It was a fantastic gamble IMO. Low chance of success, but enormous payoff if it had succeeded. Imagine a commercially viable alternative to iPhone and Android with multiple manufacturers and a completely open platform. Ultimately, I think they came to market too late and Android moved into the niche (low end market) they were targeting.
They gave up on FirefoxOS too soon. They also didn't promote it in the markets where it could have made a real impact. I live in India, and a dirt cheap FirefoxOS phone would have done very well here if only they had made it easy to purchase. I had one of their early phones, but I had to get mine from the US.
After being abandoned by Mozilla, FirefoxOS was resurrected as KaiOS. For a while, it was the second most popular mobile operating system in India, mostly because Reliance decided to use it for some of their low-end Jio phones[1]. Where would FirefoxOS be today if Mozilla had stuck with it? If hundreds of millions of people had their first taste of the Internet via FirefoxOS and not Android?
I've been a Firefox user since 2004, but I don't think Mozilla understands how to conduct business. They're an ideological organization first and foremost. It's not a bad thing -- we need somebody to stand up to Big Tech -- but it means that they probably won't be taking a big share of any market except by complete accident.
They gambled away the only open source browser with this and other money drains. Would I like an 50%+ market share open source phone OS? Yes. Would I gamble and lose the much more important open source browser? No.
Yeah, I'm glad they tried. I absolutely think they should be spending a chunk of their money on things that might broaden their impact and their revenue, even when some of those things don't pan out.
They took Gecko, the slowest rendering engine that there was (is?), made an entire OS around it, and put it on the slowest mobile phones that existed back then. That was not a gamble, that was throwing money down the drain.
