Mozilla has “stopped all commercial development of Firefox OS”
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Distribution: Debian, Red Hat, Slackware, Fedora, Ubuntu
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Mozilla has “stopped all commercial development of Firefox OS”
Quote:
Remember when Mozilla said it was ceasing development of Firefox OS for smartphones, but that it wasn’t giving up on the browser-based operating system altogether? Yeah, now the organization has pretty much thrown in the towel.
After shifting the focus from phones to smart TVs and other Internet of Things products for a while, Mozilla senior engineering program manager Julie McCracken says development of the operating system was “gradually wound down” and that as of the end of July Mozilla has “stopped all commercial development of Firefox OS.
That said… it’d be an exaggeration to say the operating system is dead. It’s probably more accurate to say that Mozilla has washed its hands of responsibility for the platform.
The software continues to power some smart TVs from companies like Panasonic, for instance. And the open source Boot 2 Gecko (B2G) operating system (which is the foundation for Firefox OS) continues to be, well… open source. So anyone can still build upon it to create their own software (like Acadine’s ill-fated H5OS).
Meanwhile, Mozilla will continue to develop the Gecko rendering engine that powers both the Firefox web browser and B2G/Firefox OS. It’ll just be up to someone else to decide whether to integrate any future Gecko features into those platforms.
I own a Flame, the Mozilla reference phone given out to developers at MozFest 2014. I still use it as a mobile today.
Firefox OS is not very polished, and in many small ways it's barely functional, although to be fair it's probably on par with the original iPhone (which is more a dig at iOS than at Firefox OS).
I firmly believe that Mozilla went to market with this WAY too fast. It wasn't ready to be sold to anyone when it was released, and now it will likely never fulfill whatever potential it had.
Problems include:
* keyboard functionality is poor (touch detection seems to be pretty bad; maybe a swype-like alternative would have been something to investigate)
* keys are always in CAPS even when you're typing lowercase - not a big deal until you're typing in a password and can't actually see what you're inputting; gets very confusing
* alarm clock function fails to trigger alarm after a reboot, unless you manually launch clock
* repeating alarms fail to adjust for daylight saving time; must re-create all existing alarms
* many volume controls are contextual, so adjusting volume of phone does not affect volume of all apps
* audio recorder stops recording when screen (not phone) shuts off
* when answering phone calls, there's a 70% / 30% split as to whether the phone app will actually activate
* when responding to alerts/notifications, there's a 70% / 30% split as to whether the app will activate. I've had to reboot the phone just to stop some application from alerting me of some event.
The list goes on and on, but the bug reports are online, so I'll stop.
I'm not impressed with how Mozilla has handled this situation.
I feel support was always lacking, and obviously their commitment to the project is not what it should have been.
In a way, I think the worst part about the fiasco has been the addition of "yet another" failed open source commercial venture. I don't understand why companies pushing closed source products throw millions of dollars and development at it, yet companies who try to sell open source just throw the product into the marketplace with no more than a prayer that it will magically sell. This is why people say open source isn't a sound basis for business: because so many places selling open source seem to bank on the idea that someone else will take care of the development and promotion, instead of taking the job of driving the product upon themselves.
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I never saw the point of another dumbed-down OS for slabs of glass. Either one wants to pay Apple a lot of money to make it all too easy or one wants to give one's details to Google in exchange for a device which works most of the time. Either way you're getting a slab of glass which does most of what a phone did and all the bits lazy people want from computers.
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I have never used any Firefox OS nor device which may have used it. I really wish there would be more of a move toward a framework of standards that would make compatibility become a non issue. once there is a standard field established ,for free, then individuals would be able to try to sell their versions or editions. but the too early to the dance method of trying to sell beta or alpha or less tested stuff makes me as a consumer angry. I refuse to but microsoft software because in the 10yr or so since i abandoned apple i have never once gotten a microsoft software operating system that worked out of the box , so to speak. even the well honed win7 had a .1 after the many vistas with sps. and the money they wanted was outrageous plus all that anti pirate nonsense I had to go through if wanted to add a better graphics card or replace a broken cpu or whatever. good part is that i really began to explore Linux and did find out how sane and dependable it is.
but the point was well presented in the last paragraph NotKlaatu wrote above noting the insanity , as i see it,looking for magical outcomes, over and over that dont work and doing it again, and again. adds a new level to insanity : doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.
i think there is competition on the wrong aspects. hopefully, this will work itself out, but that is insane thinking too.
john
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