The Firefox OS smartphone will soon be no more. Mozilla announced on Tuesday that it would stop developing and selling smartphones based on its experimental mobile operating system.

Mozilla first made the announcement at its developer event in Orlando, Florida, later issuing a statement on the matter to TechCrunch from Mozilla Senior VP of Connected Devices, Ari Jaaksi:

"We are proud of the benefits Firefox OS added to the Web platform and will continue to experiment with the user experience across connected devices," wrote Jaaksi. "We will build everything we do as a genuine open source project, focused on the user experience first and build tools to enable the ecosystem to grow."

Firefox OS was an innovative take on mobile computing, first unveiled by Mozilla in 2013. At a time when Android and iOS had taken hold of the rapidly-growing smartphone market in developed countries, Firefox OS focused on a different market with a different technology strategy.

Mozilla partnered with carriers across the developing world, such as Telefónica across Latin America, to bring low-cost smartphones running Firefox OS to untapped mobile markets where most Android devices and iPhones were still prohibitively expensive for many.

Firefox OS was the key to Mozilla's strategy of maximizing smartphone performance and stability while minimizing the level, and cost, of the hardware needed.

A completely community-based, open source operating system, Firefox OS's user interface was based entirely on common languages of the web, like HTML5, CSS and JavaScript. No proprietary software or technology was involved -- rather than a walled garden of approved apps to buy and download, Firefox OS ran web-based apps that required no permanent storage space.

And it was capable of running on many devices that shipped with Android. After partnering first with ZTE in early 2013 for its first Firefox OS smartphone launch in Spain, Firefox OS quickly expanded through partnerships with carriers.

By early 2014, Firefox OS was available in Spain, Venezuela, Peru, Colombia, Brazil, Uruguay, and Mexico, along with a few other countries in Europe. Eventually, over a dozen small manufacturers were making phones that ran Firefox OS, while the operating system was also demonstrated to work on big-name Android devices like the Nexus 5, the Sony Xperia Z3, and the Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge+.

However, Firefox OS's primary smartphones, many of them of very low quality, failed to garner significant interest from consumers, and at the same time Google and its OEM partners began aggressively marketing low-cost Android devices in the same developing markets.

Ultimately, Firefox OS was an all-or-nothing strategy from the beginning. Differentiating itself from Android and iOS by using the apps on the open web was a lofty goal, but as an open standard, it required mass adoption to survive.

"Separate platforms," like iOS and Android, "are no longer necessary once you have the correct standardization and interoperation," said Mozilla co-founder Brendan Eich to Know Your Mobile in 2012, at the inception of Firefox OS.

The goal implied by Eich's assertion, not only of becoming a viable third party in the mobile world, bifurcated by Apple and Google -- but also obviating the fundamental concept behind those two rival companies' technologies -- was a lofty one. And one worth trying, even if it didn't pan out.