Mozilla Will Stop Developing and Selling Firefox OS Smartphones • Hacker News Board

Re: Mozilla Will Stop Developing and Selling Firefox OS Smartphones

#181

Post by johansch » Tue, Dec 08, 2015, 11:30 PM UTC

pcwalton wrote: post #170

johansch wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't done profiling of firefox os on a crappy device... but my suspicion is that it really is as simple as: even really-well-optimized html/css/js that needs to go through a browser core will suffer performance-wise compared to something with 10-15 less layers of indirection. (Like a traditional windowing toolkit.) The Android UI toolkit isn't exactly efficent (ha!), but still seems to beat Firefox OS on super-l…

The indirection is a problem with existing browser implementations (and some spec issues, such as lack of Typed CSSOM, which is the current subject of work in the WGs). There is no fundamental reason that I can see as to why there needs to be a gap between the hardware and the graphics and layout of Web apps.

That sounds intriguing. But.. how?

Re: Mozilla Will Stop Developing and Selling Firefox OS Smartphones

#182

Post by benlower » Tue, Dec 08, 2015, 11:30 PM UTC

MawNicker wrote: post #77

sremani wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Will Windows Phone/ Windows Mobile be around 2019, as a die-hard WP user, I hope so. I just do not like those icon based OSes.

I suspect the Universal Windows Platform will have a significant impact. Especially the ability to dock your phone with an external display/keyboard/mouse. For a large portion of the market it displaces the need for a second computing device. Microsoft is much further along on this front than both Android and iOS.

Microsoft continues to shoot itself in the foot here. Nearly two years ago at BUILD they announced universal apps for Xbox One. A year later the new term, Universal Windows Platform (UWP), was being used and another promise of opening up Xbox to app developers. Xbox has yet to really open up for app devs.

The second leg of UWP's 'write a single app and have it go everywhere' was mobile. We've all seen how that's been going.

The final (and biggest/main) leg is traditional Windows. They whiffed badly with the Windows RT devices. Now all the tablets are running the full-blown OS. That means they all run Win32 apps.

Win32 is good enough so why would a developer port their app to UWP when the first two legs are either unavailable or have a very small install base of customers?

Re: Mozilla Will Stop Developing and Selling Firefox OS Smartphones

#183

Post by derefr » Tue, Dec 08, 2015, 11:30 PM UTC

nickbauman wrote: post #162

derefr wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yeah I don't buy that either. Was there an ROI case made about the iPhone? I don't think so. There's no similar ROI case anyone could make for Firefox, either.

The original iPhone wasn't a platform (didn't have "apps"), remember; it had value without third party support. Persona, meanwhile, has no value apart from its adoption.

Obviously, it doesn't need adoption to "survive", but it does need adoption to succeed in its goals: rescuing users from stupid hack-job login systems.

I would compare it more to Chrome: Google made Chrome with the goal of getting the web to work better for some people, so they could more easily consume Google's various services. You could say that Chrome's bottom line was "increased Google service adoption": if Chrome renders faster and provides more HTML5 features, then Google gets more and happier customers for their products.

Mozilla doesn't have "services" that Persona is a loss-leader for, but there's still that same ROI calculation of whether Persona is achieving its goals, and measuring adoption rate is a good proxy for that.

The important thing, that Mozilla failed to do, was to actually understand what an adoption curve for something like Persona should look like, and what things affect it. They needed to heavily advertise it (to developers, not to users!) over about two years, and then start looking at the adoption curve.

Re: Mozilla Will Stop Developing and Selling Firefox OS Smartphones

#184

Post by xj9 » Tue, Dec 08, 2015, 11:31 PM UTC

rockdoe wrote: post #138

rmxt wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Call the desire to rid the web of ads "destructive" if you please, but don't call those wishes "self-destructive" from the user's perspective. It is completely within the user's prerogative to filter whatever content they wish to filter before it hits their eyeballs. Why should anyone feel bad about choosing what they want to look at it? For a sort of analogy, the presence of pay-to-read newspapers hasn't precluded t…

It's self-destructive because users who don't block ads are keeping sites alive for the users that do block them. If all the users block the ads, the site will need to scramble for a new income model, and for some the new model might not work out. Seems like a perfect example of self-destructive/tragedy-of-the-commons behavior to me.

This is a perfect example of a changing market driving out incumbents that have been unable to adapt. The internet is probably better off without them.

Re: Mozilla Will Stop Developing and Selling Firefox OS Smartphones

#185

Post by johansch » Tue, Dec 08, 2015, 11:32 PM UTC

zbraniecki wrote: post #179

johansch wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Those were the actual goals. Next time you want to spread theories and rumors, check background of who you are questioning ;) Source: I work at Mozilla and on Firefox OS project.

I got that. I am just questioning whether you and the executive management at Mozilla had the same goals.

Re: Mozilla Will Stop Developing and Selling Firefox OS Smartphones

#186

Post by dTal » Tue, Dec 08, 2015, 11:42 PM UTC

thesimp wrote: post #114

wott wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

4 days ago, I read a Mozilla employee writing "Seamonkey does not interest anyone inside Mozilla. Who would nowadays use a Netscape-like tool?".

I use Seamonkey because it has sane UI interface elements like "buttons+text" that are actually larger than 15 pixels so that I can click on them without having to exactly aim my mouse on a tiny little button. My guess is that every Firefox developer still runs a 2007 Asus eeebook with a 7" screen. I got more pixels than I care to count, so I just want a UI that scales in proportion with the screen. Just one example…

>My guess is that every Firefox developer still runs a 2007 Asus eeebook with a 7" screen.

I can assure you that they do not, because Firefox requires heavy tweaking to run comfortably in 1 gigabyte of RAM.

Seamonkey is real nice though.

Re: Mozilla Will Stop Developing and Selling Firefox OS Smartphones

#187

Post by zanny » Tue, Dec 08, 2015, 11:43 PM UTC

funkyy wrote: post #140

zanny wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They shouldn't be off doing their own thing in the "not Google / Apple / Microsoft" phone scene. Canonical, the now dieing Jolla, and Mozilla were all doing their own thing and years later Ubuntu Touch is still an unfinished mess with no forseeable legit launch worth mentioning (3rd parties have sold Ubuntu Touch phones, and the UX was awful), Jolla is bankrupt, and Mozilla just gave up. Plasma Mobile has the right i…

Once again, average user when first in touch with Plasma Phone will say "Oh, is this new Android?". All of them unique mobile OS's look the same at first glance. And first glance is most important. Windows Phone did amazing job in that, to bad they screwed almost everything else. Also it sounds like your comment is technical point of view. Users dont care of that. If mobile system cannot attract regular users, then i…

Its not really about attracting users though, its about getting phones in stores that users are buying. The market of users that shop for a device, looking for specs and features, is a tiny fraction of the market of phone users, the vast majority of which are regularly ripped off by carriers to buy underpowered overpriced iphones or Android handsets.

If you don't get on Sprint / AT&T / Verizon / Tmobile store shelves you are DOA before you even think about appealing to users switching.

But something like Plasma Mobile does not need to care too much about that. If it has the technicals right, and can run Android apps, it can be an enthusiast platform nobody else adopts because Google has strong armed manufacturer control to keep that kind of competition off store shelves if they wanted to. Its also incredibly expensive to buy market share like that, something none of these participants have the money to do.

Re: Mozilla Will Stop Developing and Selling Firefox OS Smartphones

#188

Post by dualogy » Tue, Dec 08, 2015, 11:45 PM UTC

Raed667 wrote: post #75

rimantas wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Foe me IoT lacks the problem that needs solving. And we do know what happens to the solutions without the problem.

I'll be graduating in a few months and I study embedded/IoT. And as someone who spent the last 2 years digging in the corners of IoT, I agree that IoT can seem to be over-engineering problems that don't exist. But the market is there, and it is huge. (mainly industrial, energy & transport applications) IoT now is like the early personal computers, they were too expensive and almost no one knew why they needed them.

Would you recommend your favourite resources for techies to dig into this space?

Re: Mozilla Will Stop Developing and Selling Firefox OS Smartphones

#189

Post by dcw303 » Tue, Dec 08, 2015, 11:45 PM UTC

Linux as a platform took off because it was possible for a smart user to install it on hardware they already had.

If there had of been a way to install Firefox OS on an iPhone or Android phone, I would have certainly tried it out. Mozilla really needed to target power users, but it was just too hard to get hold of the hardware - both hardware availability and the stupid state of carrier contracts are to blame here.

I don't know that Mozilla's business model works if they are not bundling their software to a licensed phone, but it's a shame that the mobile platforms can't be opened up the same way desktops are.

Re: Mozilla Will Stop Developing and Selling Firefox OS Smartphones

#190

Post by bobajeff » Tue, Dec 08, 2015, 11:54 PM UTC

oconnore wrote: post #173

bobajeff wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a user I really don't care about ads. Unless, of course, they are those annoying hover ads or auto-playing video ads or they slow down the browser.

So far, informally, every person I've seen write something like this works in marketing, works for a company that makes revenue from advertising, or is somehow monetarily incentivized to have a web where "users" widely agree to view ads. Obviously, there's no causation (perhaps those people naturally gravitate towards fruitful work that doesn't bother them), but it seems to be a pretty reliable (read: so far 100%) co…

No, I don't do any of that stuff. So I guess I'm the combo breaker.

I'm never offended by the presence of ads themselves. Maybe it's because I grew up with them? Maybe I'm just more comfortable with ignoring them?