Mozilla declared at the Mozlando programmer convention in Florida that it’s formally left efforts to get a foothold in the smartphone market with its Firefox OS system.

“We’re proud of the gains Firefox OS added to the Web platform and will continue to experiment with all the user experience across linked apparatus.

“Firefox OS demonstrated the flexibility of the Web, scaling from low end smartphones all the way up to High Definition TVs. Nevertheless, we were not capable to offer the best user experience possible and so we will discontinue offering Firefox OS smartphones through carrier stations.”

The statement was not too much of a jolt for Jaaksi, who joined Mozilla on the job less than six months past, but he’s had practice in this type of scenario. He spent 12 years at Nokia, helping develop the now-defunct MeeGo mobile operating system, before going to HP to take charge of webOS, which the company after dropped.

Firefox OS was designed to be the applications that did to the mastery of iOS and Android what Firefox had done to the browser marketplace – introducing some competition to established players using a better choice.

The first answer from mobile makers was tepid.

The greatest issue for the operating system was a dearth of developer support.