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> 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. FireFox

> 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.
- owebmaster 1y ago
  I think an alternative to iOS/Android duopoly is much more needed than another nodejs or electron. Those two actually work quite well.
- Yoric 1y ago
  For what it's worth, Mozilla has done Electron-on-Gecko at least twice (several years before Electron), and Electron-on-Servo at least once. There was brief interest by the community, and a few applications were written to take advantage of it, but it didn't last.

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.

owebmaster 1y ago
I think an alternative to iOS/Android duopoly is much more needed than another nodejs or electron. Those two actually work quite well.
Yoric 1y ago
For what it's worth, Mozilla has done Electron-on-Gecko at least twice (several years before Electron), and Electron-on-Servo at least once. There was brief interest by the community, and a few applications were written to take advantage of it, but it didn't last.