Not impossible, it only required a small amount of vision and risk taking. Which Nokia et al obviously lacked.
> Nobody thought mainstream users would be happy pocketing a phone with a "massive" 4.13" display.
Yet it was exceedingly obvious there was a very profitable sizeable niche of users that were willing to do so.
And it shouldn't have taken very much imagination to realize that "web in the pocket" was useful in 2008, and would quickly become much more useful in 2009, 2010 etc as the population of people with the web in their pocket grew and companies started to serve the market.
The big problem was that all of those phone companies were hardware companies. Putting Firefox in a phone was a challenge beyond them. Microsoft could have and should have done it, but they were dysfunctional at the time.
> Nobody thought mainstream users would be happy pocketing a phone with a "massive" 4.13" display.
Yet it was exceedingly obvious there was a very profitable sizeable niche of users that were willing to do so.
And it shouldn't have taken very much imagination to realize that "web in the pocket" was useful in 2008, and would quickly become much more useful in 2009, 2010 etc as the population of people with the web in their pocket grew and companies started to serve the market.
The big problem was that all of those phone companies were hardware companies. Putting Firefox in a phone was a challenge beyond them. Microsoft could have and should have done it, but they were dysfunctional at the time.