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.
Wish something like that would come back.
I had a Windows Phone (NOT the older Windows Mobile) for a while back around 2011 thanks to my job as a multi-platform mobile developer. I loved that phone and the OS and developing apps for it was a lot easier and faster than for Android or iOS. I was surprised at how quickly Microsoft kicked the whole thing to the curb.
BlackBerry OS 10 was my favourite one. They way it used widgets and gestures was really cool. Hub application was awesome. Android and iOS copied a lot of it later but I liked how simple and minimalistic BBOS10 was compared to them. Never tried developing for it though.
People talk about FFOS like it was a failed project while in reality it was successfully commercialized and is so popular it has a native WhatsApp client. It has ~70x more users than LineageOS. Maybe Mozilla didn’t knew how to make money out of it but it’s definitely was a great OS project.
I always thought it’d be more of a feature phone type os. Couldn’t compete with what Android had to offer to the mainstream Western market at the time using primarily HTML, but I’m glad to find out that is what it turned into.
This makes me nostalgic for my Palm Pre and webOS.
oh wow, i had forgotten! I too was hopeful…
This makes me nostalgic for my old Palm Pre. It was basicallly ChromeOS: Phone Edition. So far ahead of its time if was dismissed….and the hardware engineering was trash. That may have contributed to its downfall a little.
Multitasking on the palm pre was so much better than anything else. It’s a damn shame they didn’t lean into that with their marketing.
The fact that the hardware was lower spec (ignoring the design for the moment) definitely contributed to it’s downfall. Apple gets away with it because they are apple. Palm needed to do the same thing apple does, which is convince the public that the phone was designed so well that it completely overcomes it’s hardware limitations, which it absolutely did.
Despite having a lower quality camera sensor, the software produced surprisingly decent pictures and video. Despite having much less ram, you could have a surprising number of apps open at once and instantly switch between them with no lag. And it had a tactile keyboard with a very fun slide to open mechanism.
The only thing that sucked about it was that websites loaded slowly, but that was true of all devices back then. Even now websites still load slower on phones than on PC.
Where it lost me is when it lost YouTube, and it never got an implementation of Swype. Once I got my first Android phone (sharp Aquos crystal, the first bezelless smartphone and honestly another amazing piece of hardware that wasn’t marketed properly) that was it.
Ah, nostalgic! I loved the Firefox OS! I even preached about it to family and friends. Good times.
Unfortunately it never felt like a finished product.
