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Comment by fabrice_d | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunately market share is more about being about to efficiently distribute your product than just the quality of said product.

Mozilla is suffering from not having its own platform - they could have done so by keeping FirefoxOS alive and use the growing success of KaiOS today. Looks like they are not ready to come back because... reasons.

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FirefoxOS never had a snowball's chance in hell against Android and iOS. I wish it were otherwise, but it's not, and never was.

But yes, I agree that FF market share problems are not due to problems with the product itself.

Firefox OS was a terrible idea. Gecko is horribly slow as it is, and they put it on low-end, under-powered mobile phones. As it was expected, using it for a few minutes made you want to hang yourself. I know they met with bosses from telecos, I wonder what faces they made when they showed them how the mobile behaved.

I used to have a Flame, the FirefoxOS development phone (which was the higher-end FFxOS device but was still bellow $200), and it was WAY snappier than my current Android phone (which is a $400 one!).

> Unfortunately market share is more about being about to efficiently distribute your product than just the quality of said product.

Firefox has broken out of this before by being a better product. Not being default on any platform is nothing compared to back in the day when IE had >95% market share and sites were made to work with it only.

These days even many linux distros are defaulting to chromium, that's the one place where it could be the "native" browser.

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