I’m a big fan of Mozilla, and I’m really glad to see them focusing on Firefox instead of troubled projects like FirefoxOS.
While they are not immune from poor decisions I really believe they try to do the right thing in the end. That’s more than I can say for many other companies.
FirefoxOS was out last hope for good and accessible mobile operating system - it was supposed to give people who can't afford iPhone something open, instead of evil data-slurp that is Android.
Without it, billions of people in developing world are going to have every every second of their lives snooped by Google.
Agreed; even from the start I had a dim view of FirefoxOS's chances for success, but the sheer audacity of the move (in conjunction with the implicit acknowledgement of how important it is to have influence over the underlying platform, for the long-term sake of both Firefox specifically and the web in general) earned Mozilla a lot of goodwill from me. (The other audacious move from that period that won my goodwill was their investment in Rust/Servo, for which I initially had a similarly dim outlook and have been happily surprised at how they've far exceeded my expectations; goes to show that "audacious pie-in-the-sky idea" doesn't have to imply "tire-spinning boondoggle".)
Rust and Servo are indeed impressive projects. Too bad Servo is jumping the shark by moving away from building a functional web engine to doing VR experiments. :(
Servo's end goal remains to produce a browser engine, and the current focus is on high-throughput low-latency graphics performance, which happens to dovetail with Mozilla's WebVR R&D. Servo hasn't stopped focusing on producing components for integration with upstream Firefox, e.g. WebRender and Pathfinder, which are available in Firefox Nightly.
What annoyed me the most is that FirefoxOS failed because it was mismanaged and badly planned -- It was a a fantastic idea, and the concept worked -- people were buying the phone but they just picked the absolute wrong market to aim at.
I think it was a huge mistake to abandon FFOS but not enough people felt that way.
Compare how FFOS did to how Ubuntu Phone did which was essentially vaporware IIRC.
> I think it was a huge mistake to abandon FFOS but not enough people felt that way.
Sometimes you need to pick your fights and when even MS decides they don't stand a chance I guess it is time to stop bleeding money and try another approach.
I wonder if a main reason why they shut it down might not be financial but rather related to focus:
Firefox the browser was falling behind. While it was always my favourite it was totally eclipsed by Chrome for a while.
After they started focusing on Firefox again a number of great things have happened:
- Firefox is getting faster
- Firefox is getting safer
- Firefox is gaining mindshare
- Techies are starting to use and recommend Firefox again
- etc
All this puts Mozilla in position where they can do things like they now announce: they will make big improvements again, this time by squelching 3rd party tracking.
Still they could have kept alive the low level underpinning (what is called the "gonk" port) to let a community project go on. Mozilla's leadership choose to not do so for reasons that were never substantiated by any data.
> Also, which other approach are you talking about?
Other approaches to furthering their mission: if getting their own phone to market is to expensive, regroup behind the main product(s) and use them to launch new approaches like we are seeing in the linked article.
Yeah but there's a fundamental difference -- FFOS is a non-profit. They have to make money, of course, to stay afloat, but making it seem like a binary decision between FFOS and Firefox is a mistake.
I haven't looked at their books but surely there was enough money to fund FFOS if they just stopped their rapid expansion into every single emerging market they could find. Make 1 high quality, expensive headset, that nerds will buy (OnePlus did this), and keep working on the software.
IMO There are more than enough nerds out there (myself included) who will fork out $400/500 for a FFOS phone with how much of a difference it was from other OSes.
> IMO There are more than enough nerds out there (myself included) who will fork out $400/500 for a FFOS phone with how much of a difference it was from other OSes.
Very good point.
But you really need to nail the marketing on such a thing:
- you really want people to buy it to support mozilla and FFOS
- but you don't want to look desperate
- you want people to talk about it
- but there are a number of reviews and articles you don't want to be written. ('FFOS phone arrives and is already outdated', 'Too late, too little from Mozilla')
- etc
It is still early on the morning and I'm in a hurry so I cannot name any but I have a strong hunch that this has happened to comparable initiatives in the past few years.
You're right -- but I think initially you could drop a lot of those requirements and just market to the diehard F/OSSers out there. It's exactly what Librem is doing, and Ubuntu Phone, and all those other things -- the mainstream will follow once you're established in some niche, especially when the blowback from tracking on all the other platforms (well less so iOS) is so prevalent.
I know it's naive to think so, but fuck marketing posturing, just make a good thing, in a strategic market, and stick to it. They literally did the hard work, making the platform, getting big apps to add compatability (LINE, a huge messaging app here in Japan had a FirefoxOS app) -- which was also easy for them... Then you just throw up your hands because of rough waters in literally the hardest arena you could have gone into (the low margin arena)... Also, people in other developing countries were starting to use the phone and it is way easier to develop for.
They really let go of something that could have changed the game. I see how their other products have benefitted but it really doesn't seem like they didn't have the money to do it, it seems like they didn't have the money to do it the stupid way they were trying to do it.
There's the firefox team, and the thunderbird team. I know mozilla does a lot of other shit, but maybe stop doing that other shit if you want to be an alternative to google/microsoft/amazon level players a mobile OS is strategic. Maybe stop trying to get clicks with IoT shit (gateway is cool though, so props) and just hunker down? They don't have a board in the traditional for-profit company sense so I dunno wtf.
I can't remember where I read (assuming I did) that mozilla's C-level team suffers a lot of turnover because people just come in, do whatever they want with mozilla's direction and then leave to some for-profit company.
Sorry this is more of a rant but I dunno, I just really feel like mozilla screwed the pooch. I literally flew to another country to try and buy the highest spec FFOS phone I could find (LG's FF zero phone I believe), and bought multiple because I didn't want one to die eventually. I can't be the only one who felt that way.
Librem5 has iPhone class pricing. It's no alternative to FirefoxOS. I earn decently, have mid-range need for security, and I won't buy iPhone nor Librem5.
Okay. Well Purism is already a free OS (modified Debian of course). It’s definitely an alternative to FirefoxOS. Librem 5 and iPhone are hardware, so you are correct that they are not software alternatives. The Librem 5 is priced at $600 probably because they’ve never built a phone before. It could be cheaper once it takes off.
You can already run Purism on other machines(laptops, desktops, etc). The mobile version will essentially be Purism with gnome-mobile UI. I’m sorry to read that you don’t think an open device that will have its drivers available and probably work with Android, isnt worth the cost.
Cheap android devices don't have free software drivers, and I thought some connection between those drivers and Google is what holds back a free Android.
Yeah, software is always going to be a challenge early on (whether it’s Microsoft or Librem). However much of the web is available already. I think as long as devs are willing to throw their html 5 apps into something then it will be not too shabby.
There's a few alternatives to the Android/iOS ecosystem, notably Librem 5, KDE Mobile, Ubuntu Touch, microG (e.g. with LineageOS), and last but not least Sailfish.
"As part of the investment, KaiOS will be working on integrating Google services like search, maps, YouTube and its voice assistant into more KaiOS devices, after initially announcing Google apps for KaiOS-powered Nokia phones earlier this year."
Google is everywhere. What if you don't want it on your KaiOS-powered Nokia phone and prefer open source alternatives? If I want Google, I'll get Android with OpenGapps. It has terrific support for Google's products.
There's WebOS and Tizen. I haven't used either, but heard Tizen's codebase is abysmal. WebOS is by LG, Tizen is by Samsung.
MeeGo was a combination of Intel's Moblin and Nokia's Maemo. I'm not sure what became of Intel's efforts after MeeGo. Sailfish is the successor of Maemo/MeeGo whereas Mer is an open source mobile Linux OS which Sailfish uses as base. Both utilise libhybris [1] for Android compatibility layer. Backwards compatibility = important; no apps / ecosystem = no users, and that curve is very steep.
Another interesting effort I saw the other day is actually from Google. An effort to easily build an app which is easily ported to Android and iOS. That might directly benefit Android and Google most, but indirectly it could benefit libhybris users. I'm unsure how good Sailfish 3's Android compatibility is these days. It used to be Android 4.4 compatibility for a long time.
I think a hard fork of Android might have been a better approach. The AOSP has a lot of good, it's just controlled by Google and is more of a source dumping ground and less of an open source project.
They might have even been able to work with Amazon, who has a vested interest in Android a la FireOS, and possibly forced Google to make AOSP a truly open project.
I don't think Android is a good starting point for an operating system. And the big elephant in the room doesn't go away. If most Androids are Google Androids, and developers don't want to write their app three times, they're going to write it for iOS and Google Android, and not actually-open-Android. So either you aggressively do not maintain compatibility, to which developers still develop for Google's platform instead of yours, or you're stuck trying to maintain compatibility so devs release apps on your platform, which means you're still beholden to do whatever Google wants.
You might as well start clean with an OS designed for the modern era, Android's over a decade old now, and it shows. You're stuck with the app gap either way.
I think you are being a touch dramatic, I am perfectly happy with my google free lineageOS setup. Though I agree with what you are saying and the developing world is not really using LOS I still think there is more hope now than then.
I run the same thing and have zero complaints. The only app I've found that actually requires Google services to start is YouTube.
A lot of other apps pops up a dialog saying they need Google services but then work perfectly without it. I'm not a android Dev but it's almost like that behavior is default even if the developer doesn't use any of Google services?
How was FirefoxOS better than Android ?! Giving back control of the OS to carriers. Do you remember/know how hard it was for an indie dev. to publish an app that could be used by millions of people in the J2ME/BREW/RIM era ?
> Without it, billions of people in developing world are going to have every every second of their lives snooped by Google.
Still sounds like a better deal for them than no smartphones at all. Do they even care about Google's data collection? I find it to be a perfectly fair tradeoff for cheaper smartphones and free services.
It's good to see an article about Firefox enhancing privacy, rather than for backdoor installing plugins for Mr Robot, integrating closed source Pocket (the server is still closed source despite the Mozilla acquisition), or opting in sending browsing history to commercial companies like Cliqz without explicit user consent.
Mozilla has done incredibly well to have Firefox survive at all against competition from Microsoft and Google, and has undoubtedly had to make some tradeoffs (such as DRM), but it's at its best when it sticks to its principles.
While they are not immune from poor decisions I really believe they try to do the right thing in the end. That’s more than I can say for many other companies.