
Mozilla has stopped all commercial development on Firefox OS - bpierre
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/mozilla.dev.fxos/FoAwifahNPY/Lppm0VHVBAAJ
======
yoavm
So we had Jolla, Ubuntu, Mozilla and even Microsoft trying to create a new
major player in the mobile OSs market - all pretty much failed to do so.

Is it practically impossible? Are we stuck with Android and iOS forever? This
tiny selection of options worries me.

~~~
maheart
I'm a big supporter of GNU/Linux on the phone.

I don't care if Jolla or Ubuntu don't ever make it as "major" players in the
mobile OS world.

I'd be perfectly happy with GNU/Linux mobile software that's as good as the
Linux desktop.

I run Linux on my desktop (and laptop), and we're 1% of desktop users. I'd be
satisfied with 1% mobile market share. We don't need a billion users, all I
want is a hacker-friendly platform, with a good developer community around it
(which I think both GNU/Linux on the desktop, and IMO SailfishOS [Jolla]
provide).

~~~
skrowl
Android is Linux on the phone. It's Linux kernel with stuff on top. Check out
Replicant. It removes most of the stuff you might find objectionable.

~~~
maheart
>> Android is Linux on the phone. It's Linux kernel with stuff on top.

Android is just the Linux kernel on the phone -- that's the issue I have with
it. It comes with none of the other stuff that makes GNU/Linux great:
philosophically/socially it's different, but on a technical level it's missing
rest of the GNU/Linux stack (e.g. package management, and the plethora of
developer tools -- including languages and libraries). The GNU/Linux stack is
developed by a diverse ecosystem of contractors, big and small business, and
non-for-profits (e.g. Red Hat, Intel, Mozilla, Samsung, Canonical, Document
Foundation, Fujitsu, Google, etc). Android is largely controlled by one
company.

~~~
ghostly_s
Is Tizen any closer to this?

~~~
maheart
I honestly don't know what's happening with Tizen these days -- Samsung has
invested money into it, but it has (IMO) very little to show. Again, my bias
is showing, but I think Jolla (SailfishOS) and Canonical (Ubuntu Touch) have
achieved infinitely more with smaller teams and less capital.

------
franze
I still love my FirefoxOS Geeks Phone Keon 2013, it still is my go-to
backpacking phone. ongoing long battery runtime, a decent browser for the
[https://mbasic.facebook.com/](https://mbasic.facebook.com/), gmail HTML,
hacker news. necessary apps are there and work fine: For me that's HERE maps &
alarm function.

I love it, because it's un-addicting. android and ios are designed to get your
attention, all the time. FirefoxOS ist a tool that is there for you when you
need it.

I wish they had succeeded, I even ran an FirefoxOS meetup in Vienna, I will
miss it. Now back to my Android Phone, I think it beeped, vibrated or needs me
in some other way.

~~~
creshal
Yes, thanks Mozilla for making a timer app that by default neither beeps nor
vibrates. Thankfully I only lost one oven load of food before I noticed.

And thanks Mozilla for making an OS that glitches out if you use the power
button in the wrong moment, nothing wakes you up better than having to reboot
your phone to stop the damn alarm clock.

FirefoxOS is such an unfinished shitfest. I have no idea how 1.3 passed QA.
(Nor why Alcatel still isn't releasing any update, even though they're still
selling the phone in question.)

~~~
zbraniecki
And for that reason, it's worth recognizing how much work ahead there is for
the web platform to be capable of delivering full OS experience.

Only now, pieces of the HTML/DOM/JS spec that have been kickstarted out of
need when FxOS was being developed start landing in the spec.

Whoever will try next, will have an easier job because of the FxOS experience.

source: I'm an engineer who worked on FxOS in 2014-2016

~~~
wmf
Or it's worth recognizing that trying to deliver full OS experience with Web
technology is a waste of time.

~~~
zbraniecki
"It always seems impossible until it's done."

------
makomk
Not only that, they're ripping out support for it from the Gecko code base,
which means that the only way to get security updates for it will be to fork
Gecko. I doubt anyone has the resources to do that. It's basically dead.
(Every non-Firefox consumer of Gecko has met the same fate so far.)

~~~
adamc
Mozilla of course has every right to determine how it wants to allocate its
resources... but to me, this action speaks loudly that you cannot really count
on them to stay the course. So, from an outsider perspective, every initiative
must be analyzed skeptically, since they may leave you holding the bag.

This is always true to a degree, but the more true you think it is, the less
likely you are to jump onto said initiatives.

~~~
coldtea
> _This is always true to a degree, but the more true you think it is, the
> less likely you are to jump onto said initiatives._

While I'm sad since I can't now run Firefox OS on my OpenMoko phone, while
listening to my ogg vorbis files and rocking Chandler, the revolutionary PIM
app and posting updates to Diaspora, this should have been the conclusion from
the beginning.

It was pretty clear that nothing much was ever gonna come out of it.

~~~
walterbell
Chandler (epic distraction) may have wandered off into the sunset but people
are still running predecessors Lotus Agenda (DOS era) and Ecco Pro (Win 95
era) to this day. Ecco Pro has even been binary patched to enable Lua
scripting. The computer industry has many commercial failures that shipped
elements of technical excellence.

------
bionsuba
This outcome should have been obvious to everyone involved. The fact that it
wasn't raises serious doubts about the Mozilla leadership.

You can't compete with Android by being slower, less responsive, and ship with
less features.

~~~
tarancato
Seriously... I avoid Firefox on my (rather beefy) desktop because of how much
it freezes. I don't want to imagine how it worked on a 50€ phone, which looked
like it was their target.

Maybe they thought Gecko would be ready by the time the OS was going to ship?

~~~
teekert
But this a poor, skewing argument always made by at least one person here. For
most FF is very responsive and there are no problems what so ever.

And FF is not FF-OS.

~~~
lloeki
> For most FF is very responsive and there are no problems what so ever.

Open dev tools, type `for (;;) {}`. Notice the whole browser becomes
unresponsive. This has been improved upon (as in it doesn't block the whole
Firefox UI, just merely every single content tab) thanks to Electrolysis
partially reaching stable but "there are no problems whatsoever" simply isn't
true performance wise (and this is the most obvious one, there are numerous
other very well known performance issues with FF)

~~~
syrrim
Open your terminal, type ':(){ :|:& };:'. Notice how the whole OS becomes
unresponsive.

There is a very simple solution to both these problems, which most people
employ to great effect: just don't do that.

~~~
lloeki
Besides that doing `perl -e 'for (;;) {}'` and watching your OS burn down in
flames (which it doesn't) is the correct parallel, I'll assume you have
overlooked that we have no control on what JS does in whatever page we're
presented with, and if it's some heavy handed code it has a significant impact
on whatever else I may be doing on an unrelated tab, which feels like going
back to plain old cooperative multitasking, upon which the above perl code
would effectively be a blight.

------
ksec
Number 1 reason why I didn't pick up an Panasonic 4K TV, because i knew
Firefox OS will be dead some day. And number one reason why I REALLY want an
APPLE TV Set rather then Apple TV STB.

Most of the Smart TV on the market today are total piece of Junk. They are
what "Smart"phones were before the iPhone came out. As a matter of fact,
SmartTV from China are pretty good on the software front, and lacking ( price
cutting too much ) on the hardware.

Just wanted to mention about Mozilla leadership. And so call leadership in
general, HOW DID these *&@^$% ever got to their position? This is speaking
from a user who has been with them before the Firefox era.

~~~
vollmond
I want a dumb display and a smart STB -- because I don't want to have to
replace a thousand-dollar display just to get new STB hardware.

It's why I have a TV and a Roku, rather than a Roku TV. Why combine them when
their upgrade cycles don't match up?

~~~
emodendroket
AFAIK at this point the dumb TVs all have worse displays.

~~~
Twirrim
Which is why I just ignore the smart stuff and use a capable STB instead.

~~~
wyldfire
emodendroket is stating that "ignoring the smart stuff" means disregarding
high-quality imaging available on the top-of-line products.

~~~
khedoros
Twirrim is stating that "ignoring the smart stuff" doesn't necessarily mean
buying a dumb TV, and that they buy a smart TV, ignore a bunch of the TV's
features, and replace them by using a separate set-top box.

~~~
wyldfire
Ah, of course. Ok, chalk it up to muphry's law.

------
twelvechairs
A major shame that we are moving our technology from open playforms built to
empower to walled gardens built to consume. One day maybe it will shift
towards something more progressive again.

~~~
skc
The most bizarre thing about this is that geeks now even manage to rationalize
this away.

That iOS/Apple (of today) are so revered by open-systems loving folks is a
little bit counterintuitive.

~~~
nicklaf
Stockholm syndrome.

------
beardicus
This makes me sad, not because I wanted to use Firefox OS, but because
JanOS[1] (a hacked up FFOS) turned cheap Firefox phones into really powerful
Javascript-based hardware hacking platforms. It's really quite fun, and I love
the idea of abusing the economies of scale of cheap consumer electronics to
make creative hardware tools. Most dedicated hardware development boards with
all the features of a phone would cost 4 times as much.

[1]: [http://janos.io/](http://janos.io/)

------
emodendroket
Maybe they could work on Thunderbird again; that's a product actually used
that doesn't have many real competitors.

~~~
hamhamed
They have way more competitors in that space, but I still use it because it's
clean and bloat free.

~~~
emodendroket
Really? What are all these desktop e-mail clients other than Thunderbird,
Outlook, and Mail.app? And how many of them are cross-platform?

I remember looking into whether there were alternatives for a while and really
not being able to find anything.

~~~
hamhamed
Nylas, Polymail.. just to name a few

~~~
emodendroket
So a tool specialized for sales professionals (apparently) and a Mac-only
product. Well, you can see what I mean.

------
mhd
I've had a developer phone and was quite disappointed with the system. If you
really want to sell the advantages of HTML/JS apps, the default ones should've
been a lot nicer and full-featured.

I still miss WebOS and my Pre.

~~~
contingencies
I bought two of them. Different. They never worked, and were both slow. Mailed
one to a fellow HN'er in India, used the other for awhile but was unable to
recompile the OS to get things fixed and received zero support online. Felt
like the whole thing was compromised from the word go by business people, from
my perspective.

I will repeat my take here, for the last time, on where they screwed up: _They
screwed up by pretending to target low end devices but still only supporting
centralized communications. They should have had Ad-hoc /Mesh Wifi as a
requirement, and designed the OS API to give those features to developers._
Developing world people want to send things between one another, not huddle
around shared wifi or pay premiums to carriers. I wrote this up in some detail
at
[https://bug945047.bugzilla.mozilla.org/attachment.cgi?id=840...](https://bug945047.bugzilla.mozilla.org/attachment.cgi?id=8407268)
... nobody bothered to reply, except for "wifi supports in FFOS is relied on
wpa_supplicant which is provided by partner mostly", ie. the business setup
within Mozilla was that the actual device manufacturers were the ones who had
control of the _wpa_supplicant_ build, and there was no way for the developers
to rely on, require or enforce features in that software being present. Nobody
took ownership, everyone lost.

------
vamur
Good move by Mozilla. Hopefully they continue to aggresively cut other non-
core products and concentrate on improving Firefox.

------
gwbas1c
What was the point of Firefox OS? I never really saw any kind of marketing
around it beyond "Mozilla decided to make a phone OS."

From what I've gleaned, the only differentiating factor was that all apps are
Javascript. Like my mom cares what languages her apps are written in.

~~~
addicted
A real open source OS? Youd equally well have asked what the point of Linux
was before it picked up steam.

Of course the big difference is that Linux succeeded while Firefox OS failed.
But thats after the fact.

I think something like Firefox OS is important, but probably wasnt something
Mozilla should have undertaken when their key asset was under massive threat
and it keeps dropping other stuff that, admittedly small numbers of people are
using, were still successful in Theur niche and could have continued with
minimal effort (examples of projects that affected me directly are Thunderbird
and Prism).

~~~
coldtea
> _Of course the big difference is that Linux succeeded while Firefox OS
> failed. But thats after the fact._

The relevant big difference is that Linux filled a need and had a particular
niche that had nothing to do with being "libre": it was good and costed
nothing to run servers on.

Big UNIX vendors charged an arm and a leg (and often required their own hw
platforms to run), and their software was behind the times (to the point that
loading the GNU userland was necessary for getting them remotely comfortable
to admin/program on).

Otherwise, Linux has been a failure on the Desktop too (statistically, nobody
cares if someone here personally uses it -- the original idea of most Linux
advocates was that it would conquer the desktop, overtaking Microsoft. Not
that "it would get good enough to be used by some users on their desktops". It
was already that, back in 1999).

~~~
qplex
Actually being "free/open/libre" software has had everything to do with the
success of Linux.

However, I've heard the high cost of UNIX licenses in the early 90s was the
reason why Linus decided to start his project.

Also, Linux has never been "a failure" on the desktop: you seem to think that
the definition of being successful is to have a complete monopoly.

~~~
coldtea
>Also, Linux has never been "a failure" on the desktop: you seem to think that
the definition of being successful is to have a complete monopoly.

Complete strawman.

First, I used the Linux advocates' own definition of "success": Linux
overtaking MS on the desktop, and the fabled and continuously moving "Year of
Linux on the desktop". Which never happened.

Second, what "complete monopoly" rubbish, which I never alluded to? Linux has
less of 2% on the desktop (by all browser-based stats). For a completely free
OS, that's a failure. 10-20% would have been a great success.

~~~
qplex
I get somewhat weary when I hear somebody say that "Linux is a failure on x
because..."

Anyway, where did you get that definition? It is the view of the Linux Zealot.
To say that it some sort of general definition is just silly.

You also seem to think that if an operating system is free (as in cost?)
people would automatically go for it. That is simply false.

In any case I think Linux will outlive Windows. Windows is pinned on one
single player and Linux is has reach over many.

------
fabrice_d
The title here is really misleading. Commercial development stopped a while
ago. What was announced today is the removal of some code from Mozilla's
codebase that will make it impossible for the community to keep working on b2g
OS.

------
sohkamyung
Not unexpected, but a bummer. I suppose this means my Firefox OS powered
Panasonic TV won't get any more updates too.

------
themihai
The main issue with FirefoxOS was the performance(of the devices and perhaps
also the OS itself). I had the first firefox phones(I think the brand was ZTE)
and they were basically rubbish(i.e. they had a 1sec or more lag). I would
take a Nokia 6600 over that any day.

Mozilla tried to market it as a low cost alternative but nobody wants low cost
rubbish. You are better of with a feature phone.

I think the biggest mistake was the reliance of the OS on javascript. It was
dead on arrival or better said from start.

------
endemic
The problem with FirefoxOS was that you could already run web apps on
iOS/Android; there was no compelling value besides the "privacy" component, as
low-cost Android phones already existed. And as I've noticed on other Moz-
centric threads, privacy is not enough of a benefit for people (even the tech
savvy!) to use a poorly-performing product.

------
sebringj
So the pattern seems that zippy-compiled-modern-language-strongly-typed stuff
works as a basis for a framework on devices, No? Why not just go with that
paradigm for a new Firefox OS but call it "Phoenix OS" or something? Would be
cool if they abstracted that for JS developers with ReactNative-like developer
experience on top of it so it was more approachable as well or just let
Facebook do that. Dumb idea? Good? This is probably not taking into account
the cash buckets raining from the two ivory towers that already did it though.

------
erikpukinskis
I'm super grateful to Mozilla for trying. I think we'll eventually get to an
open source web phone, but we're not quite there yet.

It's a tough market because as soon as you release something, there is a
ticking clock until all of the low cost manufacturers release something
cheaper and faster. Moore's law is not your friend when you're trying to
differentiate a mobile product.

Beyond that general difficulty, a web phone faces some specific inevitable
challenges:

1) No access to the "app world" of Instagram, Snapchat, etc

2) Can't optimize performance to the same degree

3) Web app access to hardware devices is limited

I think those are things you can't fight, you just have to accept them, but
they are _really_ hard to accept. This is the key psychological hurdle in any
new web phone design project.

But let's get over them for a second and see what we're left with. The web
also has some indominable advantages:

1) Instantaneous installation/startup of new "apps"

2) Long tail of web content can be a first class citizen in the UI

3) Novice-friendly development platform, i.e. "show source", embeddable HTML
widgets, etc

4) Cloud-based by default

5) A community who will deploy infrastructure for free, so long as it is open
source and decentralized

If I squint my eyes, I can imagine a web browser that really tries to
capitalize on these things. From first principles, I think a development
platform where the infrastructure for getting started is free-ish, apps and
development environments all load instantaneously, data is never lost because
it always lives in the cloud, emerging standards allow data to federate freely
between services... you just float around allowing app access to your cloud
data... such a platform would have substantial advantages over something like
iOS or Android.

Those advantages may or may not be able to outweigh the inherent platform
weaknesses I mentioned, but I can at least imagine it becoming a major player
on mobile.

I think the trouble for Mozilla is there are still quite a few research
projects there:

How do you federate data between services?

How do you host open source web apps in such a way that neither the programmer
nor the end user has to be a sysadmin?

How do you make it easy to write performant, mobile friendly apps?

How do you organize a decentralized global community to adopt good usability
practices?

How do you design a web browser so that web developers can make simple, fully
integrated apps that fit into a more unified mobile experience?

I think if you could design something that at least solved all of these
problems in a simplistic way—not fully robust, but a proof of concept with a
few core apps, messaging, video, etc—and you really leaned in to the kinds of
experiences that become uniquely possible on a platform like this, and then
refine the shit out of it in an empirical Apple-style user-centered design
tsunami, I think you might have a leapfrog product that could put Android and
iOS on their heels.

Maybe.

If you could make it fundamentally easier to build and deploy web apps, you
could get a huge store of long tail apps, which would form a kind of exclusive
content moat. Not because those apps would be inaccessible on iOS or Android,
but because they would be second-class citizens there.

To different extents Google and Mozilla have both been trying to tackle some
or all of these research projects in different ways. But I'm not even sure if
it's time yet. Maybe we just need to wait a little until some more of these
answers shake out. Or maybe Mozilla just lacked the strategic vision to really
know what to hammer hard on here.

But I am totally grateful to them (and Google) for trying. I still am drinking
the Kool-aid. I still think the web is the future. Thousands of people are
working on these problems all over the world. I think as Ethereum matures, it
will fill in a lot of the gaps.

So, I think the Firefox can rise again. We'll see.

------
BuckRogers
While I was very excited for FFOS and it's sad to see it go because I
generally follow Mozilla endeavors.

I prefer my phone to be a phone and not a general purpose computer. The less
complexity the less problems incurred. Few vendors are willing to put in the
really hard optimization to make a lowend device work well.

The lowend target of FFOS was an additional concern because it meant the
software had to be that much better.

------
mynameislegion
[https://wiki.debian.org/Mobile](https://wiki.debian.org/Mobile)

------
lamarkia
Ubuntu phone is still on.

------
justincormack
There goes the chance of any updates on my Panasonic TV I guess... I wonder if
there will even be security updates.

~~~
ascagnel_
Maybe not security updates, but you may get some advertising updates[0].

[0]:
[http://www.flatpanelshd.com/news.php?subaction=showfull&id=1...](http://www.flatpanelshd.com/news.php?subaction=showfull&id=1416894724)

~~~
justincormack
Don't get those in this model/country...

------
cryptolect
I was really hopeful for a ChromeOS competitor. Guess I'll have to wait. Maybe
Ubuntu's mobile OS?

~~~
Sylos
...why not just regular Ubuntu?

Or well, any lightweight Linux distro, really.

There's also this, in case that comes closer to what you see as ChromeOS
competitor: [https://cublinux.com/](https://cublinux.com/)

~~~
pix64
I don't want to use the terminal on a phone

~~~
Sylos
ChromeOS isn't on phones, is it? Ubuntu also doesn't really require terminal
usage either way...

------
GTP
Sad news for me

~~~
josteink
While yes, it's kinda sad, I also think this was obvious the second the first
Firefox OS phones were shipped. The _idea_ was good, but the execution and
result was completely underwhelming.

And after the dud launch, whatever momentum had been there, simply dried out.
_Nothing_ major has happened since launch for Firefox OS, while Android and
iOS have had several major releases.

That it took Mozilla this many _years_ after the fact to admit this failure,
is (as other comments) a sign of bad leadership.

The effort spent here could have been much better spent elsewhere. And these
days Mozilla needs to spend its resources efficiently more than ever.

IMO the whole "connected devices" initiative which Mozilla also mentions here
(I had completely forgotten about it) will suffer the same fate. It's not
connected to anything they currently do, or anything they have a natural
ability to reach out to. Whatever drives this initiative, it seems completely
disconnected from engineering.

Unless they kill it now, we'll see a similar announcement in a few years. And
that too will be resources that could have been spent more wisely.

~~~
mintplant
> it took Mozilla this many _years_ after the fact to admit this failure

The first Firefox OS phones shipped in early 2013. After spending around two
years trying to make the project work, Mozilla stopped releasing new versions
in May 2015 and officially started winding down the project by the end of
2015, as mentioned in the linked newsgroup post. So it wasn't really many
years at all; also, it's hard to place the blame on "bad leadership" when the
current CEO didn't come on board until the middle of 2014.

~~~
creshal
By middle 2014, many FirefoxOS phones were already months behind on updates
and neither Mozilla nor the hardware vendors were putting any effort into
supporting their own flagship devices. By that point, the app store was
useless, because you couldn't install any apps on most devices due to ABI
breakage between versions and a fragmentation worse than Android.

Neither CEO did anything to mitigate this issue. I don't know how that's _not_
bad leadership.

(Not that updates would have helped much: 1.3.0, the last and only FxOS
version my phone received – which is still sold by Alcatel – was _much_ worse
than Android 2.0 in terms of UX and stability. I have no idea how anyone
thought this was in any way ready to ship.)

~~~
dismantlethesun
> Neither CEO did anything to mitigate this issue. I don't know how that's not
> bad leadership.

Arguably that's great leadership because the CEO knew instantly to cut his or
her losses, and not give into the sunk cost fallacy by pursuing this failing
venture "because we're so invested in it already; we just have to try harder
you see!"

~~~
jahewson
And yet an entire year would pass after that before they announced that the
project would be wound down.

------
z3t4
i would like ff to implement commonjs modules and support nodejs lib and
modules in a elevated mode. users would be able to host a chat server by
visiting an url, settings could be saved in localstorage or local db.

------
proton1h1
I really loved the idea of it, it was so intutive. Really sad to see firefox
os go :(

~~~
andromeduck
Wtf hoe was it on any way intuitive?!

------
Thaxll
Another dead project by Mozilla, not sure when they will understand they don't
have resources like Google

~~~
sp332
Google has plenty of dead projects too.

------
transfire
When they ditched the Firefox phone I new it was over. They didn't really give
it an earnest try. Smells a lot like HP's destruction of webOS. I would not be
surprised if powerful players in the industry pressured them to drop it.

~~~
aikah
Yeah, the "FirefoxOS for internet of things" speech was complete bullshit. It
was obvious. The worst is the lack of honesty from Mozilla.

------
azimuth11
So when I signed up for FF sync last night that was a waste of my life? The
only reason I was giving them a shot is Chrome's goofiness. It crashes my GFX
card on Win10 (constantly) and always has threads open for hardly-ever-used
extensions.

~~~
gpribeiro
Firefox OS is getting discontinued, not Firefox the browser.

------
wott
> _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._

So, according to the history of past announcements, if I translate from
Mozilla speak to normal English, Gecko will be abandoned in March 2017.

~~~
creshal
I don't think Servo is mature enough yet.

~~~
bobajeff
However, WebKit and Chromium are. They are already experimenting on an
Electron based browser called Tolfino and on iOS Firefox is built using the
WebView.

~~~
freehunter
Mozilla experiments with a lot of stuff, and on iOS _any_ browser has to be
built with Webview. None of that means anything.

~~~
aikah
The point is Mozilla previously said FirefoxOS would live on through Internet
of Things projects when they discontinued Firefox phones. They are using the
exact same PR when shutting down FireFoxOS relative to Gecko. The question is,
is Mozilla capable of maintaining its own browser engine today? both from an
engineering perspective and from a financial perspective ? Let's see where
Rust and Servo are going in the next 3 years.

~~~
bobajeff
Yeah, but that's just how Mozilla's PR comes out. It doesn't mean they'll
abandon Gecko.

I think it's more likely they'll make Gecko/Firefox into community led
projects and dissolve Mozilla Corporation.

