It was a fantastic gamble IMO. Low chance of success, but enormous payoff if it had succeeded. Imagine a commercially viable alternative to iPhone and Android with multiple manufacturers and a completely open platform. Ultimately, I think they came to market too late and Android moved into the niche (low end market) they were targeting.

Yeah, I'm glad they tried. I absolutely think they should be spending a chunk of their money on things that might broaden their impact and their revenue, even when some of those things don't pan out.

I seem to recall them saying they did reuse part of that work in Firefox on Android in terms of low-end performance, so it wasn't 100% wasted.

They took Gecko, the slowest rendering engine that there was (is?), made an entire OS around it, and put it on the slowest mobile phones that existed back then. That was not a gamble, that was throwing money down the drain.

They gambled away the only open source browser with this and other money drains. Would I like an 50%+ market share open source phone OS? Yes. Would I gamble and lose the much more important open source browser? No.

They gave up on FirefoxOS too soon. They also didn't promote it in the markets where it could have made a real impact. I live in India, and a dirt cheap FirefoxOS phone would have done very well here if only they had made it easy to purchase. I had one of their early phones, but I had to get mine from the US.

After being abandoned by Mozilla, FirefoxOS was resurrected as KaiOS. For a while, it was the second most popular mobile operating system in India, mostly because Reliance decided to use it for some of their low-end Jio phones[1]. Where would FirefoxOS be today if Mozilla had stuck with it? If hundreds of millions of people had their first taste of the Internet via FirefoxOS and not Android?

I've been a Firefox user since 2004, but I don't think Mozilla understands how to conduct business. They're an ideological organization first and foremost. It's not a bad thing -- we need somebody to stand up to Big Tech -- but it means that they probably won't be taking a big share of any market except by complete accident.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KaiOS

Firefox OS was not that bad. It was sold on terrible phones. Anyway it led to tons of APIs that we use now, like passing phone camera and microphone input to the browser.

Nope, those were pushed by Google, the Web is now ChromeOS.

An open source phone OS would have literally changed society. If it had succeeded. Alas it did not. I don't know why not. But it was not a wrong goal.

AOSP is open source, and open source user facing systems are available (Lineage, Graphene)

Even then, it's really limited in terms of hardware, and the application support isn't that great either without the google services that are typically deployed. I don't lay it on Mozilla though.

I think that FirefoxOS could have been great if they'd kept up the development a few more years. Much like XULRunner was a bit ahead of it's time... The hardware got better enough over a few generations, that if it ran on current phones or even last gen it could be pretty good.

I'm running a Pixel 4a, and current Android runs like hot garbage at times, I've got an older Pixel 2XL that needs a new battery... I'd like to take both and put something more open on them to at least play with.

Unfortunately, Mozilla doesn't understand how Firefox even got to be where it was at its' height. They seem to think it's just about marketing buzz. They got to #1 on organic growth alone. By creating something better than the alternatives at a technical level. They need to do that again, but also need some creative types to steer the ship as well. I'm still mad about how they let Thunderbird die on the vine, and if any related tech could have been their ongoing revenue stream it could have been in that space.

FirefoxOS was the sort of sheer audacity that I'm glad Mozilla invested in. Same with Servo, which eventually gave us Rust.