FirefoxOS was eventually forked into KaiOS, which was the second most common mobile OS in India for a while, selling millions of phones.
It was never going to beat iOS, but it could've had Google's (and at the time Microsoft's lunch) for cheaper phones.
On the browser front, Google only had a third of the market at that point. Firefox was losing users, but the situation wasn't nearly as dire as it is right now.
And what would having millions of cheap phones meant for Mozilla? Not much if you ask me. Basically just Indian and Chinese ultra cheap phones that pay very little back and do little development.
Chrome might have only had a third of the market, but anybody around at the time could see that this was only a matter of time. Chrome was just better in so many ways. Mozilla needed to buckle down and focus all their engineer on the browser.
I'm convinced FirefoxOS would've stuck around a lot longer if WhatsApp had an app for it. Maybe it wouldn't have made waves in the US, but in other countries it was a great alternative to other low-cost options, except the messenger everybody used for everything didn't work on it.
I always found it very interesting how WhatsApp kept its Symbian app alive for so long but didn't build an application for FFOS. They had a KaiOS app but it seems like they dropped KaiOS too.
I do wonder, though, did Mozilla ever try to convince Facebook to build a FirefoxOS build of WhatsApp?
> I do wonder, though, did Mozilla ever try to convince Facebook to build a FirefoxOS build of WhatsApp?
Yes, they tried.
From what I know, a big difficulty in convincing them was that FFOS didn't have actual native applications, it was running everything on the Firefox Gecko Engine (on top of Linux).
WhatsApp would have had to develop their application as a WebApp in Gecko, to run on quite low-spec hardware, which would have been a huge undertaking at that time.
(FYI, the first FFOS device was launched in 2013, Facebook acquired WhatsApp in 2014)
Disclaimer: I was at Mozilla working on FxOS and then at KaiOS where I worked with the WhatsApp team to add some apis they needed.
The problem was never technical, only business. WhatsApp was basically saying: "We'll build an app if we think we can get XY millions new users". FxOS was just not shipping enough to reach the bar. KaiOS shipped in India with Jio, Facebook saw the traffic coming from KaiOS devices using the basic FB app and decided to move forward with a WhatsApp app.
I don't think they need to worry about the FIVE eyes when the
"FIVE eyes plus 3", "Nine Eyes", and "Fourteen Eyes" contain several EU countries. The larger groups aren't working together as intensively but it's not like cutting off the UK is going to stop the US from the (industrial) espionage they do in the EU.
For what it's worth, there are also a whole bunch of models that speak Chinese.
So far the US and China are spearheading AI research, so it makes sense that models optimize for languages spoken there. Spanish is an interesting omission on the US part, but that's probably because most AI researchers in the US speak English even if their native tongue is Spanish.
It's not on the same level in terms of emotion, but I believe the research https://github.com/CorentinJ/Real-Time-Voice-Cloning was based on is mostly oriented around Chinese first (and then English). It seems to work well enough if you and the voice you're cloning speak the same language though I haven't tested it much.
Public research and well-intentioned AI companies is all focusing on (white) American English, but that doesn't mean the technology isn't being refined elsewhere. The scamming industry is massive and already goes to depths like slavery to get the job done.
I wouldn't assume you're safe just because the tech in your phone can't speak your language.
Didn't Google already demo that with Google Duplex? It's not available here so I can't test it, but I think that's exactly the kind of thing duplex was designed to do.
Although, from a risk avoidance point of view, I'd understand if Google wanted to stay as far away from having AI deal with medication as possible. Who knows what it'll do when it starts concocting new information while ordering medicine.
KDE is quite popular for personal computers I believe. It's got things like HDR support much earlier than Gnome did.
Corporate also seems to like OpenSUSE and RHEL. Universities seem to like Debian. Practically all of them default to Gnome or offer Gnome equivalently.
Even several (relatively) big SteamOS-alikes are using Gnome despite SteamOS itself defaulting to KDE.
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