Firefox made sense from a business point of view (in the sense of making something people want, never mind its search bar money) because it had a lot of features that IE lacked, such as tabbed browsing, not being the primary target for hacking, and its cross-platform support. Those are reasons people actually used Firefox.
Firefox OS doesn't make sense the same way, because they aren't making anything that people want. As far as I can tell, it's a way for Mozillans to testify their faith in JavaScript.
For a lot of people, the appeal of Firefox at the time was that it was developed by a company whose primary goal was to improve the internet as public infrastructure.
With the mobile market being dominated by Google, Microsoft and Apple, Firefox OS makes sense in the same way.
For users, it is about building a platform in which users are not locked to a proprietary silo, and are not spied upon by default.
For carriers and hardware vendors, it is about building a platform that is not 100% controlled by Google. Recall that Google can decide to revoke Android license from any vendor on arbitrary grounds, and if you lose your Android license, you pretty much lose everything (no AGPS, no Google Maps, no Google Play, etc.)
Oh, and yes, it's also a third thing: it's designed to be a cool platform for [web]developers.
>For users, it is about building a platform in which users are not locked to a proprietary silo
How are they not locked into the 'silo' of FirefoxOS and the FirefoxOS APIs? If the answer is that the apps are 100% web standards compliant then users already have web browsers that can run those apps without needing to use FirefoxOS, so what is the point of FirefoxOS for users?
>Recall that Google can decide to revoke Android license from any vendor on arbitrary grounds, and if you lose your Android license, you pretty much lose everything (no AGPS, no Google Maps, no Google Play, etc.)
While this is shitty, it still just leaves you pretty much in the same place as FirefoxOS (being able to access (some of) those services through a web browser rather than a native app). If a hardware vendor is worried about losing the licence to use the native google maps app, why would they move to FirefoxOS - a platform without a native google maps app?
The entire project seems more about politics and religion than an actual business case. Which is fair enough, but isn't a recipe for commercial success or market penetration.
> How are they not locked into the 'silo' of FirefoxOS and the FirefoxOS APIs? If the answer is that the apps are 100% web standards compliant then users already have web browsers that can run those apps without needing to use FirefoxOS, so what is the point of FirefoxOS for users?
Because the other platforms don't support all of the standards developed by FirefoxOS, and will have no incentive to implement them without competition. Basic economics.
> How are they not locked into the 'silo' of FirefoxOS and the FirefoxOS APIs?
FirefoxOS is fully open source, while the Google platform is not. At the very least, that provides an environment where the source code for all the official supported platform is Free Software, which isn't true for Android.
This means that all users could share the same experience without depending on proprietary software (except maybe for drivers and BIOS specific to the hardware platform).
So instead of losing all the Google apps with an Android fork, let's throw away all the other Android apps, too! That sounds like a great way to kick off your fine-grained-permissions-having phone project.
History lesson from an old guy: Firefox was born out of a stagnating IE (MS was pissed about the whole DOJ saga) and a bloated Netscape. Opera was a fun/weird side project (it used to fit on a floppy!) but Firefox was literally born in the dark ages of browser development to serve a clear need(s): lean, fast, modern.
Once could argue this same "need" exists for smartphone OS's. However, not so easy to swap those out, in contrast to Firefox which was an easy switch for most.
> Firefox was literally born in the dark ages of browser development to serve a clear need(s): lean, fast, modern.
Yes, and imo Firefox was the best browser for several years, until Chrome/Chromium took hold. Chrome is faster, it's developer tools are still better than Firefox's, and maybe more importantly, by usage it currently ranks highest: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers
Mozilla has really struggled in the past several years with Firefox, and Firefox OS is similarly fighting. As noted in http://www.cnet.com/news/firefox-os-in-flux-as-mozilla-loses... "Mozilla joined Microsoft, Samsung and BlackBerry in learning that it's brutally hard to compete successfully. Of the 334 million phones shipped during the first quarter of 2015, Google's Android OS accounted for 78 percent and Apple's iOS 18.3 percent, according to analysis firm IDC. That leaves just 3.7 percent for all other challengers."
> One could argue this same "need" exists for smartphone OS's.
I'm not sure if I agree completely. Firefox OS is modern in the sense that it aims to be HTML/CSS/JS-based, but in what sense is it either lean or fast? If it is HTML/CSS/JS-based, it probably won't take up less space than compiled apps would. And from others here, you can see there are complaints about its speed.
I will continue to use Firefox at home, but I think Firefox OS needs to be rethought before I'll use it. I don't think lean/simplistic and fast should be the goals. Instead I'd suggest:
(1) Freedom: How can it be used almost anywhere for almost anything? Why just mobile devices? What about building atop the Linux kernel, thereby having access to a slew of possible devices, and providing easy access to them via JS?
(2) Fun: How can it be fun to both use and develop for via well-designed but easy to use libraries along with great documentation that automatically generated and given lots of attention along with lots of examples for each version.
However, that would be a huge undertaking and I don't foresee them doing it.
Google didn't donate money to Mozilla (not large-scale anyway), it paid for being the default search engine just like it pays Apple and Opera, for instance. Very traditional business deal.
I'm not quite sure what you mean. It was a revenue sharing deal at that time and very orthodox at that. It was new in that it was the first time a search / advertising company paid a browser vendor, but that doesn't make it a one-sided charity act or some special kind of deal that could be summarized appropriately with "Google funding Mozilla", as this only tells half of the story.
After all, we had Internet Explorer, Safari and Opera as perfectly viable browsers.