Firefox OS's story from a Mozilla insider not working on the project (2024)

Summary

I clearly remember, but can't date it. I was working for Mozilla messaging at the time (momo), being the QA lead for Thunderbird. It was at the end of one of the Mozilla All-hands, maybe in 2011 or 2012. At one of the ending keynotes, we were introduced to Boot 2 Gecko. A hack that would let US - Mozilla own the platform to run a mobile browser on. At the time, the iPhone was going strong and Google was trying to catch up with Android. MeeGo had been in development at Nokia for a while but was going nowhere even when Intel tried to help. Blackberry was slowly starting to die.In the Silicon Valley everything was about mobile, mobile, mobile and the emerging South Easter Asian market, where people would skip computers and use smartphones to join the internet revolution. We were struggling with Chrome and the massive investment by Google to take market share. Our Firefox port on Android was having loads of issues. We were denied by Apple's policies to be present on iPhones. I was running Nightly on my then Galaxy S Samsung android powered phone. As android was open source, the idea to use it as a base for a complete phone OS that would make the web a platform emerged has an idea. At that time, Mozilla consisted of around 600 employees, all working on Firefox on the desktop. Most of our huge community was helping the project, making it available in many languages (Like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Frisian_language), helping with some marketing efforts too.B2G, or Android's version, were not Mozilla first effort to be present on Mobile. The first effort I'm aware of is Minimo, who was targeting Palm like handheld devices.As I said above, Mozilla's management was really afraid to miss the mobile revolution. They hired someone from the mobile industry to run the company, this led to some culture changes : no more a flat org, but a pyramidal one with middle managers. Culture became way less engineering centric, and started being a bit more top -> down. Focus was now s...