Mozilla doesn't have a real sustainable business model right now.

FireFox OS could have provided such model, in fact, its successor kaios is doing very well and one can imagine that in the future, it will be the primary OS of half the mobile users on the planet. 'Feature phones' aren't dead. They provide a cheap alternative to touch phones, are usually more robust, and allowing them to run web apps instead of MIDP stuff is a giant opportunity for any web actor.

Ditching Rust as a core component of the future of Firefox is also a demonstration that Mozilla isn't a tech focused corp anymore. Rust is going to yield a lot of result when it comes to security, memory saftely and maintainability and firing Rust devs was terribly short sighted.

So yes Firefox was always enough. Leadership at Mozilla doesn't get it.

I can't understand how Mozilla failed to execute on Firefox OS.

From where I am at it was a massive opportunity for Mozilla and Web developers all round the world. They didn't have to take on Android and iOS directly, but may have gotten there eventually thru 'worse is better'.

Imagine a web developer learning just a few APIs and being being able to customize their web app for smart TVs

> Imagine a web developer learning just a few APIs and being being able to customize their web app for smart TVs

This was WebOS in 2009.

Windows Phone, WebOS, Meego and Ubuntu Phone all "failed" around the same time period as Firefox OS. I have a hard time laying blame solely on Mozilla there.

What was the hard part that caused Android and iOS to win? Was it convincing manufacturers to ship with them? Or was it just the first mover advantage for iOS and the network effects of the Play Store with Android?

Yes. Mozilla couldn’t get the mobile operators to sell a phone pre-loaded with FirefoxOS. And no one is going to buy a phone and reimage it.

> I can't understand how Mozilla failed to execute on Firefox OS.

This is naive. They did execute, and failed. That’s different than not executing at all. You can’t break into this segment without cooperation from the mobile phone operators... even in India and Southeast Asia whom were the primary target markets (less disposable income than Americans)

I had a Firefox OS phone. There was nothing great about it. It was average (by intention in order to work on restricted devices). I never used it to make calls, I used it for development. And it only had a wifi connection because I did not buy service for it.

There was nothing really “disruptive” about it as I recall. $20 Android phones destroyed any hope after the mobile operators turned a blind eye.

p.s. I still have the phone.

So I guess the question is what made KaiOS able to succeed instead of fail if we're saying the problems FirefoxOS faced weren't execution? Was it simply different timing and now more operators are willing to partner?

The GP is mostly wrong. What killed FxOS in the market is the lack of official support for one extremely popular messaging application starting by W.

Then Mozilla's leadership didn't have the patience to wait for the right opportunity.

Lack of WhatsApp support did not kill FirefoxOS.

Commercially, it totally did. Without Whatsapp we could not sell enough devices, but without enough volume Whatsapp was not interested to build an official app. Chicken, meet egg!

If it was literally make-or-break for the entire platform, especially in the markets it was targeting, I’m surprised Mozilla never volunteered to subsidize or build a WhatsApp port.

We actually:

- have been friendly to 3rd party clients developers, like Loquim (https://loqui.im/). Once WA turned on e2e encryption, the situation for 3rd party clients changed from "difficult but fun" to "mostly impossible".

- wrote a JVM in JS to run the S40 version of WA (https://github.com/mozilla/pluotsorbet).

- partnered with a company specialized in bringing android apps to other OSes (they had Windows Phone support for instance).