Mozilla Will Stop Developing and Selling Firefox OS Smartphones

Re:Mozilla Will Stop Developing and Selling Firefox OS Smart... by digi_owl on Tuesday December 08, 2015 @03:51PM (#10699394)

I dunno. From what i am seeing, Apple and Google are busy rearranging UI deck chairs.

The major problem of FirefoxOS though was trying to pitch the whole "everyone can (re)write apps" to a market that is all about user lock-in.

Every OEM and carrier wants to be the landlord of the phone "owner", taking a bite out of everything the user does with the device.

But if every app is a web page, and all the code is out in the open, it is quite easy for the user to disable and strip out rent extraction code.

And yes your right about Mozilla being distracted. And sadly they are not alone. The whole FOSS world seem hell bent on wasting energy doing all kinds of shiny projects and social outreach.

I'm tempted to call it the curse of SXSW.

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Re:Mozilla Will Stop Developing and Selling Firefox OS Smart... by rimantas on Tuesday December 08, 2015 @04:02PM (#10699497)

  > But if every app is a web page, and all the code is out in
  > the open, it is quite easy for the user to disable and
  > strip out rent extraction code.

No. There should be more than a billion smartphones/tablets sold, what do you think is the ratio of those who can do what you told to those who have no idea? And what is the ratio of those who can willing to do it instead of just using the app?

And there is also the issue that if your app is just the web page, it is either universal and thus crap on all devices, or highly customized for each platform at which point it would be easier and less messy just to write it natively.

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Re:Mozilla Will Stop Developing and Selling Firefox OS Smart... by detaro on Tuesday December 08, 2015 @04:27PM (#10699661)

How big is the ratio of people using adblockers/YouTube downloader add-ons etc vs. those capable of writing them?

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Re:Mozilla Will Stop Developing and Selling Firefox OS Smart... by jay_kyburz on Wednesday December 09, 2015 @12:52AM (#10702147)

Yeah right, I was excited by the idea that we might be able to download all kinds of cool UI's for our phones.

I was thinking of developing a really minimalistic almost commandline interface for my notes, address book, dialer and calendar.

I would love to see what cool creative people could come up with.

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Re:Mozilla Will Stop Developing and Selling Firefox OS Smart... by digi_owl on Wednesday December 09, 2015 @11:33AM (#10704669)

Even if they themselves do not know, they know where to find someone that knows. I am pretty much the go to tech support of family and friends, for example.

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