Mozilla's foray into the world of smartphones heralded its mobile glory with its very own internet browser. However, with Google's Android operating system, the search engine giant's predominant software, Mozilla, also gears to get a bigger part of the spectrum by launching its own smartphone operating system two years ago. While it boasted a clean user-interface and Firefox's powerful Gecko rendering engine, Mozilla's Firefox got mixed reception. Today though, the company now plans to shift its focus to other devices.
According to recent leaks, Mozilla is reportedly shifting its focus on other hardware such as HDMI sticks, routers, tablets and so forth. Recently, Ari Jaaksi, the company's SVP of Connected Devices, said that Mozilla has not been able to deliver the best user experience on smartphones, which led the company to stop offering those through carrier channels. Furthermore, Jaaksi also added that Mozilla will be announcing more work and new experiments in connected devices in the near future.
The first device, the Firefox Pad, as the name suggests, is a tablet that runs on Firefox OS. It's expected to share a similar experience that its smartphone counterpart offers, although it won't likely have telephony capabilities. The Firefox Stick, on the other hand, is a standard HDMI stick that appears to function similar to how Google's Chromecast and Intel's Compute Stick operates, providing smart capabilities to any HDTVs with HDMI ports.
Also in development are the Firefox Pi and the Firefox Hub. The former is a keyboard computer built on the Raspberry Pi platform and running Firefox OS, and it will likely have education and emerging markets as its target demographics. The Firefox Hub, on the other hand, is a smart router designed for privacy and parental controls while still being user-friendly, as well as automatic updates.
