Today 10 years ago I went to Poland to buy a Phone with pre installed #Firefox OS on. The Phone was a Alcatel One, so very shitty. Two years later I installed Firefox OS on my Nexus 5 instead.
It was a very good concept, but sadly rolled out on too shitty hardware so it never caught on.
Imo that's what caused Firefox to lose market share to Chrome. They focused too much on Firefox OS and deprioritized browser development. In one example, it took them a long time to implement FIDO when it was already functional in Chrome.
Considering how dominant the mobile OS has become, this wasn’t a terrible gamble. Like they lost and it looks bad in hindsight, but you can’t blame them for trying. If it had succeeded, we’d be living in a very different world of technology right now.
My recollection was that the game was already down to just iOS or Android by the time this came out. Windows Phone still existed, but it was already being ignored by popular apps like Snapchat.
Plus the people who even knew about this (tech people) didn't like the "everything is a web app" idea when Chrome OS did it, much less a smartphone.
You’re right the game was pretty much won by then. The Firefox angle was to go for the limited resources end of the market (as it should have run better than Android on less powerful modestly priced handsets) So it launched at the very budget end.
The problems were: People wanted an Android phone so they could use the apps their friends wanted even if they could only afford a slow but cheap experience; the people who might have been interested in a Firefox OS weren’t interested in budget handsets; the experience was poor and there was little ‘app’ support.