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Firefox OS devices officially released

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Re: Firefox OS devices officially released

#61

Post by pjmlp »

Yoric wrote: post #39
pjmlp wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fully agree. It is great that Mozilla is fighting for openness, but in terms of what street joe and street jane want, I think it will join WebOS in a few months. Given my experience in telecommunications I don't see how sales are going to push these devices out of the shop when users come asking for other OSs.

What would you suggest?

The devices need to have a story.

When normal people buy a mobile, many choose a specific model, because:

- how it looks

- certain persons they know the same model

- there is a specific set of apps they want to have

- how the battery holds

- for whatever reason they want to have a contract and have a limited set to choose from, which fall anyway under the previous points

The question is how to bring these persons to buy a FirefoxOS mobile.

Sure a few geeks will buy them, but will it be enough quantity to keep the operators selling them?

Re: Firefox OS devices officially released

#62

Post by pjmlp »

glogla wrote: post #29
pjmlp wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It also needs to sell, being different is not enough. If the only selling point is HTML5 based apps, other OSs also have browsers.

Depends on the target market. For me, not having any of the above mentioned "features" is a selling point for me. Do other people care? Possibly no, but that doesn't concern me. also, Firefox OS devices have potential to be cheaper than android devices, because there's no extortion from Microsoft, and may be consistent, unlike Android with many terrible manufacturer-made OS modifications and version fragmentation. Ev…

For me a device without native apps is a no go.

I already have a browser and for the looks of it, FirefoxOS still needs some performance tuning to reach the level of throw away Android and Windows phones.

Re: Firefox OS devices officially released

#63

Post by x3c »

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…

This should be a blog post in itself.

Re: Firefox OS devices officially released

#64

Post by pjmlp »

mwcampbell wrote: post #54
soapdog wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 an…

Plus all other mobile OS allow for the use of pure native code if you really need to go full performance, not so with FirefoxOS.

Re: Firefox OS devices officially released

#65

Post by Shorel »

drdaeman wrote: post #44
kimlelly wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is currently the most open mobile OS. Count me in!

Opennes's nice but is it single-person hackable or huge monolithic blob that nobody except the most skilled teams would dare to bite? My problem with Android is that I miserably failed to hack it alone (I wanted to mess with app permission system and make it work my way). The Behemoth seem to have quite a steep learning curve, so I quickly lost my way in its innards. However, I was able hack Maemo (except for proprie…

What's your opinion on Ubuntu-phone ?

Re: Firefox OS devices officially released

#66

Post by aaronharder »

pjmlp wrote: post #23
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…

Fully agree. It is great that Mozilla is fighting for openness, but in terms of what street joe and street jane want, I think it will join WebOS in a few months. Given my experience in telecommunications I don't see how sales are going to push these devices out of the shop when users come asking for other OSs.

One big difference from WebOS is that the company behind FirefoxOS will not likely abandon it within 12 months of kicking it off. 4th or 5th place in the market might represent enough scale to be considered a "success" as far as Mozilla is concerned.

Re: Firefox OS devices officially released

#68

Post by freehunter »

GFischer wrote: post #40
freehunter wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows Phone does not require an account paired with a credit card.

However, it is VERY restrictive in its Live account interaction. I had some very ugly experiences setting up one for my cousin (I stupidly didn't lie and registered her as being from Uruguay and under 18), which made the phone behave like a brick ("sorry, no apps available in your country", "sorry, you have to be over 18 under laws from another country to use most of the features of this phone"). Changing the Live ac…

That doesn't surprise me. Regional restrictions on apps might not make much sense, but they're well known and exist on every platform. Same with age restrictions. You can't enter into a contract with Microsoft or a third party developer unless you're over 18. It's not just Microsoft that forces this.

Re: Firefox OS devices officially released

#69

Post by soapdog »

mwcampbell wrote: post #54
soapdog wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 an…

mwcampbell,

Thanks for your reply. =D

In the high-end market, it doesn't matter, everyone is good. In the low-end market, Firefox OS has better performance than Android.

From a high level analysis, your comment appears spot on but unfortunately it is not that simple. Dalvik VM is GREAt and we all know the bad parts of JS. The problem is that there is a lot going on on android phones. Its not as if there is only Dalvik and your app. In Firefox OS Gecko is so close to the hardware that it doesn't need to go thru hops. Firefox OS can be said to be nothing but a browser running on bare metal. Android is not slow, but on low-end hardware it is not as responsive as it should be. Pick a Galaxy Ace for example, its specs are similar to ZTE Open (ZTE Open has better specs) and the price is similar but the experience is much better and more responsive on ZTE Open.

Dalvik was created to be efficient, and it is. My comment is not about Dalvik being bad, it is not. Its about low end phones running android offering a bad experience. I don't know if you ever used those phones or if you ever tried a Firefox OS phone.

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

HTML evolved. The current standards and practices are pretty good. Check out new JS proposals, the language is evolving and becoming better. While you may perceive the combination of HTML/CSS/JS as something horrible, others like it. Check out enyojs at http://enyojs.com for example, it is a great framework for app development that shows the potential for pure web based solutions.

As you said:

> What matters is that, as far as I can tell, the Android platform was designed for efficiency, while the Web platform was not.

And yet, the web runs pretty well inside a browser in Android right? Even with all Android around it, open web apps running in a browser (when built correctly) do pretty great. Now remove Android and just leave the browser. Imagine how much complexity went away. How much CPU cycles and memory you saved if you have nothing but a web runtime.

We all agree that Android is a great platform. As I said, this is not an attack on Android. Firefox OS is a return to simplicity where you have just a web based architecture that is being optimized and refactored into a great mobile platform. We're not picking Desktop Firefox and shoehorning it into a mobile device. Firefox OS is being built for mobile.

You certainly know your tech and so I will leave you with an invitation. Android development is not open, Google releases new versions of Android when it wants to and then you see the source code. Even so, Android is hard to hack. On the other hand, Firefox OS is developed in the open. All source code, including whats is being worked on is live on github.

Better than me sprouting opinions and experiences here is for knowledgeable people such as you to check the code out. See how it is being built and how things work together. Help shape a better platform for everyone. Everyone is encouraged to contribute to Firefox OS. If you think SpiderMonkey (or IonMonkey or OdinMonkey) is slow, help improve it, we could all use some help! :D

https://github.com/mozilla-b2g/

As I said, one of the key thinks about Firefox OS is how open it is. Want to try to develop new features? Check out the repo, hack away and if it good enough, talk about a pull request on IRC.

If you want to check out the system without building it, pick the Firefox OS Simulator, it is just a add-on for Firefox at https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/firefox-os-simulato...

For example, you will notice that we use the Android kernel and parts of Android SDK tools such as adb and fastboot. The cool think about open source is that you can reuse the good bits and not use what you don't want to.

So I invite you to check out the platform. The web may appear badly designed and not build for performance but there are more and more people working on it and it just grows and surprises us. No one believed in JS for gaming until people saw the unreal engine running inside the browser without plugins. JS and its friends will keep improving and cross-plaform open solutions tend to win in the long run.

Re: Firefox OS devices officially released

#70

Post by soapdog »

x3c wrote: post #63
soapdog wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This should be a blog post in itself.

Thank you, made my day!
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