Firefox On Amazon Fire TV, Echo Show Ending Support Next Month

Mozilla as an organization has been having trouble finding ways to generate revenue without betraying its principles and its community. One of the steps it has taken to keep operating despite that is to consolidate its resources to focus on efforts that have a bigger ROI. That involves restructuring, layoffs, and dropping projects it may no longer consider worthwhile. One of those, it seems, is the version of Firefox for Amazon devices which will no longer be supported after April.

Firefox arrived on the Fire TV and Echo Show at a time when the enmity between Amazon and Google was its highest, at least in the public's eyes. Google refused to allow a YouTube app on those devices while Amazon refused to sell Google's rival products.

The workaround that Amazon and device owners saw was to access YouTube from a web browser and Mozilla was quick to answer that need. Eventually, however, Amazon itself came up with its own web browser for these devices, ironically based on Chromium, to keep users from having to seek third-party options. That pretty much made Firefox almost redundant except for those who actually prefer using that browser.

The nail in the coffin, however, came when Google and Amazon finally met halfway, leading to the arrival of official YouTube apps on those platforms. Mozilla admits to AFTVnews that, with those new options for accessing content now available, it has decided to puts its focus on things that will actually bring value rather than being an "also-ran".

Official support for Firefox will end on April 30, 2021, and the app will no longer be available from Amazon's Appstore. Those who have the browser installed on their Fire TVs will still be able to use it, at least until they uninstall the app, but Echo Show owners will automatically be redirected to Amazon Silk when they try to launch Firefox beyond that date.