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Comment by i80and | Hacker News Reader

The author's remarks about FirefoxOS actually mirror my own perspective as an outsider. It was a beautifully-made product that felt mismanaged and somewhat unfocused. It was definitely prematurely killed just as it was coming into its own.

I'm still sore about that.

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I'm sore about it too. I had one of the original phones and I loved it. It was simple and elegant. The author mentioned something about spending too much time copying Android. That was definitely misplaced effort. Why not spend the time making something original? IMO, Mozilla spends too much time in general copying others. Look at the Firefox browser. It seems more and more like Chrome every release. I much preferred the original Firefox.

They should've just made the phone boot directly into the browser, and then focus all energy on making the browser better. One app. No screens, widgets, dialer, anything. Add all of that as open web APIs as users demand them. Don't bother with UI beyond proof of concept, let the web optimize it.

You sacrifice the best things about a web OS if you wrap it in a traditional OS UI.

The implication that "a web OS" is what people want raises some question marks. I use the web a lot on my phone--for reading documents. I use applications for interacting with services because, still (and this is years after FirefoxOS), the experience of using a mobile web app, especially for integrating with hardware, is awful. There may be something of a chicken-and-the-egg problem here, but at the same time--if it's awful, it's awful, and so going towards real applications is the only thing that makes sense unless you want to make devices that are awful. Nobody wants to make devices that are awful.

Letting "the web optimize" your dialer, though, is perhaps the most dangerous idea I've heard in a while. Core applications under no circumstances should be optimized by the web because that's how you get malware masquerading as those core applications. No bueno.

> the experience of using a mobile web app, especially for integrating with hardware, is awful

I think the implication is that if FirefoxOS had focused on making it not awful, they would have done really well.

It'd be awesome to have a phone for which app development is all done in HTML / CSS / JS while still remaining fast and efficient.

Lots of things would be awesome. You have to have something that is not awful to get people invested in pulling something off.

Palm - we are going to build a device that will let you build apps using web technologies. Developers rebel, Palm releases a native SDK.

Apple - you don't need native apps you can build great web apps. Developers and users rebel, a native SDK is introduced 9 months later.

Blackberry - you can build apps using Adobe based web technology. You get the picture...

None of those examples are what I described. Palm came closest, but still was web-like apps, not actual web apps.

That's just the point. Every mobile platform that come out has tried to tell the "you don't need native apps you can build web apps story" at some point besides Android.

Instead of web apps, Google stuck the world with a sub optimal Java implementation that they spent years trying to optimize.

None of those platforms told that story. None of those platforms released with web apps only.

Apple only allowed web apps at first. Palm's first SDK for WebOS was based on web technologies. BlackBerry's first SDK was based on Adobe Air.

They are chasing market share, they used to have the goal of being the best preforming, most customizable, and most secure/private browser... The market share came with all those things.

Today they see Google Dominating because of Pure marketing, so they want to chase that dragon... They are killing everything Mozilla stood for in the process.

Chrome won not because of pure marketing. Chrome is a very good browser is why.

FirefoxOS should have competed against ChromeOS, not Android and iOS. Over time, as the product grow in popularity and web technologies become more capable, then you can introduce a mobile variant of the OS if it make sense to do so.

Chromebooks are great devices for a lot of people who simply don't need a full operating system. Look at how Chromebooks are successful in (US) schools. This is the perfect market for Mozilla.

I went to my public library the other day and they have computers to search for books, find info, etc, and the computers run Windows, but the actual app they use is browser based (IE)! Unbelievable. Mozilla could have the perfect product for them.

My biggest gripe about Firefox OS was that Mozilla partnered with companies making low end phones that were quite awful even for that time. At that time, I felt that if it were released with high end or near high end hardware, the overall user experience would've have been much better and there would've been more freedom for Mozilla to focus on the important things. It could've then percolated down to cheaper/low end hardware with a separate "make Firefox OS lean" program. Trying to compete with Android on devices that were underpowered, in my view, killed all prospects of it surviving.

What would a manufacturer making first-tier hardware have gotten from partnering with Mozilla?

The most likely I'd see there would have been a "Certified for reflashing" platform.

"We're an open platform, unlike an Android"? "We don't rat you to the CIA, unlike Android"? "Our apps are all-js"? I wonder whether Mozilla could have not partnered at all and targeted a stock Android phone?

None of those are selling points to customers, though (well, perhaps the CIA one, but even then, most don't care). A manufacturer wouldn't take on a Firefox phone for those reasons, it needed a compelling consumer selling point, and it didn't have one.

Ironic...

Andy Rubin

the definition of open: "mkdir android ; cd android ; repo init -u git://android.git.kernel.org/platform/manifest.git ; repo sync ; make"

https://mobile.twitter.com/arubin/status/27808662429?lang=en

> What would a manufacturer making first-tier hardware have gotten from partnering with Mozilla?

Product differentiation. Android is a crowded hardware market where everyone looks the same.

FirefoxOS was primarily marketed at third-world consumers (who are literally in the billions). Third world consumers purchase $10 smartphones, not $400 smartphones, because they don't have that much money.

I've got two Firefox OS phones, and was very excited at first, but when I was no longer getting updates I felt where this was going to.

One of the phones, orange, I think the first or second model, is still in use. My wife now uses it on our annual trip to home country, and it still works fine as a phone. It's somewhat safer to use it, than the iPhone she has here in US - simply for not being stolen. It works just fine years after development. Most surprisingly though... the battery life was at 50%, a year after we haven't used it. (unless my son secretly charged it, and used it...)

I kind of wish for Firefox OS to come back. I liked the idea of apps being web apps, though it was a bit blurry what's downloaded and what's not, but with today's prevalent mobile internet that should not be a big deal (just a bit more pricey)

See http://kaiostech.com/. B2G lives, for now -- the "G" (for Gecko) part is not likely to last. Blonk, not Gonk, coming, I hope with Muon (https://github.com/brave/muon/) included, but the "Muonk" name goes too far ;-).

IMO, they were already way, way late to market the day they assigned their first engineer to work on FirefoxOS.

FirefoxOS was so clearly doomed to failure from inception.

Web based anything has huge overhead compared to native code.

Yet they targeted ultra low-end hardware for emerging markets...

The benefits of web-based apps are the low barrier to entry and freedom from platform lock-in (openness).

They needed to target rich open source loving users with ultra high-end hardware that could cope with the overhead, and use Freedom as the USP.

Not sure that would've worked, but it would've fit their OS better.

One thing I can say - at least FirefoxOS was 1000x better than Ubuntu Phone.

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