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Mozilla to Cease Development of Firefox OS

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

joekiser writes:

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.

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  • (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.