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Mozilla Will Stop Developing and Selling Firefox OS Smartphones

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Re: Mozilla Will Stop Developing and Selling Firefox OS Smartphones

#151

Post by johansch »

zbraniecki wrote: post #142
bad_user wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Source?

You can read the original announcement with the list of goals here: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/mozilla.dev.platf... there used to be a website - arewemobileyet.com which listed the API's that we identified as necessary to make FxOS possible. You can find it in web.archive - http://web.archive.org/web/20140401194921/http://arewemobile... We successfully standardized most of them! :)

Those were the publicly announced goals. You must be really naive if you think those were the actual goals.

Re: Mozilla Will Stop Developing and Selling Firefox OS Smartphones

#152

Post by KuhlMensch »

gkoberger wrote: post #9

Firefox appeared at a time when there was huge potential being stifled by a stagnant monopoly in the space, and people were desperate for something good. It filled a real need, and people loved it. FirefoxOS appeared at a time when there was huge potential being actively being pushed forward and innovated on by the two largest tech companies in the space, and people already had two great options to choose from. It fi…

All good points.

"it's all about packaging. That's Mozilla's strength."

On this we start to deviate. I think its all about platform. And you only get mainstream users on your platform if its awesome in the "mainly used" ways.

Its like the difference between a doctorate of psychology vs medicine. With one you can help people who really want to be helped, the other, you can give someone a flu shot and they are treated.

Re: Mozilla Will Stop Developing and Selling Firefox OS Smartphones

#153

Post by distances »

Apocryphon wrote: post #6

Guess it's up to Canonical to make Ubuntu Touch a viable open source smartphone OS - are there even devices running it that are being sold in the U.S.? Did not expect that Sailfish OS would outlive Firefox OS.

To be fair, Jolla is having some financial turmoil just at the same time. There were some (possibly temporary) lay-offs, and deliveries of the new tablet are delayed.

Re: Mozilla Will Stop Developing and Selling Firefox OS Smartphones

#154

Post by sp332 »

johansch wrote: post #60
sp332 wrote: post #31

Remember, the point of Firefox OS was not to challenge or take over the market with Firefox OS devices. It was to develop web APIs for phone things, like the dialer, video, voice, accelerometer, etc. And they succeeded! That's why the statement says "We are proud of the benefits Firefox OS added to the Web platform". Other browsers adopted the tech, and all phone browsers are better off for the project. That's a win.

That sounds like a post-rationalization to me. All I heard was that this was how they expected to survive without Google. It was expected to bring a lot of revenue.

Yes, but I was never involved so I don't have to rationalize anything :)

Re: Mozilla Will Stop Developing and Selling Firefox OS Smartphones

#155

Post by derefr »

nickbauman wrote: post #143
wamatt wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a shame really, but as an outsider, it wasn't clear that Persona was even given a chance to fail.

Absolutely right. Dan Callahan's statement on why: "with Mozilla Labs somewhat sudden dissolution, we were unexpectedly asked to demonstrate traction and commercial adoption that simply wasn't there." Commercial adoption? What does that even mean in the context of MoCo? What does MoCo sell? And 24 months? Makes no sense, even for MoCo. Google is consistently a small player in the Cloud Computing Platform space. Their…

I think that for Persona in particular, "commercial adoption" would probably have meant "random startups deploying Persona as their customers' identity provider." The idea being that a government/nonprofit/enterprise can be convinced to adopt any old ridiculous thing if you say the right things about it, but "the market" (i.e. a critical mass of SMBs) will only adopt your product if it's giving them a higher ROI than the alternative.

Re: Mozilla Will Stop Developing and Selling Firefox OS Smartphones

#156

Post by gsnedders »

johansch wrote: post #129
gsnedders wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll argue there was a later screw-up on the desktop browser (and really mobile too): Unite sucked resources from much for a long while, failure to tackle some of the technical debt (things that manifested itself such as the integer maths used for percentage values in CSS, contrary to every other browser out there, and that went unchanged as layouts became increasingly complex and the web relied ever more heavily on…

Well, yeah, there was a serious of screwups. :) I don't buy the argument about a lack of investment in Presto. IIRC there were like 90 (most of them really good) people working on Presto at its peak. And we still couldn't keep up. (And most of those issues were about lacking desktop market share, which caused sites to de-prioritize Opera, anyway.)

From memory it was a touch more than 90—and while I never ceased to be amazed by what we achieved with the resources we had, everyone else was expanding while Opera didn't, despite clearly having the money to do so.

When it comes to lacking desktop market share, it's undeniable that has an effect on site compatibility—people kept on supporting IE6 till a few years ago, after all, despite all its flaws. If Opera had more marketshare, it could've afforded to not keep up (though then we'd have articles about how Opera is the new IE!). I think, however, site compatibility was less about marketshare in later years and more about ancient incompatibilities (percentages rounding down, keyboard events, range events, selection, document loading/unloading) that were increasingly important in an increasingly dynamic web. People were deliberately deciding not to support Opera at that point because it involved more than a trivial amount of work because of bugs like those and the lack of marketshare.

Re: Mozilla Will Stop Developing and Selling Firefox OS Smartphones

#157

Post by tacojuan »

I bought one of the Fx0 phones last month.

Sad to hear this news. I wanted to move away from Android and iOS, and saw FFOS as the only viable option.

They should've mass produced whatever the developer phone was, the Flame I think? Sell it to consumers as a flagship, supported by Mozilla devs, and community devs...

Re: Mozilla Will Stop Developing and Selling Firefox OS Smartphones

#158

Post by bronson »

steveklabnik wrote: post #136
rockdoe wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lots of headlines at HN from Mozilla these days. They're having a developer conference so big announcements are concentrated.

It's more accurately described as an employee all-hands, with some volunteers invited too. 1200 employees, ~200 volunteers, not really people developing things on Mozilla platforms.

Twelve hundred employees???

And they couldn't find one or two of them to port Thunderbird to Qt.

Re: Mozilla Will Stop Developing and Selling Firefox OS Smartphones

#159

Post by x0x0 »

johansch wrote: post #96
karussell wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+1 interesting. Started using Opera since ~2000 and really liked it. Really innovative (tabs, mouse gestures, download manager, ...) and fast! Even an email client was included :) ! But replaced it with Firefox by the time FF had tabs and was fast enough, due to 'trust/privacy' reasons. For the same reasons I do not use chrome. And if FF keeps disappointing me and Opera gains trust I can imagine a switch :) (hmmh, bu…

"We" (I have since left Opera Software) really screwed it up with the desktop browser around 2004. Management (i.e. the then-CEO Jon) was too worried about recurring revenue to pull that obnoxious ad banner in the free version until it was too late. At the time the desktop Opera had superior performance compared to Mozilla/Firefox.. but wasn't free/ad-less. It was really depressing to watch. (But at the same time, I…

Do you mind sharing a few of those lucrative / non-annoying monetization models? I'm curious. And thanks for the insights into opera!

Re: Mozilla Will Stop Developing and Selling Firefox OS Smartphones

#160

Post by janvidar »

gtirloni wrote: post #127
Steko wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same 'forecasters' that had WP over 20% in 2015, lol. http://cdn.geekwire.com/wp-content/uploads/idc21.jpg

It's maybe at only 5% in LatAm and that's where I know it's been having relative success.

It is up in the double digits in India.
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