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There is something magical about Firefox OS

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Re: There is something magical about Firefox OS

#41

Post by j_col »

mike-cardwell wrote: post #39
j_col wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (Wait, what's that? A company/community can work on more than one thing at a time?) But that's the whole point: they're not, at least not in the case of Thunderbird. Firefox OS clearly has a higher priority for them than Thunderbird.

As far as "total users", Firefox OS has the potential to overtake Thunderbird in a matter of weeks after launch. I use Thunderbird and have done for many years. I would like to see them continue developing it. But Firefox OS is much, much more important. The World needs a free alternative to Android based on open standards.

The World already has it: http://www.openwebosproject.org/

Re: There is something magical about Firefox OS

#42

Post by andrewcooke »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #30

Mozilla seem almost apologetic about Firefox OS. "aiming at middle market" "performs well on low end hardware" I think this is a mistake in positioning - this is still an expensive piece of hardware for most of the world (50 USD is not low-end if minimum wage in Brazil is 322 USD /mth) Instead this has the potential to be "the best" phone in most emerging markets - the most desireable OS, because it can appeal to the…

it doesn't really work like that. emerging markets have people as rich as rich americans and they know about, want, and own iphones.

(i live in s america and would love the kind of thing being described. but i am pretty odd and currently use a dumbphone that cost $20 - i know plenty of people with fancy phones here.

so i would like what you suggest to work, but in practice i think people would perceive it as aimed at "second class citizens" - kind of condescending, in a way. you have to remember that even though people have less money on average (and higher prices for imported goods) they swim in a similar media context - can access the same internet sites, see the same aspirational movies, etc)

Re: There is something magical about Firefox OS

#43

Post by zokier »

kgabis wrote: post #29

This looks like a terrible idea for a mobile OS, where every cycle should count. What about battery life? I think that for now, and foreseeable future, the only reasonable choice for mobile devices are native code based apps and system.

> I think that for now, and foreseeable future, the only reasonable choice for mobile devices are native code based apps and system.

So basing a mobile OS on something like Java (or C#/Silverlight) would be completely silly in your opinion?

Re: There is something magical about Firefox OS

#45

Post by dochtman »

robhawkes wrote: post #35
dmpk2k wrote: post #27

What's the £50 device? I'm not going to buy a Galaxy variant to play with Firefox OS, but £50 is a different story.

It's a ZTE Kis. You can't use it yet because it's a development version but we're working on getting devices available to developers before we launch properly. The Kis is merely a test device for now.

I really want a cheap test device so I can start hacking on B2G. Sure, I guess I could get a second-hand SGS2, but those are still pretty expensive to use a test device.

Re: There is something magical about Firefox OS

#46

Post by nikcub »

robhawkes wrote: post #18
zacharyvoase wrote: post #4

> In short, Firefox OS is about taking the technologies behind the Web, like JavaScript, and using them to produce an entire mobile operating system. Just let that sink in for a moment — it's a mobile OS powered by JavaScript! This kind of happened before: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_webOS What went wrong? Well, apparently[1] there were some big performance issues—and IIUC Gecko has some of those already. [1]: ht…

Thanks for the comment, the WebOS question is one I see a lot. One of our engineers answered this recently on Quora, I hope it helps explain the differences a bit: http://www.quora.com/How-does-Mozillas-Boot-2-Gecko-compare-...

I might not be reading this right, but in my mind this summarized as:

* WebOS added custom API's to handle parts of the phone hardware that are not web standard, for eg. phone calls, SMS

* The Firefox project also added custom API's, except they are submitting them for standardization as web interfaces

Why not just implement the WebOS API's and thus make them a standard, or are they considered flawed in some way that the B2G project now solves?

This option would have had the added bonus of immediate interop with WebOS applications, developer learning curve, documentation, etc.

Re: There is something magical about Firefox OS

#47

Post by robhawkes »

coffeeaddicted wrote: post #38
robhawkes wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have plenty of challenges to overcome but it's nothing that can't be fixed. We're fully aware of some of the frame-rate issues on the really low-end devices (like in the video) and are actively working on improving that (it's a main priority to get 60FPS).

Constant framerate is the thing that matters most to games. 60 fps or just 30 fps doesn't matter as much as that it's constant. You can even play a racer for example at 15 fps, but you fly out the curve the moment a 60 FPS game has a 250ms freeze at the wrong moment. Just mentioning this as it's something a lot of people not doing games are missing (and maybe one of the main reasons why c/c++ still are dominant in ga…

Yup, you're completely right… it's the constant frame-rate of a game that's important. And even if it's not truly 'constant', it should always stay above 30FPS. You probably shouldn't code a game to be tied to the frame-rate though.

This is exactly what my job is at the moment, testing games and monitoring FPS across these games on various devices and platforms. I'm confident that JavaScript is more than capable to have games running fast on mobile, we just need to work with the game developers more (to optimise) as well as improve the platform.

Re: There is something magical about Firefox OS

#48

Post by praptak »

robhawkes wrote: post #17
tsahyt wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is. Sounds like a big waste of performance to me.

You'd be surprised at how well JavaScript performs when allowed.

The scary part of JavaScript is not performance, it is the hell of inconsistency.

'1' - 0 is 1. Guess what '1' + 0 is? Nope, it's '10'.

Crockford's JavaScript truth table is mind-bending. On top of that, semicolon insertion.

Re: There is something magical about Firefox OS

#50

Post by sp332 »

ngokevin wrote: post #7
zacharyvoase wrote: post #4

> In short, Firefox OS is about taking the technologies behind the Web, like JavaScript, and using them to produce an entire mobile operating system. Just let that sink in for a moment — it's a mobile OS powered by JavaScript! This kind of happened before: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_webOS What went wrong? Well, apparently[1] there were some big performance issues—and IIUC Gecko has some of those already. [1]: ht…

WebOS had a proprietary Javascript SDK or something lame. Firefox OS runs on pure HTML5 standards.

There might have been some proprietary bits, but you can download the code for the WebOS desktop and build it to a useable state from here: https://github.com/openwebos/build-desktop
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