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An entire Mobile OS built using HTML, CSS and JS - by Mozilla

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Re: An entire Mobile OS built using HTML, CSS and JS - by Mozilla

#91

Post by sp332 »

grannyg00se wrote: post #77
johnrob wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then just stick with the DOM and XHR APIs. Those alone have been consistently crushing most desktop applications since ~2003.

Wow. Can you clarify? Are you saying something like Google docs is crushing Microsoft Office? What DOM/XHR app is crushing photoshop? I think there is a new class of "apps" that are emerging as web based, but they are creating a new segment as opposed to crushing an existing one.

First, JS & HTML are much more popular than Windows APIs. Second, I think johnrob meant that the DOM is more sane than most "desktop" APIs for laying out apps, not desktop publishing layouts.

Re: An entire Mobile OS built using HTML, CSS and JS - by Mozilla

#92

Post by hughw »

lbotos wrote: post #24
mhd wrote: post #6

Boy, the video's constant use of " the web" really annoyed me. I know that you have to cut down the jargon to make it presentable, and "HTML, CSS and JS" gets a bit confusing. What about "web technologies" or even just "a browser"? Also: "You can run on less expensive hardware, because you've got less technology going on under the covers." You can't really call a full HTML5 stack light-weight. Sure, you save some lib…

Regarding the Angry birds argument, if there were some type of deep-reaching JS "extensions" that expose lower level stuff I'd wager that you could get the game running pretty fast. I think Appcelerator/PhoneGap offer things like this. Granted, It is "twisting" JS, but I'd assume they are considering the limitations of the current "HTML5" platform and hopefully offer some solutions to get a "Web" Angry Birds version…

That looks like a full fledged game running in a canvas. It looks great to me. Is it somehow inferior to native Angry Birds? (I've never looked any other version).

Re: An entire Mobile OS built using HTML, CSS and JS - by Mozilla

#93

Post by nupark2 »

mhd wrote: post #33
sp332 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't perform better. But at the low end, you don't need to bootstrap a java VM (like Android) just to check your email and browse the web etc. You can do the little things on less hardware.

Dalvik being a bigger overhead than JägerMonkey?

Your comment should be sitting higher. Dalvik is unlikely to be more expensive than a similarly complex JS VM.

Re: An entire Mobile OS built using HTML, CSS and JS - by Mozilla

#94

Post by projct »

johnrob wrote: post #48

I love the mentality behind this effort. More stuff can and should be done in the browser on mobile devices. For this to succeed, the most important problem is not exposing mobile hardware (camera, gps, etc) - it's user input. The cornerstone of the web is typing a url into the address bar, and typing is still a miserable experience on phones. Clicking links on touchscreens isn't exactly stellar either (hence the new…

FYI, 'fat-fingering' or 'fat-fingered' isn't really that new and I've more often heard it used in regard to keyboards on computers.

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=fat%20finger has a definition from 2005 but I think I had heard it as early as 1997.

Re: An entire Mobile OS built using HTML, CSS and JS - by Mozilla

#96

Post by wavephorm »

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #84
wavephorm wrote: post #60

This is actually a battle cry for Mozilla. The desktop GUI paradigm is done for, it's at the end of the line. Once desktops die off in popularity there will be no growth for web browsers like Firefox unless they own the whole stack like Apple and Google have successfully done, and Microsoft and RIM are attempting to do. Mozilla is developing Boot2Gecko because without expanding into a full mobile platform Mozilla is…

I'm sorry, desktop GUI applications are done for . Someone please notify my entire computer setup of its impending death. Also, my wife, my mother, my brother, my stepfather, my father, and everyone else I know . Hey, everyone, your computers are dead! It's time to convert to WebSmartiPhonePadTablets running nothing but web-browsers! Sure, you don't want to because they run like crap compared to actually writing nati…

Ah yeah I should have expected such pedantry on HackerNews. You know very well I didn't mean you were going to stop using Windows immediately. I said nothing of the sort. You didn't even have the respect to read anything else I said or even acknowledge that I said anything else. Instead you pointlessly nitpicked at a generalization and added nothing to this thread.

Re: An entire Mobile OS built using HTML, CSS and JS - by Mozilla

#99

Post by wickedchicken »

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #80
nooop wrote: post #35

"This is now just running the web directly." This makes absolutely no sense. This is borderline an insult to system developers -- because system software is what the device is running directly. I'm all for people to state a bit of sensationalist statements so they can sell there shit and be understood by the general public and so over, but this is going way too far. Being proud of an intrinsically limited product (th…

>This makes absolutely no sense. This is borderline an insult to system developers -- because system software is what the device is running directly. It's ok. We're used to it. From the desktop to the laptop to the netbook to the phone, Mozilla and Google have been trying to exterminate us for years.

> Mozilla and Google have been trying to exterminate us for years.

I highly recommend you take a look at PNaCl: portable LLVM binaries run in the NaCl sandbox. Since LLVM bitcode can be JITed (or even offline compiled before execution), you would be looking at optimized code for whichever target you're running on. Very exciting stuff.

http://www.chromium.org/nativeclient/pnacl/building-and-test...

Re: An entire Mobile OS built using HTML, CSS and JS - by Mozilla

#100

Post by ma2rten »

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #73
shinratdr wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just imagine... - One terrible interface for everything - Apps that update to broken versions without asking you and can't be reverted - A web designer, who knows nothing about UI design for an app let alone the specific UI conventions of each device pumping out apps - An ecosystem where it's a complete free for all. That always works out right? Yeah I think I'm going to stop imagining now.

This is another Visual Basic craze, in which someone creates a way for non-programmers to program and everyone piles on thinking it will be the next big thing.

See my post below (the one that the majority of development will be in HTML/CSS/JS in a few years). I don't want to copy & paste it here.
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