Firefox was first introduced back in 2012 and a lot of us here at XDA have had a soft spot for the platform. We are very passionate about open source software and Firefox OS offered a very open source mobile platform and it had some momentum for a while. By late 2014, 14 different carriers in over 25 countries around the world were offering smartphones that ran Firefox OS, but this didn’t last very long.
Less than a year later, Mozilla had announced they would stop selling commercial Firefox OS smartphones. The company said they would discontinue the development of the platform for smartphones in May of this year. This was only for smartphones though, as in January of this year we saw Firefox OS being used in Panasonic 4K televisions. The company had thought that pivoting to connected devices was the way forward but even this didn’t work out how Mozilla had wanted.
It’s now been confirmed that development on Firefox OS has ceased so they can focus more on their browser, and the engine that runs it. In a Mozilla developer newsgroup, the company has announced they will pull all Firefox OS related code from the Gecko engine. The developers say this is needed in order to continue evolving the “underlying code that comprises Gecko” as it being attached to Firefox OS was hindering the development process.
While this isn’t technically the end of Firefox OS as a whole, remember it’s still an open source project, the community developers who are passionate about it can pick up where the project was abandoned. Mozilla says the community will need to fork Gecko and maintain the code base so that it is still compatible with Firefox OS. Time will tell if there will be enough people to not only start and complete the project, but also keep it going so that Firefox OS can continue on.
from xda-developers http://ift.tt/2cVtTg6
via IFTTT
Aucun commentaire:
Enregistrer un commentaire