Remember when Mozilla said it was ceasing development of Firefox OS for smartphones, but that it wasn’t giving up on the browser-based operating system altogether? Yeah, now the organization has pretty much thrown in the towel.
After shifting the focus from phones to smart TVs and other Internet of Things products for a while, Mozilla senior engineering program manager Julie McCracken says development of the operating system was “gradually wound down” and that as of the end of July Mozilla has “stopped all commercial development of Firefox OS.
That said… it’d be an exaggeration to say the operating system is dead. It’s probably more accurate to say that Mozilla has washed its hands of responsibility for the platform.
The software continues to power some smart TVs from companies like Panasonic, for instance. And the open source Boot 2 Gecko (B2G) operating system (which is the foundation for Firefox OS) continues to be, well… open source. So anyone can still build upon it to create their own software (like Acadine’s ill-fated H5OS).
Meanwhile, Mozilla will continue to develop the Gecko rendering engine that powers both the Firefox web browser and B2G/Firefox OS. It’ll just be up to someone else to decide whether to integrate any future Gecko features into those platforms.
If you’re one of the handful of people who spent money on a Firefox OS smartphone you shouldn’t expect any ongoing support from Mozilla. Even security updates are likely to become a thing of the past unless someone picks up where Mozilla is leaving off.
via Hacker News