Many organizations have tried to create an alternative smartphone operating system to Android and iOS, but few have made much progress, even Microsoft. Some are still soldiering on – Sailfish, for instance – but many, including Blackberry and Mozilla have thrown in the towel. For some of the contenders, like Samsung’s Tizen OS, there has been hope of a second life in the Internet of Things, where OS battle lines are not firmly drawn yet, but Mozilla has acknowledged failure here too. The organization behind Firefox says it is closing down a group which was designing an IT operating system based around some of the work done for the failed Firefox Mobile. “We have shifted our internal approach to the…