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The Story of Firefox OS

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Re: The Story of Firefox OS

#51

Post by smacktoward »

pavlov wrote: post #38

I don't understand why they decided that Firefox OS would be a good fit for low-end hardware, when they had empirical evidence of how poorly webOS performed. Firefox OS and webOS are essentially the same concept. Palm built theirs for 2009 top-end hardware, and it turned out that the hardware just wasn't quite enough to run a browser engine for the entire UI... And then Mozilla goes ahead and tries to do the same thi…

> Palm built theirs for 2009 top-end hardware, and it turned out that the hardware just wasn't quite enough to run a browser engine for the entire UI

I owned a first-gen Palm Pre, and this was not my experience. It had plenty of problems, but the UI was always responsive and pleasant to use. (More pleasant than I find Android today, on much beefier hardware nearly a decade later.)

Re: The Story of Firefox OS

#52

Post by johansch »

i80and wrote: post #46
johansch wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You do have to understand that they also had no realistic chance of pursuing a top-tier device in a top-tier country. HTML-based UI:s (rendered on gecko) just aren't there in terms of performance. Which leads to the question... why the heck did they pursue this in the first place? I would point at Mozilla management incompetency (Mitchell Baker etc). My thoughts: They didn't do any technical/performance feasibility s…

> HTML-based UI:s (rendered on gecko) just aren't there in terms of performance I'm actually going to quibble with this. Having ran Firefox OS 2.1 on the original (crappy hardware) Flame, all of the main UI and built-in apps were buttery smooth. I wasn't expecting this, and it kind of blew me away.

I never got my grubby hands on a Firefox OS device. All of the reviews I read were unanimous in their dislike (because of framerate issue, primarily) though. What happened here?

Re: The Story of Firefox OS

#53

Post by sdflkd »

vetinari wrote: post #18
hutzlibu wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, OpenSource is only for those, who can't afford better... Seems the premise of many, but if we also accept that, we won't get far. But he knows that: "After realising “open” on its own doesn’t sell, ultimately chose a strategy to compete mainly on price, which is just a race to the bottom. "

One of lessons that Dell learned: do not create low-end laptops with Linux. The Linux users won't be interested in weak hardware and those who want to save the money, will be disappointed, because they do not realize that there's no Windows before the purchase. That's why the project Sputnik used a machine from the higher end of the spectrum - and it was a success.

Except for packing the wrong Wi-Fi card in some models.

Re: The Story of Firefox OS

#54

Post by i80and »

johansch wrote: post #52
i80and wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> HTML-based UI:s (rendered on gecko) just aren't there in terms of performance I'm actually going to quibble with this. Having ran Firefox OS 2.1 on the original (crappy hardware) Flame, all of the main UI and built-in apps were buttery smooth. I wasn't expecting this, and it kind of blew me away.

I never got my grubby hands on a Firefox OS device. All of the reviews I read were unanimous in their dislike (because of framerate issue, primarily) though. What happened here?

New software. The version of FXOS that came with the Flame (1.0) was... not good at all. 1.1 and 1.2 added some niceties that started to make it usable as a daily driver phone; 1.3 added async pan and made things feel slick; and 2.0+ were just lovely.

Re: The Story of Firefox OS

#55

Post by johansch »

i80and wrote: post #54
johansch wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never got my grubby hands on a Firefox OS device. All of the reviews I read were unanimous in their dislike (because of framerate issue, primarily) though. What happened here?

New software. The version of FXOS that came with the Flame (1.0) was... not good at all. 1.1 and 1.2 added some niceties that started to make it usable as a daily driver phone; 1.3 added async pan and made things feel slick; and 2.0+ were just lovely.

So.. the best of the best kind of browser people at Mozilla optimized the HTML/JS/CSS and reached their target after a while.

This makes sense with my experience from Opera Software (who also tried to build a browser OS, but way back in 2003-2004 and quickly retreated after it failed):

The main issue here is that writing a performant HTML-based UI is a very complex thing. It works great when people who really understand the entire web platform writes the software, but breaks down when regular web devs are supposed to write "HTML apps" for it.

Meanwhile, the usual mindless singsong around HTML UIs is amongst the lines of "now 10 (or is it 20 now?) web developers can write mobile UI:s; they don't need to learn native Android or iOS development."

My main point here is that the HTML way is a lie. It's easy to make something that looks good; and it's insanely hard to make it perform well.

Re: The Story of Firefox OS

#56

Post by IshKebab »

cpeterso wrote: post #33
jgraham wrote: post #23

I think this slightly understates the "business development" problems with developing a new OS, and a mobile OS in particular. It turns out that there are certain apps that, if they are not available on your platform, are immediate deal breakers for huge numbers of consumers (to the extent that they will ask for them by name in stores and return devices that won't run them). Often these apps lack web frontends (for n…

WhatsApp was the big missing app for Firefox OS. In Mozilla's target markets, WhatsApp was huge but the company didn't want to invest any engineering resources to support Firefox OS, understandably. Firefox OS was an unproven OS with no market share and no J2ME support. In response, Mozilla Research started a "j2me.js" project to try running the WhatsApp J2ME app in JavaScript, sharing some code with the Shumway proj…

Wait... WhatsApp has a J2ME app? Like... a Midlet? From the 90s? For real?

Re: The Story of Firefox OS

#57

Post by IshKebab »

JohnBooty wrote: post #43
pavlov wrote: post #38

I don't understand why they decided that Firefox OS would be a good fit for low-end hardware, when they had empirical evidence of how poorly webOS performed. Firefox OS and webOS are essentially the same concept. Palm built theirs for 2009 top-end hardware, and it turned out that the hardware just wasn't quite enough to run a browser engine for the entire UI... And then Mozilla goes ahead and tries to do the same thi…

This is addressed in the linked article in great depth. I don't think the poor performance of WebOS means that approach is fundamentally doomed, especially since FirefoxOS was a few years later... a few years during a period of massive year-over-year increases in mobile computing power. Long story short: relative to Android, they were bypassing the whole Java layer. Gecko (which is pretty mature + optimized) was esse…

Lol what? Relative to Java which is maybe 50% slower than native... they used Gecko, which is at least 100% slower than native in practice. There are huge obvious well-explored reasons why this can't be fast.

Re: The Story of Firefox OS

#58

Post by 9gunpi »

jhasse wrote: post #14
9gunpi wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First class unsigned code in unsafe language support on a physical device seems to be a bit of a worrisome idea.

Web apps would also have to get permissions like native apps. But you're right that some permissions like complete file access might be a bit too much. They could implement it so that only signed Web apps installed through the app store would get such permissions.

The problem is not only permissions. The problem is that code execution model within anything a mile close to web and browsers is a security threat by itself.
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