Comment on Today 10 years ago I got a Firefox OS phone
meiti@lemmy.world 10 months 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.
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.
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.
This is incorrect, it was also Linux-based but completely unrelated to Android.
It was android 5 (or maybe 6 with its 2.6 versione) and the launcher was gaia
djsaskdja@endlesstalk.org 10 months 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.
angstylittlecatboy@reddthat.com 10 months ago
My recollection was that the game was already down to iOS or Android by the time this came out. Windows Phone still existed, but it was already being ignored by popular apps like Snapchat.
Knightfall@lemmy.ca 10 months ago
This perfectly explains the demise of BlackBerry phones too.
Historical_General@lemmy.world 10 months ago
They timed it right so that they fucked up both ways, in the browser and in the low end webn-connected phone market. They are clowns.