Firefox for Fire TV

~ the obit ~

Amazon's streaming hardware never became a default in Turkey, so the fight this browser came out of is one I followed as industry news rather than as something that broke my television. The shape of it travels anyway, because the question underneath was whether two American companies could use a living room as leverage against each other.

Firefox for Fire TV was a real browser, rebuilt for a remote control. No pointer and no keyboard: you moved a focus ring around with a D-pad and typed into a search box one character at a time, or by voice if you held the microphone button. The handful of sites you actually visited got pinned as tiles on the start screen. It was Mozilla's Android codebase with the interface replaced, in the same family as the other small Firefoxes of that era.

It existed because of a specific corporate quarrel. Amazon would not sell Google's Chromecast or its speakers in its store; Google's response, announced in December 2017, was to cut the YouTube app off Fire TV from the start of January 2018. Amazon's response to the response was to ship a browser and send people to it. Mozilla's app landed on 20 December 2017, within a month of Amazon's own Silk browser, and Amazon's YouTube app was updated to redirect anyone who opened it toward one of the two. That worked because the TV app had always been a wrapper around the web interface, so a browser pointed at youtube.com got you the same thing.

The quarrel ended on 18 April 2019, when the two companies announced that YouTube would return to Fire TV and Prime Video would reach Chromecast. The official app shipped on 9 July 2019. Firefox stayed in the store for another twenty-two months with its main reason for existing gone, and on 30 April 2021 Mozilla took it out.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the youtube war ~

What makes this browser worth a grave is that it is a piece of evidence about platform power. Google owned the content and Amazon owned both the hardware and the shelf space, so neither could reach the other's customers without permission. The one thing neither of them controlled was the open web, so when the apps were taken away the web was what remained.

Mozilla got something concrete out of it. Fire TV handed the organization millions of installs in a device category where it had none, at a moment when its desktop share was sliding, and Amazon got to tell its customers that YouTube still worked on a Fire Stick. Google was the party getting nothing, and Google is the one that ended the blockade.

~ the day it was pulled ~

Mozilla's notice covered two devices at once. Both Fire TV and the Echo Show lost the app from the Amazon Appstore on 30 April 2021, which meant no new installs and no reinstalls. Copies already on a Fire TV kept running unsupported; copies on an Echo Show stopped working. Silk was unaffected and is still shipped on both devices.

The stated reason was that consumers now had more options for reaching content on these devices, and that Mozilla wanted to move its resources to building new experiences. That is corporate language for a true thing: hardly anybody was opening a browser on a television once the app they wanted was back on the home screen. Firefox Lite and Firefox Reality were retired in the same stretch, which makes this one of three small Firefoxes that went in about a year.

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