The Firefox OS smartphone is dead

The death of the Firefox OS smartphone

The Firefox OS smartphone has been discontinued by Mozilla. This comes as no real surprise, given the intense competition in the smartphone market and the domination of Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android phones.

Ingrid Lunden reports for TechCrunch:

Farewell Firefox OS smartphones. Mozilla today announced an end to its smartphone experiment, and said that it would stop developing and selling Firefox OS smartphones. It will continue to experiment on how it might work on other connected devices and Internet of Things networks.

To differentiate from Android and iOS, Mozilla and its carrier partners focused on a web-first platform, with no native and only web apps. Sales, however, were always poor and the devices themselves failed to ignite a lot of consumer interest, and a number of OEMs cornered the market with a flood of cheap handsets. In a business that depends on economies of scale, it was a failure.

Firefox OS was first unveiled in 2013, with the aim of targeting the developing world and late adopters with low-cost handsets.

More at TechCrunch

The death of the Firefox OS smartphone caught the attention of Linux redditors and they shared their thoughts in a long thread:

Jringstad: ”I don’t want to say “told you so”, but… well… told you so. I developed for FFOS and dog-fooded various FFOS phones (keon, peak, …) for about a year back in the day, when telefonica, telenor and various other telcos were totally on board with the idea and needed developers to push the (still non-existant) app ecosystem forwards.

Not only was FFOS late to the party, it was also terribly naive, poorly thought out and massively lacking. You’d think if you are late to the party, you should at least learn from the mistakes others made, but FFOS really did not do that at all. ”

Nightofthelivingham: ”Mozilla has had a lot of spaghetti moments lately. A LOT of them.

They went from the largest market share in the browser wars, and held a nice position for years, taking advantage of Microsoft’s incompetence to becoming an inefficient joke that lags behind google.

It’s like the people who actually helped firefox become the David to Microsoft’s Goliath left and were replaced with a committee that constantly produces bad ideas.”

Bobby: ”This is pretty sad news. I’ve always though about the Firefox OS like I’ve thought about the OpenMoko project, “this is neat, I might not need/want it, but at least somebody is doing something”. I was looking forward to use a Firefox OS device someday, they seemed like neat devices.”

Fixedthatforme: ”Yay. That flushing sound would be several million dollars of money that could’ve been used for actually improving Firefox and other worthwhile projects. Yet it was spent on something that had no prayer of ever actually gaining a foothold. Well done Mozilla. Oh well, at least they’re stopping the bleeding rather than throwing good money after bad…”

F22rapture: ”FirefoxOS resulted in MANY improvements to Firefox proper, particularly where it came to performance and closing up memory leaks. It’s not like it was wasted effort. And FirefoxOS did gain a decent foothold in developing countries, where it was always intended to go.”

StalkerShrike: ”Everybody is complaining, yet is anyone in this subreddit happy with the current dichotomy? Does anyone feel that it’s a good thing that the web is in the hands of Google and Apple? Everyone keeps complaining about how Mozilla is ‘killing’ firefox, but in most arguments on that point very tech savvy arguments are used, which do not extend to the normal user. I for one hate the demise of another open source project.”

Aspensmonster: ”Finally. Mozilla: please please please stay focused on Firefox and its attendant projects. ”

BloodyIron: ”What was their competitive advantage over iOS or Android? Faster? Features they didn’t have? Better phones? Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should. To get market share in the phone industry you need to come out swinging, not just show up.”

Fantonald: ”Cheaper. The plan was to sell the phones to the hundreds of millions of people that can’t even afford the cheapest Android model. And then the cheapest Android phones got even cheaper, and that potential market disappeared.”

Anatolya: ”…I’ll bite the head of the first Mozilla apologist in this thread who says “hindsight 20/20”. No. It was written on the wall and everybody told that, but of course it’s not surprising criticism-deaf Mozilla apologists didn’t hear it back then and now they’ll try to make it look like it was worth trying.”

More at Reddit

Ars Technica reviews Google’s Pixel C tablet

Google’s Pixel C tablet has reminded some of Microsoft’s Surface device. Ars Technica has a full review of the Pixel C. Is it worth buying? Read on to find out.

Ron Amadeo reports for Ars Technica:

So much here feels like hardware built without any concern for the software it would run. The screen’s 1:√2 aspect ratio seems designed for a split screen mode, but there is no split screen mode here. The four microphones on top of the tablet seem designed for great always-on voice commands, but always-on voice commands aren’t supported. The keyboard seems designed for a productivity device, but productivity is one of the weakest areas of tablet Android.

If this device was originally meant to run Chrome OS, that would explain the complete lack of hardware and software synergy in the Pixel C. Hopefully some of this will be fixed in the future via a software update, but today we can only judge what is here. We also hope the myriad issues we had with the touchscreen and keyboard aren’t widespread.

iOS and Windows are both much better suited to a larger form factor device. Maybe some day Google will implement that “experimental” multi-window mode, which will help. However, right now it’s selling a $650 tablet/keyboard combo that can display a single app at a time. Even with a hypothetical split screen mode, you’d still have to deal with a sea of phone apps from developers that are reluctant to implement a large-format layout, in part because even Google doesn’t take its own tablet platform seriously.

The bottom line for every Android tablet is that until Google revamps its software to fully take advantage of the larger screen size, no Android tablet is worth your time.

More at Ars Technica

Adobe releases security update for Linux Flash player

Flash has always had its share of security problems, even when running in Linux. Adobe has released a big security update for the Linux Flash player.

Silviu Stahie reports for Softpedia:

Adobe abandoned active development for the Flash Player on Linux a while back and is now only releasing security upgrades. The company just released a massive security update, and it looks like the Linux platform is covered as well.

Flash is so well embedded on the Internet that it’s really difficult to get rid of. Despite being shunned by all the major players like YouTube, Facebook, Apple, and pretty much everyone else, it’s still present all over the place. That means that all the security problems are still present, and they need to be dealt with.

The Flash Player for Linux has been stuck at version 11.x for many years, and it’s not going to advance. It will stay in that branch until it is declared dead, but from time to time Adobe remembers that there are Linux users as well and that they might be affected.

More at Softpedia

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