Life is all about learning, and we learn the most from our mistakes. Hence, it is not surprising at all to know that Mozilla themselves have decided to call it a day with their smartphone operating system experiment, where the company has mentioned that they are going to “stop offering Firefox OS smartphones through carrier channels”. This particular move was made after Mozilla figured out that they were not able to offer “the best user experience possible” on smartphones, and what better way than to walk away from losses now than later? After all, if they do not do so now, it would be an even bigger hole to fill later on, so it is far better to cut their losses at the moment. It simply makes good economic sense.
The smartphones that run on Firefox OS which have been released to date are low end propositions, and not a single one of them has ended up as a huge sales success story. Not only that, Firefox OS ran only web apps without any kind of native apps to boot.
Of course, this does not mean that the operating system is not going to be around any more, but most probably its existence will be limited to other kinds of connected devices as well as Internet of Things networks. Should that be the case, then it will certainly be a real open source project.
Filed in . Read more about Firefox. Source: techcrunch