Oh, hi! Long time.

Don’t take my words as being too critical of the Android version FWIW, at least the Gecko one. I think that’s been one of the few mobile successes. But what I personally perceived as discounting desktop as a viable strategy was a gross mistake IMO.

Yeah, I agree FxOS was largely a dead end for Moz by the time it was killed and there wasn’t much choice there. My take was partners pretty much lost faith when it became obvious we’d never have performance parity with Android even if feature parity were reached.

But I’m not sure what they—or Moz—expected. FxOS was running core apps on multiple layers of browser stack. Even a Dalvik-based app was going to be faster than that for having a JIT optimized to that purpose, much less native core system utilities. WebAssembly could possibly have mitigated some of that, but partners were universally putting FxOS on the lowest of low end smartphones since cheap was the selling point for them.

I also think the split personality it put on development of Gecko was a huge detriment to Mozilla’s momentum. The browser-focused devs plainly didn’t appreciate the pressures FxOS put on the stack. Then there was the bit where a zero-day in the browser would have been unfixable without potentially compromising all the phones that wouldn’t be able to update for weeks or months later across a disjointed ecosystem.

I left largely over my dissatisfaction with how Mozilla handled that whole period of time and particularly the FxOS effort. It really damaged my impression of Moz as an effective org, primarily due to the leadership and execution issues and what struck me as extreme tunnel vision.

I hear you that after being on that path, Moz was pretty much forced to fold when partners walked away, but maybe some unrealistic expectations were set in the first place. And maybe there wasn’t enough consideration for how that half-pivot would divide the org and drag on Gecko.

I do think the opportunity for feature phones could have panned out technically, though the way reorgs played out may still have gutted it. But when I said I don’t know if it would have advanced browser synergy or the open web (i.e. pushed market share back to full-featured Firefox) I’m saying I’m deeply skeptical it would have been anything other than a purely business success.

KaiOS isn’t a mission-based product and just needs to succeed in being adopted. Moz would have needed to make it mean something. Plus I’m just not sure the audience for feature phones and the audience for web-standards-requiring websites are the same. That’s why I think brand recognition and cash influx were the only real potential gains there.

I think IOT played out well after I was gone, but another comment on here suggests it was never a serious effort so much as a tactical positioning.

Re: TV OS, if you mean Panasonic I’m not sure exactly how much of Mozilla’s code actually survived into that product. I’m pretty sure I’d heard that there was a lot of work done on under the hood on Panasonic’s part to make it viable, while keeping the look and feel plus the FxOS brand on the label.

Maybe that was exaggerated or Moz took a more active role in it after I left, but I didn’t get the impression we had many people in the org dedicated to it when the first implementation happened.