The Mozilla Foundation's Firefox development team has decided enough is enough and will stop supporting Windows XP and Vista in March 2017 and also bin Firefox OS. The OS first. In this post Mozillans Ari Jaaksi and David Bryant, respectively the head of connected devices and veep for platform engineering, write that “By the …

Owners of Panasonic smart TVs say their sets have been unable to access applications – including video-streaming apps – because backend servers keep falling over. The Panasonic UK Twitter feed has been beset by folks demanding answers and refunds after their expensive Firefox OS-based tellies refused to work properly. The TVs …

Mozilla's Head of Core Contributors, George Roter, has announced the end of development of Firefox OS for smartphones. Competing with Android and iOS is simply too hard, says Roter: We made an awesome push and created an impressive platform in Firefox OS. However, as we announced in December, the circumstances of multiple …

Mozilla announced at the Mozlando developer conference in Florida that it has officially abandoned attempts to get a foothold in the smartphone market with its Firefox OS system. "We are proud of the benefits Firefox OS added to the Web platform and will continue to experiment with the user experience across connected devices …

Mozilla has appointed ex-Nokia man Ari Jaaksi as its new senior veep of connected devices. "In this role, Ari will be responsible for Firefox OS and broader exploration of opportunities to advance our mission across the ever-increasing range of connection points of the modern Internet, i.e. phones, TVs, [internet of things], …

The Mozilla Foundation has formalised Firefox OS development, pledging that henceforth new versions will emerge every six months. “To deliver upon this vision we are immediately moving to a development model where we will drive a single open source core of Firefox OS, with major releases every six months, based upon weekly …

Spanish smartphone startup Geeksphone is winding down operations and will not pursue any future mobile phone projects. "Geeksphone has always worked for its users, trying to listen to their needs, in order to bring innovation, freshness, quality, style and to differentiate their mobile devices," the company said in a statement …

The Mozilla Foundation staged a Mozilla Festival in the UK over the weekend, and one of the projects developers delivered was a port of Firefox OS working to the Raspberry Pi. Mozilla has big ambitions for its OS on the Pi, stating the following four objectives for a future Pi-compatible release: Be at parity with Raspbian/ …

The Mozilla Foundation's aim to create a Firefox OS for mobile devices was not to take a quixotic tilt at the top end of the smartphone market. Instead, it hoped to provide an alternative that would enable the delivery of low-cost, but still smart, devices to places where smartphones are still a significant purchase. That plan …

Mozilla has confirmed that Chris Beard, who was appointed as interim CEO three months ago as a replacement for controversial Brendan Eich, will stay at the helm for the foreseeable future. "Chris has a keen sense of where Mozilla has been – and where we’re headed," said Mitchell Baker, executive chairwoman at Mozilla. "He has …

Mozilla's Firefox OS continues its slow march across the globe, with carriers set to begin shipping devices running the open source, browser-based smartphone platform in additional developed markets this week. Spanish telecoms giant Telefónica has previously sold Firefox OS phones in Spain, but the bulk of its efforts have …

ReviewOpen-source enthusiasts have hailed Mozilla’s Firefox smartphone operating system as a liberation from the power and intrusiveness of Google, Apple and Microsoft, who each demand your soul in return for getting the most out of their mobile OSes. The open-source crowd may have a point, though a larger number of commentators are …

Mozilla has begun taking preorders for the Firefox OS Flame, a new developer handset that's a reference design for what the not-for-profit browser maker calls "mid-tier hardware" for its open source mobile OS. "Until now, there has been no 'reference device' and the options for getting something through retail were limited," …

Chinese mobe-maker ZTE has announced that the ZTE Open C, its latest phone running Mozilla's open source Firefox OS, is now available for sale worldwide via eBay. The new device, which was first unveiled at the Mobile World Congress tradeshow in February, is an upgraded version of the earlier ZTE Open, but while that device …

MWC 2014Ever in search of the next few billion people who will access the internet for the first time in the coming years, Mozilla has unveiled a reference design of a smartphone that it says could sell for as low as $25 (£15). The entry-level prototype running Mozilla's Linux-and-HTML-based Firefox OS was unveiled at the Mobile World …

Smartphone startup Geeksphone has announced complete specs, pricing, and a selling date for Revolution, its Intel-powered, OS-agnostic handset. The Spanish firm said the device will go on sale in its online store on February 20 with a list price of €239, but "for a limited time" – exact dates unspecified – it will be …

Commercial smartphones running the mobile version of the Ubuntu Linux distro probably won't be available through carriers until 2015 at the earliest, a Canonical spokesman has revealed. When Canonical CEO Jane Silber first announced plans to port Ubuntu to phones last year, she said the goal was to ship the first handsets with …

CES 2014Panasonic has used CES to announce that it's going to work with Mozilla to build smart TVs based on the Firefox OS. Whatever you think about smart TVs, the vendors remain utterly committed to the idea that more computing power and a user interface driven through the remote control is the future of the idiot box. To date, much …