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There is something magical about Firefox OS

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Re: There is something magical about Firefox OS

#271

Post by [deleted] »

hessenwolf wrote: post #251
jsnell wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yes, I seriously dispute the claims you make, but purely based on my own sample of, say, ten users that I have discussed this with. Hence, I have a completely different opinion, but I don't have a large sample. I'm trying not to be argumentative, but you're tempting me :).

[deleted]

Re: There is something magical about Firefox OS

#272

Post by goldfeld »

Evbn wrote: post #267
goldfeld wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At some point, native would still be faster in the same sense a curve approaches the x-axis but never quite touches it. The mobile web rendering performance might never hit the 0-grade latency standard where we put native, but it will eventually get so close to it as to not make any difference whatsoever to anyone but cold-hearted scientists the likes of whom whish they could keep their science drinks at absolute zer…

HTML hit practically 0 latency 10 years ago then we added DHTML, CSS, encryption, Ajax, 3D, multitasking, 2x DPI and 4x screen size, background syncing, ... When will we stop adding functionality to soak up the hardware power?

If we hadn't added those things, HTML&Cia. wouldn't even be a contender to replace native performance now. It would still be a simple technology meant for static information.

If your argument is more in the line of why do games keep getting bigger and meaner, needing more resources, when we could have stopped advancing 3D a decade ago and every computer would be able to play any game today; then that's a whole other discussion. But I like the path towards true virtual reality with photorealistic graphics.

Re: There is something magical about Firefox OS

#273

Post by jff »

Evbn wrote: post #269
jff wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Addendum: Don't fall into the Linux trap. Don't start off being "great on old hardware!" but eventually grow so huge as to need the same specs as modern Windows (my i7 laptop with 4 GB of RAM runs like crap, thanks Debian). Do things in a straightforward way, but in such a way that you can expand without tacking on loads of extra code.

Is Debian your problem, or GNOME? My phone runs Linux, and it has 512MB RAM and a 1GHz ARM processor.

It's not GNOME, I haven't run GNOME on a day-to-day basis in over 7 years. Actually, I think it's probably Firefox that screws me as much as anything else.

Re: There is something magical about Firefox OS

#274

Post by cincinnatus »

robhawkes wrote: post #54
cincinnatus wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Web standards apps will always have to make bad compromises. We need browser byte code.

What sort of compromises?

Having to target JavaScript. You then have issues with debugging, overly convoluted build processes etc.

Re: There is something magical about Firefox OS

#275

Post by lsh »

randallu wrote: post #173
masklinn wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

A core set of the apps were written in HTML+JS using the Enyo framework, but apps can also be written quite easily in C++, too.

Enyo2 was released recently and is being incorporated into Open WebOS: http://enyojs.com/

How anyone can stand to use javascript for anything significant is beyond me, but Enyo, and hopefully whatever FxOS uses, can have substantial parts of an app's logic written in something like Coffeescript or Clojurescript.

Re: There is something magical about Firefox OS

#276

Post by flyinRyan »

goldfeld wrote: post #265
flyinRyan wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And at that point, native would still be faster....

At some point, native would still be faster in the same sense a curve approaches the x-axis but never quite touches it. The mobile web rendering performance might never hit the 0-grade latency standard where we put native, but it will eventually get so close to it as to not make any difference whatsoever to anyone but cold-hearted scientists the likes of whom whish they could keep their science drinks at absolute zer…

I wasn't speaking practically. The GP said "native will always be faster" and that's true. Relevance of that truth is a separate issue.
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