Re: Mozilla Will Stop Developing And Selling Firefox OS Smartphones

From: S Moonesamy <sm+mu_at_elandsys.com>
Date: Wed, 09 Dec 2015 07:31:44 -0800

Hi Shane,
At 18:05 08-12-2015, Vy-Shane Sin Fat wrote:
>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.

Firefox OS was in direct competition with Android. Why use web
technologies on entry-level hardware when the performance would be
poor? That puts the product at a disadvantage. Did Mozilla rely on
the brand name to drive sales? There weren't web developers behind
that brand or else there would been a lot of apps available on Marketplace.

Was FirefoX OS a toxic asset [1]?

Regards,
S. Moonesamy

1.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/02/technology/hewlett-packards-touchpad-was-built-on-flawed-software-some-say.html
Received on Wed Dec 09 2015 - 15:32:16 PST

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