Today 10 years ago I went to Poland to buy a Phone with pre installed #Firefox OS on. The Phone was a Alcatel One, so very shitty. Two years later I installed Firefox OS on my Nexus 5 instead.
It was a very good concept, but sadly rolled out on too shitty hardware so it never caught on.
Imo that’s what caused Firefox to lose market share to Chrome. They focused too much on Firefox OS and deprioritized browser development. In one example, it took them a long time to implement FIDO when it was already functional in Chrome.
Considering how dominant the mobile OS has become, this wasn’t a terrible gamble. Like they lost and it looks bad in hindsight, but you can’t blame them for trying. If it had succeeded, we’d be living in a very different world of technology right now.
My recollection was that the game was already down to just iOS or Android by the time this came out. Windows Phone still existed, but it was already being ignored by popular apps like Snapchat.
Plus the people who even knew about this (tech people) didn’t like the “everything is a web app” idea when Chrome OS did it, much less a smartphone.
They tried to focus on lower end devices and that’s not inherently stupid. If you only need half the ram and CPU of a low end Android phone, you can undercut Android’s marketshare - in theory at least.
Once Firefox lost session manager and downthemall, it was dead to me.
Nowadays I use edge. All the benefits of chrome plus it’s leaner.
I use kiwi browser on phones for the addons, and because it’s faster than Firefox
Chrome won the browser war because they were lightweight, had better plugins support and it was easy to integrate with you google accounts, which were basically standard.
Firefox at the time was plagued by memory leaks and it was worse with plug-ins installed.
Ironically I switched back to Firefox years ago because Chrome was having those same issues that Firefox was had.
Fxos was just android + a custom launcher, it was not a huge investment since it was just a launcher in the end. They focused on low prices, a camera to create video reports and a usable mobile browser.
This is incorrect, it was also Linux-based but completely unrelated to Android.