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Comment by sunaookami | Hacker News Reader

No it really wasn't. It took Firefox multiple years of catching up, releasing multiprocess architecture, 64-bit binaries (!), ... It took until Firefox 58 (2018) until they finally cought up. There was this huge period of nothingness around 2014 when they focussed on other weird stuff like FirefoxOS that everyone saw from miles away that it will flop.

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Fun fact - FirefoxOS only flopped in Mozilla, it went on to be the insanely successful KaiOS based on the source code. KaiOS has over 100M active users.

This indicates there was actually a lot of technical merit in it and the problem was with the GTM and leadership.

TBF KaiOS had a measure of success but it is now on life support.

The fact is Android could be scaled down way better than KaiOS could be scaled up.

(and you could just wait for the perf/$ to continue to decrease).

I seriously doubt that "100m active users" metric. I haven't even heard of this OS, and if it truly had that many users, we would at least hear SOMETHING about it in the tech world (we do not).

Doubting things and skepticism are great. The 100m number is off common device profiling trackers (statcounter etc) but the number is also mentioned in several other sources.

You have not heard of it because it primarily targets feature phones and primarily in emerging markets. If you are not in the market for a feature phone in India or building software for one it makes total sense you're blissfully unaware.

(And as the other comment mentioned, after a very successful run as a FirefoxOS fork - Android caught up )

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