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Mozilla announced earlier today that they will be cancelling the Firefox OS effort, and will cease creation of new smartphones.
From Techcrunch:
To differentiate from Android and iOS, Mozilla and its carrier partners focused on a web-first platform, with no native and only web apps. Sales, however, were always poor and the devices themselves failed to ignite a lot of consumer interest, and a number of OEMs cornered the market with a flood of cheap handsets. In a business that depends on economies of scale, it was a failure.
This comes a week after gauging interest in spinning off Thunderbird. Is Mozilla's new focus on becoming privacy-oritented enough to save the struggling company? What experience did SoylentNews users have with FirefoxOS? I'll admit, I was optimistic and even owned a ZTE Open for a few months back in 2013, but it was a step down from my feature phone at the time (Nokia Asha 311) and ZTE never delivered on the promise to provide updates to the OS.
(Score: 2) by quixote on Thursday December 10 2015, @02:54PM
who bought just before they stopped making FirefoxOS updates available for that model. I suppose I could have figured that out if I'd been paying attention (way too little activity on the xda-developers forums, for one) but it didn't occur to me that (what was) an open source stalwart would screw its users that way. I'm stupid like that.
Very, very, very disappointed in Mozilla. I've been using Firefox since it was Firebird. In the mid-00s (2006 or so) I was one of those people installing Firefox on everybody's computers and evangelizing. Now they completely lost the plot. Mandatory chromification. Tracking while PR-ing about not tracking. (eg Pocket) Ads on new tabs. It's been getting worse for years.
I'm going back to Pale Moon. And I just bought a Tizen phone. I need to find something to replace my trusty N900 before that USB connector totally fails.
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 10 2015, @03:56PM
Mandatory chromification.
Well, except the good bits of Chrome, like per-tab processes. They haven't copied those.
(Score: 2) by quixote on Thursday December 10 2015, @04:01PM
Yeah. There is that, too.
(Score: 2) by darnkitten on Friday December 11 2015, @03:23AM
Same here. As the librarian in a small rural town, I'm responsible for getting Firefox on a good proportion of computers in my community, especially amongst the Seniors. I actually persuaded people that "The Big Blue e" was not only Not The Internet, but that Firefox was a safer and preferable way of getting online.
For the last couple of years, I've been hearing complaints about Firefox being "broken," each time the devs made a major "enhancement to the user experience."
...and each time the devs reverted fixes we made to one of their "improvements."
...and when they disabled yet another security setting or feature in the interest of tracking the users.
...and each time they eliminated a traditional control, menu, interface element, etc. which the Seniors had painstakingly learned and replaced it with a graphic that they didn't understand and which didn't function in any familiar way.
...&ct., &ct.
Now, I try to persuade them that Firefox is Not The Internet, and that Pale Moon is the better choice...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 11 2015, @06:19AM
Took me a long time to find the main menu my first time encountering th word-less menu-bar.
3 horizontal bars? Really?!
Is this a slot machine of something?
(Score: 2) by quixote on Sunday December 13 2015, @10:25PM
Too true.