So Mozilla's clever idea to attack the low end of the market outside the US has failed and now they want to pivot. The rub is that now they are competing with Android and iPhone, which have years of head start and gigantic app stores. They aren't pursuing compatibility with those existing app stores, so that will be a disadvantage. And they don't have resources like there are behind Windows Phone.
Even to take a niche, they need a remarkable positive differentiator. As the quote in the article says, "In the mass market, that's basically impossible." Rhetoric like "change the world" isn't it - the specifics matter. "Embrace the web" isn't a differentiator when all Smartphones can browse websites. I welcome you to find in that article anything but a few planned features which might just keep Firefox OS alive without necessarily giving it a competitive advantage.
After watching a few years, I'm not sure even Mozilla knows what the differentiator will be to consumers, because what I always see from them in this kind of press-release piece are vague phrases like "the open web". So for years I have been a little confused about exactly what they are trying to do. A possible clue is that whenever you drill down on projects to which these catchphrases have been applied, what it really boils down to is more Javascript. Please try an experiment: every time you see "the open web" mentioned by Mozilla, see if the same sentence makes as much sense substituting "Javascript."
For years this has bothered me because "the open web" does not literally mean "Javascript," yet Mozilla and its fans consistently equivocate between the two. What I realize now is that this isn't because Mozilla is confused about the difference, it's because their core allegiance is to Brandan Eich's brainchild and phrases like "open web" are just a chosen mode of evangelizing Javascript. Maybe Mozilla doesn't know exactly what an all-Javascript world will exactly bring to consumers, but they want it anyway because that is their understanding of their mission.
The problem with this is that Javascript advocacy doesn't necessarily have a lot of benefit to consumers or even to programmers other than diehard Javascript fans. To be plain, basically nobody gives a rat's ass if their phone uses more Javascript than Java. It doesn't make anything more open to use Javascript rather than other technologies, openness is a matter of licensing and maybe development process. In practice you still end up with a lot of Javascript APIs specific to Firefox OS (and therefore a collection of apps).
I don't know how you're missing it but apps on phones are like desktop software vs the web. Mozilla wants to win that battle and make it possible to use the open web on multiple devices. You won't be limited to a particular OS and APIs, you can just use FireFox OS or the browser and you're good to go. Using JavaScript is an alright decision especially when you have asm.js and you have TypeScript and flow if you want static typing or type annotations.
The flaw in the plan is that no one has tried to get something like Google Docs working on Firefox OS/Mobile and then tried to tune and optimize performance until it worked properly.
If they focused on getting heavy websites to load in under a second come hell or high water, they would have made the web browser king on the phone. Instead we have Facebook cutting out the browser by caching the content of news sites.
You will, of course, be limited to the APIs available in standard Javascript. At the moment that means missing a lot of things that people might want to be able to do (or need to be able to do to write things that act like freestanding apps instead of websites). The way Mozilla tried to get around that was to add a lot of Firefox OS specific APIs and then claim that those APIs were part of 'the open web' because they were going to submit them for standardisation at some point in the future.
Mozilla seem to think that they are the sole arbiter of what the web standards are. The APIs they want to add are 'open' and 'standard' and anybody who is against adding those APIs is an entryist enemy of 'the open web'. APIs proposed by other vendors that Mozilla dislikes are an attack on the open web.
That's not how it works.
Things only become standards (formally or de facto) when all (or nearly all) of the big browser vendors support them. That's the definition of an open standards based platform - it's lowest common denominator. If you don't like that reality then you don't like open standards based platforms. There was little sign that the other browser vendors had any interest in adding a bunch of FirefoxOS specific APIs (just as how Mozilla have rejected various proposals from other vendors over the years).
You can argue that all this is very unfair. Why should Apple and Google and Microsoft have veto power over what APIs are available on FirefoxOS? But this is a trap of Mozilla's own choosing. It's the fundamental problem with the dream of a single platform standard for all user facing software. It creates a tight sandbox (both software architecturally and politically) that gives the big players veto power over everything. The idea of a single grand standard platform with perfect compatibility across all devices is certainly alluring, but it has huge downsides that nobody ever seems to really want to talk about. And that's before you get to the technical issues to do with the web standards being pretty crappy for complex GUI development.
another really good differentiators could be fully open source drivers, including base band firmware. That's becoming an increasingly important issue, and just apeing androids driver model where everything is closed and locked to some specific kernel versions really, really sucks.
It might not attract the masses, but it will easily snag a big following among people that care about this stuff.
Even to take a niche, they need a remarkable positive differentiator. As the quote in the article says, "In the mass market, that's basically impossible." Rhetoric like "change the world" isn't it - the specifics matter. "Embrace the web" isn't a differentiator when all Smartphones can browse websites. I welcome you to find in that article anything but a few planned features which might just keep Firefox OS alive without necessarily giving it a competitive advantage.
After watching a few years, I'm not sure even Mozilla knows what the differentiator will be to consumers, because what I always see from them in this kind of press-release piece are vague phrases like "the open web". So for years I have been a little confused about exactly what they are trying to do. A possible clue is that whenever you drill down on projects to which these catchphrases have been applied, what it really boils down to is more Javascript. Please try an experiment: every time you see "the open web" mentioned by Mozilla, see if the same sentence makes as much sense substituting "Javascript."
For years this has bothered me because "the open web" does not literally mean "Javascript," yet Mozilla and its fans consistently equivocate between the two. What I realize now is that this isn't because Mozilla is confused about the difference, it's because their core allegiance is to Brandan Eich's brainchild and phrases like "open web" are just a chosen mode of evangelizing Javascript. Maybe Mozilla doesn't know exactly what an all-Javascript world will exactly bring to consumers, but they want it anyway because that is their understanding of their mission.
The problem with this is that Javascript advocacy doesn't necessarily have a lot of benefit to consumers or even to programmers other than diehard Javascript fans. To be plain, basically nobody gives a rat's ass if their phone uses more Javascript than Java. It doesn't make anything more open to use Javascript rather than other technologies, openness is a matter of licensing and maybe development process. In practice you still end up with a lot of Javascript APIs specific to Firefox OS (and therefore a collection of apps).