Comment by sunaookami
7 hours ago
No it really wasn't. It took Firefox multiple years of catching up, releasing multiprocess architecture, 64-bit binaries (!), ... It took until Firefox 58 (2018) until they finally cought up. There was this huge period of nothingness around 2014 when they focussed on other weird stuff like FirefoxOS that everyone saw from miles away that it will flop.
Fun fact - FirefoxOS only flopped in Mozilla, it went on to be the insanely successful KaiOS based on the source code. KaiOS has over 100M active users.
This indicates there was actually a lot of technical merit in it and the problem was with the GTM and leadership.
TBF KaiOS had a measure of success but it is now on life support.
The fact is Android could be scaled down way better than KaiOS could be scaled up.
(and you could just wait for the perf/$ to continue to decrease).