Mozilla’s Firefox OS for smartphones made a buzz when they were launched and were touted as an alternative to Android devices, giving more freedom to the users. However, the OS couldn’t get the desired acceptance amongst the users, despite getting support from several OEMs from different parts of the world. Hence, the open source operating system maker has decided to kill the Firefox OS for smartphones. The news was confirmed by Mozilla Foundation recently.
According to various online reports, Denelle Dixon-Thayer, chief legal and business officer at Mozilla stated, “We are proud of the benefits Firefox OS added to the Web platform and will continue to experiment with the user experience across connected devices. We will build everything we do as a genuine open source project, focused on user experience first and build tools to enable the ecosystem to grow.
Firefox OS proved the flexibility of the Web, scaling from low-end smartphones all the way up to HD TVs. However, we weren’t able to offer the best user experience possible and so we will stop offering Firefox OS smartphones through carrier channels.
We’ll share more on our work and new experiments across connected devices soon.”
Firefox OS first came into being as a project called Boot2Gecko. Boot2Gecko brought the idea of a mobile operating system that delivers we and web applications using the web.
Unfortnately, the idea, despite being innovative, did not convert into a good business proposition for Mozilla. Despite several attempts, Mozilla failed to penetrate in the mobile landscape dominated by Android and iOS. Other operating systems including Windows, Blackberry, Tizen and Ubuntu are also making efforts of fitting in this space, but their volume, as of now, is very low.
