This article just popped up on my radar this morning: Mozilla Will Stop
Developing And Selling Firefox OS Smartphones [1].
It's sad to see a platform die, but I always thought that they had set
themselves up with a very difficult technical challenge: Using web
technologies on entry level hardware. Web technologies currently struggle
on flagship level hardware, so it wasn't a surprise when reviews panned the
OS for its poor performance.
From a technology point of view, it would have been far more interesting
had Mozilla used their own Rust [2] language for developing applications
for the platform. A systems language seems better suited for the specific
challenge of eking performance out of low performing hardware. I guess that
Mozilla decided to use the popular HTML5/JavaScript combo to try and get
web developers interested. God knows there are many of them. However,
there's a precedent for this: Palm tried to do the same thing with WebOS
and failed.
[1]:
http://techcrunch.com/2015/12/08/mozilla-will-stop-developing-and-selling-firefox-os-smartphones/
[2]:
https://www.rust-lang.org
Received on Wed Dec 09 2015 - 02:05:24 PST