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Mozilla Will Stop Developing and Selling Firefox OS Smartphones (techcrunch.com)
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."
Who knew?
I guess not enough of us....
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Well, Mozilla is starting to undo the things that people were complaining about. So, the people at Slashdot were correct.
(I have a Nokia 770 in a storage box)
My Mozilla Flame has been my daily phone for nearly 18 months. The initial builds (v1.3) weren't great for usability but things got pretty stable around the 2.1 release. I use the phone as a phone, with a killer web browser, so 'apps' weren't an issue. But the writing has been on the wall for a while, with feature implementation slowing to a crawl over the past few months on the nightly builds.
IoT with a javascript API derived from Firefox OS has already been done in the form of JanOS.io thus a couple of hackers are ahead of the curve...
I have no desire to go back to Android and an iPhone is out of my price range, so I guess I'll cross over to the dark side and get a cheap Lumia when the current handset dies. :(
Android today is bloated as hell and requires over 1 gig of ram.
Android describes many things:
1. The ROM. It is usually used to ship bloatware with the phone. Once you get a free rom like CyanogenMod (which is not the same as Cyanogen OS), you have no bloatware anymore. Just get a popular enough phone that is supported well by such a ROM provider.
2. The google apps (gapps). These are the sole place google has any real influence over, because they are the only closed source non-vendor-specific component. Amazon has I think the most full set of replacement apps. There are also even libre alternatives, like F-droid.
3. The actual AOSP project. It is led by google. They try to do some influence over it as well, like for example by making the build system extra ugly (and putting the informative docs into internal wikis instead of the trimmed down public wiki), so that you have to download their binaries, and have to agree to the license to not fragment Android. But mostly, these things can't really stop any competitors, as the source is openly licensed. Google knows this, therefore their trend to abandon apps from AOSP and to put them into the gapps package instead.
One of the advantages of AOSP being open source is that the app format isn't something proprietary, but can be used by competition as well. Yes, currently the only major player is google, but in a few years it can be some other company, too.
Google is not the microsoft of the phone world. Yes, their system is the most successful one, but they don't do EEE, because most of their formats are open, most prominently their base OS, and those which aren't are forced to be closed by competitors (think for example of the xmpp abandoning which was caused by skype). Yes, most apps won't work without google apps, but porting an app from using google apps to some alternative is much easier than eg porting a game from directx to opengl, or porting a windows desktop application to use X11.
apperating system. I'll have to remember that one.
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.
The problem was getting one. They were only released in small emerging markets. Even their developer phone sold out before a lot of interested users knew it existed. The easiest one to get was the ZTE Open, an incredibly low-end phone with virtually non-existent support from ZTE. (you were stuck with v1.0 for a while. We got a 1.1 release, with impressive performance improvements, and a buggy 1.2 release long after those were outdated. Savvy users have 2.0 unofficially now, though that is also now outdated, with 2.5 being a rather dramatic update.) The Fx0 is the next viable option, as it was very recently discovered for a good price on Amazon. It sold so many so quickly that the vendor raised the price, all despite the locked bootloader making it less attractive as a dev unit.
Why they never released it a budget phone in established markets is beyond me. Or why they didn't produce enough dev units to meet the demand of interested developers. Unbelievably, they even gave some of those away to developers as an incentive, while shorting the clamoring hoards who wanted to buy the thing!
There was some talk about selling smart feature-phones running FxOS in the US next year. I guess we'll see if those partners strike out on their own or not.
Required reading for internet skeptics