7 ms·

I’m going to throw my hat in the ring to say FirefoxOS and the phone (of which I bought the first beta version) were IMO great ideas and they should have stuck

I’m going to throw my hat in the ring to say FirefoxOS and the phone (of which I bought the first beta version) were IMO great ideas and they should have stuck with it. The iOS/Android duopoly really needed a web-SPA option. Maybe they were too early (rust & wasm would have helped a lot with the speed), maybe it was too difficult a task…but I really wish they had succeeded.

bsimpson 3y ago
They did in a way, just after they had given up. There's a whole series of popular phones in India that ship FirefoxOS. I think they're sold by Jio, a carrier there.
- rjsw 3y ago
  Not just India, there are several Nokia/HMD models that run the same fork [1] of FirefoxOS, I am thinking of buying one in Europe. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KaiOS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KaiOS
  - fabrice_d 3y ago
    Unfortunately KaiOS is not in great shape currently.
    - rjsw 3y ago
      I was looking at the phone mainly to use it as a 4G WiFi hotspot. What is wrong with KaiOS itself?
      - fabrice_d 3y ago
        KaiOS is struggling because business on the low-end segment is very hard. Which means that the technical side is cutting corners and you end up with a lacking product in important areas like security. (disclaimer: I worked there and left recently)
    - mardifoufs 3y ago
      It basically got pushed out by android as even very low end devices can now mostly run android sort of ok, right?
    - qingcharles 3y ago
      It's not great at all. Convicted persons on parole are often disallowed from Internet use or smartphone ownership, so I see a lot of parolees with KaiOS flip-phones. The text entry is really, really horrible. That's probably the worst bit. The OS is pretty unintuitive and inconsistent in the UX. No-one is really developing apps for it as far as I know. It's definitely way worse than c. 2007 Nokia Symbian devices.
- ksec 3y ago
  The idea of Mobile WebOS wasn't bad on itself, but execution at Mozilla, both management direction and workload just wasn't up to the speed of Google Android or Apple iOS. They were targeting Smartphone of $35, thinking in the future most of the smartphone sold, the entry level phone will be at that price range. Falling into the same fallacy as Bill Gates, all hardware will eventually cost next to nothing, software is expensive. [Note] Bill said that in 00s and Mozilla thought of it in early 10s. So somewhat 20-30 years later Silicon Valley still has zero understanding of how Hardware and Supply Chains works. Not only did that $35 dollars phone never happened, average selling price of iPhone was $700+ selling at hundreds of millions of unit every year. Mozilla later had to revise the target to $50 phone which was still wrong. It just shows software people simply dont get it. And they had the vision of running the OS, preferably with Javascript only. Writing all modules in JS if possible. It was the early days before asm.js or WASM. And they spend a lot of time battling this. One engineers even wrote the culture was so JS-focused no one dare to ask why some of these aren't written in C++. All that combine with rapid pace of development in Smartphone software. They lost out and it is now forked into KaiOS. Which is doing surprisingly well without Mozilla. Mozilla kind of feels like Xerox in many ways. A lot of great "ideas" came out of it. But they never manage to capture much value. [Note] It does seems counterintuitive, but 20 years later may be ChatGPT / LLM will make software cheaper faster than hardware getting cost reduction.
JasserInicide 3y ago
It would have gone the way of the Palm Pre guaranteed. They just don't have the cash compared to Apple/Google
jahnu 3y ago
I think it’s an unpopular opinion but I think it’s actually not an impossible goal today. One well run org making an OS for phones that put the user not profits first is possible. Just like Linux was in the 90s.
jeroenhd 3y ago
Firefox was actually successful, in the form of its fork KaiOS. It's a shame that Mozilla wasn't the organisation that managed to bring the OS to the people, but KaiOS is still running on millions of phones today. Mozilla partnered with them to upgrade the Gecko engine from some ancient version to a much more recent version, as well. With KaiOS 3 not receiving many app updates necessary to continue functioning (WhatsApp, most importantly) I'm not sure how long it'll stick around, but it certainly left its mark on the mobile phone industry.

bsimpson 3y ago

They did in a way, just after they had given up. There's a whole series of popular phones in India that ship FirefoxOS. I think they're sold by Jio, a carrier there.

rjsw 3y ago
Not just India, there are several Nokia/HMD models that run the same fork [1] of FirefoxOS, I am thinking of buying one in Europe. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KaiOS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KaiOS
- fabrice_d 3y ago
  Unfortunately KaiOS is not in great shape currently.
  - rjsw 3y ago
    I was looking at the phone mainly to use it as a 4G WiFi hotspot. What is wrong with KaiOS itself?
    - fabrice_d 3y ago
      KaiOS is struggling because business on the low-end segment is very hard. Which means that the technical side is cutting corners and you end up with a lacking product in important areas like security. (disclaimer: I worked there and left recently)
  - mardifoufs 3y ago
    It basically got pushed out by android as even very low end devices can now mostly run android sort of ok, right?
  - qingcharles 3y ago
    It's not great at all. Convicted persons on parole are often disallowed from Internet use or smartphone ownership, so I see a lot of parolees with KaiOS flip-phones. The text entry is really, really horrible. That's probably the worst bit. The OS is pretty unintuitive and inconsistent in the UX. No-one is really developing apps for it as far as I know. It's definitely way worse than c. 2007 Nokia Symbian devices.
ksec 3y ago
The idea of Mobile WebOS wasn't bad on itself, but execution at Mozilla, both management direction and workload just wasn't up to the speed of Google Android or Apple iOS. They were targeting Smartphone of $35, thinking in the future most of the smartphone sold, the entry level phone will be at that price range. Falling into the same fallacy as Bill Gates, all hardware will eventually cost next to nothing, software is expensive. [Note] Bill said that in 00s and Mozilla thought of it in early 10s. So somewhat 20-30 years later Silicon Valley still has zero understanding of how Hardware and Supply Chains works. Not only did that $35 dollars phone never happened, average selling price of iPhone was $700+ selling at hundreds of millions of unit every year. Mozilla later had to revise the target to $50 phone which was still wrong. It just shows software people simply dont get it. And they had the vision of running the OS, preferably with Javascript only. Writing all modules in JS if possible. It was the early days before asm.js or WASM. And they spend a lot of time battling this. One engineers even wrote the culture was so JS-focused no one dare to ask why some of these aren't written in C++. All that combine with rapid pace of development in Smartphone software. They lost out and it is now forked into KaiOS. Which is doing surprisingly well without Mozilla. Mozilla kind of feels like Xerox in many ways. A lot of great "ideas" came out of it. But they never manage to capture much value. [Note] It does seems counterintuitive, but 20 years later may be ChatGPT / LLM will make software cheaper faster than hardware getting cost reduction.

JasserInicide 3y ago

It would have gone the way of the Palm Pre guaranteed. They just don't have the cash compared to Apple/Google

jahnu 3y ago

I think it’s an unpopular opinion but I think it’s actually not an impossible goal today. One well run org making an OS for phones that put the user not profits first is possible. Just like Linux was in the 90s.

jeroenhd 3y ago

Firefox was actually successful, in the form of its fork KaiOS. It's a shame that Mozilla wasn't the organisation that managed to bring the OS to the people, but KaiOS is still running on millions of phones today. Mozilla partnered with them to upgrade the Gecko engine from some ancient version to a much more recent version, as well. With KaiOS 3 not receiving many app updates necessary to continue functioning (WhatsApp, most importantly) I'm not sure how long it'll stick around, but it certainly left its mark on the mobile phone industry.