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Comment by int_19h | Hacker News Reader

The question you should rather be asking is, who in this bloody comment thread didn't expect Firefox OS to fail, back when it was first announced?

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FirefoxOS was a way out of Apple's proprietary walled garden and of being Google's product and information slave.

Maybe it was unrealistic to expect it to work out - one relatively small company fighting with Google and Apple - but I guess some people are optimists and want to believe that the world can be made into something else than corporate dystopia or whatever.

Firefox OS was the out of reality belief from mozilla that computer were dead in a handful of years to be replaced by mobile, combined with the absolute nonsense that they could compete without hardware manufacturer support.

Wanting to believe in something is a thing, neglecting your core product and users to bet on a personal belief is something else.

Maybe some of the hardware makers should have thrown some resources at the project.

What's in it for them that justifies the expense?

If I could have invested in half the tech things I've seen which I thought were bloody stupid ideas, I'd be a rich man.

Half is actually good chance, why didn't you invest in all of them?

1. I'm not a venture capitalist and startups don't/can't generally accept small investments.

2. I thought they were bloody stupid ideas.

I'm not convinced that investing in ideas I think are stupid because things I have previously thought were stupid did well is a sound strategy. All it shows is I'm bad at predicting what will do well, so it makes more sense for me to invest broadly across as many markets as possible.

Your comment reminded me of this xkcd. https://xkcd.com/1497/

I thought Firefox OS could've found a niche on low-end phones. There's still nothing fundamentally wrong with a phone OS that uses web technologies for its UI, Mozilla wasn't even the first to try it (the Palm Pre got there first). Also, there are tons of phone apps that are just websites in an application wrapper, so it's not like they had to start from scratch to build up their app ecosystem. Lastly, whilst Mozilla has stopped funding it, a fork of it lives on as a smart TV OS for a major TV manufacturer, so it did find a niche, just not the intended one.

> There's still nothing fundamentally wrong with a phone OS that uses web technologies for its UI

There isn't, of course. But that wasn't why it failed. It failed because it didn't answer any questions that weren't already answered, except for some (like "more privacy") that too few people wanted an answer to, to have a market. And that part, unfortunately, was utterly predictable.

As I said before, I saw Firefox OS's primary niche being low-end phones. In that market, many people barely care about the OS being run. They could've easily racked up some decent sales in this area without many of their customers caring about the long term benefits. In some ways, Firefox OS was a case of unfortunate timing, part of me wonders if it would've been better to have a longer incubation period to make the platform better before announcing it, but another part of me thinks that they had to release it when they did, before the vacuum that Symbian had left behind was completely filled by Android.

Google closed off the market with Android One. In another world they couldn't get it together, or weren't interested in low margin competition. Firefox OS was a reasonable bet, it could have paid off, even if the technology was manifestly limited at the time. I actually wish they'd kept it going as an ongoing experiment, with a very low budget, once they'd done the work to get it running on a device like the Nexus 5, you'd have thought improvements would flow almost automatically from the work on the browser.

It was also a really bad implementation. I developed for the firefox os reference phone before the launch - it was atrociously slow.

Think low end android phone (of the time!) running software that was 10x slower than android's.

It's really hard to describe how slow it was if you didn't personally use a firefox os phone. There were times when it felt significantly slower than a 386 running windows 3.11.

If those phones were actually available to buy. I wanted to buy one but they were not available to western europe, then were distributed over weird channels and turned out to have performance issues. So I gave up and got an older android phone for free.

Same for phoenix. This is nonsense.

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