They tried with FirefoxOS almost a decade ago but couldn't find any hardware partners.

FirefoxOS was not stopped by Mozilla leadership due to a lack of hardware partners. The distribution model - mostly through carriers - failed because a key app was not available (WhatsApp) which caused a chicken and egg situation: no sales because no app, no official app because not enough users.

That's pretty interesting. I was around back then and hadn't recalled that there was such a lynchpin issue, but that makes a lot of sense as to why it suddenly hit such a hard stop. Were you able to support WhatsApp with KaiOS, or did the feature-phone target make it moot?

Yes KaiOS has an official WhatsApp app. This was possible thanks to the market size of Jio in India, with > 120M devices shipped.

At the time, I had a FirefoxOS device made by ZTE in my hands.

It was so slow, it was unusable; even the first Android devices running on underpowered hardware were speed champions in comparison. Looking for an Whatsapp launcher was beyond the patience of even dedicated fans.

Somehow this chicken-egg problem isn't stopping GNU/Linux phones.

Sent from my Librem 5.

Indeed, but the go to market strategy was not the same. Librem 5 is still far from being a usable daily driver for most people.

And what is the market share of those phones on the mobile device market?

The market share is low for any new technology.

The rendering engine doesn't really matter - nothing is stopping Mozilla from implementing a better browser app than Safari.

Safari is _really_ good and a very high bar to catchup to, even if you don't have to implement the rendering engine and Mozilla is not exactly known for their friendly and refined UIs. Vivaldi on iOS is much younger by comparison and looks a lot better than Firefox.

> The rendering engine doesn't really matter

I disagree. For the purposes of this conversation, I feel like it's the only thing that matters. The web doesn't benefit at all from a WebKit-based browser by Mozilla capturing some of the iOS marketshare. Websites will still have to cater to WebKit. Not Gecko or something new

> Mozilla is not exactly known for their friendly and refined UIs

I actually strongly prefer the Firefox app's UI to safari

> For the purposes of this conversation, I feel like it's the only thing that matters. The web doesn't benefit at all from a WebKit-based browser by Mozilla capturing some of the iOS marketshare.

I believe it matters because it shows Mozilla's ability to market their product (Firefox). If they continuously fail to capture user base on any platform, then what powers Firefox is of little consequence.

As an experiment, I just installed Firefox on iOS just to see what's up and honestly 4 screens of things to confirm before I even get to the browsing part? As a tech person I understood each of them of course, but no sane person would put 4 screens in a row blocking users from using an app they normally already know how top use. So no, I don't believe Mozilla has the required UI/UX skills.

Mobile browsers aren't sufficiently differentiated enough for a significant amount of people to bother changing the default. Does anyone really think Samsung Browser would get close to 1.6% if it were a free and unbiased choice?

Apple sets the rules, gets special access (new releases, features, platform changes, countless other things), and relentlessly captures their users into the Apple ecosystem/moat. You seem to think swapping the rendering engine is a trivial task but you're asking them to practically create a new browser. And for all that effort, you're still competing with an opponent that's basically cheating. I'm not sure why Firefox/iOS even exists, frankly.

Firefox on iOS exists so desktop Firefox users can sync their bookmarks, tabs, passwords and history. I use Firefox on my iPad all the time.

It does, actually. For example, the reason why no other browser has the equivalent of Firefox containers is because they are the only ones with an architecture that allows for such isolation. Users of Vivaldi have been asking for containers for years now, and every time the dev team explains that they'd love to do it, but it can't be done without forking Blink and doing some massive surgery on it - at which point you again end up with your own thing, and have to play catch-up every time Google pushes yet another "standard" onto the web.