Comment by fidotron | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fidotron | Hacker News Reader

The real reason Firefox OS was doomed was the timing was all wrong with the explosion in graphics capability of the devices, as anyone that worked on anything performance sensitive during the iPhone 3GS -> 4 will tell you: the same GPUs were being asked to drive 4x the number of pixels. Users didn't care, they just expected it to work.

FFOS was doomed because the pixel explosion wasn't just stretching the GPUs of that time, it had also made CPU rendering a serious bottleneck, a fact the Android team also struggled to accept. Mozilla lacked the resources to do anything about it, although I didn't get the impression they actually understood the problem at all (as shown by it not being mentioned here), while the Googlers resorted to that most Googly of activities: arguing via walls of text that try to deny the obvious truth.

I have long maintained that what Mozilla should have done was a Firefox OS based e-reader. The mania that exists for all things e-ink in the tech industry is real, and if you combined that with a proper open platform you could leverage it into being a self sustaining business.

> FFOS was doomed because the pixel explosion wasn't just stretching the GPUs of that time

Actually this is the reason that I, at the time working at Mozilla on the rendering team and helping with Firefox OS, proposed will-change. To solved this exact problem. With it, I managed to get the home screen to be perfectly smooth using pure web technologies and no hard coding on low end mobile hardware. Here's the original proposal: https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2013Nov/0414....

It’s a sad shame that in 2025 I’m using Chrone on my e-ink reader. I still get upset these days at what could have been with Firefox and Mozilla :(

I don't think video mattered at all to their failure. FirefoxOS was never going to eat Apple's lunch it was going to eat Google's.

If thousands of vendors had made something Android 2.X level for the entry level market and the technical people who actually want what Google engineers wanted the ecosystem by volume would have been mostly FirefoxOS instead of mostly out of date Android and the ecosystem by revenue still Apple's.

> FirefoxOS was never going to eat Apple's lunch it was going to eat Google's.

Aside from all else, and what about the very responsive Windows Phone 7 or similarly flawed WebOS? Let alone all the feature phones, Blackberry etc. This was an enormously competitive era, and Google had to do some serious fighting to secure the future of Android at that time.

Phone manufacturers do not exist to serve the bidding of the software builders, they actually have to make money, and doing that requires looking at least superficially competitive. The primary way users experience that is through the graphical interface on the device, hence why my then employer made incredible amounts of money selling game builds for all these other devices to demonstrate how close to iPhone equivalent they were.

It's no accident that the Android golden age began with fusing the UI concepts of WebOS that worked with a rendering pipeline that started to make sense for the hardware it was on.

The next billion users for each billion after the first were not enterprise workers who wanted to connect to some email server so windows and BlackBerry missed the volume market entirely. Users wanted a phone that lasted 3 years, could browse and could bank. A small number of power developers that dont despise the platform are simply needed to keep the user base at all and a browser OS that wasn't Android had that by default.

Mozilla ignored the autonomy of the parties that should be in an ecosystem and tried to make them wait for Mozilla's choices and implementations on things. I bet they had more than enough people on every one of their waiting lists for being involved but they discouraged actual involvement.

https://www.wired.com/2011/08/blackberry-london-riots/

BBM was much more mass market than your attempt at revisionist history would suggest.

The next billion didn't live in London. (These companies didn't want to butcher their high price per user market for volume and BB was not much of the market a year or two later. Firefox OS existed from around when Android had 80% share with most of that being at least one version behind.. I was rather obsessed with the limits of the 3rd quartile mobile browser in 2014..)

Yeah, what about Windows Phone? From a user's perspective it felt like it was good, very good even, but MS kind of... gave up on it suddenly? Like they pulled a google on it.

We actually released an app for WP7 and then just as the platform was starting to get traction, they released WP8, made it backwards incompatible and told everyone to rewrite their apps. It killed the platform overnight. Maybe you can get companies to take a chance on a new platform once, but you can't then deprecate every device and app a year later and expect everyone to do the same thing again

The iPaq dominated the era, and just like Windows on the phone, it seemed like they just vanished overnight

It kinda ate the feature phone market for a while as KaiOS. It was way better than normal feature phones like Nokia Series 30.

Unfortunately there's very few KaiOS phones on the market anymore. Nokia stopped making them and reverted back to Series 30 and 40. I wonder why.

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