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Firefox OS Shows Continued Global Growth

blog.mozilla.org

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Re: Firefox OS Shows Continued Global Growth

#61

Post by regularfry »

mozmark wrote: post #39
regularfry wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might think that, but you've got to be careful not to let old phones update. I've got a Galaxy S2 I use mainly as a wifi hotspot with a data-only sim, and while it used to have a pretty snappy UI, these days it really crawls, almost to the point of being unusable. To be honest I've not looked particularly hard at why this is, but how well a phone runs a browser, for instance, isn't frozen in time when the phone i…

Not letting your phone update maybe isn't a great solution if you care about security at all. Users shouldn't have to choose between 'affordable' and 'currently supported'; I hope Firefox OS can help here.

You're absolutely right - it's a real pain.

Re: Firefox OS Shows Continued Global Growth

#62

Post by JoeAltmaier »

happyscrappy wrote: post #59
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Much of the bad is cultural. Americans are impatient with devices, and feel frustration/anger when they don't get instant gratification. Others are more adaptable, more patient, and content to learn to use the device as it must be used to work correctly.

Job would smash this phone, at least he would only be out $35.

Most of the world lives with dumb phones and don't dissolve into childish fits. How to explain that?

Re: Firefox OS Shows Continued Global Growth

#63

Post by pjc50 »

jonknee wrote: post #52
gambiting wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm from a developed country and I don't know anyone who pays for a phone on top of the contract price. It baffles me how in US people get a $50/month contract + they have to pay $200 for the phone. Crazy.

Because the phones are $600? At $50/mo it would take an entire year to pay for just the phone before any revenue could be used for actual operator business.

Just to drive gambiting's point home, here's EE's phone selection: http://shop.ee.co.uk/mobile-phones/pay-monthly/gallery

The nearest to the $200 upfront is the £150 upfront for the "iPhone 6 plus 128GB", although that's then about $100 a month. For the very latest top-end phone. All the others have tiny or zero upfront fees.

Re: Firefox OS Shows Continued Global Growth

#65

Post by pinkyand »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #19
zedr wrote: post #5

At this point, I think Mozilla really needs to: 1) launch a high end phone, capable of competing in specs with the Nexus 5 and the like; 2) release the first Firefox-OS tablet, which would be a prove very valuable to kiosks.

Firefox OS has a huge advantage when running on low-memory phones. The most memory intensive thing typically run on a low-end phone is the web browser. (Or an app that wraps a browser, like Facebook). So the ability to run a web browser is the limiting factor. Every other OS has to have enough memory to run a GUI + a browser. Since Firefox OS uses the browser for its GUI, it theoretically can run smoother in 128MB or…

A 256MB RAM, in volume, would cost about $2.5-5 in volume. If that's the only difference between Android with 512MB(which is very usable) and FirfoxOS device, that doesn't sound like a lot.

Also opera/opera-mini offers much better performance on mobile than mobile firefox,and opera mini is very light on ram(maybe 30MB-40MB). So while i haven't tried, i wouldn't be surprised to learn that running opera mini on a 256MB android offers better performance than FirefoxOS.

Re: Firefox OS Shows Continued Global Growth

#66

Post by jcampbell1 »

netcan wrote: post #18

Measuring whether or not a device is gaining market share is tricky. I remember iphone launching and weeks later, every website with substantial traffic had a noticeable number of visits from an iphone. Same with ipad. At the start, there were more nokia n95s, blackberry's and other pre-iphone smartphones in the market. There were even more being sold as iphones were supply limited. But, none of these mattered becaus…

> But, how many visits to your site come from a chromebook?

A lot.

I sell SaaS where about half the customers are high school students. In my estimation, of the schools where all students are issued a device, about 1 in 4 schools opts for chrome books, and the rest use iPads.

For many reasons, I think schools should pick chromebooks instead of iPads. The laptop form factor is better, and iPads have such little memory, they cache nothing, and overload the network which is a the bigger problem for most schools.

Re: Firefox OS Shows Continued Global Growth

#67

Post by happyscrappy »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #62
happyscrappy wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Job would smash this phone, at least he would only be out $35.

Most of the world lives with dumb phones and don't dissolve into childish fits. How to explain that?

Save $5 and get a phone that actually works.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/B004ZLV4JG/ref=sr_1_1...

Edit: I want FFOS to succeed, pretending that this phone is usable will not help that goal.

Re: Firefox OS Shows Continued Global Growth

#68

Post by mikeash »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #58
happyscrappy wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ouch: The Good •Per-app privacy controls. Block an app from seeing your location, contacts, or a host of other things on your phone. •It's cheap! •No really, have you seen how cheap it is? It's $35. Off contract. That's like, really cheap. The Bad •The software—Firefox OS was a totally inappropriate choice of operating system for this hardware. There are literally zero considerations for the speed and memory of the C…

Much of the bad is cultural. Americans are impatient with devices, and feel frustration/anger when they don't get instant gratification. Others are more adaptable, more patient, and content to learn to use the device as it must be used to work correctly.

It's weird how Americans are apparently the only group that it's perfectly acceptable to criticize in completely malicious and baseless ways.

I'm an American, and while there's much wrong with my country and its people, you are full of shit here.

Re: Firefox OS Shows Continued Global Growth

#69

Post by StanAngeloff »

aikah wrote: post #64
knocte wrote: post #41

Can it run Android apps?

It only "runs" webpages.

So true, even marketplace apps are just shims around web pages. I have been using Firefox OS for about 2 months and this is one of my biggest complaints. Apps are just websites, no more, no less.

Re: Firefox OS Shows Continued Global Growth

#70

Post by muyuu »

srcmap wrote: post #56
muyuu wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is is the same as the ZTE Open C Firefox Phone? because I tried it and it's pitiful. IIRC it's £60 in the UK. Don't bother with that phone, it's useless.

Form the point of view of the folks who never use a smart phone before, this $35 phone is probably very good. Just as win3.1 might be very good for someone who only use DOS before.

I disagree on both accounts actually. I hated Win3.1 with a passion, everything ran like crap as it tried to do too much on computers that weren't ready for it, 99% of the time (only by the time of 3.11 for WorkGroups it started being decent). I was definitely happier working on DOS (DRDOS 6, MSDOS 5, DOS/V) at the time using protected mode.

This is a bit of the same thing. A smartphone so poor, it will make you love your dumbphone and your computer a lot more. Tries too much on hardware that just cannot deal with it.

Shame, because some of the ideas are really necessary right now. Like OS-level control of app privileges as standard, network control, privacy controls... absolutely essential. I'd very likely get a high end Firefox phone despite of how terrible the current phone is, if it performs passably. There was talk about that (and tablets) earlier in the year but I haven't seen anything.

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