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Firefox OS devices officially released

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Re: Firefox OS devices officially released

#51

Post by Yoric »

octotoad wrote: post #42
Yoric wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't? All recent MacBooks I have seen insist rather hard to be paired with an account and a credit card number. I have never done the initial setup of an iOS device, but I would have assumed that it was the same or worse.

No, it definitely doesn't. iPhone 5 + iOS 6: doesn't know a thing about my credit card, and never will.

Interesting. Can you access any form of store without a credit card and without giving away your identity to Apple? And, just as importantly, can joe/jane user do it?

Re: Firefox OS devices officially released

#52

Post by Yoric »

michael_h wrote: post #43
Yoric wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't? All recent MacBooks I have seen insist rather hard to be paired with an account and a credit card number. I have never done the initial setup of an iOS device, but I would have assumed that it was the same or worse.

I have a 2011 MacBook and my wife has two iPhones, none of which are paired with a credit card. It's been a while since I set it up, but if I recall correctly you can create your "Apple ID" online and select 'None' for the credit card, then you sign in on your device with that account. When you're creating an account on the device , I think it may force you pair a credit card though.

Interesting. My experience was that I eventually resigned to giving a fake identity and a fake credit card number to get rid of all the nagging and annoyances. That's with a 2010 MacBook (annoyances appeared during an OS upgrade, if I recall), a 2012 MacBook Pro and a 2013 MacBook Air.

Re: Firefox OS devices officially released

#53

Post by dan1234 »

netcan wrote: post #35
ippisl wrote: post #21

I fail to see the value of such devices to the consumer. With android devices available at $100 with 1gb, android 4, a large screen, and huge market of highly optimised apps, what can Firefox is offer, except from marketing by carriers which are usually hated by consumers? liliputing.com/2013/06/android-gets-cheaper-meet-the-100-quad-core-phone-59-dual-core-tablet.html

I think you need to compare these to whatever low end android you are likely to find in a local retailer: galaxy mini, Xperia tipo, etc. My guess is that Mozilla see the low end as the most vulnerable angle. Apple aren't going low end. Android aren't excluding it, but There is always demand at the lower end. Handset makers are happy to fill it. Android might be the best current option, but Google aren't focused on th…

Although it's not generally their style, I wouldn't rule Apple out of a grab for the budget sector. Rumours concerning a low end, plastic iPhone have been gaining momentum for some time now and they already practically give away the previous generation spec'd phones.

Re: Firefox OS devices officially released

#54

Post by mwcampbell »

soapdog wrote: post #46
PommeDeTerre wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox OS will need to successfully compete against BlackBerry OS, Windows Mobile, bada and the other quite obscure mobile OSes long before it'll have a chance to even begin competing against Android or iOS. Many of these alternative systems have actually shipped on numerous devices, and have actual users. And how exactly is it "different"? Firefox OS is really just a limited subset of what we already have available…

Hey PommeDeTerre, Allow me to give a different perspective here. While in many other mobile operating systems you can build apps with HTML (saying HTML from now on but meaning HTML/CSS/JS, ok?), the API the vendors make available don't cover the same features as what is native on that platform. We can say that Firefox OS is important because of the following things: MAKING THE WEB A FIRST CLASS CITIZEN Makes the web…

I love what Mozilla is trying to accomplish with Firefox OS. I hope it succeeds, and I don't want to be negative. But I'm not convinced about this part:

> Firefox OS offers the best cost-benefit ratio once you think about how much performance you have against your hardware specs. If you pick the same low-end hardware with Android or Firefox OS, Android will have a worse experience, not because Android is broken in any way, Android is great but because there are more things going on on Android than on Firefox OS. Firefox OS is just a tiny hal, gecko and gaia, while Android has a VM and lots of other things going on.

Let's look at some of the components that a modern mobile OS needs:

* Kernel

* Hardware abstraction layer

* OpenGL ES implementation and compositor

* 2D vector graphics API

* UI toolkit

Android and Firefox OS both also have a VM to run managed code, along with a JIT compiler. Android's VM, Dalvik, was specifically designed to be memory efficient in the case where several apps are running as separate Unix processes. Is the same true of SpiderMonkey?

So Android and Firefox OS share many of the same types of fundamental components, and in some cases, the same components (the kernel, some aspects of the HAL). But on top of this, Firefox OS and its apps add:

* Markup language processor and layout engine designed for hypertext documents, not UIs

* Parser for a poorly designed programming language (JS), and advanced JIT optimizations that in effect extract the latent static types from a dynamically typed language. By contrast, Dalvik accepts bytecode as input, and the program is already statically typed, so the JIT compiler can be much simpler

* Hacks on top to turn this combination of hypertext markup language and poorly designed programming language into a tolerable UI toolkit and application platform

So how can you say that Firefox OS is more resource-efficient than Android? Perhaps the Android platform developers have gotten sloppy lately, since they're primarily concerned about high-end phones. But that can be remedied. What matters is that, as far as I can tell, the Android platform was designed for efficiency, while the Web platform was not.

I hesitate to bash the Web platform, because for better or worse, it seems to be the best way of achieving Mozilla's mission, and I believe social ends outweigh technical means. But I believe I have accurately described the current reality.

Re: Firefox OS devices officially released

#55

Post by Yoric »

anon1385 wrote: post #48
scribu wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We can already quite successfully run HTML5/CSS/JavaScript-based apps on Android, iOS, and BlackBerry OS for instance. Right, but in Firefox you also have "native" HTML5 apps, which give access to more hardware functionality than a regular web app. > And this is ignoring Firefox OS's inflexibility when it comes to using languages other than JavaScript I don't see how Firefox OS is less flexible than other systems.…

>Right, but in Firefox you also have "native" HTML5 apps, which give access to more hardware functionality than a regular web app. Which negates the sole benefit of a web app in the first place since those APIs are not standard and not available on other platforms, so those apps are not portable. Maybe the APIs will become standard and implemented on Android and iOS etc, but at that point you can write those kinds of…

Actually, almost all of them are available on Android and on Desktop.

Interestingly, while you seem to consider that this is a weak point of Firefox, we (Mozilla) did this on purpose and we consider this one of the strongest points of the platform: _no vendor lock-in_. If you write an application for FirefoxOS, we do not place any obstacle that can prevent the developer from distributing the application on other devices/OSes or that can prevent the user from using it on their other devices/OSes.

As you may recall, we (not just Mozilla) did this to the web a few years ago, and look where this brought us all. We are now attempting to bring the same degree of freedom to mobile. And yes, this is going to be quite a fight, but if you want to help us, that will be great :)

Re: Firefox OS devices officially released

#56

Post by [deleted] »

mcintyre1994 wrote: post #47
Yoric wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure about asm.js/OdinMonkey. I believe that FirefoxOS 1.0 does not have it, but that FirefoxOS 1.1 (which should be available as a free over-the-air update) has it. More generally, FirefoxOS does not automatically get the latest version of Gecko, because the process for mobile operating systems is more complex. The operating system must first pass certification by (if I recall) both the constructors and the…

Can you give an idea of how you expect that to work compared with Android? Given that Firefox OS devices seem to be cheap and low end, how likely are constructors and operators to perform a "long and costly" process to upgrade them regularly? Cheap and low end Android devices have terrible support from both, even for upgrades without new hardware requirements, is there any indication that they will better support sim…

[deleted]

Re: Firefox OS devices officially released

#57

Post by gebe »

diggan wrote: post #15

This is my lucky day to be in Spain! Have been following the project from the B2G[0] days and will order a phone ASAP. If you are in Spain, you can order the phone from Telefonica[1] and if you are like me and want to talk with other Firefox OS nerds, there is a Google Plus community for that[2] Also, don't forget that if you want to develop for Firefox OS but don't yet have a device for it, you can run the superfast…

I can't say that I have used the Firefox OS simulator extensively but I have been fiddling around with it a little bit and a lot of stuff didn't seem to work for me at least (like landscape mode, buttons in the notification menu, scroll seem to behave very weird in lists and/or gets stuck quite often resulting in me accidentally clicking on stuff, strange text formatting so that text gets printed outside of the screen, it crashes when I turn on WIFI, can't seem to change screen resolution, etc.). So "the best" might be pushing it, especially compared to the Windows Phone emulator and tools which are really, really great (but sadly won't be used by most mobile developers for obvious reasons :) ).

However I am excited to see where Firefox OS might be heading even though I think they will have a though time fighting it out with other potential "third spot" platforms for starters.

Re: Firefox OS devices officially released

#58

Post by fzzzy »

Yoric wrote: post #17
AndrewDucker wrote: post #10

I'm curious - does it automatically get the latest version of FF when it's released for desktop/Android? And does it support all of the functionality that comes with it? i.e. will it now have the asm.js optimisations and similar?

I'm not sure about asm.js/OdinMonkey. I believe that FirefoxOS 1.0 does not have it, but that FirefoxOS 1.1 (which should be available as a free over-the-air update) has it. More generally, FirefoxOS does not automatically get the latest version of Gecko, because the process for mobile operating systems is more complex. The operating system must first pass certification by (if I recall) both the constructors and the…

1.1 is still the b2g18 branch, so no asm.js. 1.2 will be the version that pulls from master (gecko 26 I think?) and will have asm.js.

Re: Firefox OS devices officially released

#59

Post by nakedrobot2 »

I think Firefox OS has potentially huge geek (read: early adopter) appeal, which Blackberry and Windows Mobile do not have - they are dead. Tizen, Jolla, and others are just obscure specks.

I am rooting for Firefox OS to be a serious contender within a couple of years. I think it has a strong chance to be #3. Likewise I don't think it has any chance whatsoever of taking the #1 or #2 spots - those are going to stay as they are for many years to come.

Re: Firefox OS devices officially released

#60

Post by the_mitsuhiko »

Yoric wrote: post #51
octotoad wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it definitely doesn't. iPhone 5 + iOS 6: doesn't know a thing about my credit card, and never will.

Interesting. Can you access any form of store without a credit card and without giving away your identity to Apple? And, just as importantly, can joe/jane user do it?

> And, just as importantly, can joe/jane user do it?

Irrelevant as those users will not care and just punch in their credit card if asked.

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