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Comment by benoau | Hacker News Reader

I installed FirefoxOS on a phone years ago, it wasn't even bad really.

The main problem with Firefox OS was that it was really slow. At the same time it was targeting budget phones.

But on the other hand progress was quite good. Back in the days I was maintaining unofficial images for Alcatel Fire. Each version was a little bit faster, but you really can't do much when the whole OS is a browser running on a device with with 256MB of RAM and a single core CPU.

Wasn't webOS effectively an OS built on web standards and effectively just a browser engine?

The Pre had 256MB and something like a 600mHZ processor. While it was no speed demon, I was always impressed with the animations and multitasking they pulled off with it.

People forget we used the web on 100mHz 486s with maybe 16MB of RAM and sites like Slashdot were plenty usable.

Granted sites like Slashdot didn't used react server components.

I use it as my primary phone for 2 years, first with the Flame, then with a Z3C. For me Firefox OS was the finale move of Mozilla, either it successes and Mozilla becomes a major actor again or it fails and they slowly die. And thebmy decided to kill it right when it was becoming stable enough.

It's another damned if you do, damned if you don't. FirefoxOS is regularly listed by commenters as an example of a wasteful side bet, whereas my feeling is more along the lines of yours, that it was striding greatly, as the saying goes, and attempting to be a major actor.

A big part of the market share loss was due to monopoly and distribution lockdown of a controlled platform tightly tied to hardware, so I can certainly see the strategic wisdom of the attempt. I suspect they didn't have the resources to press forward, they had a lot less money then than they do now. Which makes it all the more maddening that Yahoo's role as a partner was so muted; it could have made the difference for both of them.

As with most new operating systems, its biggest problem was lack of apps. Mozilla seemed to abandon Firefox OS right as Progressive Web Apps were starting to take off, which would have done a lot to fix that problem.

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