11–20 of 131 posts
I'm kind of sad about this because I found development for the OS to be better than for any other mobile OS, even though I've got no love for javascript. It also ran a lot smoother than android even on the potato quality phone it come on. I hope in future they can leverage their rust knowledge and give us a platform that's open, easy to develop and fast.
I find that hard to believe considering the reviews I've read on it.
I use to have a Firefox OS phone (the Flame), but since I broke it last july, I switched to Android and 7 month in I still miss my FFOS phone :/. Android UX is just terrible, and the interface looks so slow (my new phone is a $400 phone from 2016, compared to a 180$ phone from 2014 …)
The original announcement that Netscape would release Mozilla as open source included some FAQs, including one question along the lines of "are you going to release your own operating system?" The answer was that there was no good reason to build an operating system on a browser. If only they had remembered that!
Because Chromebooks are such a failure right.
Should have been kept as a research project, and only launched for consumer devices when service workers and PWA's became mainstream, and also the new rendering techniques from servo are integrated into gecko. If we're lucky, web apps will be able to cover 50-80% of native app use-cases in the next 2-3 years. When Firefox OS was launched, it was clear they were simply not up to scratch to make a system like that viab…
> web apps will be able to cover 50-80% of native app use-cases in the next 2-3 years Feels like this has been 2-3 years out for almost as long as "native apps" have existed. Reminds me of the first scene in "Snatch" - Turkish: What's happening with them sausages, Charlie? Sausage Charlie: Five minutes, Turkish. Turkish: It was two minutes five minutes ago.
Should have been kept as a research project, and only launched for consumer devices when service workers and PWA's became mainstream, and also the new rendering techniques from servo are integrated into gecko. If we're lucky, web apps will be able to cover 50-80% of native app use-cases in the next 2-3 years. When Firefox OS was launched, it was clear they were simply not up to scratch to make a system like that viab…
> web apps will be able to cover 50-80% of native app use-cases in the next 2-3 years Feels like this has been 2-3 years out for almost as long as "native apps" have existed. Reminds me of the first scene in "Snatch" - Turkish: What's happening with them sausages, Charlie? Sausage Charlie: Five minutes, Turkish. Turkish: It was two minutes five minutes ago.
The part I'm still concerned about is UI performance - it's still miles off native.
Should have been kept as a research project, and only launched for consumer devices when service workers and PWA's became mainstream, and also the new rendering techniques from servo are integrated into gecko. If we're lucky, web apps will be able to cover 50-80% of native app use-cases in the next 2-3 years. When Firefox OS was launched, it was clear they were simply not up to scratch to make a system like that viab…
> web apps will be able to cover 50-80% of native app use-cases in the next 2-3 years Feels like this has been 2-3 years out for almost as long as "native apps" have existed. Reminds me of the first scene in "Snatch" - Turkish: What's happening with them sausages, Charlie? Sausage Charlie: Five minutes, Turkish. Turkish: It was two minutes five minutes ago.
Should have been kept as a research project, and only launched for consumer devices when service workers and PWA's became mainstream, and also the new rendering techniques from servo are integrated into gecko. If we're lucky, web apps will be able to cover 50-80% of native app use-cases in the next 2-3 years. When Firefox OS was launched, it was clear they were simply not up to scratch to make a system like that viab…
If service workers were invented, PWAs were a thing, or Servo had been built, Mozilla's actions around Firefox OS would probably have been much different.
What really killed Firefox OS was the lack of ecosystem. VP of Apps Rick Fant put all the emphasis on apps for Firefox OS instead of Firefox for Android. Firefox OS could run any app built for F4A, but not the other way around. Why would I, as an engineer, write an app for a device that I can hardly get my hands on, running an operating system almost nobody uses, with customers who (in many cases) don't want to pay $0.99 for an app, using APIs that don't work on anything else, and translate it to a language you don't speak? There were millions of F4A users at the time, and Mozilla made no effort to get folks to build for it at all. A real shame.
The original announcement that Netscape would release Mozilla as open source included some FAQs, including one question along the lines of "are you going to release your own operating system?" The answer was that there was no good reason to build an operating system on a browser. If only they had remembered that!
Should have been kept as a research project, and only launched for consumer devices when service workers and PWA's became mainstream, and also the new rendering techniques from servo are integrated into gecko. If we're lucky, web apps will be able to cover 50-80% of native app use-cases in the next 2-3 years. When Firefox OS was launched, it was clear they were simply not up to scratch to make a system like that viab…
> web apps will be able to cover 50-80% of native app use-cases in the next 2-3 years Feels like this has been 2-3 years out for almost as long as "native apps" have existed. Reminds me of the first scene in "Snatch" - Turkish: What's happening with them sausages, Charlie? Sausage Charlie: Five minutes, Turkish. Turkish: It was two minutes five minutes ago.
Yup. I've been reading about the imminent demise of native apps forever, but even Steve Jobs couldn't sell that vision. Web apps on mobile are the way of the future, and always will be.
I'm kind of sad about this because I found development for the OS to be better than for any other mobile OS, even though I've got no love for javascript. It also ran a lot smoother than android even on the potato quality phone it come on. I hope in future they can leverage their rust knowledge and give us a platform that's open, easy to develop and fast.
>It also ran a lot smoother than android I find that hard to believe considering the reviews I've read on it.
Firefox/gecko has always been great on "underpowered" hardware though. A few years ago I bought an unusably slow android tablet. This thing couldn't play an MP3 without long pauses every 5 seconds. Chrome was absolutely useless but with Firefox it became a half decent web browsing machine.