14 DAY TRIAL // More than seven months after it stopped development of Firefox OS for the smartphone market, the Mozilla Foundation announced today plans to discontinue the project altogether.
The Foundation says Firefox OS 2.6 is the last OS version Mozilla engineers will work on and is urging the open source community to fork the project past this point and continue work on it outside of Mozilla's watchful eye.
Mozilla cites several reasons for its decision, but says that they have nothing to gain out of developing Firefox OS.
Firefox OS was supposed to be an Android killer
Also known as Boot2Gecko or B2G, Firefox OS was developed in 2013 and deployed on cheap smartphones. Mozilla had great plans for it, hoping to supersede Android on the mobile OS market.
Things didn't turn out as expected, and in December 2015, Mozilla announced it was pulling out of the smartphone market, with no immediate plans to release new B2G-powered smartphones.
In its initial announcement, the Foundation said it would continue to support Firefox OS development, but this didn't last long, and in February 2016, they announced the stoppage of Firefox OS development for smartphones altogether.
From the smartphone market to the Internet of Things
Nevertheless, Mozilla engineers changed plans and distanced itself from the smartphone market, with intentions to release Firefox OS versions for IoT devices, such as TVs, routers, keyboards, and tablets.
Rumors and a few sketches appeared online, and everybody seemed to like the idea of Firefox OS powering the emerging IoT market. Alas, it was not meant to be.
According to a recent assessment from Mozilla's Ari Jaaksi and David Bryant, Firefox OS simply doesn't fit in Mozilla's long-term plans, and it costs the Foundation too many resources.
“ In the spring and summer of 2016 the Connected Devices team dug deeper into opportunities for Firefox OS. They concluded that Firefox OS TV was a project to be run by our commercial partner and not a project to be led by Mozilla. Further, Firefox OS was determined to not be sufficiently useful for ongoing Connected Devices work to justify the effort to maintain it. This meant that development of the Firefox OS stack was no longer a part of Connected Devices, or Mozilla at all. Firefox OS 2.6 would be the last release from Mozilla. ”