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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 richtopia on Thursday December 10 2015, @06:29PM
This worries me. Chrome is a good browser, but it seems we are moving to a monoculture. I don't think it will be as bad as IE6 days, but already I hit websites using advanced features of HTML5 that only Chrome supports - even the webkit Opera browser does not render the page.
(Score: 2) by Hairyfeet on Thursday December 10 2015, @10:49PM
Opera seems to stay pretty far behind the curve, have you tried using Comodo Dragon or Comodo Chromodo? Both of those are based on newer builds of chromium than Opera last I checked, with Chromodo being the bleeding edge build and Dragon being their stable branch, I've used both (currently using Chromodo as I type this) and they are nice, supports all the plug ins but without the Google phone home crap.
As for Mozilla? I think they are pretty much boned, they have ignored their users for so long too many have bailed and simply won't be coming back. I think Pale Moon will end up becoming the new FF, they have a good dedicated team, are making enough money from their search and default page (which I urge users to support by keeping it as I do, its quite handy with links to the most popular services) to keep the team working strictly on the browser, and they have already forked away from FF and have their own user agent string. They've even reached out to FF devs to support their browser with extensions built for PM and those that don't they are compiling their own versions for, its a well run and rock solid browser.
And for those that say "they are too small, no chance"? Remember that when FF launched (can't even remember what it was called then, Firebird? Phoenix? Something like that) they weren't big at all either, IE pretty much owned the web and they were just a speck compared to MSFT and ended up having nearly half the market....until they crapped all over their UI and ignored their users trying to be an ersatz Chrome.
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by takyon on Friday December 11 2015, @01:38AM
How can Opera be behind the curve? They now use the same Blink rendering engine as Google Chrome, making them a part of the browser monoculture.
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