Fresh from Mozilla's internal revelation they'd like to jettison Thunderbird as a drag on Firefox development (sure to rankle our Tenfourbird builder in the land of the Rising Sun), Mozilla has now announced the end of the Firefox OS smartphone.

I can't say I'm surprised. I liked FxOS as a user, but its application support was dismal (so I could not ditch my Nexus 5, nor could I truly dogfood any Firefox device), and FxOS seemed to only be offered as an option on truly awful hardware. In my case, it was the so-bad-it's-terrible Geeksphone Revulsion Revolution, branded as their developer unit after the whimpering fail of the Peak. True to form, when I actually finally got one, it turned out to be an unmitigated steaming heap and essentially ensured I would never buy a Geeksphone device ever again. Yes, it was that bad. And this was supposed to be their developer device, to get people actually excited about the platform!

That said, I'm sad to see this development (even if I'm not at all shocked), because even though FxOS will live on in some form as an open source project I predict it'll eventually go the benignly neglected way of things like Firefox for webOS (which, having recently acquired an HP Veer for snickers and fighting with endian problems in novacomd, would be really handy about now). That's bad for us in Power Mac land because the improvements to boost Firefox performance on constrained mobile devices also help with our now decade-plus computers. Time will tell if Mozilla decides to kill the entire project as well, not just shipping Firefox phones.

TenFourFoxBox so far has been a huge success. I should publicly mention Mike Hommey's comment in the last blog entry: yes, the true successor to WebRunner is the webapp runtime that Firefox presently comes with, but the webapp runtime doesn't work on 10.4 and needs quite a bit of hacking to do so, and since we weren't using it anyway I could just implement an even lighter chrome and make it even faster. There will be some adjustments to allow people with differently-named executables to work (as well as an override version in case you want to use a specific version of the browser to run your foxboxes), and we need to implement a component for certain sites that try to enumerate navigator.* properties (Chase was the main offender), but otherwise it's been very well received. 1.0 will appear after 38.5.0 and will receive its own website at that time.

Speaking of, I haven't had a lot of time to do much else with 38.5 or the occasional test complaints about the MP3 decoder due to time constraints and finishing my Master's degree, but the MP3 decoder will be enabled and we'll gather some data points to figure out which encoders minimp3 doesn't like (after all, the fact it can play most MP3 files is better than none). There will also be a patch for bug 1181977 to fix the empty Application menu in foxboxes (remember to quit any running foxboxes before you upgrade the browser), and a custodial cleanup after issue 308. Watch for it this weekend for release next week.

http://tenfourfox.blogspot.com/2015/12/so-long-firefox-phones.html