I don't know where journalists get their facts, but this article is terrible.
1) FirefoxOS was killed a year ago.
2) We never attempted to bring FxOS to other kind of connected devices beyond phones and TVs.
If they had took the time to check the projects being worked on (see https://wiki.mozilla.org/Connected_Devices/Projects) they would have understood the activities a bit better. For instance, the device built for SensorWeb was based on a cortex-m4 CPU, running bare metal code written in Rust on top of freeRTOS.
The journalists definitely got their facts wrong here, but they missed the overarching story. Why is Mozilla acting like a tech company/startup, and not as a non-profit here to push Firefox and other projects under their management to new heights?
Mozilla has basically ignored Firefox for the past few years and let it languish as a single threaded browser in a multi-threaded world, where the other 3 major competitors are highly optimizing their browsers to the respective laptop/tablet/phones. Google with Chromebooks (shipping more than Macbooks[1]) & Android, Microsoft with Surface, Apple with iOS (where they have an illicit monopoly) & on Macbooks.
Mozilla can fight this battle and provide a better user experience, but as it stands a few years have been sunk down the drain on Firefox OS and Mozilla isn't even trying to leverage it into a Chromebook killer!
Sure, trying to win on price (which is what Moz tried with Firefox OS) isn't going to be a battle that can be won. Google and others already have the relationships with manufacturers who know they can drive volume, but what they don't have is the community support & buy in that Mozilla has. Create a compelling user experience! Netscape won the war against the monoculture of a decade ago by creating a user experience that people loved, in spite of the IE6 monoculture of the time.
Today, we have a Webkit monoculture, with Edge nipping at its heels. This is a very similar situation to a decade ago, where Deer Park Alpha lead the way out of the shadowy darkness, with flash free video & audio and performance and protocol support that ran circles around the others.
Indeed. From where I stand Mozilla is working hard at making the transition it's just:
- it's a hard problem
- they don't have the resources of MS or Google
- they have a much bigger extension culture and must support it
- the current work is not sexy and visible and hence get little advertisement
Mozilla created an entire freaking language to level up their game. And in a few years it became one of the most promising technology of the decade, with a vibrant community.
If it was a movie, this period of their life would be the scene with a small outsider named "Moz" training by night in a dirty gym or during the night under the rain.
Next one will be the training paying off and him kicking the other guy's ass in the ring.
It is a hard problem, and Mozilla has put a ton of effort into Rust, but at this point they aren't supporting any of their current extensions (XUL) and WebExtensions will not cover most use cases that XUL covered. This isn't a Python 2 to Python 3 event, this is Mozilla going from the equivalent of C to Java.
Most of your favorite extensions will die, and it is directly forcing me to drop firefox for chromium at work, which I abhor. Sadly the feature I need (decent kiosk mode) will die in its current form (as a XUL addon) only a year after deploying this solution, versus with chromium its built in, and not going away any time soon.
> WebExtensions will not cover most use cases that XUL covered.
This is just FUD. Especially as Mozilla is working closely with the developers of the most popular add ons to make sure all capabilities they need will be available (see also webextension experiments).
Of course not all capabilities of XUL will make it, but as Chrome has a vibrant extensive add on community around WebExtension the idea that most usecases are affected is implausible.
Yes they had to make a some very hard choice on this one. It's going to piss of a lot of people on the way. But on the long run I think it will result in a better browser. With less versatility, yes. But I got an entire OS at my disposal for advanced used, it's rather have a very good browser doing browser things.
I'll the tab group extension though. I loved it and it won't be possible with webextensions.
Your comment is a good example tightrope that Mozilla is on.
I've switched to Firefox a few times over the past years, but usually I'd switch back to Chrome because, whether true or not, it felt more performant/cleaner/better. The main reason I bothered trying to switch back to Firefox was always the versatility or 'freedom'. Stuff like the tree-style tab plugin.
Realistically, for me to break my usual patterns and try Firefox again would have to involve at least one of the following:
- equal (perceived) performance to Chrome
- freedom/versatility in regards to plugins
- some as-of-yet not seen before advantage
With all else being equal, or even ever so slightly worse than Chrome, I'd go for Firefox simply because I distrust Google.
Thing is, I'd characterize myself as much more security- and privacy-conscious than most people, and yet I'm still on Chrome despite giving Firefox a shot at least once a year for the past few years or so. I catch myself forgetting to test the stuff I make on FF occasionally (I'm a web developer). While I'm by no means a paragon of sticking with my beliefs, I'm still a bit of a privacy-weenie. The fact that I'm not using Firefox worries me a bit.
The fact that I can't quite explain it frustrates me. If I had to give a reason as to why I use Chrome instead of Firefox, I'd say there are two primary reasons and a very vague third one:
1. Chrome is just more familiar at this point, especially its dev tools
2. Firefox feels like one of those Java applets: slow to boot and alien to my OS (moreso than Chrome).
3. Chrome feels snappier
> Electrolysis is basically here and working, slowly rolling out
Unless you use extensions, which used to be one of Firefox's biggest advantages.
I gave Firefox on Ubuntu a try for a week last month because I was looking for a replacement for Chrome and if I wasn't tech savvy I wouldn't have been able to figure out that Firefox was running in single-process mode and how to fix that.
E.g. the default "Ubuntu integration" extension that Firefox ships with on Ubuntu (where it is the default browser) is not compatible with electrolysis. Additionally the (now outdated) Lastpass extension from the Firefox addon shop isn't compatible. I think the Trello Scrum extension also isn't compatible. The React developer tools also only just experimentally enabled compatibility.
I'm not nitpicking -- users don't care why Firefox is slow or why electrolysis is disabled. If an extension is available for Firefox, especially if it's available on the official addon shop, users expect it to work and not to make Firefox slow to a crawl.
That said, even with multiprocess mode I found that Firefox would often be considerably slower when having many tabs open (it's normal for me to keep 30-40 tabs open and this isn't rare, even among my non-developer friends). And as a developer the dev tools are still lightyears behind.
Electrolysis is here and fairly reliably working with my main XUL based extensions, but the ship for WebExtensions has sailed and I'm not gonna be on the wrong side of things (eg. Python 2 vs 3, Systemd vs "fun" init scripts), just gonna prepare for the realities of it, no matter that it breaks my heart to be forced to chromium at work :(
I get that Mozilla wants to dump all the cruft added by XUL based extensions, and that they offed all the Firefox OS bits ASAP, but there are still markets for both those things. The latter prolly had more life in it if it were targeted as a Firefox chromebook type deal to give to the parents/kids, as that is eating into laptops marketshare in the double digits, and that on a Pinebook could easily make it the year of the Linux Laptop.
> Why is Mozilla acting like a tech company/startup, and not as a non-profit here to push Firefox and other projects under their management to new heights?
Call me cynical, but Mozilla is made of people. People don't mind making a name for themselves: no one works at Mozilla for life. One might as well prepare for life at tech giants or startups. Firefox is printing money so they can afford the Jonesing (for now).
A less cynical reason is that Mozilla shares the same hiring pool as startups and tech giants and people go back and forth; changing mindsets is hard.
Sure, but quite a few employees are at Mozilla for significant periods of time, and (theoretically) Mozilla doesn't have free reign to run the non-profit into the ground by letting marketshare continue to slip away.
Another perspective a friend recently shared with me is that perhaps it is time for Firefox to go the way of Icedove, Mozilla has taken it pretty far, but it is not its main focus even now, and it can be picked up and developed on into the future (not that there haven't been forks already).
Its the exact same deal as with IE on Windows just a decade ago, by force bundling it, and then with Apple taking the additional step of blocking ALL competition, you get no choice.
Today, I can build a SIP client for the browser and it will work well on every major platform except iOS, where Apple is still dragging ass years after WebRTC was standardized and implemented by every other browser.
>Its the exact same deal as with IE on Windows just a decade ago, by force bundling it, and then with Apple taking the additional step of blocking ALL competition, you get no choice.
No, Microsoft was a monopoly on the OS market.
You cannot be a monopoly with < 50% share like iOS has (and it's not a monopoly to have 100% share on your OWN platform and dictate terms there, as long as your platform is not a monopoly on the overall market).
In other words, people and devs dissatisfied with how iOS does things, can always go to Android (or Windows Phone).
People couldn't do that when Windows had 95%+ of the desktop and enterprise market, because there was no escaping it.
> You cannot be a monopoly with < 50% share like iOS has (and it's not a monopoly to have 100% share on your OWN platform and dictate terms there, as long as your platform is not a monopoly on the overall market).
You're assuming "iOS" and "iOS apps" are the same market, which they aren't in the same way that LibreOffice is in the same market with Microsoft Office but not with Microsoft Windows.
The argument you could be trying to make is that Android apps and iOS apps, or Google Play and the iOS App Store, are the same market. But you can't install Android apps on iOS and you can't get iOS apps from Google Play.
And iOS app developers are the customers of the iOS App Store. They pay Apple for it and have no alternative. "Switch to Android" doesn't work because it is the device customer who would have to switch to Android, not the app developer. The app developer is already in both. It's like facing a retail monopoly in California and what you're saying is to go buy retail space in Texas. That's not the same market.
> You cannot be a monopoly with < 50% share like iOS has
You are a monopoly when you have pricing power over some good or service (the ability, in some range, to raise prices without losing sales to a competitor). Having less than 50% share in some market using the market boundaries usually drawn by analysts does not prove or imply the absence of pricing power.
>You are a monopoly when you have pricing power over some good or service (the ability, in some range, to raise prices without losing sales to a competitor)
The good or service being "mobile phones" or "mobile apps" -- e.g. the whole market they belong to.
Not "iPhones" or "iOS apps".
Any company has "pricing power" over their own products and marketplace.
>Having less than 50% share in some market using the market boundaries usually drawn by analysts does not prove or imply the absence of pricing power.
> The good or service being "mobile phones" or "mobile apps" -- e.g. the whole market they belong to.
No, it doesn't work that way. If you have pricing power on, say, iPhones -- you can raise the price and sales don't move to someone else -- you have a monopoly because price power demonstrates that whatever putative competitors exist are in a functionally separate market, not substitute products in the same market.
> Any company has "pricing power" over their own products and marketplace.
No, companies in competitive markets lose sales to competitors when they raise prices, which is exactly what pricing power means doesn't happen.
At least in outside communication, a year ago Mozilla only said they are shifting Firefox OS from phones to other devices and IoT [1]. Then they went on to do some smart TV stuff but were looking at other applications as well.
A single-board computer running Firefox OS was discussed last year here on HN. The post itself is now private. I think this was the demo, where they showed how to blink a LED from some HTML and Javascript:
I'm not sure how you can make those claims; if anything, they've been even more active in reviewing hardware, etc. since they actually have better corporate sponsorship.
But all things change, and the heady era of technological advances that we saw in the 90s and early 2000s are long gone, at least in the desktop and server computer world.
Electronics has now become mainstream-consumer oriented and the sites reflect that interest, since after all, they only exist due to advertising funds.
This article is inaccurate. Mozilla canceled Firefox OS a year ago. Mozilla is now canceling the Connected Devices project, which was exploring IoT and "Web of Things" technology outside of a browser:
Firefox OS should have competed against Chrome OS, not Android and iOS.
Chrome OS is the perfect OS for the masses; lightweight, very secure and stable. A lot of things that used to require dedicated apps can be done in the browser now. Chromebooks are also great machines for schools, much more practical than iPads (in my opinion) and very easy to manage. Mozilla missed the boat.
The thing that's probably second most upsetting about Firefox OS is this:
If you say what you've just said right now, you'll be told you have the benefit of hindsight working in your favor.
On the other hand, if you had the ability to go back in time to make your argument back then, even with perfect omniscience about how things would turn out, then you would have been subjected to claims that there is no market for such a thing, that you're trying to satisfy your own nerd niche itch, and whatever post hoc rationale that the Firefox product team could have (and regularly did) come up with to reassure themselves that their track is the right one.
I had perfect omniscience on this one. At least I thought that was the direction they were taking FirefoxOS. In fact, I sent a product request over to Panasonic to make a FirefoxBook about 6 years ago[0] and made sure I mentioned it to Eich as well[1]. Since they were integrating it into their TVs I figured they were my best bet to push the product idea onto.
I'm a Mozilla fan and wanted a privacy respecting, libre thin-client that kept advertising money coming into Mozilla's coffers so they can continue their mission.
Focusing on that and Firefox was the way. Unfortunately, Mozilla is a little lost.
Is it too late for them to try such a strategy? It seems Google has proven there's a market for this sort of product. Or is Google Docs (etc.) an additional part of the appeal of Chromebooks? I know there's been backlash regarding student usage tracking with ChromeOS; seems like a point of differentiation for Mozilla. It also would seem to have more synergy with improving the desktop Firefox client.
Pretty much that's it. A lot less conflict of interest with a MozillaBook. They're really the only ones who should be doing such a thing at all. I don't think it's too late but Mozilla isn't listening to me.
You raise a great point about synergy between development of Firefox and FirefoxOS. The phone and tablet thing is a joke, the world needs and wants FirefoxBooks (they just don't know it yet).
The difference is that Google was able to commercialise and sell their product.
You don't need hindsight to realise that competing in the phone markplace is the wrong place to start. You start with the desktop and then make gradual adaptions that allow your operating environment work well on tablets, phones and laptops.
This is mostly marketing bullshit [1][2] and misses the point entirely. There is competition on mobile because it's a captive market: the device ships with an OS with integration into first-party services like search and maps, and the default first-party app and content store, where the house takes a cut. Whoever controls the platforms gets the eyeballs, thanks to the power of defaults.
Until recently, the highest marketshare desktop OS, Windows, was a utility and not a content-monetizing platform, but Windows 10 brought it up to the level that was long standard on mobile. Google Search, Chrome the Browser, Chrome OS and Chromebooks are Google's progressively vertical takes on inviting a user into the Google data ecosystem in a non-mobile form factor, proving that Windows's weakness was that Google could monetize these users without having to control the hardware, but getting cheap first-party hardware into the hands of people is always a plus.
In all likelihood, the same would've happened to Firefox OS anyway if it had become successful -- the celebrated 'open' mobile OS would be just another entry point into the same exact platforms that managed to rise to prominence on Windows -- a proprietary but laissez-faire ecosystem where anyone could run an application to do just about anything. Over time, a few players bubbled to the top, and now they're shipping their own hardware to cut out the middleman.
This is true. It may not be a truth people in professional circles like to here. But PCs used to be mass market consumer products in the 90s (during the internet boom) but now Smartphones, tablets and in some cases set top boxes have taken their place.
This is exactly the kind of argument I'm trying to burn to the ground in the second part of my comment above (see "nerd niche itch"). You write this, thinking that you're revealing some uncomfortable truth that the bubbleheads don't understand. But the real truth is that Chromebooks are killing.
The penetration Chromebooks have made in education is huge. And even if it were an entirely no-profit/break-even situation, the idea of millions of students and public library patrons doing work on a "Firebook", and that it would be a serious contender to Windows-based PCs in a number of IT departments, is so perfectly aligned with Mozilla's ideals that it makes me sick to think about, especially juxtaposed with the hundreds of millions that Mozilla Corp has thrown away in the go-nowhere endeavors that it did pursue.
Still an US only phenomenon, I haven't seen anyone in education related domains with a Chromebook, specially since in Europe it is up to the students to care for their own hardware, as consumer purchase.
If I am reading this article correctly, it looks like the %/market that Chromebooks have managed to capture in the field of education is large worldwide.
Ah, one of those Gartner studies that companies buy from 2015, yet we don't see them on the stores.
When we do happen to see one, if it is a store we visit regularly, what we see is the same device on display being discounted to death until the store finally manages to get rid of it.
I must have seen around 5 like that, so I don't get where Gartner is getting their values from.
Should have been kept as a research project, and only launched for consumer devices when service workers and PWA's became mainstream, and also the new rendering techniques from servo are integrated into gecko. If we're lucky, web apps will be able to cover 50-80% of native app use-cases in the next 2-3 years. When Firefox OS was launched, it was clear they were simply not up to scratch to make a system like that viable. Especially for low performance devices.
> when service workers and PWA's became mainstream, and also the new rendering techniques from servo are integrated into gecko
If service workers were invented, PWAs were a thing, or Servo had been built, Mozilla's actions around Firefox OS would probably have been much different.
What really killed Firefox OS was the lack of ecosystem. VP of Apps Rick Fant put all the emphasis on apps for Firefox OS instead of Firefox for Android. Firefox OS could run any app built for F4A, but not the other way around. Why would I, as an engineer, write an app for a device that I can hardly get my hands on, running an operating system almost nobody uses, with customers who (in many cases) don't want to pay $0.99 for an app, using APIs that don't work on anything else, and translate it to a language you don't speak? There were millions of F4A users at the time, and Mozilla made no effort to get folks to build for it at all. A real shame.
I think we're really starting to see the saturation point with native apps, particularly on phones. I am so sick of having to install yet another mobile app, for something that basically shows me a bunch of text, pics, and like buttons. 90% of these shouldn't exist. There is a time and place for it, but I think there is going to be a shift to the web app with more OS integration stuff.
This has been happening for a while. This 2012 article from Nielsen [1] wrote that while app downloads were up (in 2012), user time spend in all apps was flat. It also notes that the 4 of most popular apps were Facebook, YouTube, Google Search, and Gmail.
This 2014 recap [2] of a comScore report notes that more than half of all smartphone users download 0 new apps a month -- this started the catchphrase that "the average user downloads 0 new apps a month", which has both been supported and challenged by additional analyses on old and new data every year since. Whether it's 0 or 1.5 [3] isn't the point -- the growth is measly.
Aside from a select runaway hits, most of today's most used apps are the same as 4, 5 years ago. The app boom has been over for a long time. Occasionally, one can still strike it rich, but it's the exception, and not the norm.
We've got the worst of both worlds a lot of the time. Tiny little apps that would be just fine as web pages, and web/electron apps that should be real apps.
> Feels like this has been 2-3 years out for almost as long as "native apps" have existed
Yup. I've been reading about the imminent demise of native apps forever, but even Steve Jobs couldn't sell that vision. Web apps on mobile are the way of the future, and always will be.
It's not really the demise of native apps. I think it's almost undeniable that a percentage of native apps should be websites, it's just a question of whether that's going to end up as 30% or 80%. Seems unlikely it will ever be 100%.
I agree but there really has been a lot of progress lately. Service Workers allowing offline, web notifications, and just today I read that Chrome webapp will appear in Android as if they are full apps.
The part I'm still concerned about is UI performance - it's still miles off native.
> The part I'm still concerned about is UI performance - it's still miles off native.
Many times needlessly low expectations of both developers and managers are the blame for this. Yes, there are certain elaborate UI effects that are genuinely difficult to do well on web. But when there's a full second lag after pressing a button, or a menu slides into view at 3fps, the platform is not the problem.
A native app that has incredibly choppy, laggy UI for simple interactions wouldn't make it past many engineering managers or PMs. But when there's needlessly a full second lag after pressing a button on a web app everyone shrugs, inaccurately blames it on the web platform (instead of piss poor engineering), and it's out to production furthering the stereotype that web apps are inherently jank.
As a web development community we need to stop this cycle. Web engineers need to stop building, and engineering managers need to stop approving, web apps with needlessly janky, laggy UI for even rudimentary interactions.
It is inaccurate that the members of the Connected Devices team (not FirefoxOS, which was cancelled a while ago) are simply being laid off. Their positions have (mostly) been eliminated, but there are opportunities for those individuals to find new positions in Mozilla. That's a challenging position to be in (I've gone through it myself at Mozilla, frankly it sucks), but it's not the same as a blanket layoff.
It sucks psychologically. You still get paid, have benefits, you interview for the new position but it's not like you put your resume in the stack with everyone else. Still there's no guarantee you'll be able to find another position. But people have used this time as a chance to change their career track, and that probably wouldn't be possible on the open market.
Exact employment status during this interim time is confusing because Mozilla is international and the people affected fall under different labor laws. In the U.S. where there's almost nothing is mandatory you can describe these arrangements any way you want. In Europe if you want to establish a time limit I think you have to actually give the person notice that they are laid off.
Is it possible that they are collecting resumes online but never hiring or interviewing the candidates? The resumes would be used as evidence that they tried to hire Americans but didn't consider any of the applicants to be qualified. This evidence was used to file visa applications.
I've seen this done for less nefarious reasons, whereby a company will keep advertising for positions, but just not hire anyone. This is because not advertising jobs is a strong negative signal that business is in trouble.
And these folks will probably have a chance to switch; IIRC something similar happened during Firefox OS (I'm not sure.)
In Mozilla you usually get hired for a specific position; programmers (or anyone, really) aren't liquid resources to be moved around randomly between teams. Larger companies have enough going on that if a project is shut down there's usually some other project to shift to that works for both the team and the programmer. Mozilla only has a thousand employees, so there will be very few openings to choose from based on your experience level, field, and interests.
From the original CNet article:
> Some affected employees are getting new roles in Mozilla, but those losing jobs get severance and job-hunting benefits, Mozilla said. Although about 50 people are affected by the cut, some might stay at Mozilla since they can apply for new positions, some of which Mozilla opened early to ease the pain of the layoffs.
Also, from the CNet article:
> "We have shifted our internal approach to the internet-of-things opportunity," Mozilla said in a statement, "to step back from a focus on launching and scaling commercial products to one focused on research and advanced development, dissolving our connected devices initiative and incorporating our internet-of-things explorations into an increased focus on emerging technologies."
The "layoffs" aren't because of money reasons, it's just a project being shut down.
You also need to publicly post job listings for PERM labor certification (for green card) and LCA (for H-1b petition). They probably have employees that want to move off whatever visa they are on (typically H-1b to green card, or STEM to H-1b).
afaik job postings are aimed at a specific team, have a hiring manager and a few engineers for phone screening and interviews assigned. There is even a system for tracking candidates, and an effort to blind screener for bias.
So spare me the baseless accusations.
---
By the way, most employees and jobs at Mozilla are distributed.
Nobody on my team shares time zone with more than one co-worker on a team of 7 engineers :)
I'm kind of sad about this because I found development for the OS to be better than for any other mobile OS, even though I've got no love for javascript. It also ran a lot smoother than android even on the potato quality phone it come on.
I hope in future they can leverage their rust knowledge and give us a platform that's open, easy to develop and fast.
I know, I read the same reviews so I was pleasantly surprised. I even went back to the store a few days later and bought dad his first smart phone for Christmas. It really is quite criminal how slow android is on machines that would have been unimaginably high powered desktops not long ago.
Firefox/gecko has always been great on "underpowered" hardware though. A few years ago I bought an unusably slow android tablet. This thing couldn't play an MP3 without long pauses every 5 seconds. Chrome was absolutely useless but with Firefox it became a half decent web browsing machine.
They targeted the wrong public for their first devices. There are many enthusiasts like me that wanted rather powerful FFOS devices, and would have paid for quality apps. By targeting low end devices and poor countries first, there was very little demand for app developers to release to this market.
I don't think Mozilla is lost - although they lost a battle. The war continues, and now it's all about Servo and Rust. Don't be too shocked if a new browser-based-OS comes out in time, too; with the new tech. The timing for such a thing is better every day as HTML5 adoption increases, etc. And remember how far Mozilla fell once upon a time before an independent effort called Firefox revived them and then some. Rust has massive advantages. I do wish they'd look over at Chromium's license and change their license terms so that they could be almost assured that they were building the future because they were building for everybody, though.
So many (ubuntu, sailfish, tizen) seem to be going down the Qt path which really only ever works well with c++ (and a particular dialect at that), bindings for other languages have always been unstable to non-existent. I wish they'd either go with GTK or something else in pure C.
I don't really mean for app development to be in raw c, just the core libraries so that bindings can be made available for a number of languages (go, rust, c++, .net).
Lately I've been playing with gtk in c and now rust and it's fantastic how simple gui development is.
Nice for you to enjoy doing GUIs in C, but having been coding since the 80's and exposed to so many more productive ways to do GUI development, I don't enjoy it at all, and many that do UI/UX as part of their daily job think the same way.
I've use qt, gtk, win32, swing, winforms, etc, right up to more modern approaches like wpf with mvvm and similar JavaScript ones. After going back to c and gtk I think we've really lost our way and made some really simple problems really complicated.
My experience with Tizen on my 2016 Samsung TV has been great so far with a pretty rapidly growing application base. Not seeing any obvious reasons why it would die on this platform any time soon barring Samsung removing it from their devices for some reason.
I'd honestly love to see any of these gain market share. Tizen would be my preference, followed by Windows Phone (Surface Phone anyone?). It is pretty awful that we only have two real choices.
If I was in charge of either Tizen or the Surface Phone, I'd make one really nice piece of hardware for my phone OS to fight Android at the fragmentation and developer experience level.
What Android phone are you using? Stock Android is pretty good in my opinion but the manufacturer and carrier-flavored versions of Android can get pretty disgusting.
Unless you are running AOSP, you are not using stock android. FirefoxOS WAS FAST. I demo'd it on single core 400mhz device and it ran circles around my dual core 1.5Ghz android with cyanogenmod 11.
The original announcement that Netscape would release Mozilla as open source included some FAQs, including one question along the lines of "are you going to release your own operating system?" The answer was that there was no good reason to build an operating system on a browser. If only they had remembered that!
"Mozilla is positioned well as an application software. However, it makes very little sense to try to make Mozilla into an operating [system], almost as little sense as it would to make a Word Processor or a MP3 player into one. Beyond technical reasons, the operating system market is currently glutted, and a new entry would be unlikely to attract enough users to ensure the writing of drivers for a new system, a critical mass point. People who want to work on an operating system no doubt would be welcomed by the BSD teams, the Linux team, the Freedows team, or any of the many other open source operating system groups out there."
That analysis appears to have applied to webOS just as clearly as it had applied to the desktop and laptop market a decade earlier.
And just to twist the knife a little more, the last sentence in the answer to 4.2 is "Reinvention of the wheel is a poor use of volunteers."
Maybe it's where I live, but I can only remember seeing one Chromebook, and that was years ago.
The fact that many people believed the dream -- including myself twenty years ago -- doesn't make the dream any more realistic. Eventually, people notice that they would like to do more things than their browser allows them to.
So, yes it is true that people have been willing to migrate to cheaper, limited computers (but mainly tablets and phones; not tiny laptops). But those computers are not generally modeled after using the browser for everything.
Chromebooks are successful as school computers, children's laptops and literally nothing else. If that was the goal then great but I've never seen someone who wasn't under 14 or a student using one.
Mozilla is a global company. It would have been nice to do the right thing and inform all the people affected before a public announcement, but people love to leak when they've already been let go. Shame that people might have learned they lost their job from a news site because their colleagues didn't respect a confidential memo.
I rooted for the success of Firefox OS. They treated the developer very well -- sent me a Keon, even paid for the custom fees, just over a verbal promise that I would port my app to the platform. And the idea was fantastic - pure HTML5, like WebOS was.
(At that time I was talking with some manufacturers, they had a need of including locally-made apps in their phones - their proposals were essentially giving over the app, and I would have to guarantee that it worked on their phone, and they would not give one to me!)
IMHO a huge mistake was to pursue the mythical "$25 phone for the poor people". Poor people buy iPhones because this is the primary computing device they have. Lisa Simpson-like deeds, like the "bro" file extension discussion.
Mercifully done after Christmas, but I guess the writing had been on the wall for some time.
Now let's see if Mozilla can break through the bubble and focus on what web developers really need, rather than blindly following "valleyist" fashions.
If they had took the time to check the projects being worked on (see https://wiki.mozilla.org/Connected_Devices/Projects) they would have understood the activities a bit better. For instance, the device built for SensorWeb was based on a cortex-m4 CPU, running bare metal code written in Rust on top of freeRTOS.