Today 10 years ago I went to Poland to buy a Phone with pre installed #Firefox OS on. The Phone was a Alcatel One, so very shitty. Two years later I installed Firefox OS on my Nexus 5 instead.

It was a very good concept, but sadly rolled out on too shitty hardware so it never caught on.

  • meiti@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1252·
    a year ago

    Imo that’s what caused Firefox to lose market share to Chrome. They focused too much on Firefox OS and deprioritized browser development. In one example, it took them a long time to implement FIDO when it was already functional in Chrome.

    • djsaskdja@endlesstalk.orgEnglish
      1352·
      a year ago

      Considering how dominant the mobile OS has become, this wasn’t a terrible gamble. Like they lost and it looks bad in hindsight, but you can’t blame them for trying. If it had succeeded, we’d be living in a very different world of technology right now.

      • zer0nix@lemm.eeEnglish
        2·
        a year ago

        User experience beats everything else. It sounds like some essential components were never finished

      • Historical_General@lemmy.worldEnglish
        22·
        a year ago

        They timed it right so that they fucked up both ways, in the browser and in the low end web-connected phone market. They are clowns.

    • SokathHisEyesOpen@lemmy.mlEnglish
      251·
      a year ago

      I think what destroyed Firefox market share was a RAM leak that took them like a year or two to fix. It consumed all of your available RAM and would bog your computer down. I know that’s what drove me away. It took like 10 years for me to come back.

    • zer0nix@lemm.eeEnglish
      62·
      a year ago

      Once Firefox lost session manager and downthemall, it was dead to me.

      Nowadays I use edge. All the benefits of chrome plus it’s leaner.

      I use kiwi browser on phones for the addons, and because it’s faster than Firefox

      • prole@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        3·
        a year ago

        I haven’t looked into those specifically, but I’m pretty sure there are alternatives that do the exact same things for FF

      • meiti@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        a year ago

        I use Tab Session Manager and Session Sync add-ons with Firefox and I’m quite happy with them.

    • Hyperi0n@lemmy.filmEnglish
      1·
      a year ago

      Chrome won the browser war because they were lightweight, had better plugins support and it was easy to integrate with you google accounts, which were basically standard.

      Firefox at the time was plagued by memory leaks and it was worse with plug-ins installed.

      Ironically I switched back to Firefox years ago because Chrome was having those same issues that Firefox was had.

    • suoko@feddit.itEnglish
      12·
      a year ago

      Fxos was just android + a custom launcher, it was not a huge investment since it was just a launcher in the end. They focused on low prices, a camera to create video reports and a usable mobile browser.

      • Bal@lemm.eeEnglish
        4·
        a year ago

        This is incorrect, it was also Linux-based but completely unrelated to Android.

        • suoko@feddit.itEnglish
          11·
          a year ago

          It was android 5 (or maybe 6 with its 2.6 versione) and the launcher was gaia