Mozilla to open first-world front in Firefox OS war
1–10 of 153 posts
Re: Mozilla to open first-world front in Firefox OS war
#2I'm unreasonably excited about Firefox OS. Android really isn't open enough for my taste, and my trust of Google has diminished over the years, as they've encroached on more and more of the web and my data on that web. Apple has always been awful for the open web. And I'd rather write JavaScript and HTML than Java.
Re: Mozilla to open first-world front in Firefox OS war
#3I'm unreasonably excited about Firefox OS. Android really isn't open enough for my taste, and my trust of Google has diminished over the years, as they've encroached on more and more of the web and my data on that web. Apple has always been awful for the open web. And I'd rather write JavaScript and HTML than Java.
I like that they are targeting the low end, both in developing countries and now in the US. I need a phone for email/sms/phone, and I use the browser, calendar, calculator, and authenticator, but really that's about it. I don't want a 5-inch device in my pocket for this use case!
Re: Mozilla to open first-world front in Firefox OS war
#4I'm unreasonably excited about Firefox OS. Android really isn't open enough for my taste, and my trust of Google has diminished over the years, as they've encroached on more and more of the web and my data on that web. Apple has always been awful for the open web. And I'd rather write JavaScript and HTML than Java.
With Firefox OS you could also write C or C++ (possibly Rust eventually) thanks to emscripten and asm.js. But, crucially, asm.js makes them portable. No compiling for different architectures.
Re: Mozilla to open first-world front in Firefox OS war
#5I'm unreasonably excited about Firefox OS. Android really isn't open enough for my taste, and my trust of Google has diminished over the years, as they've encroached on more and more of the web and my data on that web. Apple has always been awful for the open web. And I'd rather write JavaScript and HTML than Java.
Is it possible to write good mobile apps in JS and HTML, compared to Android or iOS? I don't know much about mobile programming, but it seems much harder for JS to compete with native apps, no?
Re: Mozilla to open first-world front in Firefox OS war
#6It has definitely been an up-hill battle for Firefox OS trying to gain market share, but I think everyone (including Mozilla) expected that. Having played with one of their earlier test units and the newer Firefox Flame with FFOS 2.0, it has come a long way. Even our Android-obsessed designer loves the Flame.
It's a tough situation to be in where they need to improve the quality of the ecosystem, but need users to convince the big-wig devs to developer for the OS. The total user numbers we've seen from them is certainly better than we expected, but still too small to convince a major developer to build for Firefox OS on numbers alone.
If their platform wasn't the web, I'm not sure they'd have much of a chance at success, but being able to convince a developer the values of building for the web is much easier than building for a fairly new mobile OS.
Re: Mozilla to open first-world front in Firefox OS war
#7I'm unreasonably excited about Firefox OS. Android really isn't open enough for my taste, and my trust of Google has diminished over the years, as they've encroached on more and more of the web and my data on that web. Apple has always been awful for the open web. And I'd rather write JavaScript and HTML than Java.
Android's open enough for me, but what I find unhappy is that Google seems intent on tricking people into revealing more and more information. It often reminds me to turn on history tracking, despite having said no many times.
Every time I use the Play store, it tries to get me to enter a phone number. The way it does this is by popping up a dialog, with no buttons except continue. It makes it look like you MUST do this (there's no indication you can back out), even though it's optional. That's deceptive.
And of course, the idiotic permissions system. Want to check to see if a user's on the phone? Gotta also get access to who they call and their IMEI and other permanent identifiers.
Basically, all the time I'm on my Android device, I feel like I've gotta be extra cautious, that Google's out to screw me over. Unfortunately, MS is just flubbing their system by pumping it full of crap. (They were paying devs in 3rd world countries $2000 to push out junk apps. They refuse to take down garbage/scams. They even published fake Windows Updates on the store, and other stuff that falsely claims to be by MS.) MS could fix it all immediately by offering Android app compatibility. I'd switch in a minute.
I use Firefox as my browser, mainly because of this. I wish I could switch to another smartphone platform.
Re: Mozilla to open first-world front in Firefox OS war
#8I'm unreasonably excited about Firefox OS. Android really isn't open enough for my taste, and my trust of Google has diminished over the years, as they've encroached on more and more of the web and my data on that web. Apple has always been awful for the open web. And I'd rather write JavaScript and HTML than Java.
Is it possible to write good mobile apps in JS and HTML, compared to Android or iOS? I don't know much about mobile programming, but it seems much harder for JS to compete with native apps, no?
It all depends on the hooks that Mozilla provides to the JavaScript developers. These hooks are the way that the web page can interact with the phones built in hardware. If these API's are sufficient then there is no reason that these apps can't execute as well as an app on any other phone.
Re: Mozilla to open first-world front in Firefox OS war
#9I'm unreasonably excited about Firefox OS. Android really isn't open enough for my taste, and my trust of Google has diminished over the years, as they've encroached on more and more of the web and my data on that web. Apple has always been awful for the open web. And I'd rather write JavaScript and HTML than Java.
Is it possible to write good mobile apps in JS and HTML, compared to Android or iOS? I don't know much about mobile programming, but it seems much harder for JS to compete with native apps, no?
The startup I work for was approached some time ago by Firefox in order to ship our app on FFOS (our app has ~1 million daily users, so we regularly have this kind of proposals).
I did not participate in this firsthand, but from what I gathered from my colleagues, the FFOS SDK is so atrocious that sadly the idea of porting our app to this OS is laughable.
On the other hand, we are fully committed to our iOS and Android app (in objc & java) and are mostly satisfied by these two SDKs.
It might be an unfair comparison though, Google and Apple have had way more time than Mozilla to improve their respective SDKs.
Re: Mozilla to open first-world front in Firefox OS war
#10I really respect Firefox OS for being fully open, but I dislike the lack of native applications. I wish normal glibc Linux mobile distros (not Android) would gain more traction. Sailfish OS is great, but they don't seem to be interested in opening up the UI and most of the core applications.