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posted by cmn32480 on Thursday December 10 2015, @09:38AM   Printer-friendly
from the and-little-was-lost dept.

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.


Original Submission

Related Stories

Mozilla Corporation: Thunderbird “a tax” on Firefox Development 82 comments

In this Ars Technica article, Mozilla Corporation Chair Mitchell Baker discloses the desire to drop the Thunderbird email client altogether.

"Many inside of Mozilla, including an overwhelming majority of our leadership, feel the need to be laser-focused on activities like Firefox that can have an industry-wide impact." Baker writes. "With all due respect to Thunderbird and the Thunderbird community, we have been clear for years that we do not view Thunderbird as having this sort of potential."

Thunderbird has already been demoted to second-tier status, receiving only security updates since the summer of 2012. Baker's plan would turn Thunderbird over to a community product, similar to what happened with the Mozilla Suite a decade ago.

Is Mozilla's decision to laser-focus on improving Firefox going to stop their dwindling market share? Who else, besides the submitter, is still using Thunderbird? And where will you go once Thunderbird is no longer supported?


Original Submission

Firefox OS IoT Single-Board Computer Under Development 7 comments

About a month ago we learned Mozilla was ceasing development of the Firefox OS, admiting it was "a failure." Today (Friday) it was announced that Japanese company MozillaFactory.org is developing a board called Chirimen that

aims to be a development board for Web developers who want to build Web-connected Internet of Things devices powered by the technologies implemented in the Firefox web browser, which means Firefox OS.

Chirimen was designed from the offset to use web browser technologies in various science projects by extending the I2C and GPIO WebAPIs to control devices powered by Mozilla's Firefox OS 2.0 and higher operating systems. As such, Web developers can easily use browser technologies to develop really awesome things.

"We will share openly the firmware code, board design, manufacturing process, API spec, and all necessary sources. In this project, we honor developer's will and work on the standardization," said the Mozilla Japan community in the project's website.

Chirimen's page on Mozilla's site.

Board specs:

RK3066 SoC, 1GB DDR3 RAM, 1GB NAND Flash, two I2C ports, two UART ports, two SPI ports, a single, configurable GPIO port, one MicroSD slot, one USB port, and one USB microUSB OTG port.

Additionally, the board will come with a video micro HDMI female port, one Analog IN port, one PWM port, as well as audio analog/stereo input and output ports. Chirimen is quite compact at a size of 80 mm x 48 mm, and it's colored in red. Its hardware design is open, and the XX GPIO pins will allow devs to connect and program a wide range of physical components, such as LEDs, sensors, buttons, etc.


Original Submission

Firefox OS Lives on as KaiOS, Which Now Runs on Over 80 Million Devices 18 comments

How KaiOS claimed the third-place mobile crown

In December 2015, Mozilla announced it would be abandoning Firefox OS as a smartphone platform. Many assumed the company's withdrawal would kill any hope of a mobile operating system built around the open web, rather than a combination of native apps and tightly-controlled storefronts. In the last few years, plenty of so-called "alternative" smartphone platforms, including Ubuntu Touch and Windows 10 Mobile, have faded into obscurity, too. Jolla has struggled on with Sailfish OS, but it's never felt like a true challenger to the Android and iOS duopoly. Three years later and a surprising competitor has emerged: KaiOS. The relative newcomer, which makes feature phones smarter, is already running on more than 80 million devices worldwide. How did it grow so big, so quickly? With a little help from Firefox OS.

[...] The operating system that emerged is quite different to Firefox OS. The user interface, for instance, is built around phones with physical keys and non-touch displays. The application icons are smaller and you'll often see a contextual strip at the bottom of the screen with physical input options such as "Cancel" and "Okay." KaiOS optimized the platform for low-end hardware -- it only requires 256MB of RAM to run -- and, crucially, kept support for modern connectivity such as 3G, 4G, WiFi, GPS and NFC.

Feature phones are normally associated with emerging markets such as India and Brazil. KaiOS, however, started in the US with the Alcatel-branded Go Flip. Codeville and his team persuaded AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile to stock the handset because of their proven track record while working at TCL. Those deals then allowed the company to win a contract with Jio, a mobile network in India owned by a massive conglomerate called Reliance Industries. Together they built the JioPhone, a candybar-style device with a 2.4-inch display and 512MB of RAM. It was effectively given away with ultra-competitive 4G plans.

[...] Google Assistant was a particularly important addition. For many, voice is a faster way of typing than pecking a classic one-through-nine keypad with their thumbs. The Assistant talks back, too, which makes the platform viable for people with poor literacy skills.

Previously: $25 Firefox OS Smartphone Coming to India
Mozilla Adding Granular App Permissions to Firefox OS
Geeksphone Stops Support for FirefoxOS with No Warning
Mozilla to Cease Development of Firefox OS
The Story of Firefox OS
Google Invests $22 Million in the OS Powering Nokia Feature Phones


Original Submission

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  • (Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 10 2015, @10:42AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 10 2015, @10:42AM (#274366)

    I've never heard of Firefox OS, and I'm a self-important know-it-all techie nerd, so if I haven't heard of a thing, it's irrelevant. Tell me more about Linux, because I guzzle penguin piss.

    • (Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 10 2015, @10:47AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 10 2015, @10:47AM (#274367)

      Because not working on Firefox OS gives them more resources to fuck up the Firefox browser?

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 11 2015, @01:47AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 11 2015, @01:47AM (#274752)

      I think you're confused, Slashdot is that way -->

  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by mtrycz on Thursday December 10 2015, @10:50AM

    by mtrycz (60) on Thursday December 10 2015, @10:50AM (#274368)

    I like options, and I like Mozilla, so this is pretty bad news. I also had a ZTE Open C (which was a much improved version of ZTE Open, it was usable) and it did what I wanted it to. I use my smartphone as a PDA anyway. The only problem was when Whatsapp decided to shut down their APIs. (I lost the phone, though would buy a new Firefox OS if I hadn't a spare android on hand).

    Having an OS that doesn't come from an ad company is a great option. Expecially if it's coming from a someone that's done so much for the web (no-profit style) and is pushing for privacy.

    Why does the submitter say that Mozilla is somehow struggling? Also, nitpicking, but it's not a "company".

    --
    In capitalist America, ads view YOU!
    • (Score: 4, Insightful) by Nerdfest on Thursday December 10 2015, @11:21AM

      by Nerdfest (80) on Thursday December 10 2015, @11:21AM (#274372)

      I'm disappointed about Thunderbird as well. With a focus on privacy, having an email client that could actually support encryption cleanly and easily would go a long way. Better integration of EnigMail and some key infrastructure to make things even easier would be a great thing for them to do. Certainly far better for privacy than adding features to store and sync bookmarks across installs, etc.

      • (Score: 2, Interesting) by pdfernhout on Friday December 11 2015, @02:22AM

        by pdfernhout (5984) on Friday December 11 2015, @02:22AM (#274768) Homepage

        See comments here on Mitchell Baker's blog post from 2012: https://blog.lizardwrangler.com/2012/07/06/thunderbird-stability-and-community-innovation/ [lizardwrangler.com]

        An example from "roscoe": https://blog.lizardwrangler.com/2012/07/06/thunderbird-stability-and-community-innovation/comment-page-8/#comment-4700 [lizardwrangler.com]
        "This is really disappointing. First Sunbird – a fine, robust Calendar app gets killed off. Then Songbird support on Linux was dropped. Now development of Thunderbird, the only reliable free GUI email client, is to be “left to the community”. Mozilla are putting all of their eggs in one basket with this narrow focus on Firefox OS, which, lets face it, is doomed to failure. There is no way Firefox OS can compete with Android. Thunderbird was great because it gave Mozilla a niche – Google don’t offer a desktop Email Client. Mitchell says “we have seen the rising popularity of Web-based forms of communications”. With Thunderbird being effectively mothballed, and a lack of other good free GUI based email clients, many people will have little choice but to switch to webmail. ..."

        One has to ask what went wrong with Mozilla? What kind of group think led to this disaster? And that is the only word for the waste of (guesstimating) at least US$100 million dollars earmarked for free software, where such dollars are so hard to come by. Like a cancer eating money instead of sugar, Firefox OS sucked the (fiscal) life out of Thunderbird and even Firefox Desktop (with bugs going unfixed for years). I'm not asking anyone to step down -- just asking the Mozilla community to do some introspection on what went wrong internally or in the community for this sort of disaster to have happened? What failed in the internal decision making and due diligence processes? And, as a software developers, could better software tools like structured arguments (SRI SEAS) or multi-perspective tools (SRI Angler) or Issue Based Information Systems (Compendium/IBIS) made a difference in thinking these investments through better?

        Here is a proposal I wrote up yesterday for at least improving the Thunderbird situation by creating a Thunderbird Server webapp that runs locally and is browsed using Firefox (and which could support structured arguments and multiple perspectives and IBIS); I posted the link to the Mozilla Governance thread about spinning off Thunderbird:
        "Thunderbird Server as a Way Forward for Mozilla -- the ThunderbirdS Are Grow! Manifesto"
        http://pdfernhout.net/thunderbirds-are-grow-manifesto.html [pdfernhout.net]

        It would probably only cost a million dollars to get something working well-enough for most of the community to switch to it -- except Mozilla just wasted probably more than 100X that and so now may (perhaps correctly) claim to have no resources left to support what historically was part of their success. :-(

        --
        The biggest challenge of the 21st century: the irony of technologies of abundance used by scarcity-minded people.
        • (Score: 1) by pdfernhout on Friday December 11 2015, @03:02AM

          by pdfernhout (5984) on Friday December 11 2015, @03:02AM (#274781) Homepage

          Firefox OS itself looks like it will continue, so maybe that investment will still pay off:

          http://www.cnet.com/news/startup-acadine-picks-up-the-torch-for-mozillas-troubled-firefox-os/#ftag=CAD590a51e [cnet.com]
          "Mozilla isn't pulling the plug on Firefox OS completely, but the carrier partnership plan is over, said Ari Jaaksi, senior vice president of connected devices. ... Mozilla still hopes Firefox OS will power devices like this year's Panasonic 4K TV with apps and interactive features. And it's been working to encourage enthusiasts to install Firefox OS on their own phones. ..."

          http://www.linuxinsider.com/story/82862.html?rss=1 [linuxinsider.com]
          "Mozilla on Wednesday confirmed that it has hung up on the Firefox OS mobile phone and will try using the operating system to dial into other connected device uses instead."

          To be clear, I like the idea of a free software phone where apps are deployed using web standards. Just, practically speaking, given all the past failures in the cell phone market by better funded efforts, it might have been better to get everyone writing such web standard apps for Firefox on Android, iOS, and the desktop first. Then if that succeeded, it's much lower risk to essentially just have Firefox as the single app running on Linux, like Chrome OS did with Chromebooks.

          --
          The biggest challenge of the 21st century: the irony of technologies of abundance used by scarcity-minded people.
    • (Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 10 2015, @11:57AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 10 2015, @11:57AM (#274379)

      Firefox browser share has declined massively to as low as 10% by some counts.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Usage_share_of_web_browsers_(Source_StatCounter).svg [wikipedia.org]

      • (Score: 2) by richtopia on Thursday December 10 2015, @06:29PM

        by richtopia (3160) on Thursday December 10 2015, @06:29PM (#274564) Homepage Journal

        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

          by Hairyfeet (75) <{bassbeast1968} {at} {gmail.com}> on Thursday December 10 2015, @10:49PM (#274682) Journal

          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: 1) by Fledermaus on Thursday December 10 2015, @12:11PM

      by Fledermaus (1913) on Thursday December 10 2015, @12:11PM (#274385)

      I like options too, that's why I bought Jolla :)

      But Firefox OS was never really an option; I feared it would get worse as time went on, as has been the case with their browser. Firefox is still my main browser (with pentadactyl), though slowly being replaced by qutebrowser.

      And Whatsapp. Their hostility towards non-standard client users is a bit mystifying. You would think that more users the better?

    • (Score: 2) by romlok on Thursday December 10 2015, @12:43PM

      by romlok (1241) on Thursday December 10 2015, @12:43PM (#274399)

      Why does the submitter say that Mozilla is somehow struggling? Also, nitpicking, but it's not a "company".

      There are both a Mozilla Foundation and a Mozilla Corporation. I believe they set things up this way so that Mozilla as a whole could take Google's cash as a majority of their income, without losing the non-profit status the Foundation holds.
      Though you are right that neither are really "struggling", as most business owners would understand the term.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 10 2015, @08:12PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 10 2015, @08:12PM (#274609)

      Why does the submitter say that Mozilla is somehow struggling?

      Perhaps because they're struggling to find direction these days. They seem to be flailing about blindly at this point, trying to turn their flagship product into a Chrome clone instead of doing meaningful things like, oh, stabilising the extension API, fixing decades old bugs, etc.

  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by PizzaRollPlinkett on Thursday December 10 2015, @12:20PM

    by PizzaRollPlinkett (4512) on Thursday December 10 2015, @12:20PM (#274388)

    The mobile world just doesn't have room for also-ran operating systems. Both iOS and Android are overwhelmingly complex beats that take all your development effort and then some. If you're not trying to learn some baroque, obscure framework like Chromecast's casting, you're running to stand still reimplementing working code to support version x + 1's total rewrite of a feature.

    So someone has a new operating system that is both complex and obscure. As a developer, you have to choose between doing work that affects 99.99% of your installed base, or a pilot project for the new operating system which has almost no users. Who's going to win? Not the also-ran. You can't keep up with iOS and Android, let alone learn some other platform with a new way of doing the same thing. No one has the time to do that, especially for little or no future payback.

    So the ultimate cop-out is to try to get Android apps running on the also-ran platform. Sounds like a good idea, but everyone who has tried it has failed. They don't support Google Play services, so my app won't run as-is. The process for building, running, and publishing an Android app on the also-ran platforms is too complex and if I don't want to learn your complicated API, I also don't want to learn your 1000-step process for publishing an Android app.

    Amazon is the only viable Anrdoid platform left that doesn't support Google Play services, and I frankly think they've given up on third-party apps and are concentrating on the platform as a way to serve their own content.

    So the rule of three hasn't worked with mobile development. It's the rule of two. Mainly because platform complexity. Two is about all you can handle.

    And then there's the side of why a device manufacturer would want an also-ran mobile OS when worldwide capacity can barely keep up with iOS and Android. MS had to buy a mobile device company to make phones.

    --
    (E-mail me if you want a pizza roll!)
  • (Score: 2) by quixote on Thursday December 10 2015, @02:54PM

    by quixote (4355) on Thursday December 10 2015, @02:54PM (#274452)

    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

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 10 2015, @03:56PM (#274491)

      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

        by quixote (4355) on Thursday December 10 2015, @04:01PM (#274494)

        Yeah. There is that, too.

    • (Score: 2) by darnkitten on Friday December 11 2015, @03:23AM

      by darnkitten (1912) on Friday December 11 2015, @03:23AM (#274790)

      Very, very, very disappointed in Mozilla...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.

      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

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 11 2015, @06:19AM (#274834)

        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

        by quixote (4355) on Sunday December 13 2015, @10:25PM (#275876)

        Now, I try to persuade them that Firefox is Not The Internet, and that Pale Moon is the better choice...

        Too true.

  • (Score: 2) by Celestial on Thursday December 10 2015, @03:03PM

    by Celestial (4891) on Thursday December 10 2015, @03:03PM (#274461) Journal

    Is there any viable alternative mobile OS to iOS and Android in North America? Not even Windows Phone is surviving here, at least not well. I wanted to like and support Jolla, but it's complete and utter disregard for the North America market made it a non-starter.

    • (Score: 1) by jpkunst on Friday December 11 2015, @10:19AM

      by jpkunst (2310) on Friday December 11 2015, @10:19AM (#274908)

      Up until a month ago I would have said Blackberry 10 (note: not the old Blackberry OS), but Blackberry went Android with its latest phone and the future of its own OS seems uncertain.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 10 2015, @05:23PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 10 2015, @05:23PM (#274526)

    isn't /wasn't firefox OS like a super powerfull CMS?

    normally you can do page layout, add/edit/delete text-images-tables-multimedia and then do searches on this with a CMS via browser.

    so no need to write html text or use a local html editor and then upload the stuff to a webserver.
    the CMS does it all.

    only with firefoxOS-CMS you can tell it to take pictures, read sensors, move files around and even ... make phone calls?

  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 10 2015, @06:12PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 10 2015, @06:12PM (#274557)

    I love my ZTE Open C. It doesn't have a 500 dpi screen or anything, but it gets the job done (web browsing, email, XMPP, sms, phone calls, calendar, music player). Once I figured out how to update it with the 2.2 channel I was set. I've been using it for a year now and am quite please. Needless to say, I'm disappointed Mozilla won't be developing FxOS for phones anymore.

    • (Score: 1) by petecox on Thursday December 10 2015, @11:01PM

      by petecox (3228) on Thursday December 10 2015, @11:01PM (#274685)

      I'm a daily user of a Flame running a nightly. On decent hardware it runs acceptably but the OS will be tainted by reviews running on ill-specced 'developing world' devices - a strategy Mozilla abandoned some months back.

      I hope they keep a skeleton staff maintaining builds of the OS for Flame with stable versions of Gecko even if they don't proceed with new features of Gaia. (for security fixes etc) I tried building my own copy once but the download went awry in trying to download some 20GB (?) of sources.