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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."
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 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. :(
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.