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There is something magical about Firefox OS

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Re: There is something magical about Firefox OS

#201

Post by grayrest »

ravichhabra wrote: post #167
robhawkes wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Brazil at first, next year. We're working on developer devices that can be used worldwide.

Any developer version that we could buy? I don't mind if we have to pay more. Need to test this for Burma market. Edit: Didn't read carefully. You already mentioned that developer versions would be available worldwide soon. Any mailing list to subscribe for the announcement?

> Any developer version that we could buy?

Like all Mozilla projects, this is developed completely in the open. You can get an original Galaxy Nexus and flash it over to the latest nightly relatively easily. It probably works on other phones, but the nexus is what they gave out at JSConf so that's what I use. ;)

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Boot_to_Gec...

Re: There is something magical about Firefox OS

#203

Post by stcredzero »

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…

> If Firefox OS says we are not as good as iOS then thay are squarely putting themselves in the middle of the market.

That's only if people actually perceive feature phones as the same "market" as smartphones. I very much doubt this is true. 2nd hand smartphones are already widespread in 3rd world markets. Having a "real smartphone" will have considerable cachet, functionality notwithstanding.

tl;dr - "mobile phone" isn't a market. "Mobile phone" is one market and "smartphone" is another people aspire to.

Re: There is something magical about Firefox OS

#204

Post by unwiredben »

masklinn wrote: post #180
newman314 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

webOS 1.x shipped with a Java runtime that was used to run basic system services like the email engine. This didn't show up directly in applications, but all the PIM apps made use of the Java code over the Luna Service Bus. 2.0 shipped with all the Java code removed, reimplemented either as native code or node.js-based services, but still communicating over the LSB.

Re: There is something magical about Firefox OS

#205

Post by stcredzero »

wtracy wrote: post #187
nathan_long wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> If it's an alternative to Android that doesn't let Carriers "add value" then it's an alternative they won't use. Ideally, they shouldn't "use" any phone, because they are not the user . We should buy whatever phone we please somewhere else, with financing if necessary, and then buy service from the carriers. The whole "subsidizing" thing is a scam unless you get cheaper service by bringing your own phone, or after…

Here's the real problem: The major carriers charge the same rate regardless of whether you got a free phone from them or not. The phone subsidy doesn't go away even if you paid $500 out of pocket for a Nexus.

My solution: I bought a factory unlocked iPhone 4 from Canada on ebay. I run it with a Straight Talk SIM for $45 a month, no contract, unlimited everything.

Re: There is something magical about Firefox OS

#206

Post by drbawb »

markmm wrote: post #164
jmmcd wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It depends, if your app is just a dumb UI that calls out to services then all the logic etc should be in the server, the UI code should just be displaying and a bit of caching. Once you have built it in one framework it will be much faster porting it to the others. I know it requires 3 updates when you add a new feature but it's not a major pain and you get native apps running very fast.

I'd also add that I don't think it necessarily violates "DRY".

I think "doing it wrong" would be _porting_ the same code to 3 platforms. A blind port to three different mobile platforms is going to look out of place on at least 2/3 of them.

Unless you're talking game development (where you pretty much invent the UI and UX from scratch), each OS has very well established human interface guidelines.

I largely agree with you, but I think GP is incorrect in assuming it's 3 parallel branches of the same code.

The three ports should all be different, in some cases _drastically_ different, or they're bad ports. The business logic may be the same, but the presentation should not.

Also you point out a very good way to separate the business logic without rewriting it three times. Though I wonder if you could write the business logic in C as well?

I know it could be used as a lowest common denominator between iOS and Android. Android does provide the NDK and JNI so you could bind to C libraries, and Objective-C (IIRC) would allow you to link C libraries as well. Not sure what the Windows Phone toolkit looks like these days, though, so I can't comment on that.

Re: There is something magical about Firefox OS

#207

Post by aaronblohowiak »

omarqazi wrote: post #194
cs702 wrote: post #77

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 availab…

Watch the video. That's not native performance. It will never be native performance, because there will always be the layer of the rendering engine between your application and device. The best they'll ever do is "close enough to native that you don't notice", and they're certainly not there yet. And the number of apps is already in the millions? Give me an example of one app out there that's in the same ballpark of…

There is always a rendering engine unless you're writing pixels to the buffer directly. The thing is that Cocoa/CocoaTouch's rendering and compositing is much faster than Webkit's. Why that is, is left as an exercise for the reader.

Re: There is something magical about Firefox OS

#208

Post by lifeisstillgood »

stcredzero wrote: post #203
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…

> If Firefox OS says we are not as good as iOS then thay are squarely putting themselves in the middle of the market. That's only if people actually perceive feature phones as the same "market" as smartphones. I very much doubt this is true. 2nd hand smartphones are already widespread in 3rd world markets. Having a "real smartphone" will have considerable cachet, functionality notwithstanding. tl;dr - "mobile phone"…

I really struggle with that - it's the app that counts. Having a web browser is probably the main dividing line, but having sms networjs that really allow your business to trade over SMS means to me that the functionality counts - it would be nice to buy an iPhone but if a LCD SMS device will allow me to sell my goods each week, then high end and low end are far wider than we presume

Re: There is something magical about Firefox OS

#209

Post by lifeisstillgood »

stcredzero wrote: post #203
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…

> If Firefox OS says we are not as good as iOS then thay are squarely putting themselves in the middle of the market. That's only if people actually perceive feature phones as the same "market" as smartphones. I very much doubt this is true. 2nd hand smartphones are already widespread in 3rd world markets. Having a "real smartphone" will have considerable cachet, functionality notwithstanding. tl;dr - "mobile phone"…

I really struggle with that - it's the app that counts. Having a web browser is probably the main dividing line, but having sms networjs that really allow your business to trade over SMS means to me that the functionality counts - it would be nice to buy an iPhone but if a LCD SMS device will allow me to sell my goods each week, then high end and low end are far wider than we presume

Re: There is something magical about Firefox OS

#210

Post by pkolaczk »

azakai wrote: post #181
pkolaczk wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So how come e.g. www.circuitlab.com which is a simulator written in pure JS is two orders of magnitude slower on Chrome or Firefox than native *SPICE implementations in C? It is actually even much slower than the already pretty slow Falstad's Java applet.

Two orders of magnitude? That can't be explained by the difference between C and JS. There must be some other difference, like which algorithms are used, or that the C one relies heavily on inline assembly or such. The expected difference between C and JS should be more like one order of magnitude in the worst cases (and much better in the best).

Well, I could agree if I saw any computational-heavy JS application (and not a microbenchmark) doing well compared to native counterpart, especially on multicore. So far, I found only the one I cited - and the fact is, it is damn slow.

While JIT is getting better over time, you are soon going to hit the law of diminishing returns - the JIT is already extremely sophisticated, but still being a few times slower on average even than JVM. And JVM has it much easier, because it has full explicit type information, while JS has to first figure it out. So I wouldn't expect miracles here.

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