What Happened to Firefox OS?

Today we're installing a developer preview of Firefox OS onto a somewhat spicy Galaxy Tab 4!

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#Firefox #Mobile #OS

[cameronbosch]

Same thing as what happened to Ubuntu Touch: Not enough funding and not enough developers or hardware, so a cycle developed of not having apps, so nobody used it, but nobody used it so there are no developers.

[mateusfelipecota]

Fun fact. KaiOs is the third largest phone OS of the world and it's an OS that was based on FirefoxOs

[ZanyCat]

I imagine in an alternate timeline Firefox OS would be a privacy-focused competitor to Chrome OS

[lmorchard]

"Foxfood" is an internal Mozilla term like the "dogfood" as in "eating our own dogfood" to test software with a friendly staff & community audience before releasing more widely

[colinmoller]

I went to a Firefox Dev Days in Vancouver around 2013, since they were pushing FirefoxOS pretty heavily at the time and wanted developers. It was OK! It felt primitive, but it had some potential, and it was pretty easy to get into. They had a competition to see who could design a working app for it in the shortest amount of time - they had 5 FirefoxOS dev-kit phones to give away, and I ended up winning one of them with my app. I think it was an app to tell you if you should bring your umbrella with you by querying some web APIs for weather. Pretty neat! The phone was slow, the OS was buggy, but I kinda liked the underdog-ness of it all. We certainly had fun playing with it!

[danhanrahan]

5:36 I didn't expect an os to have jiggle physics.

[AndreShouldBeWriting]

That version, the one you'd run as a home screen app, was never the best way to experiment Firefox OS. It was just an experiment that didn't run well. The best way to do it was with one of the official devices or with a real instalation with a compatible device such as a Sony Xperia Z3C. In both cases, the OS running would be Firefox OS and not Android with Firefox OS sandboxed into it. The real thing was faster and more stable. Oh, and I'm the one that uploaded that 2048 version to the Firefox Marketplace :)

[aDumbHorse]

Man it's crazy to hear "Firefox" and "underdog" in the same sentence when back in the day they were almost dominating the web browser world

[lmorchard]

IMO, the thing that killed Firefox OS is that Mozilla got caught in a bad spot between manufacturers, carriers, and other OS makers. Very different world than installing Firefox on a general-purpose PC. Never owned the stack from OS down to hardware, with hardware locked behind closed-source driver blobs and legal contracts. That gave manufacturers & carriers key gatekeeping leverage in OS distribution. And Mozilla didn't have the heft of a Google, Microsoft, or Apple to get what they wanted from the manufacturers & carriers.

But, Mozilla really, really wanted this OS to escape a tinkerer market ASAP and get into average consumers' hands so that it could make a difference. That led to compromises on open source & open web aspects of the OS to just get it practically working & shipped. And there was a push to get it working on low-end devices like US$25 phones in "emerging markets" - which led to a lot of performance challenges, unsurprisingly. In the end, there wasn't really a point to an alternative, compromised OS that struggled in distribution, performance, and developer adoption.

[HVG]

You didn't install a new OS at all: you installed a launcher. That is not the same.

[Voltaire-bp]

Android 0.9 beta was originally just an application for Windows phones. There were only like 16 apks and no app store when i installed it on my HTC touch.

[FlavoredGumball]

At first I thought this was regular smartphone, this shows how big they got through recent years.

[Afsafs]

I unironically used a Firefox Phone back in the day, circa 2011 I think? The phone was hot garbage. Phantom touches, lack of app support... It was NOT a good time. With better hardware, I'm sure it would've been a decent option.

[JohnSmith-xqpz]

It transformed into mischievous Fox Spirit and had to be sealed away

[zekicay]

The same thing that happened to Windows Phone and Ubuntu Touch. Google blocked them until they invested in KaiOS.

[TekTherapy]

This brought back memories Sean! I actually owned a Firefox OS Smartphone from LG here in Europe back than! Always searching for the alternatives even back than! Thanks for the great video as usual!

[KillrTfuuu]

man your house is a fire hazard. I wouldn't let a bulging battery near my stuff

[thumbtak]

I think XDA developers has a full install of Firefox OS.

[smileyface]

i'm getting the "designed for old people" vibe cause of the large icons

[NeverJhonsen]

I still use those background images to this day, both in a browser style as well as my phone’s background.

I liked it :) I bought a cheap phone with the OS on there, and played around for a while. It ran like a cheap phone, but that was more of a hardware thing than a software. I made a few apps for it, but they never got uploaded anywhere. Maybe if I charge that phone up, I can see about saving them . ..