There is something magical about Firefox OS

I get that green is usually associated with starting a call and red ending a call, but why? Why not blue or purple or orange or yellow or black?

Good point on the angle. But why even use the same handset icon? You could use a candlestick phone, a wall phone, a rotary phone.... for fuck's sake, you could use an icon representing the phone itself.

Is Objective C native? Not yet. Is the ARM executable native? Yes. Is javascript native? No. Is the executable code generated by the jit native? Yes.

I'm glad you didn't use any hyperbole.

it's a mobile OS powered by JavaScript!

And you thought a Java-powered operating system was crappy...

So you might be thinking, "This sounds great, but why use JavaScript to build a phone?" And you'd be right, that's a really important question to ask. The good news is that there are plenty of reasons why this is a good idea, besides making Web developers weak at the knees.

I'm pretty sure this is the only reason to do this. Nobody but web developers are going to give a shit. Grandma doesn't care what OS her iPad runs on. It just needs to work really well. I am wondering how you're going to get real-time priority on threads for the phone app over your slow HTML5 game threads if they're run by the same interpreted scripting engine.

Why the huge performance improvements over browsers in Android on identical devices? It's because of the lack of stuff going on between Gecko and the hardware, meaning things like JavaScript can run at full pelt. So much for JavaScript being slow!

What lack of stuff ? What's going on in this "JavaScript OS" that is different than in a Java OS? What calls are not happening? What memory is not being allocated? What graphics are not being displayed? What the hell are you talking about?

What Firefox OS aims to do here is to use the native everywhere-ness of the Web to provide a platform that allows applications to be enjoyed on a mobile device, a desktop computer, a tablet, or anywhere else that has access to a browser. Wouldn't you want to be able to pick up your Angry Birds game on the desktop where where you left it on your phone? I certainly would!

I think you actually missed the point of the quote right before that paragraph. It's an incredibly powerful idea to make a mobile platform that's as free-to-use as a web browser. A security nightmare, yes. A competing-open-product-that-implements-unsupported-features nightmare, yes. But it could change things, for better or worse.

Because Firefox OS is constructed using HTML, JavaScript and CSS it means you only need basic Web development skills to reach in and completely change the device experience. You could literally change one line of CSS and completely change the way the icons on the homescreen look, or re-write some core JavaScript files that handle phone-calls.

I could have sworn I heard of something like this before... Web Oh Ess or something?

Has the whole world gone nuts? What the hell was wrong with just having a web browser and native apps side by side? You could use your web apps for a universal free experience, and for apps which need a lot of performance like games you would write a fast, minimal native app. Now we're reinventing a reinvention of the wheel, poorly.

Have you people even used S60? That shit was easily skinnable, had tons of developer resources, a free marketplace (once you signed your app), it was fast, stable, cheap. Now it's dead of course (thanks Android) and all we have to fill the space is bloated incompatible buggy crap.

For this reason I kinda want Dart to succeed. Why not make the browser truly polyglot if we are trying replace OS with browsers?