Mozilla has finally laid the underperforming Firefox OS to rest. The company announced that it will stop developing and selling Firefox OS based phones at its developer conference yesterday. However, this isn’t the end of the grand experiment; and Mozilla still says that it will continue to work on more connected devices.
Techcrunch managed to get a full statement out of Ari Jaaksi, Mozilla’s SVP of Connected Devices. Jaaksi admitted that the phones failed to provide customers with the best possible user experience; which is why the company decided to stop working on them.
He said, “We are proud of the benefits Firefox OS added to the Web platform and will continue to experiment with the user experience across connected devices. We will build everything we do as a genuine open source project, focused on user experience first and build tools to enable the ecosystem to grow.
Firefox OS proved the flexibility of the Web, scaling from low-end smartphones all the way up to HD TVs. However, we weren’t able to offer the best user experience possible and so we will stop offering Firefox OS smartphones through carrier channels.
We’ll share more on our work and new experiments across connected devices soon.”
It is no secret that Firefox OS based phones have flopped at the market. OEMs that adopted the OS attempted to flood the low end market with devices, but even then it failed to gain any momentum.
Mozilla has been streamlining its business to focus more on core services as of late. Firefox OS is not the only casualty, as the company has also announced plans to divorce itself from its Thunderbird email client. It isn’t clear what Mozilla intends to do with Thunderbird, but at the moment it looks more likely that the client will be sold to a third party.
[Source: Techcrunch]
