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Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?

358 points ofalkaed | 2 comments | 11 Oct 25 22:16 UTC | HN request time: 0.533s | source

Just curious and who knows, maybe someone will adopt it or develop something new based on its ideas.
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Lerc ◴[11 Oct 25 23:33 UTC] No.45553708[source]▶
Boot2Gecko or whatever the browser as Operating system was called. This was a project that should have focused on providing whatever its current users needed expanding and evolving to do whatever those users wanted it to do better.

Instead it went chasing markets, abandoning existing users as it did so, in favour of potential larger pools of users elsewhere. In the end it failed to find a niche going forward while leaving a trail of abandoned niches behind it.

replies(2): >>45555173 #>>45555204 #
1. toast0 ◴[12 Oct 25 04:22 UTC] No.45555204[source]▶
It lives on as KaiOS. Has limited success as a low end phone platform now.
replies(1): >>45556004 #
2. GeneralMaximus ◴[12 Oct 25 07:14 UTC] No.45556004[source]▶
For a few short months circa 2016 or 2017, KaiOS was the number one mobile OS in India. This was probably because of all the ultra-cheap KaiOS-powered Reliance Jio phones flooding the Indian market at the time.

I noticed the trend when I was working on a major web property for the Aditya Birla conglomerate. My whole team was pleasantly surprised, and we made sure to test everything in Firefox for that project. But everyone switched to Android + Chrome over the next few years, which was a shame.

Today, India is 90% Chrome :(