And hilariously, Mozilla screamed blue-bloody-murder when people asked for Webserial (which they define as a standard themselves!) in Firefox which would make flashing devices much easier, for developers and users.
One asshole Mozilla employee responded with "no, the danger is too great" and spouted a crazy theoretical involving someone's pacemaker getting connected to Firefox and malware blah blah blah.
People pointed out that Firefox access people's cameras and microphones, and Chrome offers Web Serial support and users have to allow the permission and pick a device to connect to, a site can't just connect to any serial device.
Cue handwaving about "we have higher standards than that smelly privacy-violating evil browser."
FirefoxOS may have died, but its fork KaiOS did quite well, shipping on tens of millions of cheap phones in developing countries.
I think these countries are moving to Android/iOS as they get wealthier, but the legacy of FirefoxOS was quite successful. It's just that Mozilla never got much out of it.
I love FF and T-bird hard, but I have this mental image of a huddle full of brilliant, 20-year-plus systems engineers sitting in a room staring at a whiteboard with 'AI?' in the middle of it.
"Ok, everybody popcorn up some ideas. Don't be shy."
[one of them opens a laptop and begins fiddling with a flame graph]
At least that was plausibly related to browser development, vis-à-vis ChromeOS. With "AI services" they're totally dropping the pretext of caring about Firefox.
