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An engineer on the Firefox OS project tells the story of the operating system's development:
I'd like to tell you my version of the story of Firefox OS, from the birth of the Boot to Gecko open source software project as a mailing list post and an empty GitHub repository in 2011, through its commercial launch as the Firefox OS mobile operating system, right up until the "transition" of millions of lines of code to the community in 2016.
During this five year journey hundreds of members of the wider Mozilla community came together with a shared vision to disrupt the app ecosystem with the power of the open web. I'd like to reflect on our successes, our failures and the lessons we can learn from the experience of taking an open source browser based mobile operating system to market.
...
Biggest Achievements--Design — Designed a simple and fresh looking mobile OS with some innovative features like edge gestures for switching windows. Came up with some great designs for how a browser based OS could work, even if the vision was never fully realised.
--Engineering — Built a mobile operating system from scratch, entirely in the open, and got it to market in less than two years. As far as I know no other team has ever done this. Got web content rendering very close to bare metal on mobile devices with a very lean technology stack, in many cases beating the performance of native code on equivalent hardware. Pushed the envelope of the web with 30 experimental new web APIs and helped create new web app trends.
--Product — Successfully launched 20 devices in over 30 countries, mobilised the Mozilla community to help run launch parties and created slick branding and marketing campaigns. Sold the message that "the web is the platform", even if we failed to live up to it.
--Partnerships — Won unprecedented support from the mobile industry. Repeatedly stole the show at MWC, the world's biggest mobile event, and got big telecommunications corporations on board with Mozilla's mission, with competing companies working together towards common goals.
Read on for the biggest mistakes, and what he'd do differently.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by drussell on Saturday March 04 2017, @10:24AM (3 children)
First we would prove it was possible to build the kind of UI that already existed using web technologies.
I have never understood why you would want to do that, though!
Why would you try to re-create a bunch of stuff that already exists in an environment not suited to it?
It seems that these folks are so immersed in their "the web is everything" mentality that they can't see straight.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Saturday March 04 2017, @11:24AM (1 child)
I have an unrelated answer: because the web is stateless.
Let's say your phone gets in the wrong hand.
A look at the smudges lets them unlock it.
Voila' your sms, call list, calendars, whatsapp compromised. And it is a best case scenario.
What if we used the smartphone for remote access only? every session starting from scratch? A minimal OS and spartan browser is all I need, content addressed ipfs or gnunet for advanced/offline functionality.
Of course firefox OS probably put too much functionality inside the browser for the above idea to work.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 04 2017, @07:35PM
What if we used the smartphone for remote access only?
I so want this. Let each app run in its on VM hosted wherever, completely isolated from all the other apps that are also displaying on my phone. If I want to run them on some cloud service, ok. If I want to run them on a PC back at my own house where no one else can snoop on me, great! Some mixture, that's fine too. With a fast enough network, the phone doesn't need to be "smart" any more and the ability to protect yourself from spying (if you so wish to) goes up.
(Score: 2) by driverless on Monday March 06 2017, @06:11AM
In April 2013 the UX team held a summit in London where they got together to discuss future directions for the user experience of Firefox OS. [...] A big focus was on “flow” [...]
It's no wonder this whole boondoggle floundered, they weren't building an OS, they were holding a be-in for geeks, where everyone could throw in their pet cool idea and then they'd sit around singing kumbayah while they coded it all up and then the market would adopt it wholesale because it was obviously the coolest thing out there. When you read through that writeup it's just a bunch of kids playing with technology, there doesn't seem to be anyone there to pull the brakes and say "well, that isn't going to fly in practice, you need to reconsider".
Which seems to describe Mozilla as a whole to some extent...