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Firefox OS devices officially released

hacks.mozilla.org

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Re: Firefox OS devices officially released

#131

Post by shmerl »

Apocryphon wrote: post #128
shmerl wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jolla has a better appeal I think. Firstly it's a full pledged Linux, not limited to JavaScript applications only. Secondly one will be able to run Firefox OS applications on Jolla as well, since the browser there is using Gecko.

How does Jolla stack against Ubuntu Touch?

Unlike Ubuntu, Sailfish uses the conventional middleware stack from Mer (i.e. graphics wise it's Xorg with plan to move to Wayland). Applications wise I can't really yet compare, since there aren't much details on Sailfish before it will be published. Hopefully it will be open sourced together after the launch (I mean the default applications like e-mail client and the rest). Silica UI components are open source already.

See https://sailfishos.org/about.html

See also: https://wiki.merproject.org/wiki/Main_Page

Re: Firefox OS devices officially released

#132

Post by slacka »

ndesaulniers wrote: post #121
thelukester wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Count you in on the openness alone? Who are you, RMS? There's already an extremely open OS out there. In fact Firefox OS is based off of it. You can download the source code, build it yourself, and submit patches. You can even change the default app store. It comes with a rich app ecosystem and a beautifully designed and responsive UI. The latter two are what people in the real world care about when choosing a smartp…

> You can even change the default app store. It comes with a rich app ecosystem and a beautifully designed and responsive UI. Thought you were talking about Firefox OS there!

Listen, I'm don't expect miracles from Mozilla on their first attempt, but the Mozilla PR and fanboyz put their reality distortion field in overdrive in this thread. The Mozilla Marketplace is a joke compared to iOS or Android app stores. And I've heard Firefox called a lot of things, like sluggish, slow, unresponsive, but responsive has never been one of them.

If Mozilla pulled a last minute rabbit out of the hat, then I'll gladly admit my error. 6 years after the Original iPhone and with much better hardware, you’d think it would be possible for Mozilla to do this. Though it seems more likely the constraints of HTML5/JS will keep this from happening on low-end hardware.

Re: Firefox OS devices officially released

#134

Post by digitarald »

gebe wrote: post #57
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 scree…

July 11 will be release of 4.0. A lot of Web API fixes to make things consistent and much more fine-grained control over orientation, location and other device APIs. Follow the hacks blog for updates.

Re: Firefox OS devices officially released

#135

Post by eigenvector »

glogla wrote: post #105
seabrookmx wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why pay $800? I can buy a brand new unlocked Nexus 4 for $305 CDN. This is a top tier smartphone.

I congratulate you on being privileged, but most people can't do that. Here it costs twice that, for example.

Where is here? A Nexus 4 costs twice as much in Norway as in Canada, but so does everything else.

When identical Chinese-manufactured electronics are priced differently it's usually because of import tariffs (Brazil) or vastly more generous consumer protection laws (Europe).

Re: Firefox OS devices officially released

#136

Post by pjmlp »

rhelmer wrote: post #133
pjmlp wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That depends on the shareholders.

Which shareholders are you referring to?

From the manufacturing companies.

Even if it the profit is big, it might not be big enough compared with whatever else they might producing instead.

Re: Firefox OS devices officially released

#137

Post by bad_user »

pjmlp wrote: post #127
bad_user wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What you wrote might appeal to some developers, but it means little to users If you look throughout history, the operating systems that succeeded where the operating systems preferred by developers. Whether this is mixing causality with correlation, we can't really be sure, since the marketplace is in general weird, however it's safe to assume that popularity amongst users is related to popularity amongst developer…

I am yet to know any developer that desired to really code for Symbian and enjoy all the issues related to the Symbian C++ dialect.

Well, that was my point. Symbian went downhill fast immediately after the iPhone and Android happened.

Re: Firefox OS devices officially released

#138

Post by [deleted] »

eigenvector wrote: post #135
glogla wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I congratulate you on being privileged, but most people can't do that. Here it costs twice that, for example.

Where is here? A Nexus 4 costs twice as much in Norway as in Canada, but so does everything else. When identical Chinese-manufactured electronics are priced differently it's usually because of import tariffs (Brazil) or vastly more generous consumer protection laws (Europe).

[deleted]

Re: Firefox OS devices officially released

#139

Post by pjmlp »

bad_user wrote: post #137
pjmlp wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am yet to know any developer that desired to really code for Symbian and enjoy all the issues related to the Symbian C++ dialect.

Well, that was my point. Symbian went downhill fast immediately after the iPhone and Android happened.

On my first contact with Symbian I could hardly believe that their C++ tooling was worse than to develop for MS-DOS in C++.

Re: Firefox OS devices officially released

#140

Post by glogla »

lbenes wrote: post #116
mwcampbell wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your argument is quite plausible. Android has indeed accumulated several APIs: ANSI C, POSIX, various Khronos APIs (OpenGL ES, OpenMAX), a subset of J2SE, and Android APIs (both Java and native, with some overlap between the two). I can accept that offering only web APIs leaves much more room for streamlining the lower layers of the stack. Maybe a future Firefox OS phone will run a new processor that was specifically…

No, they are not plausible. The whole idea of using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript as the back end technology for a low-end smartphone is nuts. Even the best HTML rendering engines are CPU and memory hogs. CSS was never designed for and is nearly impossible to hardware accelerate, and JavaScript is notoriously difficult to optimize and even the best VMs run orders 3-10x slower than native code, while the JS VM takes up mu…

That's not all that surprising. IPhone 3GS and Samsung Galasy X had launch prices four to five times higher than the phones you are talking about. Of course they are faster, the same way that old BMW M5 is faster than new Ford Fiesta.

But that's not the point. FFOS can't really offer that much to rich people in US or Western Europe where iPhones grow on trees and streets are paved with high-end Android phones. It is not supposed to compete with the next iPhone or Nexus, but with the next Nokia Asha, cheap Bada phone or the next cheap ZTE, Alcatel or Huawei Android phone that is still sold with Android 2.3.

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