Mozilla’s plans for Firefox OS just flamed out

 

 Mozilla announced today that its two-and-a-half year project to develop a smartphone operating system based on Linux and built using JavaScript and HTML5 will cease development. The organization made the announcement at its Mozlando developer conference. Ari Jaaksi, Mozilla’s senior vice president of Connected Devices, made the following statement:

“We are proud of the benefits Firefox OS added to the Web platform and will continue to experiment with the user experience across connected devices. We will build everything we do as a genuine open source project, focused on user experience first and build tools to enable the ecosystem to grow.

“Firefox OS proved the flexibility of the Web, scaling from low-end smartphones all the way up to HD TVs. However, we weren’t able to offer the best user experience possible and so we will stop offering Firefox OS smartphones through carrier channels.

“We’ll share more on our work and new experiments across connected devices soon.”

The OS idea that never caught on

Mozilla’s original goal was to push the envelope of low-cost smartphones in much the same way Google’s Chromebook has pushed the price of a basic laptop below $200. One of the company’s problems was that it simply didn’t move quickly enough. Today, basic Android devices can sell for well under $100, and while many of these products aren’t based on hardware most of us would want to own, they’re at least theoretically compatible with any application in Google Play, provided that the device is running an appropriate OS version and meets minimum hardware specifications.

The core Firefox OS architecture

One of the core principles of Firefox OS was the idea that applications should live on the Web and be accessible to users without the hassle of a local installation. There was some appeal to this idea, particularly since Android, FireOS, Windows Phone, and iOS are all walled gardens to one extent or another. Unfortunately, the same reliance on Web standards that made Firefox OS unique also hampered performance and limited the number of applications available to would-be early adopters. The handful of devices that actually used the OS all tended to be low-end, and that’s never the best way to show off the capabilities of a new platform.

The highest-end device to ship with Firefox OS, the FX0.

Between falling Android device costs, improving low-end hardware, and the difficulty of bringing HTML5 and JavaScript applications up to the performance of native code, Firefox OS was squeezed on too many fronts. News of the cancellation is still a bit surprising, considering that Mozilla had announced a new “Developer Preview” mode last month that allowed users to test-drive the OS without actually committing to wiping an existing Android device and reinstalling from scratch.
Acknowledging that the OS program isn’t going to bear fruit is a smart move for Mozilla, but it’s still a bitter pill to swallow. Firefox’s share of the browser market continues to decline. While the exact figures vary depending on which reporting methodology and institution you prefer, there’s broad agreement that Mozilla’s market share has declined to roughly half of what it was in the 2010-2011 timeframe. The company has recently stated that it wants to find a new home for the Thunderbird email client as it refocuses its efforts on the core Firefox browser.