Firefox OS's story from a Mozilla insider not working on the project (2024)

2025-06-1111:36197149ludovic.hirlimann.net

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I clearly remember, but can't date it. I was working for Mozilla messaging at the time (momo), being the QA lead for Thunderbird. It was at the end of one of the Mozilla All-hands, maybe in 2011 or 2012. At one of the ending keynotes, we were introduced to Boot 2 Gecko. A hack that would let US - Mozilla own the platform to run a mobile browser on. At the time, the iPhone was going strong and Google was trying to catch up with Android. MeeGo had been in development at Nokia for a while but was going nowhere even when Intel tried to help. Blackberry was slowly starting to die.

In the Silicon Valley everything was about mobile, mobile, mobile and the emerging South Easter Asian market, where people would skip computers and use smartphones to join the internet revolution. We were struggling with Chrome and the massive investment by Google to take market share. Our Firefox port on Android was having loads of issues. We were denied by Apple's policies to be present on iPhones. I was running Nightly on my then Galaxy S Samsung android powered phone. As android was open source, the idea to use it as a base for a complete phone OS that would make the web a platform emerged has an idea. At that time, Mozilla consisted of around 600 employees, all working on Firefox on the desktop. Most of our huge community was helping the project, making it available in many languages (Like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Frisian_language), helping with some marketing efforts too.

B2G, or Android's version, were not Mozilla first effort to be present on Mobile. The first effort I'm aware of is Minimo, who was targeting Palm like handheld devices.

As I said above, Mozilla's management was really afraid to miss the mobile revolution. 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. Focus was now solely on B2G. This impacted my work, because it was decided that Thunderbird had no future (and no business model to support its development). That meant I changed roles in Mozilla and joined the IT organization, as I wanted to see the server side of Email (this was long before Mozilla switched to Google workplace for email). I always felt that B2G to be renamed Firefox OS, killed the team I was part of, that was working on TB. I have no insight on who made the decision and why, but that how I felt. This made me not liking B2G.

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. We started making deals with phone carriers, and each of these had different requirements. We also made deals with phone makers, our Taiwan office was set up to be as close a possible as the Chinese phone makers - so we'd be at the edge of the mobile phone market. Having different deals owner made the life of the project complicated, as each of our partners had different sets of requirements for their go-to market plans. The teams were busy implementing X for partner X and Y for partner Y. Sometimes X and Y would conflict :-( With the rapid development pace, quality was omitted to reach launch deadlines. As B2G was the priority, this also meant that Firefox desktop was neglected and was slowly loosing ground to chrome. Not that we could compare the size of the devs teams, but as nobody in upper management cared about desktop, it was there, that's it. Remember that Firefox desktop was the cash machine that paid for all the rest. Without Desktop, no revenues. Then all of a sudden, by the end of 2015, Mozilla pulled the plug on B2G and got back and focused on its source of revenue, desktop. By then Mozilla had doubled in size, reaching almost 1200 employees.

I first got to play with Firefox OS back in 2012 when I switched to IT.

This was a TURKCELL MaxiPLus5. This was slow and unusable. I had work needs, so I never used it. The phone was available upon request for Mozilla employees willing to try B2G out. I'm not sure many were sent or used. After that, testing B2G as an employee was complicated if you were not working on the Firefox OS team. By early 2015, someone at the great idea to dogfood the product and four hundred phones were made available to employees. I requested one. This was a Sony Xperia phone, it came with a protective cover, a mandatory mailing list to share your experience with it and file bugs if you could. I was finally getting interested with the product. Took it with me as a secondary phone. That summer I went to Mongolia and the carrier/OS didn't work together, so had to use it over Wi-Fi. I managed to find a few bugs with the email client (don't know why, but that's where I found bugs, as well as in picture/metadata handling). I was not alone reporting bugs, they were getting fixed too. But nonetheless, Management decided the experiment was over. Well that's not completely true, it lives at https://www.kaiostech.com/

With retrospect, I think B2G was a good idea - challenging Apple would also have been a good idea, as we had an internal demo of gecko powered Firefox for iOS. Owning the complete stack was the right approach. It gives you the power to have something that work nicely on the devices you support. 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. We should have grown to work on B2G, but not at the expense of our source of revenue. We should have dogfooded the product a lot more and once ready reached out to partners. And then start using our community to market the product and gain market share and all. The death of B2G, also meant the death of most of our engagement with ordinary people, known as the Mozilla community.

I probably forgot some details - I'll gladly edit If I feel that the things I have forgotten are important.

Vision from a developer who worked on the graphics stack, in French https://linuxfr.org/nodes/107897/comments/1643786

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By nicoburns 2025-06-1112:336 reply

> With retrospect, I think B2G was a good idea - challenging Apple would also have been a good idea, as we had an internal demo of gecko powered Firefox for iOS. Owning the complete stack was the right approach. It gives you the power to have something that work nicely on the devices you support. 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.

I think this is basically correct.

I also think:

- 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)

- It's really unfortunate that Rust wasn't a bit further along during the Firefox OS era. A lot of the Rust UI pieces that are now being developed would make a really strong foundation for something like Firefox OS. And could perhaps also have enabled a better story for "breaking out" of the confines of the web platform.

By toast0 2025-06-1114:513 reply

> - 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)

The problem with targeting high end first is sales / production risk. A phone based on a new OS is a risky purchase, and it's hard to convince someone to spend $500 on a high end phone without much software available. A $100 low end phone without much software available is an easier sale.

If you can get important software built for your platform, sales are easier, but sales/usage numbers drive developer interest. Also, it helps if the platform offers capabilities developers need; maybe it's my bias, but the number of platforms that launch without everything a messaging app needs was mind bogling --- everyone seems to understand that messaging apps sell phones, but they don't find out the requirements for them until very late.

Apple does just fine without targetting low end (although they do sometimes target mid range), but they live in a different world, and it took decades to build that market placement.

By ksec 2025-06-1116:281 reply

>A $100 low end phone without much software available is an easier sale.

Except they didn't target $100 dollar phone. They were aiming at $20, but giving headrooms to $35. And in about 2 years time they finally believed they made a mistake, and raised the target to ...... $50.

Silicon Valley at the time was all about software. They believed in Bill Gate's vision where all hardware cost will drop to zero and software will subsidise it. And Apple's business model is not sustainable.

It was then I learned Silicon Valley has absolutely zero understanding of anything hardware. Apple was somehow the best and the outliner.

By toast0 2025-06-1117:072 reply

The math works even better at $35. If you're in a high income economy, and your phone breaks, you might buy a $35 phone as an impulse buy to use while you wait for the phone you want to arrive. Then, when it works better than you expect, you might give it to a late adopter. Or if you're a late adopter, maybe you dip your toe in with a $35 phone.

For low income economies, which is where the majority of people are, and the majority of late adopters of smart phones are, a $35 phone is affordable --- or much closer to affordable than the rest of the market.

If you make a smartphone that works at that price point, the addressable market share is huge. And it could be subsidized by carriers in low income countries, too (see the JioPhone). The class of hardware they were targetting could provide a good experience --- similar specs provided good UX on iOS and reasonable to good UX on Windows Phone.

If you make 1 million $35 phones and none of them sell, that's a waste of $35Million (maybe less, because you presumably have some margin, but maybe more, because R&D). If you make 1 million $500 phones and none of them sell, that's a waste of a lot more money. Around this time frame, I bought several $500 phones for $100 each when they failed; the Amazon Fire phone, the Nextbit Robin, the Essential PH-1; all were a great deal for me, and a colossal waste for the hardware team.

By ndiddy 2025-06-1117:372 reply

The problem was that in 2014, a $35 phone would get you specs worse than the original 2007 iPhone. Trying to run a mobile OS where the entire UI is written using web technologies on those specs basically made it unusable. Here's a review of one of the Firefox OS phones: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/10/testing-a-35-firefox...

Some choice quotes:

> If the lock screen pops up while reading a webpage, you'll need to reload the page again. If you start the stopwatch and leave the app, the stopwatch stops. You can set the e-mail app to check for mail every five minutes, but there is never any free memory, so the mail check never runs. There isn't even anything to keep the crucial alarm process alive. If the phone is busy when an alarm is supposed to go off, it just doesn't go off. An alarm you can't trust to work 100 percent of the time is useless.

> Typing on the Cloud FX is pure agony, and this is one of those really crippling deal breakers that makes the Cloud FX a bad phone at any price. The keyboard doesn't support multitouch, so you if press "Q" and "P" at the same time it splits the difference between the touch points and enters "Y." This means you can only ever carefully hunt and peck at a slow rate. It's very easy for the Cloud FX to slow down, so if anything is going on while you're trying to type, buttons will take a few moments to register. There's also no auto correction and no copy/paste.

> Navigating webpages is a nightmare. The problem isn't just that the phone is slow, it's that scrolling is nearly impossible. A lot of times the phone is busy, and scrolling doesn't do anything. When it does scroll, you'll find the rest of the page often isn't loaded and you'll get a gray screen that takes a few seconds to be loaded into memory. The other problem is that scrolling is often interpreted as pressing on a link. This, combined with the speed of the device and the often-frozen scrolling, means the Cloud FX is frequently doing things you don't want—and doing them very slowly.

> The performance of the Cloud FX really cannot be understated. Screen taps sometimes take seconds to register. Firefox OS has a recent apps screen, but there is never any free memory, so nothing other than the current app is ever open. During particularly slow freak-outs, the screen will just turn black. If the phone falls asleep, or the alarm pops up, or a phone call comes in, your app closes and you lose your progress. Even something as simple as opening a folder of apps has a load time measured in seconds.

> Getting devices out to the developing world will be a big focus for many OEMs, since the market is just so huge. There are billions of people out there that still need access to the Internet. We know we can't expect something so cheap to hold a candle to the high-end devices we normally review, but all we ask is that the device be executed well and that the decisions that went into the product make sense. The Cloud FX doesn't make any sense, though, even at $35. It doesn't seem like anyone set out to choose the best software for this device, and that was really the crippling decision. Low-end smartphones need a low-end-appropriate operating system, and Firefox OS isn't up to that task. We get the feeling there are relatively good, sub-$50 devices out there—but this isn't one of them.

By toast0 2025-06-1120:01

Is the core failure here the hardware target, the software architecture, or that nobody in the organization was able to determine the product would be unusable and stop the release before production?

If the core failure is decision making, having a more generous hardware target might have helped, but some other issue would likely have come up.

By Wowfunhappy 2025-06-1120:371 reply

> If you start the stopwatch and leave the app, the stopwatch stops.

...there wasn't enough free memory to store a 64 bit timestamp of when the stopwatch was started?

> You can set the e-mail app to check for mail every five minutes, but there is never any free memory, so the mail check never runs. There isn't even anything to keep the crucial alarm process alive. If the phone is busy when an alarm is supposed to go off, it just doesn't go off. An alarm you can't trust to work 100 percent of the time is useless.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think all of this stuff worked on iOS 1 in the original iPhone. It didn't have multi-tasking for most things, but preinstalled apps like the Clock and Mail were special.

This sounds to me more like unfinished software than hardware limitations. Of course, I can imagine that hardware limitations would make finishing software harder—but Apple clearly did it.

By wkat4242 2025-06-124:291 reply

> Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think all of this stuff worked on iOS 1 in the original iPhone. It didn't have multi-tasking for most things, but preinstalled apps like the Clock and Mail were special.

Also, they forced app developers right from the start (well from iPhone OS 2 because 1 didn't have third party apps) to expect their app to be killed at any time, and to save state constantly so that they could resume exactly where the user left off. Sounds like Firefox neglected to do this which is really awful when targeting such limited devices. It's one of the little things hat could have made it more workable.

By Wowfunhappy 2025-06-1213:491 reply

That's not quite how I remember iOS 2. There were some apps that saved their state, but many did not. Pressing the home button, even for a moment by accident, frequently wiped out everything.

And, I don't think there was a way for a third party Mail app to e.g. fetch new mail in the background. You essentially had to use Apple Mail.

By wkat4242 2025-06-1223:41

True, but the instruction to developers was already there. It just took them a while to get their heads around it.

And no, third-party apps could not run in the background in iOS 2, indeed. That's why a lot of people still jailbroke (Cydia etc)

By bandrami 2025-06-128:08

That's currently the Xiaomi model but I don't think the hardware was quite there yet in 2014.

By Shalomboy 2025-06-1115:38

> The problem with targeting high end first is sales / production risk. A phone based on a new OS is a risky purchase, and it's hard to convince someone to spend $500 on a high end phone without much software available. A $100 low end phone without much software available is an easier sale.

I mean, skate to where the puck is going, right? It sounds like Firefox OS started development as mobile component prices started to fall in price dramatically. By the time B2G was ready to go to market, the baseline for hardware would be dramatically higher than when they started.

By 1oooqooq 2025-06-1115:291 reply

except this analysis don't survive the real world.

living in California and contributing code to gaia, i could only have a dev phone (not being involved with moz) when i went to an alley in Mexico city known for selling black market (no tax) computers. there i could finally pay usd50 to buy the crumiest bright orange plastic phone to use for dev work.

would i have spent usd200-500 on my hobby to get a good phone months before i had a trip to mexico city? probably. would i pay the usd300 retailers in the us were charging for the crummiest low end phone? hell no.

By roywashere 2025-06-1115:35

It’s a balance. I guess they needed to target low end because they were 4 years too late. If they did this around the time of Android 1.5 or even 4, those phones were not so expensive and they could have targeted that or similar hardware.

I guess around 2012 I bought a Firefox OS phone from a Spanish company for I believe 150 euros, which was quite reasonable. FirefoxOS was unusable though. Plus it lacked WhatsApp so I could not use it as a daily driver. In 2025 I would also need to have a banking app on mobile so it’s impossible to use an “alternative” phone OS for me

By fabrice_d 2025-06-1114:462 reply

I think you are wrong on both points: - low end devices were the only ones we could start from to get official support from chipset vendors and other partners (because they segment their market). And you need that to get eg. performance fixes in their graphics drivers. On the exact same devices performance was on par with Android overall. - 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.

By nicoburns 2025-06-1115:12

> Breaking out of the web platform is the opposite of what FxOS aimed at.

I think this is part of what Mozilla missed: the key value proposition of FxOS wasn't that it was web-based specifically: it was that it was open in the way that Linux and the web are but Chrome and Android aren't (one might also compare RISC V vs ARM). The promise was that it could bring this openness to graphical operating system (mobile/desktop) environments and installable app development.

By ndiddy 2025-06-1117:261 reply

Honestly I think the whole Firefox OS idea was a major mistake, especially if the points the article makes about how the project changed Mozilla organizationally are true. Trying to make a new mobile platform in 2014, when iOS and Android were already entrenched, was never going to work out. Even if the performance was on-par with Android, why would anyone buy a Firefox OS phone over an equivalent Android phone with a far larger library of apps? The right time to try a new smartphone platform would have been at least 5 years earlier.

By fabrice_d 2025-06-1119:48

The project started in 2011 and shipped first in 2013.

By Yoric 2025-06-1114:541 reply

> - It's really unfortunate that Rust wasn't a bit further along during the Firefox OS era. A lot of the Rust UI pieces that are now being developed would make a really strong foundation for something like Firefox OS. And could perhaps also have enabled a better story for "breaking out" of the confines of the web platform.

What do you mean, "Rust UI"? In FirefoxOS, the idea was that all applications were developed solely with web technologies.

More Rust would have been nice, but would only have made sense with the support for compiling towards wasm (or asm.js, at the time).

By nicoburns 2025-06-1114:582 reply

> More Rust would have been nice, but would only have made sense with the support for compiling towards wasm (or asm.js, at the time).

Rust would have been used for implementing the web technologies, not by end users. I would note that many of the "web" technologies did not exist before Firefox OS (and Chrome OS) started adding them in a flurry, so really almost anything was on the table. The key thing was that they were open and specified.

By ksec 2025-06-1116:381 reply

>Rust would have been used for implementing the web technologies, not by end users.

It wouldn't. Another reason for Firefox OS's failure was their insistence of doing everything in Javascript. Do not bet against Javascript mentality. They quite literally wants to write most part of OS in JS.

A few developer actually blogged about this once Mozilla announced they will discontinue the development of Firefox OS.

By Yoric 2025-06-127:04

Many layers were in C++.

Most of the JS code was the applications (including the homescreen).

By owebmaster 2025-06-1115:201 reply

> The key thing was that they were open and specified.

And nowadays Firefox is the only of the "major" browsers that doesn't even support PWA anymore.

FireFoxOS could have won the battle by just existing. 5% of the smartphone market would be worth much more than only 5% of the browser market.

By jcranmer 2025-06-1116:122 reply

> FireFoxOS could have won the battle by just existing. 5% of the smartphone market would be worth much more than only 5% of the browser market.

"Just existing" isn't enough to get you to 5% of the market. At the time Mozilla started investing in B2G, it wasn't clear if the also-rans of the mobile OS marketplace were chasing, between them, 1% share or 10% share (now, it's clear that you're chasing 1% share).

As this postmortem points out (and the linked graphics developer's testimony discusses as well), Mozilla was heavily focused on the smartphone OS development, to the point of letting its existing browser competency atrophy. And despite all of that effort, the result can barely even be qualified as an also-ran.

In the counterfactual world where Mozilla didn't focus on trying to build a smartphone OS but instead pushed more for quality in its desktop and mobile browsers, or even invested in ecosystems like Node.js or Electron built on SpiderMonkey and Gecko respectively (which dovetails nicely with their everything-in-JS vision), their relevance would have been far greater, I think.

By owebmaster 2025-06-1117:52

I think an alternative to iOS/Android duopoly is much more needed than another nodejs or electron. Those two actually work quite well.

By Yoric 2025-06-127:07

For what it's worth, Mozilla has done Electron-on-Gecko at least twice (several years before Electron), and Electron-on-Servo at least once.

There was brief interest by the community, and a few applications were written to take advantage of it, but it didn't last.

By woodrowbarlow 2025-06-1113:492 reply

but did they choose the correct path for their org to get there?

> [Mozilla] 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. Focus was now solely on B2G.

when i think about the occasional anti-user decisions Mozilla has been making in the past several years (most recently, AI training policies) i wonder now if it's all residual from this structural shift.

By nicoburns 2025-06-1114:46

> when i think about the occasional anti-user decisions Mozilla has been making in the past several years (most recently, AI training policies) i wonder now if it's all residual from this structural shift.

I don't know enough about Mozilla to say, but the OP certainly makes it sound that way.

By khuey 2025-06-122:48

Eh, as someone who was there at the time I would say that these people largely left when B2G was shut down. I don't think there's much of a connection to whatever gripes you have about Mozilla today.

By officeplant 2025-06-1118:41

>Targeting low end devices first was a huge mistake.

Personally it was the only reason I ever gave Firefox OS a try.

ZTE started selling the ZTE Open[0] on ebay direct to buyers, super easy for me to obtain even in the US. The phone had miserable specs but still ran fairly well in my opinion, to the point of using it as my daily phone for months.

Eventually it was let down by most of the early Firefox phones not getting the updates to add in features like MMS support.

It was a sad day when they called it quits, and what remains in KaiOS just reminds me we could have had a strong competitor in the budget market.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZTE_Open

By extra88 2025-06-122:23

> 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

Based on my understanding of Alex Russell's info, that's not how the mobile market works. Low-end device performance in 2023 was at least 8 years behind flagship phones.

https://infrequently.org/series/performance-inequality/

By fidotron 2025-06-1111:572 reply

The real reason Firefox OS was doomed was the timing was all wrong with the explosion in graphics capability of the devices, as anyone that worked on anything performance sensitive during the iPhone 3GS -> 4 will tell you: the same GPUs were being asked to drive 4x the number of pixels. Users didn't care, they just expected it to work.

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 (as shown by it not being mentioned here), while the Googlers resorted to that most Googly of activities: arguing via walls of text that try to deny the obvious truth.

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.

By bgirard 2025-06-1121:051 reply

> FFOS was doomed because the pixel explosion wasn't just stretching the GPUs of that time

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. Here's the original proposal: https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2013Nov/0414....

By alfiedotwtf 2025-06-1210:08

It’s a sad shame that in 2025 I’m using Chrone on my e-ink reader. I still get upset these days at what could have been with Firefox and Mozilla :(

By lipowitz 2025-06-1112:132 reply

I don't think video mattered at all to their failure. FirefoxOS was never going to eat Apple's lunch it was going to eat Google's.

If thousands of vendors had made something Android 2.X level for the entry level market and the technical people who actually want what Google engineers wanted the ecosystem by volume would have been mostly FirefoxOS instead of mostly out of date Android and the ecosystem by revenue still Apple's.

By fidotron 2025-06-1112:532 reply

> FirefoxOS was never going to eat Apple's lunch it was going to eat Google's.

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.

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, hence why my then employer made incredible amounts of money selling game builds for all these other devices to demonstrate how close to iPhone equivalent they were.

It's no accident that the Android golden age began with fusing the UI concepts of WebOS that worked with a rendering pipeline that started to make sense for the hardware it was on.

By krige 2025-06-125:482 reply

Yeah, what about Windows Phone? From a user's perspective it felt like it was good, very good even, but MS kind of... gave up on it suddenly? Like they pulled a google on it.

By e2021 2025-06-127:58

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. Maybe you can get companies to take a chance on a new platform once, but you can't then deprecate every device and app a year later and expect everyone to do the same thing again

By alfiedotwtf 2025-06-1210:10

The iPaq dominated the era, and just like Windows on the phone, it seemed like they just vanished overnight

By lipowitz 2025-06-1114:011 reply

The next billion users for each billion after the first were not enterprise workers who wanted to connect to some email server so windows and BlackBerry missed the volume market entirely. Users wanted a phone that lasted 3 years, could browse and could bank. A small number of power developers that dont despise the platform are simply needed to keep the user base at all and a browser OS that wasn't Android had that by default.

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.

By fidotron 2025-06-1114:071 reply

https://www.wired.com/2011/08/blackberry-london-riots/

BBM was much more mass market than your attempt at revisionist history would suggest.

By lipowitz 2025-06-1114:09

The next billion didn't live in London. (These companies didn't want to butcher their high price per user market for volume and BB was not much of the market a year or two later. Firefox OS existed from around when Android had 80% share with most of that being at least one version behind.. I was rather obsessed with the limits of the 3rd quartile mobile browser in 2014..)

By wkat4242 2025-06-124:33

It kinda ate the feature phone market for a while as KaiOS. It was way better than normal feature phones like Nokia Series 30.

Unfortunately there's very few KaiOS phones on the market anymore. Nokia stopped making them and reverted back to Series 30 and 40. I wonder why.

By bgirard 2025-06-1121:172 reply

I worked on the rendering team at Mozilla during that time and contributed a lot to improving performance and reducing memory usage for B2G. I remember I was optimizing the experience for 256 MB devices, then one day we're told to start optimizing for a 128 MB reference phone. The very next day I open up HN to see Ars Technica reviewing a Firefox OS 64 MB phone. Predictably I knew that the experience would be terrible because I was still optimizing rendering for 256 MB two days priors. Us shipping devices that our software wasn't tuned for shot the very little remaining faith I had in the project.

Coincidentally I was profiling and tuning the keyboard pop-open for 256 MB devices at the time. Profiling and tuning the trade-offs of when to render and animate the graphical layers. Knowing that these trade-offs would be very different and incorrect for a 64 MB device.

By khuey 2025-06-123:041 reply

I was also there for the memory usage side of things.

B2G management was driven by a mix of "the web is the platform" ideology[0] and a willingness to promise whatever carriers and OEMs wanted to close a distribution deal regardless of whether it was feasible or made any sense.

My own personal "this project is hopelessly doomed" moment was roughly 48 hours before the 1.4 code freeze when I was contacted by a colleague asking how feature X was coming along. Feature X was needed to fix Bug Y, and Bug Y was in the critical bug list for the code freeze. But it turned out the B2G project managers had decided to manually track their critical bug list outside of Bugzilla, and didn't make any effort to track the transitive dependencies of those bugs, or notify anyone that they should be working on these. "ngmi" hadn't been popularized yet but that was very much my feeling at that moment. Active development ceased by the end of the year.

[0] which I think could have panned out at least technically, given sufficient resources, time, etc

By dcminter 2025-06-127:471 reply

> ... a willingness to promise whatever carriers and OEMs wanted to close a distribution deal...

That always struck me as one of the more impressive things that Jobs achieved with the original iPhone - getting buy-in from Cingular to do things Apple's way and not Cingular's. Pre-iPod Apple probably couldn't have done it.

By rickdeckard 2025-06-1214:49

...and have Cingular pay a revenue-share of the monthly user-bill back to Apple in exchange for exclusivity.

It cannot be overstated what a gamechanger it was to have a recurring revenue stream incrementing with each new user. Beside Blackberry, no cellphone company was able to finance maintenance based on its userbase AND hardware sales, they all only worked (and mostly still work) based on hardware-sale alone.

By fabrice_d 2025-06-1218:07

The Ars Technica review was for the 128MB phones (the Tarako project if you remember, shipping from the 1.3t branch). We never did a 64MB version, which was just a pipe dream from some BD folks to save a few cents of BOM costs.