Under Eich Mozilla mostly abandoned Firefox development to focus on his big bet that failed: Firefox OS. It took Mozilla many years to recover from that technically after it finally killed FirefoxOS.
It was a good bet. But it did not work out. No leader is infallible.
While the FirefoxOS brand didn't survive, the technology itself took off as KaiOS and is more popular that iOS in many markets. It just took a Chinese company with some TCL money to manage distribution successfully.
KaiOS is actually dead now; and the market share is now irrelevant - even WhatsApp has shut down their app on the platform, and the App Store is no longer working. Completely cannibalized by cheap Android.
Wow, you're right, last update was in 2022. I still see a lot of devices in use though. I guess the OS updates don't matter too much. Didn't know about the app store. I guess most people I've seen using them just use the preinstalled apps anyway. The last time I used one someone asked me to sideload something, and adb worked fine for it. The website was at least updated recently.
Didn't Firefox OS actually bring various new APIs to Firefox browser itself?
That's what I understood from their postmortem post:
"Engineering — Have a clear separation between “chrome” and web content rather than try to force the web to do things it isn’t suited to. Create device APIs using REST & WebSockets on the server side of the web stack rather than privileged JavaScript DOM APIs on the client side. Create a community curated directory of web apps on the web rather than an app store of submitted packaged apps."
I was SVP Engineering as well as CTO from 2013 January till 2014 April. Your use of "mostly abandoned" is a false statement, knowingly told. You don't say it if you don't have evidence, but the evidence in terms of headcount and budget does not support what you say. I had four VPs under me, and only one was working on Firefox OS. Firefox was fully funded.
It was a good bet. But it did not work out. No leader is infallible.