Mozilla pulls the plug on Firefox OS for low-end smartphones
10 Dec 2015
Mozilla has pulled the plug on its Firefox OS for low-end smartphones. Confirming the news in a statement to PCMag, the organisation said, while it was "proud" of what it delivered in the operating system, it could not quite match its expectations in terms of user experience.
"Firefox OS proved the flexibility of the Web, scaling from low-end smartphones all the way up to HDTVs," said Ari Jaaksi, senior vice president of Connected Devices at the Mozilla Foundation. "However, we weren't able to offer the best user experience possible and so we will stop offering Firefox OS smartphones through carrier channels."
Firefox OS emerged from Mozilla's Boot to Gecko project, first announced in July 2011, while a year later, Mozilla revealed the Firefox OS moniker and said TCL Communication Technology and ZTE would be its first manufacturing partners.
The goal of Firefox OS was to break the hold that Android and iOS had on the mobile market. Mozilla added it would continue to rely on the community to help improve its OS.
"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," said Denelle Dixon-Thayer, Mozilla's chief legal and business officer, in an emailed statement.
News of the decision was first revealed by Twitter on Tuesday with a number of attendees of Mozilla's annual developer conference breaking the news. Mozilla software engineer, George Fritzsche, had tweeted, for example, "Honesty & courage for Firefox OS: back off from commercial shipping, re-iterate as innovation project 'connected devices'."
Dixon-Thayer said, Mozilla would continue to "experiment with the user experience across connected devices" with the work accomplished on Firefox OS.
TechCrunch was the first to report the Firefox OS stoppage.
Jack Gold, principal analyst at J Gold Associates, was not surprised by the news. He had long been sceptical that the open-source developer could break into the smartphone operating system market, dominated by Google's Android and Apple's iOS, with Microsoft's Windows a distant third.
"In today's market, you can't have a phone OS that doesn't grab scale," said Gold in an email reply to questions. Gold cited Tizen, a moribund OS that Samsung created as a possible alternative to Android, and the on-life-support BlackBerry OS, as examples. "So it's not all that surprising that Firefox has pulled the plug on a product that, in my opinion, it should never have launched in the first place."
