Here's a breakdown of the major themes discussed in the Hacker News thread about Firefox OS, with quotes to support each point:
Fond Memories and Unfulfilled Potential
Many users recall Firefox OS with a surprising amount of fondness and regret, despite its eventual failure. They highlight its good ideas and occasionally impressive performance on low-end hardware.
- "I had a Firefox OS phone for hobby development. The initial release wasn't amazing, but 2.0 was actually surprisingly smooth and snappy on the anemic-even-for-the-time hardware! Great little device, genuinely." - i80and
- "Yeah, honestly I still like some things about it better than other OSes. And the web/native fusion was much better than anything similar that iOS or Android have tried (though not perfect either)." - Groxx
- "I had a FirefoxOS phone and loved it! That thing was the future I wanted for mobile :(" - owebmaster
- "The support for web apps was great too, it was so easy to code for it." - owebmaster
- "When I was just starting to learn programming years ago...I discovered Firefox OS. The idea of building apps with JavaScript was really exciting. All I wanted back then was to make a simple WebView app." - cosmodev
Missed Opportunities & Strategic Mistakes
A significant portion of the discussion focuses on what went wrong with Firefox OS, citing strategic errors and missed opportunities as key contributing factors to its demise.
- "Sadly, this doesn't go into too much detail, but it does mention a few things that explain how Mozilla ended up becoming the bloated mess it is now... They hired someone from the mobile industry to run the company, this led to some culture changes : no more a flat org, but a pyramidal one with middle managers. Culture became way less engineering centric, and started being a bit more top -> down...Besides becoming more like a normal company, the new CEO grew the size of our teams, added project managers, Sales people, to make sure B2G would reach a huge audience." - this_user
- "Targeting low end devices first was a huge mistake. The web stack they were building on was simply too inefficient for that to work with the devices at the time. If they'd targeted high end devices then it would likely have worked on low-end devices by the time they were ready to ship it anyway (perhaps this plays into them rushing and having unrealistic timescales)" - nicoburns
- "Mozilla ignored the autonomy of the parties that should be in an ecosystem and tried to make them wait for Mozilla's choices and implementations on things. I bet they had more than enough people on every one of their waiting lists for being involved but they discouraged actual involvement." - lipowitz
- "With retrospect, I think B2G was a good idea...I think the development approach we took was the wrong one. We were too in a hurry and that ended up neglecting Desktop. I believe we should have engaged potential partners way later, with a better, more finished and more QAed product." - nicoburns, quoting someone with insider knowledge.
Resource Constraints and Performance Challenges
Several commenters pointed to the limitations of hardware at the time and Mozilla's resources as a barrier it couldn't overcome.
- "FFOS was doomed because the pixel explosion wasn't just stretching the GPUs of that time, it had also made CPU rendering a serious bottleneck, a fact the Android team also struggled to accept. Mozilla lacked the resources to do anything about it, although I didn't get the impression they actually understood the problem at all" - fidotron
- "Actually this is the reason that I, at the time working at Mozilla on the rendering team and helping with Firefox OS, proposed will-change. To solved this exact problem. With it, I managed to get the home screen to be perfectly smooth using pure web technologies and no hard coding on low end mobile hardware." - bgirard, indicating that some at Mozilla were aware of the performance issues and attempted solutions.
Alternative Paths and What-If Scenarios
Some users speculate about alternative strategies Mozilla could have pursued, suggesting different target markets or technology choices.
- "I have long maintained that what Mozilla should have done was a Firefox OS based e-reader. The mania that exists for all things e-ink in the tech industry is real, and if you combined that with a proper open platform you could leverage it into being a self sustaining business." - fidotron
Comparison to Other Failed Mobile Operating Systems
The discussion naturally draws comparisons to other mobile OS failures, such as Windows Phone, highlighting the challenges of entering a market dominated by Android and iOS.
- "Aside from all else, and what about the very responsive Windows Phone 7 or similarly flawed WebOS? Let alone all the feature phones, Blackberry etc. This was an enormously competitive era, and Google had to do some serious fighting to secure the future of Android at that time." - fidotron
- "We actually released an app for WP7 and then just as the platform was starting to get traction, they released WP8, made it backwards incompatible and told everyone to rewrite their apps. It killed the platform overnight." - e2021
- "It kinda ate the feature phone market for a while as KaiOS. It was way better than normal feature phones like Nokia Series 30." - wkat4242
Management & Organizational Culture
Multiple users criticize Mozilla's management and organizational structure, suggesting that a shift away from its engineering-centric roots contributed to its problems.
- "They hired someone from the mobile industry to run the company, this led to some culture changes : no more a flat org, but a pyramidal one with middle managers. Culture became way less engineering centric, and started being a bit more top -> down" - this_user, quoting an external source.
- "And this is a common management mistake: 'We have the money, we need to grow.' Meta have basically been doing that for years now, launching all kinds of projects that were mostly failures...Maybe it would be better to let it be. In the case of Mozilla, focus on Firefox on all of the different platforms." - this_user
Open web vs Native & Importance of Ecosystems
The thread examines the tension between a web-centric OS and the growing need for native performance and features, and emphasizes the difficulty of creating and maintaining a viable ecosystem.
- "I don't understand how 'Rust UI' would have helped with anything, since the whole UI (including the system UI) was web based. Breaking out of the web platform is the opposite of what FxOS aimed at." - fabrice_d
- "Phone manufacturers do not exist to serve the bidding of the software builders, they actually have to make money, and doing that requires looking at least superficially competitive. The primary way users experience that is through the graphical interface on the device" - fidotron
Current State of Open Mobile Platforms
The discussion touches on the current state of open-source mobile platforms like Librem 5 and Pinephone, comparing them to Firefox OS and highlighting the continued challenges of achieving mainstream adoption.
- "Was it somehow more promising than today's GNU/Linux phones (Librem 5 and Pinephone)?" - fsflover
- "Much more! Because there was a big brand behind it... the biggest difference is distribution. If I could easily have access to a librem 5, my opinion would be different." - owebmaster