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Mozilla Will Stop Developing and Selling Firefox OS Smartphones (techcrunch.com)

Posted by Soulskill on from the somewhat-outfoxed dept.

An anonymous reader writes: Mozilla announced today at its developer event in Orlando that the company is ending its smartphone experiment. Mozilla will stop developing and selling Firefox OS smartphones. Ari Jaaksi, Mozilla's SVP of Connected Devices, said, "We are proud of the benefits Firefox OS added to the Web platform and will continue to experiment with the user experience across connected devices." However, he added that it didn't end up providing a great user experience, so they decided to move their efforts elsewhere within the "connected devices" ecosystem. The TechCrunch article notes, "Mozilla has been on a streamlining track lately. Last week it announced that it would be looking for alternative homes for its Thunderbird email and chat client. The aim is for the company to focus more on its strongest and core products and reputation."

8 of 174 comments (clear)

  1. Yay! Get out your pitchforks! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Insightful

    I'm really eager to see how Slashdot spins this into the next episode of "Mozilla isn't listening to us, and they're ruining everything." This is one of the most entertaining over-the-top comedies I've seen to date.

  2. Pretty much everyone saw this coming .... by BarbaraHudson · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Pretty much everyone saw this coming ....and nothing of value was lost, except the money spent on the salaries of the people in charge promoting this stupidity, instead of investing in their core product. History will continue to repeat itself until the money runs out.

    --
    "Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
    1. Re:Pretty much everyone saw this coming .... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Pretty much everyone saw this coming ....and nothing of value was lost, except the money spent on the salaries of the people in charge promoting this stupidity, instead of investing in their core product. History will continue to repeat itself until the money runs out.

      The huge sums of money were the problem. Once they put suit-tards in charge, the fail train started rolling downhill.

  3. Ridiculous Endeavors by vix86 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    About a week ago, me and my friend had actually been discussing all the stupid business decisions that Mozilla has been making. Their OS and the Firefox Phone were two big ones that came to mind that just didn't make any sense to either of us. The money they have received, they've squandered on pointless pursuits into industries they stood no chance at making a dent in.

    Seriously, what was the logic behind trying to get into the phone market in the first place? Other companies have tried just as well (Amazon, Microsoft) with little to no success. The thing that bugged us was the fact that they must have spent millions trying to do this which could have been more smartly invested to ensure that they didn't run out of money to support and improve the current products they know are/were liked (Thunderbird and Firefox). Now as result, we are left with them trying to find money streams to support Firefox, and most of this comes from pushing unwanted software and advertisement into Firefox.

    1. Re:Ridiculous Endeavors by BarbaraHudson · · Score: 4, Insightful

      You're forgetting the FirefoxOS Panasonic Smart TV that was announced earlier this year that's going to leave Panasonic with egg on the face.

      My theory is that Mozilla and Canonical were trying to copy each others tactics because they saw the media buzz that was being generated when one of them made an announcement. Phones, Tablets, and TVs were the "canonical" (pun intended) examples.

      --
      "Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
  4. What's next? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I have this nagging feeling that Mozilla is about to do something monumentally stupid to Firefox. An un-skippable 5 second splash screen? Removal of the Back button? Permanent removal of the Menu Bar? Auto-hiding scroll bars? Remove the ability to use Firefox without logging in to a Firefox account? Disable your mouse's scroll wheel in favor of Auto-scrolling? Forced telemetry?

    If there is one thing that they have shown us is that there is nothing that they wont do.

  5. Um, what did they offer? by Burz · · Score: 3, Insightful

    The way I see it, there is plenty of room to improve security on mobile devices. Maybe there are some other goals that could be incorporated in "new and innovative" products as well, but security is the big one for me. Mozilla seems like all the rest in its mobile offering: Look, a slightly new UI! But security as a top-tier feature with the kind of focus that could cause a paradigm shift? Forget it.

    There's no reason for me to adopt FF OS, with few users and available apps, then suffer some ignominious revelation that I paid for yet another swiss cheese device that any sane person should be afraid to use.

    I think the only unique angle they had with FF OS was that the "platform" was simply web server meets browser. IOW, more mainframe-oriented than even iOS and Android. No, thanks; I'm not looking for a fancy terminal.

  6. The stats show it isn't spin. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    In August of 2013, Firefox had a market share of over 16%.

    Today, Firefox has a market share of about 7%.

    That tells us everything we need to know.

    Two things have happened:

    1. They've driven away a lot of their existing users with shitty UI changes, and a lack of progress when it comes to fixing Firefox's slow performance.

    2. They haven't attracted any new users.

    Together, they have resulted in Firefox's market share being cut down to less than half of what it is, in just over two years!

    In other companies, this would be considered a huge disaster.