Firefox OS No More

Mozilla is now focusing on their core business and letting go of the peripherals like their Firefox OS and Thunderbird.

In July of 2011, Andreas Gal, Director of Research at Mozilla Corporation set the ball rolling for Firefox OS under the project name “B2G (Boot to Gecko)”.

In July 2012, the project officially got it current name “Firefox OS” and the OS was globally rolled out in February 2013, with commitments from LG Electronics, Huawei, TCL and ZTE to build handsets around the OS.

The world looked promising, and Mozilla was receiving huge support from free thinkers who wanted to break the shackles of Android and iOS with the open source platform Firefox was offering.

By the end of 2014, Firefox OS phones were available in 28 countries and supported by 14 global operators.

Then something went wrong — with the final nail being the official announcement from the Mozilla team that they are doing away with the Firefox OS.

Ari Jaaksi, Mozilla’s SVP of Connected Devices, released a statement on discontinuing work on the OS.
“We are proud of the benefits Firefox OS added to the Web platform and will continue to experiment with the user experience across connected devices. We will build everything we do as a genuine open source project, focused on user experience first and build tools to enable the ecosystem to grow.

Firefox OS proved the flexibility of the Web, scaling from low-end smartphones all the way up to HD TVs. However, we weren’t able to offer the best user experience possible and so we will stop offering Firefox OS smartphones through carrier channels. We’ll share more on our work and new experiments across connected devices soon.”

To understand the negative growth, we need to understand the tenets of Firefox OS.

Firefox OS is an open source operating system (based on the Linux) for smartphones, tablets and smart TVs.
The OS runs web based applications, which means that the device would not have apps, but will run the application in a web browser and thus support cross-platform compatibility. They used HTML 5 which enabled the devices to be loaded and accessed as a webpage, however the data will be stored locally.

From the start, the Mozilla team focused heavily on HTML5, with the objective of creating an OS that encourages the development of applications in Web API, in a move that was clearly aimed at eliminating the current platform-dependence of apps.

It was a bold concept, however there weren’t many takers, and those that did put their hands-up kind of dragged the platform down. Inexpensive Android phones did the OS more harm than the lacklustre Firefox OS and UI (with the rounded icon sets and generally simplistic visual scheme) especially when compared to the rich and comprehensive UI from Android and Apple and the HTML-only design acted as a the stone wall.

The development was focused around apps and UI, but the holistic user experience never getting much prominence. Such an approach can succeed when developing apps for “Internet of Things”, where the app has specific functionality and user interface is relatively simple with not many to compare with, however never with an overly saturated and highly competitive Mobile OS.

Mozilla is now focusing on their core business and letting go of the peripherals like their Firefox OS and Thunderbird (email and chat client). In fact, if the little birdy is to be believed, Firefox OS may already have found a new home with Acadine Technologies, a company with a former Mozilla Corporation president (Li Gong) at its helm and a team with Mozilla lineage.

They may be working on a Firefox derivative, H5O5.

That’s all we have right now. We’ll let you know as we learn more.

Originally published at Chip-Monks.