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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

#91

Post by mikegerwitz »

runn1ng wrote: post #64
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…

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.

The Replicant project wrote a post in August describing work on Replicant 6:

http://blog.replicant.us/2016/08/replicant-6-early-work-upst...

My phone (Galaxy S3) uses Replicant, and I'm quite excited for the upgrade, which will fix a number of rather unfortunate issues. I'm more than willing to make such sacrifices, but it'd be nice (for example) to be able to take videos of my children, which the current version cannot do.

It's not a shortcoming of Replicant---the fact that these issues exist at all demonstrate how much value is placed on user freedom.

Most unfortunate is that few users will be willing to make these sacrifices.

Re: Mozilla has stopped all commercial development on Firefox OS

#92

Post by contingencies »

mhd wrote: post #90

I've had a developer phone and was quite disappointed with the system. If you really want to sell the advantages of HTML/JS apps, the default ones should've been a lot nicer and full-featured. I still miss WebOS and my Pre.

I bought two of them. Different. They never worked, and were both slow. Mailed one to a fellow HN'er in India, used the other for awhile but was unable to recompile the OS to get things fixed and received zero support online. Felt like the whole thing was compromised from the word go by business people, from my perspective.

I will repeat my take here, for the last time, on where they screwed up: They screwed up by pretending to target low end devices but still only supporting centralized communications. They should have had Ad-hoc/Mesh Wifi as a requirement, and designed the OS API to give those features to developers. Developing world people want to send things between one another, not huddle around shared wifi or pay premiums to carriers. I wrote this up in some detail at https://bug945047.bugzilla.mozilla.org/attachment.cgi?id=840... ... nobody bothered to reply, except for "wifi supports in FFOS is relied on wpa_supplicant which is provided by partner mostly", ie. the business setup within Mozilla was that the actual device manufacturers were the ones who had control of the wpa_supplicant build, and there was no way for the developers to rely on, require or enforce features in that software being present. Nobody took ownership, everyone lost.

Re: Mozilla has stopped all commercial development on Firefox OS

#94

Post by freehunter »

Aissen wrote: post #59
franze wrote: post #11

I still love my FirefoxOS Geeks Phone Keon 2013, it still is my go-to backpacking phone. ongoing long battery runtime, a decent browser for the https://mbasic.facebook.com/ , gmail HTML, hacker news. necessary apps are there and work fine: For me that's HERE maps & alarm function. I love it, because it's un-addicting. android and ios are designed to get your attention, all the time. FirefoxOS ist a tool that is there…

> I love it, because it's un-addicting. To me this is synonymous with "has less features" or "unusable". I think Microsoft actually did an ad campaign on this "un-addicting" thingy. If you're actually optimizing for time well spent, re-read https://medium.com/swlh/distracted-in-2016-reboot-your-phone... (you can apply most of this to Android).

As a former long-time user of Windows Phone, it's not "unaddicting" in a way that's boring. There are plenty of apps to waste your time with. It's just that you don't need to. When I used Windows Phone, I didn't need to open an app to see the weather, or to see my text message, or to see my email. The live tiles made sure I could see all of that from the home screen. One glance across the screen and I knew everything I needed to know. Time, weather, headlines, new emails, new text messages, new Facebook posts, new tweets, next calendar appointment, and at the bottom, rotating pictures of my family. All without swiping, scrolling, tapping, or opening any apps. Ten seconds and I could lock the screen and get on with my day.

There's no other OS on the market that lets you do this.

Re: Mozilla has stopped all commercial development on Firefox OS

#95

Post by mooreds »

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.

Yes, it is practically impossible, the same way there was a duopoly of desktop computers in the 90s and 2000s. Similarly to that era, there will be niche players (OS/2, desktop linux then, windows 10 mobile now), but the vast majority of the software and hardware will run the dominant OSes.

Hey, at least it isn't a monopoly and one of the OSes is freeish. Freedom wise, hardware is behind, but the software is ahead (of the desktop market).

Re: Mozilla has stopped all commercial development on Firefox OS

#96

Post by lotsofpulp »

ikeboy wrote: post #65
pjc50 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Profit is the relevant metric, not revenue.

Re: Mozilla has stopped all commercial development on Firefox OS

#97

Post by freehunter »

bobajeff wrote: post #83
creshal wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think Servo is mature enough yet.

However, WebKit and Chromium are. They are already experimenting on an Electron based browser called Tolfino and on iOS Firefox is built using the WebView.

Mozilla experiments with a lot of stuff, and on iOS any browser has to be built with Webview. None of that means anything.

Re: Mozilla has stopped all commercial development on Firefox OS

#99

Post by FuriouslyAdrift »

makomk wrote: post #84

Not only that, they're ripping out support for it from the Gecko code base, which means that the only way to get security updates for it will be to fork Gecko. I doubt anyone has the resources to do that. It's basically dead. (Every non-Firefox consumer of Gecko has met the same fate so far.)

The Palemoon browser project forked gecko a while back. Their forked engine is called goanna.

Re: Mozilla has stopped all commercial development on Firefox OS

#100

Post by raverbashing »

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.

Of course it's not impossible

The issue is where the money is coming from.

Also, to move on an entrenched market you need to do a lot of things upfront. Android in, let's say, 2011 was much worse than iOS, today the gap has closed.

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