Dear Firefox OS Community, As you know, Firefox OS for smartphones is going to be "sunset <https://groups.google.com/d/msg/mozilla.dev.fxos/q23oHD8fXHY/jg6cAT-tBwAJ>" after version 2.6 as the Connected Devices team at Mozilla expands into new types of connected devices. Firefox OS will continue to be used for Smart TVs and will be evaluated for its suitability for other product proposals going through a new Product Innovation Process <https://wiki.mozilla.org/Connected_Devices/Product_Innovation_Process> at Mozilla.
A little known fact is that tablets were actually the original target form factor for B2G, but once we partnered with mobile carriers they were more interested in smartphones, which is why we ended up building smartphones. I believe that tablets are, and always were, a more suitable target for Firefox OS than smartphones. I'm considering pitching a product proposal to the Product Innovation Board at Mozilla for a simple tablet device dedicated to using the web. The idea is that the entire device is a web browser. There's no app store, no packaged apps, no built-in apps and no app install process. The home screen is automatically populated with your top sites based on frecency and web content is front and centre. This would be pitched as a secondary device for casual web browsing and entertainment, and as a companion/control device for smart TVs and other connected devices in the home. As the Connected Devices team at Mozilla expands into new product areas, there is an ongoing discussion about how to simplify the Firefox OS stack to make it is more manageable to maintain going forwards. This proposal would be in support of that effort as a use case for a drastically simpler Firefox OS architecture with less features and a much smaller API surface than the smartphone product. That also makes this proposal different to the previous tablet project, which was really just a scaled up version of the smartphone UI. Remember this is just an idea at this point and it doesn't have Mozilla approval, it hasn't even got to gate 0 <https://wiki.mozilla.org/Connected_Devices/Product_Innovation_Process#Process_.22Gates.22> of the innovation process. But if this product were to succeed I think it would require a small core team of full time Mozilla staff supported by a large community effort. I would expect it to be developed first as an open source project you can flash onto off-the-shelf Android tablets, and only turned into a commercial product if it demonstrated the necessary level of success. It's for this reason that I'm sharing this very early stage idea here, to gauge the level of interest from the community. You can find some information on the wiki <https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox_Pad> and a very early draft of a presentation <https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1WqFOsf6M2iRIjJbzwYIgTh6OguZALRnrEn5SVawE1gs/present#slide=id.p> to pitch the idea to the Product Innovation Board. Let me know what you think, and whether this is something you'd be interested in contributing to. Thanks Ben
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