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I'm still sad they shelved Mozilla Persona due to low adoption. There is a hole in the market around privacy and identity, and Mozilla would be a natural choice
by wvh 10mo ago
I'm still sad they shelved Mozilla Persona due to low adoption. There is a hole in the market around privacy and identity, and Mozilla would be a natural choice to fill it, but it's going to be an uphill battle to get major sites and end users on board. Not a job to be envious about indeed.
- glenstein 10mo agoAnd just to add, I kind of mourn FirefoxOS. We couldn't have guessed it at the time, but as of 2025, Google is pushing developer verification and stepping closer and closer to ecosystem lockdown. It would have been a great time for an alternative mobile OS 10+ years in the making, to welcome all the energy that has gone into beautiful projects like F-Droid. If I could time travel into the past, in addition to preventing all the bad things (e.g. Young Sheldon), I might have told Yahoo they should flex some financial muscle while they still had relevance and worked to mobilize (no pun intended) developer time, energy, etc and perhaps even provide a baseline ecosystem of stock apps to support FirefoxOS.
- benoau 10mo agoI installed FirefoxOS on a phone years ago, it wasn't even bad really.
- MattTheRealOne 10mo agoAs with most new operating systems, its biggest problem was lack of apps. Mozilla seemed to abandon Firefox OS right as Progressive Web Apps were starting to take off, which would have done a lot to fix that problem.
- flaburgan 10mo agoI use it as my primary phone for 2 years, first with the Flame, then with a Z3C. For me Firefox OS was the finale move of Mozilla, either it successes and Mozilla becomes a major actor again or it fails and they slowly die. And thebmy decided to kill it right when it was becoming stable enough.
- glenstein 10mo agoIt's another damned if you do, damned if you don't. FirefoxOS is regularly listed by commenters as an example of a wasteful side bet, whereas my feeling is more along the lines of yours, that it was striding greatly, as the saying goes, and attempting to be a major actor. A big part of the market share loss was due to monopoly and distribution lockdown of a controlled platform tightly tied to hardware, so I can certainly see the strategic wisdom of the attempt. I suspect they didn't have the resources to press forward, they had a lot less money then than they do now. Which makes it all the more maddening that Yahoo's role as a partner was so muted; it could have made the difference for both of them.
- szatkus 10mo agoThe main problem with Firefox OS was that it was really slow. At the same time it was targeting budget phones. But on the other hand progress was quite good. Back in the days I was maintaining unofficial images for Alcatel Fire. Each version was a little bit faster, but you really can't do much when the whole OS is a browser running on a device with with 256MB of RAM and a single core CPU.
- _heimdall 10mo agoWasn't webOS effectively an OS built on web standards and effectively just a browser engine? The Pre had 256MB and something like a 600mHZ processor. While it was no speed demon, I was always impressed with the animations and multitasking they pulled off with it.
- mikestorrent 10mo agoPeople forget we used the web on 100mHz 486s with maybe 16MB of RAM and sites like Slashdot were plenty usable.
- _heimdall 10mo agoGranted sites like Slashdot didn't used react server components.
- fsflover 10mo ago> And just to add, I kind of mourn FirefoxOS. Today, we have Mobian, postmarketOS, PureOS and many more GNU/Linux OSes for smartphones.
- Flere-Imsaho 10mo agoIt's too late. If I want to interact with modern society, I have to use banking apps, the NHS app, WhatsApp, numerous IoT apps... The list is endless. Many of these will refuse to run on rooted phones. Google and Apple won. We can learn from this and hope the next big thing to come along has some competition from the truly open source side of computing.
- glenstein 10mo agoWell that's a fantastic point, and interesting in this context because the whole gambit of FirefoxOS was to use progressive web apps. The browser rather than the Linux ecosystem becomes the trusted execution environment and PWAs actually ask less of your bank or (insert security agency) than even Android or iOS development.
- aaronax 10mo agoA law can fix that!
- zx8080 10mo agoSure, for those who has money for lobbying.
- fsflover 10mo agoOr for those who support https://eff.org https://eff.org or similar.
- mikestorrent 10mo agoWe need more politicians that aren't afraid of banks.
- chrismorgan 10mo ago> We couldn't have guessed it at the time, but as of 2025, Google is pushing developer verification and stepping closer and closer to ecosystem lockdown. We did guess it. Google were already past their “don’t be evil” days in 2013. They were possibly better than other companies of similar scale, but the decline was already clearly beginning. People had long warned that Google could not be trusted to keep Android open in the long term, that eventually their benevolence would fade. A good chunk of the enthusiasm around Firefox OS was in breaking the duopoly and the idea of a platform that would be much harder to lock down.
- glenstein 10mo agoFair point, I think I have to concede that you're right that it was perhaps perceivable at that time. In my defense, I will say that we are seeing some pretty concrete actions out in the wild in 2025 that we were only speculating on in 2013 heightening the urgency of the issue.
- ethbr1 10mo ago1000% The two places it's mind boggling that Mozilla doesn't have a product are (1) identity (especially as a provider to 3rd parties) and (2) instant messaging (especially on mobile). They were important 10 years ago, they're more important today, and the existing providers all have huge privacy concerns.
- pseudalopex 10mo agoWhat would be Mozilla's revenue model for instant messaging?
- glenstein 10mo ago[flagged]
- ethbr1 10mo agoAds? Nothing says you have to track users, if you're not looking to optimize ad monetization per user. And I daresay there are a fair number of companies who would love to get even blind exposure to Mozilla's userbase.
- pseudalopex 10mo agoWhy would people use Mozilla's app and not WhatsApp, iMessage, Signal, or others?
- ethbr1 10mo agoPrivacy, availability, popularity respectively.
- mikestorrent 10mo agoSignal is already ostensibly private, available, and popular enough, and doesn't have ads... why compete? IMO Mozilla should just double down on the browser and do everything they can to keep it as a lifeline for Free Software devices to be able to participate on the internet as first class citizens.
- array_key_first 10mo ago[flagged]
- wtallis 10mo agoYou don't really seem to be trying to fairly describe the problem. With Pocket, Mozilla forced it on everyone, then two years later they bought the service, then many years later they eventually killed it for everyone. They didn't even try the approach of making it an opt-in extension that users could install if they desired. The unoffensive strategy was obvious all along, and they just didn't choose that route. The concerns of Mozilla partnering with and promoting a proprietary service were easily anticipated, and the solution (buying Pocket) was clearly an option since they did that step eventually. Yes, Mozilla may be in a hard place trying to diversify and find success with their other ventures. But they're clearly making plenty of unforced errors along the way.
- throwup238 10mo agoThat unforced error was particularly egregious considering that tab containers and Facebook containers are optional addons that are well integrated into the browser.
- troyvit 10mo ago> With Pocket, Mozilla forced it on everyone, It was ridiculously easy to turn off. Making a fairly non-obtrusive service opt-out instead of opt-in is not forcing it on everyone.