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The Story of Firefox OS

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Re: The Story of Firefox OS

#81

Post by hajile »

johansch wrote: post #66
dafrankenstein2 wrote: post #6

A heavy fork of Android by Mozilla might be a better solution..

Yeah, sort of like that would have been a better for another once dominant company that couldn't handle the UX/performance: Nokia

Take Elop out of the picture and they did just fine. He did everything he could to destroy Meego.

They launched the n9 without marketing and only made it available in secondary markets, but people still beat down a path to get them. Elop also refused to provide sales numbers (instead writing the infamous "burning platform" email), but third party guesstimates are in the 4-8M (for comparison, the subsidized, heavily marketed, easily available S3 sold around 40M units in the same year).

Elop even refused to launch the n950 (aluminum n9 with a great physical keyboard) despite it being ready to go (they shipped around 5K as developer units).

Nokia had the answer. Elop was paid 25 Million to killed it.

Re: The Story of Firefox OS

#82

Post by digi_owl »

digi_owl wrote: post #34
cpeterso wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

As best i understand, Whatsapp's support for anything but iOS is "poor" to put it nicely.

Mea culpa, got it confused with a certain other messaging app...

Re: The Story of Firefox OS

#83

Post by IshKebab »

hajile wrote: post #79
IshKebab wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In number-related calculations, JS does quite well on its own. With asm.js, performance quite close to C was possible.

On micro-benchmarks most languages are fast. Micro-benchmarks just don't tell you very much these days.

Re: The Story of Firefox OS

#84

Post by endemic »

redsummer wrote: post #74

I bought a Panasonic TV because it was said to have the best UI. It used Firefox OS. The UI was OK - I have nothing to compare it to since I didn't have a TV for 10 years. Anyway, they stopped Firefox OS development soon after. I wonder if I can install another OS?

The problem with "smart" TVs...

Re: The Story of Firefox OS

#85

Post by Drdrdrq »

IshKebab wrote: post #56
cpeterso wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I read somewhere that supporting "ancient" mobiles via j2me was the reason WhatsApp got the advantage over other chat apps. Yes, they (did) put a lot of effort in supporting j2me phones.

EDIT: found source: http://blog.textit.in/your-path-to-a-$16b-exit-build-a-j2me-...

Re: The Story of Firefox OS

#86

Post by Drdrdrq »

mwfunk wrote: post #73
LordWinstanley wrote: post #2

> [biggest Achievements] Product — Successfully launched 20 devices in over 30 countries, mobilised the Mozilla community to help run launch parties and created slick branding and marketing campaigns Therein lies the rub. The products were all mediocre-specced handsets from little known manufacturers. So, right from the outset Firefox OS felt like a down-market 'landfill Android' type product. I'd have bought a Firef…

That was their strategy though- if they tried to introduce it as an alternative to iOS and Android, it was guaranteed DOA. They felt they could get it off the ground by introducing it as an alternative in poorer countries first. It might not have been a strategy that worked out in the end, but those were intentional choices, not choices made from ignorance or stupidity. Even though it didn't work out, it was probably…

It would have a much higher chance of success if they didn't strip out Android layer completely but instead combined web apps with Android app on (opensource) Android core. It is very difficult to get initial traction - even Amazon mostly failed, and they build on Android.

Re: The Story of Firefox OS

#87

Post by slacka »

digi_owl wrote: post #16

At the end of the day the web is interpreted, and developed on desktop computers. This result in two problems when doing web first on mobile. 1: bloated frameworks. Both in term of CPU usage, memory consumption, and the number of round trips needed to show something like a simple list of links. 2: "mobile" sites that may look right at first glance but that invariably show themselves to have elements that hint at havi…

> bloated frameworks. Both in term of CPU usage, memory consumption, and the number of round trips needed to show something like a simple list of links.

You combine this with the fact they were targeting the low-end, entry level marketspace. and you have a recipe for failure. At a time when even low-end Android phones had finally overcome their sluggishness, the first Firefox OS device that I tried felt slow and unresponsive.

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