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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

#131

Post by chatmasta »

maheart wrote: post #68
vbezhenar wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You can do most of that on a jailbroken iOS device as well. It even has launchd which you configure similarly to systemd files.

Re: Mozilla has stopped all commercial development on Firefox OS

#132

Post by pjmlp »

vegabook wrote: post #126
skrowl wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Android is Linux on the phone. It's Linux kernel with stuff on top. Check out Replicant. It removes most of the stuff you might find objectionable.

Unfortunately it's also JVM [edit: Java] on the phone.

It is a fork of the Java language with its own AOT/JIT compiler, nothing to do with a certified JVM.

Re: Mozilla has stopped all commercial development on Firefox OS

#133

Post by pjmlp »

skrowl wrote: post #113
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…

Android is Linux on the phone. It's Linux kernel with stuff on top. Check out Replicant. It removes most of the stuff you might find objectionable.

Not really, there are lots of APIs missing from the NDK, UNIX IPC being a set of them.

Re: Mozilla has stopped all commercial development on Firefox OS

#134

Post by Sylos »

bobajeff wrote: post #104
freehunter wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It means it's not impossible for them to consider.

Right, but your comment made it sound like they would be experimenting with an Electron-based browser as a replacement for Firefox and that they were using WebKit on iOS voluntarily, which is both not true. You might not have meant it like that, but it's how misinformation is born.

Re: Mozilla has stopped all commercial development on Firefox OS

#135

Post by pjmlp »

maheart wrote: post #127
skrowl wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Android is Linux on the phone. It's Linux kernel with stuff on top. Check out Replicant. It removes most of the stuff you might find objectionable.

>> Android is Linux on the phone. It's Linux kernel with stuff on top. Android is just the Linux kernel on the phone -- that's the issue I have with it. It comes with none of the other stuff that makes GNU/Linux great: philosophically/socially it's different, but on a technical level it's missing rest of the GNU/Linux stack (e.g. package management, and the plethora of developer tools -- including languages and libra…

And with Brillo and Fuchsia, Google is removing whatever is left of it.

Re: Mozilla has stopped all commercial development on Firefox OS

#136

Post by xyzzy_plugh »

skrowl wrote: post #113
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…

Android is Linux on the phone. It's Linux kernel with stuff on top. Check out Replicant. It removes most of the stuff you might find objectionable.

It is, and it isn't. Android has controversial patches on Linux that aren't merged upstream. They are more significant than say the patches Linux distributions maintain in their releases.

If anything, Android is a fork of Linux.

Re: Mozilla has stopped all commercial development on Firefox OS

#137

Post by bobajeff »

Sylos wrote: post #134
bobajeff wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It means it's not impossible for them to consider.

Right, but your comment made it sound like they would be experimenting with an Electron-based browser as a replacement for Firefox and that they were using WebKit on iOS voluntarily, which is both not true. You might not have meant it like that, but it's how misinformation is born.

They'd have to be using the Batman method of deduction to reach such a conclusion based off my comment.

Re: Mozilla has stopped all commercial development on Firefox OS

#138

Post by AsyncAwait »

_ZeD_ wrote: post #130
skrowl wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Android is Linux on the phone. It's Linux kernel with stuff on top. Check out Replicant. It removes most of the stuff you might find objectionable.

Android is not GNU

I think @maheart knows that and that is his main problem with Android.

Re: Mozilla has stopped all commercial development on Firefox OS

#139

Post by veeti »

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 ?

How about having acceptable performance to begin with? Even the medium spec Flame developer device feels laggy and generally unresponsive in use. Actual consumer devices like the $35 Firefox phone were literally unusable: http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/10/testing-a-35-firefox-...

Re: Mozilla has stopped all commercial development on Firefox OS

#140

Post by AsyncAwait »

bartread wrote: post #74
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 was at Phonegap Europe 2013 and there was a big noise about Firefox OS (then still known as Boot to Gecko) there. It looked cool but it was always targeted at low-end, low-cost devices. The problem with that, from my perspective as a developer, is that I don't want to develop apps for low-end devices because it's an enormous pain in the ass. The lack of horsepower and features means you're pretty much required to c…

Well said, my problem with Firefox OS was exactly that it was always targeting the low-end of the spectrum. People who buy the low-end smartphones do not usually care about the platform it's running on, nor can they afford to support 3-rd party app development.
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