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Mozilla has stopped all commercial development on Firefox OS

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Re: Mozilla has stopped all commercial development on Firefox OS

#61

Post by NoGravitas »

tarancato wrote: post #48
bionsuba wrote: post #3

This outcome should have been obvious to everyone involved. The fact that it wasn't raises serious doubts about the Mozilla leadership. You can't compete with Android by being slower, less responsive, and ship with less features.

Seriously... I avoid Firefox on my (rather beefy) desktop because of how much it freezes. I don't want to imagine how it worked on a 50€ phone, which looked like it was their target. Maybe they thought Gecko would be ready by the time the OS was going to ship?

I quite like Firefox on Android. It's fast, supports a wide range of plugins (including uBlock Origin), and syncs well with desktop Firefox.

The one downside is that it's memory-hungry, so on my very underpowered phone, it gets pushed out of memory a lot when switching apps. On a more powerful device I'd never notice.

Re: Mozilla has stopped all commercial development on Firefox OS

#62

Post by vbezhenar »

maheart wrote: post #27
yoavm wrote: post #6

So we had Jolla, Ubuntu, Mozilla and even Microsoft trying to create a new major player in the mobile OSs market - all pretty much failed to do so. Is it practically impossible? Are we stuck with Android and iOS forever? This tiny selection of options worries me.

I'm a big supporter of GNU/Linux on the phone. I don't care if Jolla or Ubuntu don't ever make it as "major" players in the mobile OS world. I'd be perfectly happy with GNU/Linux mobile software that's as good as the Linux desktop. I run Linux on my desktop (and laptop), and we're 1% of desktop users. I'd be satisfied with 1% mobile market share. We don't need a billion users, all I want is a hacker-friendly platform…

What's wrong with Android as a hacker-friendly platform?

Re: Mozilla has stopped all commercial development on Firefox OS

#63

Post by supergreg »

maheart wrote: post #45
nir wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As it stands you either give Apple complete control of you software/hardware or you give Google full access to every detail of your life. There should be a sticker "Don't blame me, I supported Firefox OS"

I know you're half-joking, but if this is something you're passionate about, there are things you can do (while there's still alternatives platforms...): 1. Purchase non-Apple, and non-Android devices (e.g. Jolla/SailfishOS, Ubuntu Touch devices) 2. Develop software for the alternative platforms -- that's what I do. It's a lot of fun programming on a GNU/Linux mobile. I write software in Python with 3rd party modules…

What GNU/Linux mobile? Can you elaborate on that?

Re: Mozilla has stopped all commercial development on Firefox OS

#64

Post by runn1ng »

maheart wrote: post #27
yoavm wrote: post #6

So we had Jolla, Ubuntu, Mozilla and even Microsoft trying to create a new major player in the mobile OSs market - all pretty much failed to do so. Is it practically impossible? Are we stuck with Android and iOS forever? This tiny selection of options worries me.

I'm a big supporter of GNU/Linux on the phone. I don't care if Jolla or Ubuntu don't ever make it as "major" players in the mobile OS world. I'd be perfectly happy with GNU/Linux mobile software that's as good as the Linux desktop. I run Linux on my desktop (and laptop), and we're 1% of desktop users. I'd be satisfied with 1% mobile market share. We don't need a billion users, all I want is a hacker-friendly platform…

Ideologically, I like Replicant. Actually free-as-in-freedom version of Android, great!

In reality though, it doesn't really work on most of modern phones, and on the ones it works on, there is no WiFi support. And the latest commit on the Replicant git (excluding website changes) is 8 months ago. And it has just one guy committing.

So it didn't catch world's attention, apparently.

Re: Mozilla has stopped all commercial development on Firefox OS

#65

Post by ikeboy »

pjc50 wrote: post #9
yoavm wrote: post #6

So we had Jolla, Ubuntu, Mozilla and even Microsoft trying to create a new major player in the mobile OSs market - all pretty much failed to do so. Is it practically impossible? Are we stuck with Android and iOS forever? This tiny selection of options worries me.

Only one of those really makes any money. What's the economic model that would bring a competing OS into existence?

What? Both Android and iOS are responsible for tens of billions in revenue.

Re: Mozilla has stopped all commercial development on Firefox OS

#66

Post by maheart »

kbart wrote: post #53
maheart wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a big supporter of GNU/Linux on the phone. I don't care if Jolla or Ubuntu don't ever make it as "major" players in the mobile OS world. I'd be perfectly happy with GNU/Linux mobile software that's as good as the Linux desktop. I run Linux on my desktop (and laptop), and we're 1% of desktop users. I'd be satisfied with 1% mobile market share. We don't need a billion users, all I want is a hacker-friendly platform…

Yes, I sure hope we can use GNU/Linux on phone one day. It wouldn't be that hard to make, given an unlocked hardware platform and open source drivers for baseband and graphics module. Actually, I have done a device very similar to smartphone in its hardware capabilities, but it was a commercial product limited in functionality. If I could get such hardware at home, I would definitely make some crude, hackish GNU/Linu…

Right now, thanks to libhybris[1] you can run glibc compiled systems (i.e. regular Linux, aka GNU/Linux) on top of proprietary Android drivers.

[1] https://github.com/libhybris/libhybris

Re: Mozilla has stopped all commercial development on Firefox OS

#67

Post by bionsuba »

SixSigma wrote: post #56
bionsuba wrote: post #3

This outcome should have been obvious to everyone involved. The fact that it wasn't raises serious doubts about the Mozilla leadership. You can't compete with Android by being slower, less responsive, and ship with less features.

So their product on day 1 should have been faster, more responsive and had more features than Android / iOS ?

No, they shouldn't enter a market by trying to out do the established players at their own game. Microsoft didn't dethrone IBM by making a better mainframe.

Re: Mozilla has stopped all commercial development on Firefox OS

#68

Post by maheart »

vbezhenar wrote: post #62
maheart wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a big supporter of GNU/Linux on the phone. I don't care if Jolla or Ubuntu don't ever make it as "major" players in the mobile OS world. I'd be perfectly happy with GNU/Linux mobile software that's as good as the Linux desktop. I run Linux on my desktop (and laptop), and we're 1% of desktop users. I'd be satisfied with 1% mobile market share. We don't need a billion users, all I want is a hacker-friendly platform…

What's wrong with Android as a hacker-friendly platform?

Android (and Apple) have a relatively rigid development toolkit. For Android you develop using the Java programming language against the Android APIs. The NDK is available, and you can always hack up methods to call the Android APIs from your favourite programming language (e.g. Python) but it's cumbersome.

I develop software for SailfishOS. It's like the Linux desktop. I SSH into my phone. zypper/pkcon install some dev tools (e.g. gcc, make, git). I initialise a Python virtualenv, pull down some libraries (e.g. Flask). I want to query SMS messages? I open an sqlite database on the filesystem. I can define services using systemd files. It really is "just Linux" underneath.

Re: Mozilla has stopped all commercial development on Firefox OS

#70

Post by bwindels »

maheart wrote: post #27
yoavm wrote: post #6

So we had Jolla, Ubuntu, Mozilla and even Microsoft trying to create a new major player in the mobile OSs market - all pretty much failed to do so. Is it practically impossible? Are we stuck with Android and iOS forever? This tiny selection of options worries me.

I'm a big supporter of GNU/Linux on the phone. I don't care if Jolla or Ubuntu don't ever make it as "major" players in the mobile OS world. I'd be perfectly happy with GNU/Linux mobile software that's as good as the Linux desktop. I run Linux on my desktop (and laptop), and we're 1% of desktop users. I'd be satisfied with 1% mobile market share. We don't need a billion users, all I want is a hacker-friendly platform…

The fairphone 2 is "fairly" hacker-friendly. The bootloader is not locked. They provide android stripped of google mobile services, and Ubuntu phone is reportedly 70% ported. Sailfish OS could also be an option if either Fairphone or Jolla port it. All of these setups still require binary blobs for firmware, but that's as good as it gets on mobile I think.
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