Technically FirefoxOS is still around: https://www.kaiostech.com/ . It's now an OS for feature phones. It's no longer owned by Mozilla but they did have a lasting impact, that's what I mean. And many of their throwaway projects have gone that way. For example Firefox VR browser is now Wolvic. https://wolvic.com/en/ . It's the great thing about open source, the work is not lost.

But Mozilla had no chance in the real smartphone market. If Microsoft couldn't manage to attract developers with their billions and dedicated hardware, Firefox supplying only the OS and no hardware just had zero chance to make it mainstream. It would have been relegated to the same position as Sailfish: A cool curiosity but not interesting enough for anyone but some hobbyists to develop for.

I don't think it was a bad idea trying: At that time the duopoly in the smartphone market was not as firmly established and there were other open projects like Ubuntu as well. They might have attracted a huge party like Samsung (after all, they did go for Tizen in the end!) and things might have worked out differently. But the choice to drop it was inevitable at that point.

I use Kaios every day and I'm happy it exists but I'd have been even happier if it had just been stock Ubuntu with some phone specific bits thrown in. I actually bought a phone like that but it eventually stopped being serviced. But that was the best phone I ever had, this one is a distant 3rd after all my previous Nokias.

so, you want mobian

Or possibly PureOS.

FxOS failed commercially because it tried to be a "me too" product, with the same distribution strategy as Android that relies a lot on carriers. For that to work you need to get support from key apps in the carriers markets, and FxOS never managed to get Whatsapp on board.

KaiOS got Whatsapp support thanks to shipping in India with a single carrier (Jio) that has a very large user base. Deployment in the rest of the world has been a struggle and the company is not in great shape.

All that to say that Mozilla could have kept the lights on for a couple more years and get access to large markets. Hard to predict what would have happened but we certainly would have more diversity in the OS space.

The only path to FirefoxOS success would have been if someone like Samsung hitched their wagon to it.

Which would have been because they thought they could make more money using it than Android.

Which probably wouldn't have bode well for user-friendly changes to the base image.

Android's value prop to manufacturers was "Was to sell a lot of mobile phones, but not have to pay for most of the development? And get a working Maps solution? Here you go." Which Google could afford to torch money on.

I think you're wrong but we'll never know :) What is true is that some of the interest from carriers for alternative OSes was indeed that they didn't like to be handcuffed to Android and iOS.

Are we using carrier and manufacturer differently?

And I'd imagine carriers don't, as they'd no doubt love to go back to the feature-phone days, but they're all (individually) too weak to do anything about it.

Only aggregated can they offer the resources to support an alternative.

Worth noting Fabrice was one of the primary devs on FxOS, and I believe the primary dev on KaiOS. I'm pretty sure he's familiar with the history.

No, I'm not happy. I was gobsmacked by how smart the people working on it were (you included), and was so proud to work a few desks away from such amazing engineers.

My thoughts that FirefoxOS was mismanaged from an executive level are in no way a reflection of the work I saw coming out of your team, and I took no pleasure in it shutting down. I felt the executive team got caught up too much with things like presenting at Mobile World Congress, at the cost of a ton of focus.

Even if Mozilla reallocated all their resources and dedicated themselves 100% to building a mobile OS, I’d personally be surprised if they were able to secure any meaningful market share. Talk about playing against a stacked deck.

FirefoxOS was a moon shot. The sort of project a profit making company burns a few 10s of million on in the hope it somehow works out.

Mozilla should have been focusing on the one thing anyone cared about, the browser. Rust and Servo were the correct risks to take. But I know, hindsight is 20/20.