Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

There is something magical about Firefox OS

rawkes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 276 posts

Re: There is something magical about Firefox OS

#171

Post by lifeisstillgood »

robhawkes wrote: post #26
lifeisstillgood wrote: post #22

I apologise for writing a long post - I have not time to write a short one There is a reason MBAs are taught market analysis. Its important to position your product for maximum effect (usually maximum profit, but that may not be the case here) The arguments for FirefoxOS seem to be 1. It's OSS 2. It's Web-technologies only 3. It's aimed at the "emerging" markets' mobile users 4. It runs on cheaper hardware better tha…

Thanks for the comment, I really appreciate it! To be clear, I'm not educated in business so my thoughts are my own (potentially naive) conclusions. However, there are some very sound business decisions behind us chosing to go with Brazil first, and to go with cheaper, low-end devices. I'm sure they know what they're doing more than I do! As an aside, we do have versions of Fx OS running on high-end devices and it ru…

Its good to see you on here (I tend not to see authors of posts on HN - maybe its me)

Fantastic work - and if you dont mind answering dumb questions, what device would you recommend getting if I fancy playing (B2G_build_prerequisites has a list of a few - but I have no idea how to be sure I get specifc models, or if I can buy an Otoro in UK. Basically, really horrible starting questions :-)

Happy to be told just google harder

Cheers

Re: There is something magical about Firefox OS

#172

Post by mtrimpe »

adestefan wrote: post #111
mtrimpe wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

JavaScript is browser byte code. Just like Java byte code it's not that great for a lot of cases but, just like Java, eventually the JIT will get pretty decent.

The JIT in the JVM is not for Java, but for Java bytecode. That, along with the easy integration into existing Java classes, is what makes the JVM such an attractive target for things like Scala, Jython, and Clojure.

Java bytecode is pretty close to Java "the language." You can try decompiling some Java classes and see how close to the original you end up getting.

Because of that it's also a pretty awful assembly target, something which is only now being addressed with things like invokedynamic, finally moving Java byte code beyond Java 'the language.'

Re: There is something magical about Firefox OS

#173

Post by randallu »

masklinn wrote: post #9
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…

> This kind of happened before: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_webOS Yeah, and I find the complete and utter lack of any mention of WebOS in TFA troubling. > What went wrong? Well, apparently[1] there were some big performance issues Your link points to insufficient hardware though, not software issues. Hardware which seems to have been the main recurring problem on all WebOS machines (according to reports, there we…

WebOS was written in C++, eventually with a lot of Qt (the window manager, the dock, system dialogs, etc). The apps were written as web pages, though.

FxOS is all web pages (even the IME!) though currently has the same basic PalmOS launcher model that iOS and Android have; no multitasking window manager.

Re: There is something magical about Firefox OS

#174

Post by jsnell »

hessenwolf wrote: post #170
jsnell wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

a) Your set of 99.5% apps are going to be different from those of other people. You need a lot more coverage than that to make a substantial percentage of people happy. b) It's often not enough to just have an app for a specific task, it needs to also tie into a specific ecosystem. For example I don't need generic VoIP software on my phone, but I absolutely must have access to Skype. For somebody else it might be Web…

Erm, but have you got a source for that? As fun as my anecdotal evidence versus yours is...

No. Do you seriously dispute any of the claims I made, or are you just being argumentative? It was mostly reasoning from common knowledge, not generalizing from my own anecdotal experience.

Of course there's never going to be a totally authoritative source for this kind of thing. You're not going to be able to do a double blind trial of the market success of two smartphone platforms with everything being equal except the app availability.

Re: There is something magical about Firefox OS

#175

Post by barrkel »

danielweber wrote: post #169
robhawkes wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are loadds of high-end games written in JS: Cut The Rope. Bejeweled. Angry Birds. As well as many more lesser known ones that push things as far as possible. You say "doesn't include WebGL", but WebGL is just the visual output… a game like BananaBread requires epic performance from JavaScript aside from WebGL: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/demos/detail/bananabread WebGL is one of the main reasons why we c…

Angry Birds is JavaScript? Are you sure?

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=angry+birds+html5

Re: There is something magical about Firefox OS

#176

Post by buu700 »

pkolaczk wrote: post #133
nemetroid wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The term "native-like" means "with a responsive interface" these days.

Oh yeah, by this definition interpreted Python is also native like. Just do all your UI rendering by native libs and use scripting to glue it together. But this is not what most of programmers call native speed.

I think you're misinterpreting the meaning of 'native' in this context; the tradeoff in question isn't one of interpreted/JIT'd v. ahead of time to the metal, but rather one of Web v. every platform's standard graphical application stack(s) (which may or may not be ahead of time compiled).

Re: There is something magical about Firefox OS

#177

Post by Apocryphon »

A really minor point- why is it that the phone icon nowadays has defaulted to a handset turned to that angle, with green as the color? That looks similar to the phone icon in some of the Samsung phones that look more like iOS.

Is green and at 2 o'clock simply how we think of calling someone now?

Re: There is something magical about Firefox OS

#178

Post by signalsignal »

pkolaczk wrote: post #133
nemetroid wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The term "native-like" means "with a responsive interface" these days.

Oh yeah, by this definition interpreted Python is also native like. Just do all your UI rendering by native libs and use scripting to glue it together. But this is not what most of programmers call native speed.

Hence the context of being magical. It is more of a sleight of hand trick than actual supernatural. The author of the post is misusing a development term to convey a different meaning.

Re: There is something magical about Firefox OS

#179

Post by se85 »

Javascript performing well on mobile is NOT magic, its just good engineering.

The big problem I see with Firefox OS is that it is not going to take much to make the entire "App Store" full of app's that perform horribly, and in return that will make Firefox OS look bad as a result.

Abstracting away all the complexities of making JavaScript/HTML/CSS perform well on mobile into a set of API's that anyone can use regardless of skill doesn't seem feasible to me but I could be wrong and If they have actually pulled this off, great! But it's still not magic.

Re: There is something magical about Firefox OS

#180

Post by masklinn »

newman314 wrote: post #65
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 also suffered from execution issues (as a company). They were forever rewriting things under the hood as a fair number of things were duct-taped together. For example, they moved from a Java based solution to JS using v8 from webOS 1.x to 2.x. Hopefully, Firefox OS will not suffer from the same issues. And I would certainly like to hear more about the under-the-hood architecture. It's pretty eye candy but thing…

> For example, they moved from a Java based solution to JS using v8 from webOS 1.x to 2.x.

Wow, you may want to do some basic checking on your assertions there:

* webOS never used Java, Luna (webOS-to-be) was a skunkworks alternative to the Java-based Prima project. there was java stuff below from Prima, it was not the application core and was never made available to developers

* webOS always used both Webkit and V8 for its application runtime (Palm was the first company to ship a mobile V8 port)

http://blogs.gurulabs.com/dax/2009/06/palm-pre-webos.html

http://www.theverge.com/2012/6/5/3062611/palm-webos-hp-insid...

Post reply on HN