. living in California and contributing code to gaia, i could only have a dev phone (not being involved with moz) when i went to an alley in Mexico city known for selling black market (no tax) computers. there i could finally pay usd50 to buy the crumiest bright orange plastic phone to use for dev work. would i have spent usd200-500 on my hobby to get a good phone months before i had a trip to mexico city? probably. would i pay the usd300 retailers in the us were charging for the crummiest low end phone? hell no.
- roywashere 1y ago
  It’s a balance. I guess they needed to target low end because they were 4 years too late. If they did this around the time of Android 1.5 or even 4, those phones were not so expensive and they could have targeted that or similar hardware. I guess around 2012 I bought a Firefox OS phone from a Spanish company for I believe 150 euros, which was quite reasonable. FirefoxOS was unusable though. Plus it lacked WhatsApp so I could not use it as a daily driver. In 2025 I would also need to have a banking app on mobile so it’s impossible to use an “alternative” phone OS for me

Yoric 1y ago

> - 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. What do you mean, "Rust UI"? In FirefoxOS, the idea was that all applications were developed solely with web technologies. More Rust would have been nice, but would only have made sense with the support for compiling towards wasm (or asm.js, at the time).

nicoburns 1y ago
> More Rust would have been nice, but would only have made sense with the support for compiling towards wasm (or asm.js, at the time). Rust would have been used for implementing the web technologies, not by end users. I would note that many of the "web" technologies did not exist before Firefox OS (and Chrome OS) started adding them in a flurry, so really almost anything was on the table. The key thing was that they were open and specified.
- owebmaster 1y ago
  > The key thing was that they were open and specified. And nowadays Firefox is the only of the "major" browsers that doesn't even support PWA anymore. FireFoxOS could have won the battle by just existing. 5% of the smartphone market would be worth much more than only 5% of the browser market.
  - jcranmer 1y ago
    > FireFoxOS could have won the battle by just existing. 5% of the smartphone market would be worth much more than only 5% of the browser market. "Just existing" isn't enough to get you to 5% of the market. At the time Mozilla started investing in B2G, it wasn't clear if the also-rans of the mobile OS marketplace were chasing, between them, 1% share or 10% share (now, it's clear that you're chasing 1% share). As this postmortem points out (and the linked graphics developer's testimony discusses as well), Mozilla was heavily focused on the smartphone OS development, to the point of letting its existing browser competency atrophy. And despite all of that effort, the result can barely even be qualified as an also-ran. In the counterfactual world where Mozilla didn't focus on trying to build a smartphone OS but instead pushed more for quality in its desktop and mobile browsers, or even invested in ecosystems like Node.js or Electron built on SpiderMonkey and Gecko respectively (which dovetails nicely with their everything-in-JS vision), their relevance would have been far greater, I think.

officeplant 1y ago

>Targeting low end devices first was a huge mistake. Personally it was the only reason I ever gave Firefox OS a try. ZTE started selling the ZTE Open[0] on ebay direct to buyers, super easy for me to obtain even in the US. The phone had miserable specs but still ran fairly well in my opinion, to the point of using it as my daily phone for months. Eventually it was let down by most of the early Firefox phones not getting the updates to add in features like MMS support. It was a sad day when they called it quits, and what remains in KaiOS just reminds me we could have had a strong competitor in the budget market. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZTE_Open https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZTE_Open

extra88 1y ago

> 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 Based on my understanding of Alex Russell's info, that's not how the mobile market works. Low-end device performance in 2023 was at least 8 years behind flagship phones. https://infrequently.org/series/performance-inequality/ https://infrequently.org/series/performance-inequality/