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.
I think what destroyed Firefox market share was a RAM leak that took them like a year or two to fix. It consumed all of your available RAM and would bog your computer down. I know that's what drove me away. It took like 10 years for me to come back.
Wish something like that would come back.
It's KaiOS now, completely independent from Mozilla
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.
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.
If you are still interesting in Linux phone, consider looking at PinePhone Pro. I would recommend it only for experience users and the phone experience is far from Android, but software is catching up. Check @linuxphones
P.S. writing this comment from PPP :)
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.
What is this? A phone for ants?
I remember a time when all of the companies were striving to make cell phones as small as possible. But as soon as touch screens came out that trend reversed.
When we realized we could watch porn on them.
The nexus 5 was peak size for a phone imo, it's a nightmare trying to find a decent 5" phone nowadays.
I never understood why they targetted low end hardware with a tech stack that's notoriously slow (web).
I remember when Ubuntu for phones was hyped so big, then it fell flat...
Am I the only one that misses a thick bezel?
Thick bezels are great for actual comfortable usage, but they don't look sexy so they're no more
It's nostalgic for sure, but from a UX perspective I am so happy with the edge to edge displays.
My only gripe is that they work best with at least a little Bezel. Too little side bezel especially, and the edges of your palms will give you false input. Incredibly annoying.
The iPhones have been really good with this thankfully.
For the curious people, Firefox OS kept living in a way, being used as the foundation for KaiOS, which was a smart operative system for "dumb" phones. This one took off in certain parts of the world.
today there are comparable projects with like postmarketos and ubuntu touch for specific phones, among other linux mobile projects
I completely forgot Firefox had a phone.
Facebook has phones too back then, though they're just Android with Facebook button.
FFOS was an html mess. The GUI didn't have much to offer. You couldn't organize your apps since they were only accessible through the cluttered app drawer.
The HTML was not the problem, the never finished OS was one yes.
I still liked it because of how easy it was to develop apps for it like I did with my https://jeena.net/feedmonkey
I would love another, more privacy focused os. I've tried graphene, etc, but something altogether different would be cool.
We had two of these that ended up sitting in my desk at work back around that time. They were sent to us free with hopes we would port our (shitty) android/iOS apps to it. One was a bit newer, but they both just felt shitty compared to the equivalent Nexus or iPhone of the time, so I never bothered trying to use it as a daily driver. I wasn't even on the app dev team, no one else wanted them or cared at all. Was fun as a technical curiosity though.
i really hope these alt-mobile OS's take off, i know theres things like pinephone and kde mobile but they're still a little bit rough around the edges last i checked.. at the same time tho maybe i should do some more digging around. i imagine someone's made a daily-driveable alternate OS for phones at this point
I thought this was an urban myth or a collective hysteria.
How much functionality is left on that phone?
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