Mozilla’s venture into the operating system did not play out as well as the company expected. As such, the company has announced that Firefox OS, Mozilla’s own OS specifically built for “connected devices”, will be brought to a halt today.
According to a report by CNet, Mozilla has laid off around 50 people that were working on Firefox OS. The OS itself was originally conceived as a smartphone platform with the company hoping that it would be adopted by low cost smartphones in emerging markets thanks to the OS’s free and open source nature. When that didn’t work out as planned, Mozilla then tried to reposition the operating system as the OS of choice for devices that rely on the Internet of Things. While Panasonic did ship televisions that run on Firefox OS, there is no denying that Firefox OS did not manage to make a huge impact in the market as Mozilla would have wanted.
With Firefox OS now done and dusted, Mozilla states that the company will be looking into other Internet of Things ventures. One such venture may come in the form of Project Vaani, Mozilla’s own take on the Amazon Alexa-like voice interface technology.
Source: CNet