There is something magical about Firefox OS • Hacker News Board

Re: There is something magical about Firefox OS

#71

Post by MatthewPhillips » Thu, Sep 13, 2012, 12:31 PM UTC

j_col wrote: post #25

robhawkes wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might appreciate this piece on Fx OS and WebOS: http://www.quora.com/How-does-Mozillas-Boot-2-Gecko-compare-...

Yes I read that from your other comment, the engineer begins with: > There are many similarities Indeed. And he then goes on to admit that a new version of Enjo JS will address many of the perceived shortcomings in webOS: > This is a simplification, and I should also note that Enyo 2 (the next version of the webOS application framework, not yet released) is designed to be less platform-specific and allow Enyo apps to…

First off, B2G started well over a year ago, when there were no signs of WebOS becoming open source (it was more likely that it would be sold). So what you're suggesting is that they either have waited or that they should have stopped working when Open WebOS was announced (even though it was just released a few weeks ago).

Secondly, the existence of 2 OSes that support the same apps is not a negative; it is an overwhelming positive. Just as having multiple browsers in Windows is positive. The SysApps working group was created to standardize the (currently incompatible) APIs that exist between Firefox OS, Tizen, Chrome OS, and others. http://www.w3.org/2012/05/sysapps-wg-charter.html

Re: There is something magical about Firefox OS

#72

Post by bejar37 » Thu, Sep 13, 2012, 12:37 PM UTC

PommeDeTerre wrote: post #66

h2s wrote: post #55

You could set your watch by the HN response to a story like this. Pure doom, gloom and naysaying. Smartphones these days live and die by their app ecosystem. I would love to be working on mobile apps, but for the expense of buying an iPhone, an Android phone and a Windows phone, plus licenses for software to develop for all three. Not to mention the daunting prospect of dealing with Objective C, Java and C# simultane…

I'm confused by your statement about "the daunting prospect of dealing with Objective C, Java and C# simultaneously. This is a ludicrous prospect for a lone developer." Perhaps that's true for a hobbyist. But any professional software developer should already be familiar with at least one (if not all) of those languages, and should be able to pick up the others with very little work. Once you know C#, for instance, y…

I mostly agree with your points, although I personally think that the JavaScript ecosystem is maturing quite rapidly through node and amd.

Re: There is something magical about Firefox OS

#73

Post by udp » Thu, Sep 13, 2012, 12:37 PM UTC

hermanhermitage wrote: post #63

Terrific stuff. I still think there is a use case for a static C like language (with explicit memory management) for some kernels. The same way that WebGL has HLSL, it would be nice if there was a WebCPU API with C as the 'shader' language. (Alternative is LLJS approach - but that has other issues).

I couldn't agree more. It's all good being purist JavaScript for most applications, but having some kind of native code support is really important when it comes to things like games.

Re: There is something magical about Firefox OS

#74

Post by scriptproof » Thu, Sep 13, 2012, 12:38 PM UTC

praptak wrote: post #48

robhawkes wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not inconsistency to me. + is a string concatenation operator, - is not (maybe it could be) and '1' - 0 is just a fallback.

Re: There is something magical about Firefox OS

#75

Post by MatthewPhillips » Thu, Sep 13, 2012, 12:39 PM UTC

robhawkes wrote: post #16

antidaily wrote: post #5

Looks pretty but painfully slow in that demo video.

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).

> 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).

This is the real boom to the web community. The fact that Mozilla has to make these things work. I get frustrated when I do a translate3d(-100%,0,0) on Chrome for Android and it's not buttery smooth. Or I use onscroll to achieve an infinite scroll list and it causes scrolling to be laggy.

I'm sure the Chrome (and Safari) teams are aware of these issues and working on them, but to Mozilla they are absolutely essential. This will put pressure of Apple and Google to put a stronger emphasis on web app performance.

Re: There is something magical about Firefox OS

#76

Post by scriptproof » Thu, Sep 13, 2012, 12:42 PM UTC

macavity23 wrote: post #8

It's an interesting project, and I'm all for competition, but honestly I don't see the value proposition for an OEM to put this on a phone instead of Android. Rendering JavaScript faster is great, but does that really outweigh all the benefits of the Android ecosystem?

"Android has a cost" (Steve Ballmer). And it could increase (Apple)...

Re: There is something magical about Firefox OS

#77

Post by cs702 » Thu, Sep 13, 2012, 12:43 PM UTC

According to this blog post, Firefox OS is already providing native-like performance in a standard JavaScript+HTML+CSS environment. (By "native-like" I mean fast enough that the application will feel native to users.) If this is true, then I would agree Firefox OS is a game changer, because it means that ALL modern web applications can run unmodified at native-like speeds on mobile devices. The number of apps available for the platform is already in the many millions. Very exciting!

--

Edits: changed "ALL existing web applications" to "ALL modern web applications," which better reflects what I intended to say; added a bit of context in response to robhawkes's comment below.

Re: There is something magical about Firefox OS

#78

Post by jmmcd » Thu, Sep 13, 2012, 12:44 PM UTC

PommeDeTerre wrote: post #66

h2s wrote: post #55

You could set your watch by the HN response to a story like this. Pure doom, gloom and naysaying. Smartphones these days live and die by their app ecosystem. I would love to be working on mobile apps, but for the expense of buying an iPhone, an Android phone and a Windows phone, plus licenses for software to develop for all three. Not to mention the daunting prospect of dealing with Objective C, Java and C# simultane…

I'm confused by your statement about "the daunting prospect of dealing with Objective C, Java and C# simultaneously. This is a ludicrous prospect for a lone developer." Perhaps that's true for a hobbyist. But any professional software developer should already be familiar with at least one (if not all) of those languages, and should be able to pick up the others with very little work. Once you know C#, for instance, y…

The point is not that the these three languages are hard or obscure or that using all three is hard. The point is that maintaining the same code in parallel in three languages is a Wrong thing to do. DRY. Big companies can get away with it because they can throw manpower but it's still wrong.

Re: There is something magical about Firefox OS

#79

Post by mhd » Thu, Sep 13, 2012, 12:45 PM UTC

He mentions it being a "hackable dream for developers". I wonder if we're ever going to get something that's hackable by users. Or in other words, bridges the gap between the common user and the elite app-store backed developer…

With all its sensors and social and personal applications, there seems to be a high potential for individual customizations and connections, probably more than what your average PC-of-yore office suite would warrant. Yet there's nothing like VBScript or (A)Rexx on mobile devices. (Some of you might remember Apple's NewtonScript, from their superior mobile device they're still trying to ignore)

Part of that is that it's all in the hand of the people financially benefitting from it, i.e. us developers. You could easily make a new site/app that connects social platform A and social platform B. Which is part of why we've got that huge mess of redundant, barely interoperable cloud ad sellers and allowance pinchers.

What if teens could trade JavaScripts to do the same? Script their calculator app to better fit their teacher's views and their curriculum? Connect their text messaging app with the hip new microblogging platform. Set up little JS "cron jobs" whenever they enter a certain WLAN range (or GPS quadrant)…

Apart from security issues there's little technological reason to prevent this. But it seems all over the place we've moved away from interoperation. From what I see, end-user scripting is pretty low. Nobody's talking about document-centric desktops anymore (ah, OS/2, how I miss thee). It's all about apps and services, maximum hype, maximum profit.

Re: There is something magical about Firefox OS

#80

Post by MatthewPhillips » Thu, Sep 13, 2012, 12:46 PM UTC

praptak wrote: post #48

robhawkes wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not really scary day-to-day. If you want to do integer math, make sure you're dealing with integers.