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Mozilla Has Stopped All Commercial Development On Firefox OS -- Explains What It Plans To Do With Code Base (google.com)

Mozilla announced last year that Firefox OS initiative of shipping phones with commercial partners did not bring the returns it sought. The company earlier this year hinted that it intends to shut the project. It is now sharing how it will deal with Firefox OS code base going forward. From their post: We would stop our efforts to build and ship smartphones through carrier partners and pivot our efforts with Firefox OS to explore opportunities for new use cases in the world of connected devices. Firefox OS was transitioned to a Tier 3 platform from the perspective of support by Mozilla's Platform Engineering organization. That meant as of January 31, 2016 no Mozilla Platform Engineering resources would be engaged to provide ongoing support and all such work would be done by other contributors. For some period of time that work would be done by Mozillaâ(TM)s Connected Devices team. We had ideas for other opportunities for Firefox OS, perhaps as a platform for explorations in the world of connected devices, and perhaps for continued evolution of Firefox OS TV. To allow for those possibilities, and to provide a stable release for commercial TV partners, development would continue on a Firefox OS 2.6 release. In parallel with continued explorations by the Connected Devices team, we recognized there was interest within the Mozilla community in carrying forward work on Firefox OS as a smartphone platform, and perhaps even for other purposes. A Firefox OS Transition Project was launched to perform a major clean-up of the B2G code bringing it to a stable end state so it could be passed into the hands of the community as an open source project. In the spring and summer of 2016 the Connected Devices team dug deeper into opportunities for Firefox OS. They concluded that Firefox OS TV was a project to be run by our commercial partner and not a project to be led by Mozilla. Further, Firefox OS was determined to not be sufficiently useful for ongoing Connected Devices work to justify the effort to maintain it. This meant that development of the Firefox OS stack was no longer a part of Connected Devices, or Mozilla at all. Firefox OS 2.6 would be the last release from Mozilla. Today we are announcing the next phase in that evolution. While work at Mozilla on Firefox OS has ceased, we very much need to continue to evolve the underlying code that comprises Gecko, our web platform engine, as part of the ongoing development of Firefox. In order to evolve quickly and enable substantial new architectural changes in Gecko, Mozilla's Platform Engineering organization needs to remove all B2G-related code from mozilla-central. This certainly has consequences for B2G OS. For the community to continue working on B2G OS they will have to maintain a code base that includes a full version of Gecko, so will need to fork Gecko and proceed with development on their own, separate branch.

11 of 97 comments (clear)

  1. (Gecko = "Web platform") = WTF by Zontar+The+Mindless · · Score: 4, Insightful

    There's your problem right there. How about concentrating on giving us a good *browser* instead, like you used to?

    --
    Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
    1. Re:(Gecko = "Web platform") = WTF by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Given that Mozilla makes hundreds of millions per year by auctioning off the default search engine on Firefox, and given that this money is proportional to market share (currently at 8%), I'd say that a multi-million-dollar budget is easily justified for only making a web browser.

    2. Re:(Gecko = "Web platform") = WTF by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Do we want Mozilla to 'improve' Firefox further? Mozilla's best application is Thunderbird, and the reason for that is because they stopped working on it. Had they continued development of Thunderbird you'd need about twenty extensions just to make it usable, as you do with Firefox.

      I don't think there's much hope for the future of Firefox. Mozilla have shown they're completely out of touch with what users want, and as such Firefox's market share on the desktop has dropped from about 25% to 7.69%, and is continuing to drop at an average at a rate of about 0.5 percentage points per month. Firefox isn't competitive in terms of performance so it does need improving, but the last thing you want is Mozilla's idea of improvement, so whatever happens it appears that Firefox will continue it's not-so-slow death.

  2. Re:Firefox OS? by BarbaraHudson · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Who DIDN'T see this coming? Anyone in the real world? Anyone?

    --
    "Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
  3. Re:Guess what America?? by SumDog · · Score: 3, Insightful

    They're both psychopaths. Both of you are trolls. The vote doesn't matter. America is a monarchy. The government under Romney would have been the same. Now fuck off and stop pretending your vote matters.

  4. Re:Mozilla is wasting money, brains, and time by 110010001000 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    That is what happens with organizations that literally are rolling in piles of cash and have no clue what to do next. Look at Yahoo/Microsoft/Google/etc. It took a heroic effort to get Apple back from the brink.

  5. Fixing Firefox bugs is boring by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Insightful

    Instead of fixing the tens of thousands of bugs in Firefox, its much more fun making useless OS's, making computer languages and fucking up the UI.

  6. Re:WOW by nnull · · Score: 3, Insightful

    And don't forget Ubuntu on phones. I was hoping they'd have some success with that but it seems incompetence completely rolled over that. They stopped selling the Meizu Pro 5, with all its problems, since then it has become last years phone. The Meizu Pro 6 is out and Ubuntu is just left behind, selling nothing. I hope they can change because I'm honestly tired of my Android phone tracking me ever since Google's latest maps and play store update.

  7. LUDDITES killed Appfox OS! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Insightful

    The LUDDITES at LUDDITE Mozilla killed the appy Appfox OS, which can app apps in AppScript while apping other apps! Only LUDDITES would use a LUDDITE operating system written in LUDDITE C++ instead of appy AppScript!

    Apps!

  8. Re:I want alternatives by Luthair · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I agree, it would have to had sold devices in order to fade away.

  9. Re:Meh by LichtSpektren · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Yes, keeping. Firefox is still the best browser. Now that e10s is stable its performance is comparable with Chrome's, and it still has far superior extensions, customizability, and built-in security/privacy features.