Mozilla Will Stop Developing and Selling Firefox OS Smartphones (techcrunch.com) 174
An anonymous reader writes: Mozilla announced today at its developer event in Orlando that the company is ending its smartphone experiment. Mozilla will stop developing and selling Firefox OS smartphones. Ari Jaaksi, Mozilla's SVP of Connected Devices, said, "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." However, he added that it didn't end up providing a great user experience, so they decided to move their efforts elsewhere within the "connected devices" ecosystem. The TechCrunch article notes, "Mozilla has been on a streamlining track lately. Last week it announced that it would be looking for alternative homes for its Thunderbird email and chat client. The aim is for the company to focus more on its strongest and core products and reputation."
No Wonder (Score:2)
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Nah, yahoo is just trash. Always has been. Even in the old days of the interweb when they were considered so awesome, I still never used their service, and I'm not sure what the appeal ever was (their "search" often meant sifting through topics as they tried to catalogue the web, and their home page was so full of ads and graphics and shit that it was annoying to visit on a 28.8k modem.)
To be honest, I think Mozilla is doing really well with their Android browser. Unlike other mobile browsers, you get addon
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I made a killing on Yahoo! just recently. Almost exactly a year ago, I don't have the date handy, I dumped some shares (like 1800) that I bought for far less than what I paid. I don't know as I'd call them trash, they seem to be doing just fine. You might not like them and, indeed, I don't use a single service they offer nor do I even have their site in my browser's history or bookmarks but that's not an indication that they're trash.
You never used their services but feel compelled to tell us how it worked
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Oh, wait, you wanted to feel smug and trendy. Never mind then.
No. "Never used" in the context I'm using idiomatically, and means I tried it briefly, and never used it on routine basis. Instead I relied on services like AltaVista. Which you understood that but wanted to be anal retentive about the literal meaning of my words.
I used their email and chat. I just don't any more because I've migrated away from those things and found alternatives. I'd still not call them trash.
Yahoo's market cap is LESS than their combined assets. Think about that for a minute. That means that their services are so bad, that they're valued at less than zero. An example of another company valued less than their combined assets is Sprint.
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Ah, just in time. See the new Yahoo! thread? ;-) Nah, they're not trash. They might not be of any value to *you* but they're certainly of value to someone. They've got like a billion users and own a whole bunch of other properties. I don't actually know any of those users, come to think of it. But they've got 'em and they're hard at work taking what they can from 'em. We've got people on this site who pay them to host their email, in this day and age and on this site. Nah, they're not trash just not what yo
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Nah, yahoo is just trash. Always has been. Even in the old days of the interweb when they were considered so awesome, I still never used their service, and I'm not sure what the appeal ever was (their "search" often meant sifting through topics as they tried to catalogue the web, and their home page was so full of ads and graphics and shit that it was annoying to visit on a 28.8k modem.)
No, you're just too young to remember. Yahoo was a great service in the early days, but that was when we were using modem
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TIL Mozilla developed and sold Firefox OS phones (Score:3)
Who knew?
I guess not enough of us....
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The problem was getting one. They were only released in small emerging markets. Even their developer phone sold out before a lot of interested users knew it existed. The easiest one to get was the ZTE Open, an incredibly low-end phone with virtually non-existent support from ZTE. (you were stuck with v1.0 for a while. We got a 1.1 release, with impressive performance improvements, and a buggy 1.2 release long after those were outdated. Savvy users have 2.0 unofficially now, though that is also now outd
Reputation? (Score:2)
Maybe they're wisely cutting their losses, but they're also re-enforcing their poor industry reputation. Here's my previous comment [slashdot.org] about FirefoxOS:
Don't get me wrong - I use F
Pretty much everyone saw this coming .... (Score:5, Insightful)
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My theory on firefox OS is that it was the attempted revenge of Mozilla to google for the development of the Chrome browser. It surely has been (and is) bad for firefox that Google now develops and advertises its own browser, instead of Mozilla's as it has been before Chrome.
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Pretty much everyone saw this coming ....and nothing of value was lost, except the money spent on the salaries of the people in charge promoting this stupidity, instead of investing in their core product. History will continue to repeat itself until the money runs out.
The huge sums of money were the problem. Once they put suit-tards in charge, the fail train started rolling downhill.
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By "investing in" you mean "making the tabs rounder and buggering up the UI"?
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You do realize they haven't stopped development of the OS, don't you? All they've stopped doing is signing agreements with OEMs to produce smartphones. They still have OEM partners for other devices. Further, as development continues, there's nothing to stop an interested manufacturer from producing a smartphone running FxOS.
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Any number of reasons. The most obvious being To differentiate their product in a sea of uninteresting clones.
Android isn't terribly good. Competition in this space is badly needed. Why wish for homogeneity?
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Any number of reasons. The most obvious being To differentiate their product in a sea of uninteresting clones.
Blackberry's experience says otherwise. Look what standardization did for the PC industry.
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Sorry, I didn't check your username before I replied last time. I won't feed you any further.
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What IS their core product?
Memory - Hogging Bugs?
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I switched to FireFox after the UI update, because I preferred it. The "overwhelmingly negative feedback" came from a tiny, if vocal, minority.
Re:Pretty much everyone saw this coming .... (Score:5, Informative)
Oh wow, you're like really smart and clairvoyant too.
No need for clairvoyance
Or a crystal ball (or two)
Firefox OS jumped the shark
Simply failed to make a mark
It's an outdated bag of poo!
Burma Shave
Ridiculous Endeavors (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously, what was the logic behind trying to get into the phone market in the first place? Other companies have tried just as well (Amazon, Microsoft) with little to no success. The thing that bugged us was the fact that they must have spent millions trying to do this which could have been more smartly invested to ensure that they didn't run out of money to support and improve the current products they know are/were liked (Thunderbird and Firefox). Now as result, we are left with them trying to find money streams to support Firefox, and most of this comes from pushing unwanted software and advertisement into Firefox.
Re:Ridiculous Endeavors (Score:5, Insightful)
You're forgetting the FirefoxOS Panasonic Smart TV [smh.com.au] that was announced earlier this year that's going to leave Panasonic with egg on the face.
My theory is that Mozilla and Canonical were trying to copy each others tactics because they saw the media buzz that was being generated when one of them made an announcement. Phones, Tablets, and TVs were the "canonical" (pun intended) examples.
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FirefoxOS will still be around, just not on phones (focus on IoT). Perhaps it will be more suited to something like a TV.
Panasonic loses nothing, the OS is open source and they are a big enough company to continue support even if Mozilla would totally abandon FirefoxOS.
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Mozilla wanted to provide a more open platform than even Android offers, that doesn't revolve around a single app store and bases everything on free and open technologies. They faced two major problems:
1. No-one really understood their motivation or cared about it, they just wanted a phone with some apps.
2. Android is pretty open, especially devices shipping with Cyanogen, so Firefox OS just didn't offer many advantages and there were many disadvantages.
In hindsight they might have been better off doing wha
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Exactly; they should have just teamed up with Cyanogen or made their own Android version like that. We could really use an alternative Android distro which is super-easy to install. They could just concentrate on certain popular phones even.
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I'm sorry to say but we are not witnessing just stupid and a lack of logic. I'm afraid Mozilla... has manageritis.
We all here on Slashdot are used to Mozilla so often doubling down on being the butt of the joke. But they exist in another reality than us, in which they are just merely following the one true way of the managerie.
They just want to leverage strategic strengths to deliver marketable products, and to synergize first-rate innovation with actionable core competencies towards timely enters into grow
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Sad they are going to cut off Thunderbird, especially since they're only putting in enough effort to keep it on life support.
However, if some other entity picked up Thunderbird and breathed new life into it that could be an exciting venture.
On the other hand, from what I gather of the Thunderbird codebase, it is an antiquated beast with a lot of technical debt. Open source developers may be better of putting their effort elsewhere.
I hope Libra Office or Apache takes it under its wings
Libra Office makes since as it fits well with it office suite and fills a gap in its product offerings, as well as some shared code already.
Apache has OpenOffice and it would fit their the same as it would fit with Libra Office.
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It's LibreOffice, not "Libra Office".
"Libre" is the Latin/Romance-language word for free (as in liberty). You would know this if you knew any French or Spanish, as most kids learn in high school at the least. "Libra" is a Zodiac sign. And it's one word: "LibreOffice". I don't care if you're one of those curmudgeons who doesn't like CamelCase, you can at least get the name right. You got "OpenOffice" right after all.
What's next? (Score:2, Insightful)
I have this nagging feeling that Mozilla is about to do something monumentally stupid to Firefox. An un-skippable 5 second splash screen? Removal of the Back button? Permanent removal of the Menu Bar? Auto-hiding scroll bars? Remove the ability to use Firefox without logging in to a Firefox account? Disable your mouse's scroll wheel in favor of Auto-scrolling? Forced telemetry?
If there is one thing that they have shown us is that there is nothing that they wont do.
Re:What's next? (Score:4, Funny)
I have this nagging feeling that Mozilla is about to do something monumentally stupid to Firefox. An un-skippable 5 second splash screen? Removal of the Back button? Permanent removal of the Menu Bar? Auto-hiding scroll bars? Remove the ability to use Firefox without logging in to a Firefox account? Disable your mouse's scroll wheel in favor of Auto-scrolling? Forced telemetry?
If you're going to move up to the big league, and compete with the likes of Microsoft, you need to prove that you can make corporate decisions just like Microsoft.
If there is one thing that they have shown us is that there is nothing that they wont do.
Yeah, maybe next release they will *only* support the left mouse button, and ignore anything else. Nah, I'm being cynical here - no major corporation would ever do anything as stupid as only supporting one mouse button.
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If they're going to go the whole Microsoft then the next edition of Firefox will be run purely from the cloud. You can access it by using Chrome and navigating to usefirefox.com.
Yo dawg we heard you like browsers...
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Try the fsck gesture, it's in the public domain.
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Why the hell would a display protocol define what to do on mouse presses?
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The official way wayland proposes clipboards to be implemented is via "data sharing" [freedesktop.org].
There, there is not even real distinction between copy+paste and drag+drop. All data is offered by the origin client via "wl_data_source::offer". The only actual param this accepts is the MIME type. Drag&drop isn't distinguishable from copy paste or just simply when the user selects something. In fact, one can distinguish between drag&drop by listening for additional events, but still the only "real" distinguish fac
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Heh... We're gonna get the clipboard functioning with the kernel used to serve it up and implemented with systemd. It'll get tied in to the kernel, parsed with clipboardd, and you'll be able to use your favorite middle-button-click settings that way.
I'm only partially kidding. Actually, I'm not sure where the clipboard is stored, I've never bothered to look, and I'm not sure how it is implemented - it may already be functioning at a server level for all I know. Seems unlikely but I'm not gonna go chase it d
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I usually copy/paste more often than I need to double click. *Any* patent microsoft had is surely now out of date for "real" double click functionality. That trick should be default only on mac os.
But yeah, it would be great if you could configure what the middle mouse button means.
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Mine double-clicks. However, I'd like to (without bothering to use a fancy mouse, I own a few but haven't liked many of the larger ones) be able to do combinations. I'd like to be able to left-click + middle-click and have it do one thing and all the combinations therein up to and including variations depending on which was pressed and held first. I've had some nice Microsoft mice that did a decent job and weren't too uncomfortable but I have an RSI (and won't let them operate on it) in my right wrist and I
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Sounds bad... why don't you just switch to using your left hand for the mouse? Lots of right-handed people do just this. It also makes it easier to mouse and type simultaneously, since one-handed typing is easier with the right hand.
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My body just won't let me. The funny thing is, I was left-handed until I went to Kindergarten. The teacher forced me to write with my right hand. Over the years that ability, for some things, has been lost. I just can't write with my left any more and I can't seem to get the mouse under control with my left hand. I've tried. I've tried numerous times.
It doesn't flare up too often but it does kind of suck when it does. I can wear a brace, just a wrist wrap, and that makes them far less frequent but then New
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What about a touchpad or trackpoint? Or trackball?
The thing about surgeries sounds just a bit paranoid to me. You've known multiple people with RSI surgeries that went bad? Or surgeries in general? And how far in the past? It might be worth it to find a reputable surgeon for RSI work and get it done, just to save yourself all the pain and aggravation. Heck, you could probably get it done in Belgium out-of-pocket for pretty cheap and enjoy a nice vacation there to boot. Belgium has the lowest surgical
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Honestly, I think you're a lot more likely to die driving to the grocery store than you are from surgical infection. As for reactions, you should be able to tell if that's a problem if you've actually had any surgeries before; if you haven't, that may be a worry, but if you have, then you know you're not allergic to the anesthesia (they seem to mostly use propofol these days, according to my last anesthetist) and can tolerate the surgery itself. These days it seems like most people have had surgery for so
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The touchpad isn't too bad until a flair-up and then it's probably worse as the natural position is elevated above. To solve that, I use (when I'm smart enough) a wrist-rest. I even carry one with me in my laptop bag. The trackball is worse, think of the motions as you move your fingers. The trackpoint, I kind of like and would like something similar but disconnected and not in the typical Toshiba spot. I did have a laptop where there was one just below the space bar, that wasn't bad. Unfortunately, it wasn
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The touchpad isn't too bad until a flair-up and then it's probably worse as the natural position is elevated above. To solve that, I use (when I'm smart enough) a wrist-rest.
Aren't there touchpads which are stand-alone USB-connected devices? You could get one of those and just keep it in your lap or some other orientation that works better, instead of being stuck with where the laptop maker decided to put it.
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At that point, I'm starting to lose the mobility feature of a laptop. My poor laptop bag is full. I've already got an external drive, etc... I might have to consider it though. I did have a nice wireless, small too, keyboard that had a touchpad on it. I think it was BT. Thanks, I'll have to give it a shot at some point. Probably at my next stop. I'll be leaving here over the weekend or on Monday, probably. Off to Florida with the missus in tow. Well, maybe a stop in Georgia first. I can go pick on the allig
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There, there is not even real distinction between copy+paste and drag+drop. All data is offered by the origin client via "wl_data_source::offer". The only actual param this accepts is the MIME type
You're not really explaining why that's a terrible design decision. The reason is that drag-and-drop (and the X11 selection buffer) are bidirectional operations, whereas copy-and-paste is unidirectional. When you copy something, you are providing it to the pasteboard service, which must then store every representation that it might want to contain. The receiver of the paste operation then checks which type it wants. You're limited by storage space and by processing time to a relatively restricted set of
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The current way middle click is implemented on X11 is that you have basically two separate clipboards. You ctrl+c something, and then select something else, then you can paste with middle click to a third place. The main advantage of this is that it doesn't override your buffer if you select e.g. the text that the pasted text should replace.
For implementing two clipboards, you need to be able to tell which one you mean if you advertise it or want to get its content for pasting.
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Note that it mentions drag+drop and (normal) copy+paste multiple times.
I'm not talking about the handling of functions. I'm talking about the specific handling of inputs. Why should it be up to a display protocol to define what input handlers are associated with what functions? Defining every little detail on a protocol level is how you ended up with the X11 mess in the first place.
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Well even if they did any of that, Firefox is open-source, so for the Linux distros you'd see something like PaleMoon or IceWeasel simply strip those changes out.
Um, what did they offer? (Score:4, Insightful)
The way I see it, there is plenty of room to improve security on mobile devices. Maybe there are some other goals that could be incorporated in "new and innovative" products as well, but security is the big one for me. Mozilla seems like all the rest in its mobile offering: Look, a slightly new UI! But security as a top-tier feature with the kind of focus that could cause a paradigm shift? Forget it.
There's no reason for me to adopt FF OS, with few users and available apps, then suffer some ignominious revelation that I paid for yet another swiss cheese device that any sane person should be afraid to use.
I think the only unique angle they had with FF OS was that the "platform" was simply web server meets browser. IOW, more mainframe-oriented than even iOS and Android. No, thanks; I'm not looking for a fancy terminal.
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I wanted a fancy terminal.
The smartphone is a full-fledged computer, that's true and I will be the first to point out that computer are computers not appliances, but it's also a computer where you have no keyboard or mouse and that you can't boot from a USB drive. Immediacy is rewarded, not customer's intelligence, we're asked to be turned into idiot button mashers (without the button). Even the ridiculous and long-winded EULA is lost : at installation of a program you're asked to allow a blanket authorizat
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That's really what's going on. Mozilla Corporation is "streamlining"; when HP does it, we call it "stumbling over failed business endeavors".
Burnt by early adoption, again. (Score:5, Informative)
(I have a Nokia 770 in a storage box)
My Mozilla Flame has been my daily phone for nearly 18 months. The initial builds (v1.3) weren't great for usability but things got pretty stable around the 2.1 release. I use the phone as a phone, with a killer web browser, so 'apps' weren't an issue. But the writing has been on the wall for a while, with feature implementation slowing to a crawl over the past few months on the nightly builds.
IoT with a javascript API derived from Firefox OS has already been done in the form of JanOS.io thus a couple of hackers are ahead of the curve...
I have no desire to go back to Android and an iPhone is out of my price range, so I guess I'll cross over to the dark side and get a cheap Lumia when the current handset dies. :(
Re: Burnt by early adoption, again. (Score:3)
Re: Burnt by early adoption, again. (Score:5, Interesting)
A variety of reasons.
The latest Nexus phones by Huawei and LG have priced themselves out of the market, for those of us not willing to spend $500+ on bling. Particularly brutal with the current $AU exchange rate. I'd consider buying a 2nd hand Nexus 4 if only it had a user-replaceable battery to extend its life by another couple of years but no.
So then you're in the land of vendor crapware, Chinese spyware (if purchased online) or carrier bloatware. So the solution then is flashing your device with an unofficial cyanogenmod port if it's not one of their 'blessed' models that still receives updates. That is if your handset vendor doesn't boobytrap its bootloader (Moto) or if your arch is still supported (armv6). Which all things being equal, you might find most things work smoothly except the video record feature is borked.
That's been my experience, anyway... Oh and I can't stand Chrome the mobile web browser, so I'd just be installing Firefox anyway, which was the motivation for running Mozilla's own OS...
Maybe things have changed in Android land but twice bitten thrice shy.
Windows Phone is a great unknown but I think Continuum is worth exploring since I have a spare LCD monitor, keyboard and mouse and for much casual computing use (e.g. my university studies in humanities), all I need is a web browser and MS Office. (And yes i have several x86 machines on the desk here booting Windows and Linux for specialist tasks, so it's not like I don't appreciate 'real' software)
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Not a brand I've heard of, no. I'll take a look. :)
In Australia it's mainly the international GSM brands like Samsung, LG, HTC etc plus Apple and MS with Chinese makers Huawei and ZTE targeting bargain pre-paid burner phones one buys at a supermarket.
'Buying American' would have some appeal in comparison to a similarly specced generic brand off a dodgy Chinese website if it meant aftermarket support in the form of OS updates and international warranties,
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The Mozilla t2mobile Flame I'm using is a dual core but otherwise the specs are similar though perhaps the BLU supports more 4G bands being a slightly newer Qualcomm.
Cheers, again.
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Have a look at OnePlus phones. Killer specs, very cheap, ships with Cyanogen and no spyware. User replaceable battery.
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You might want to try rooting an Android phone, then installing Pale Moon on it as your browser.
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I have no desire to go back to Android and an iPhone is out of my price range, so I guess I'll cross over to the dark side and get a cheap Lumia when the current handset dies. :(
Better be quick. Windows Phone's market share keeps slipping, it's now under 2%, no one should be surprised when they discontinue it in a year or two.
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As I understand the rumours, Lumia represents the last of the Nokia IP and MS will release their own 'Surface' branded devices in 2016. I'd think they'd see out that transition first, particularly with Universal App and Win 10 integration before culling WP altogether.
That said, yes it does look likely of a complete Android/iOS duopoly within years with respect to the alt-os graveyard.
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I know Jolla is in a bit of a rough patch at the mo' (*cough*cough*), but have a 2nd look, perhaps in January when there should be more news about the financials ?
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Well I would but recent announcements about redundancies and debt restructuring don't fill me with confidence they'll be around in 12 months time.
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I have a fairly cheap Samsung phone with Windows on it. I wanted to give them a try. Considering the hardware specs? It's fantastic! I even get *updates* in a timely fashion. I can't think of anything that I want to do with it that I can not do with it and I'm a pretty happy Linux user. I don't like Android.
I should also add, I'm not overly fond of the devices as compute devices. I do browse, send emails, send texts, and make phone calls but I've never installed an application on it and I've already got ded
Shame ... but not surprised (Score:2)
I hate the monopoly of Android that is starting. I even roooted for Windows Phone to take off. Not that I like the platforms but because I want to see a 3 to 4 party healthy ecosystem.
Android and webkit specific CSS/HTML 5 is not healthy and Google is now the new Microsoft in the mobile world :-(
But Firefox OS was really really awful and only marketed in 3rd world countries.
Android today is bloated as hell and requires over 1 gig of ram. That is because outside of Apple there is no competition nor reason to
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Android today is bloated as hell and requires over 1 gig of ram.
Android describes many things:
1. The ROM. It is usually used to ship bloatware with the phone. Once you get a free rom like CyanogenMod (which is not the same as Cyanogen OS), you have no bloatware anymore. Just get a popular enough phone that is supported well by such a ROM provider.
2. The google apps (gapps). These are the sole place google has any real influence over, because they are the only closed source non-vendor-specific component. Amazon has I think the most full set of replacement apps. There are
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More proof they're on the wrong track (Score:2)
My buddy just installed Pale Moon (think old school Firefox) on a rooted Galaxy S6 Edge, and he freakin' loves it. So I have to suspect the issue here isn't with users...at least as far as the browser part of the situation is concerned.
I think I'm just going to put this down as another example of the idiots running the show refusing to admit they made a huge mistake by trying to turn Firefox into a half-assed version of Chrome.
Firefox is now circling the drain. I'm glad I moved on when I did, rather than
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I actually have reviewed it. I left Firefox with a heavy heart, but for good reason. What attracted me in the first place was that you could pick and choose what features you wanted, and "under the hood" configuration options were virtually unlimited. This is exactly what's being compromised as the design team has tried to make it more and more like Chrome. Yes there are differences...but the direction they're moving in is obvious.
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Isn't that the case with anything?
Pale Moon has lots of options, and remains largely compatible with a wide range of Firefox add-ons. You mention accessibility options (with good cause), but that's a special case rather than a wide-ranging failure. I suspect it has to do with the limited capacity of their small design team.
I don't want to come across as some kind of fan boy, but I've found it works well for my needs, and it has now become my main browser (though not my only one).
As long as "products" remains plural (Score:2)
>> to focus more on its strongest and core products
As long as "products" remains plural Mozilla will still have a problem.
Got crushed (Score:2)
Ah, yes. I figure they got crushed by Ubuntu Phone...
Too late (Score:2)
I could have told them 2 years ago that this was a braindead idea. This was maybe viable in 2003-2005 when the smart phones where starting to appear, but doing something like this now, when Apple, Android and Windows dominate the market is just futile. It's like trying to develop a new consumer operating system for x86 computers, that market is full and complete and doing so is never going to catch on.
It never seemed likely to work (Score:2)
There's a mistake in the headline (Score:2)
should read: "Mozilla Will Stop Developing and Making Firefox OS Smartphones".
You can't stop selling something no one was buying!
So what should we use? (Score:2)
Any recommendation from say, Mozilla?
So, you were proudly making a non-spyware cell phone OS and now you're abruptly announcing you're quitting? I guess that means that if we wish to run a smartphone, then we need to run a spyware OS. Well, crap.
Was waiting for version 2.5 : now that looked promising. Also waiting for 1GB RAM, or 768MB RAM, to be on a bit more of a safe side.
I will simply continue to use and recommend using a dumb phone, but what about eventually needing a "smart" one for business reasons?
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I'm really eager to see how Slashdot spins this into the next episode of "Mozilla isn't listening to us, and they're ruining everything." This is one of the most entertaining over-the-top comedies I've seen to date.
Well, Mozilla is starting to undo the things that people were complaining about. So, the people at Slashdot were correct.
The stats show it isn't spin. (Score:5, Insightful)
In August of 2013, Firefox had a market share of over 16% [archive.org].
Today, Firefox has a market share of about 7% [caniuse.com].
That tells us everything we need to know.
Two things have happened:
1. They've driven away a lot of their existing users with shitty UI changes, and a lack of progress when it comes to fixing Firefox's slow performance.
2. They haven't attracted any new users.
Together, they have resulted in Firefox's market share being cut down to less than half of what it is, in just over two years!
In other companies, this would be considered a huge disaster.
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Actually, just one thing happened - Chrome.
Chrome was released several years prior to those stats, and it doesn't change the logical conclusion in any way. Firefox drove away the existing use base and failed to attract new users.
Where they went is irrelevant. A company which gets decimated the introduction of a competitor is still considered a huge disaster.
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Finally, the marked has grown... There is a lot more people online today. I just saw presentations of how many new users Mozilla got, but also that this didn't really move the market share, because the market is so huge.
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Re:The stats show it isn't spin. (Score:4, Informative)
What happens is Windows software and antiviruses are bundled with Chrome, and most people end up with it installed. That and 80% smartphone users use a Google browser, though often just called "Internet" or "Browser".
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For clarity: Chrome comes bundled, Ask Toolbar style, with a number of popular windows programs like CCleaner and Avast Anti-Virus. Naturally, it tries to set itself as the default browser.
Don't we have a term for software that comes bundled, opt out via a tiny checkbox, with other software, changes your settings, and then doesn't respect your privacy?
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Ugh I can't tolerate yahoo for more than about 3 seconds, because that's how long it takes to load a page that you found through their search results because of their shit ass slow redirect.
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Review websites called Firefox phones the worst phones they had ever tested. You can't polish shit.
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2 problems.
- handsets were garbage, aimed at the $35 range. Android or iOS wouldn't run on such hardware smoothly.
- software wasn't mature when most of the reviews came out in 2014. But try running a v2.5 nightly on Flame or a spare nexus 4/5 device and the experience is vastly improved from when I purchased my Flame last year.
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The Flame was a developer phone that shipped for around $US170 and wasn't about price but providing a reference platform for Mozilla employees and curious app-writing public such as myself.
Contrast that with shipping consumer hardware, priced at that reviewers saw with 320 Ã-- 480 screens, Cortex A5 and 256MB RAM or less.
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For you and for the uninitiated:
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets... [arstechnica.com]
Yeah... Just, umm... Just, yeah... Have a peek at that review. ;-)
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This phone was a horrid failure, but ZTE Open C was well received, with 512MB RAM.
I was waiting for the next ZTE, Open L, with 1GB RAM and FF OS 2.x out of the box. I guess the launch won't happen although the phone does exist.
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apperating system. I'll have to remember that one.
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If by "industry" you mean "slashdot" which has it's own version of reality.