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Mozilla to open first-world front in Firefox OS war

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Re: Mozilla to open first-world front in Firefox OS war

#51

Post by mburns »

lambda wrote: post #43
bla2 wrote: post #31

I'd rather they'd push Firefox on Android more. Firefox OS seems stillborn, but Firefox/Android is a good product and mobile could need more browser competition.

I feel like one thing they could do to promote Firefox OS would be to make it possible to run Firefox OS applications on Android; create an installer/app store that would allow you to install them as if they were native apps, but they would be using a shared runtime. That would really help to make it worthwhile to develop FxOS apps; actually having a large installed base of phones that they could be used on, in order…

>make it possible to run Firefox OS applications on Android

https://hacks.mozilla.org/2014/06/firefox-os-apps-run-on-and...

Re: Mozilla to open first-world front in Firefox OS war

#52

Post by sjwright »

ghinda wrote: post #27
JimDabell wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Apple has always been awful for the open web. Apple played a massive part in the success of the mobile web and responsive design. The release of Mobile Safari and WebKit was a watershed moment. Before that point, the mobile web largely consisted of separate, pretty awful sites on WML. Afterwards, most mobile platforms had a default web browser based on WebKit, and the mobile web transformed as a result. I'm not say…

I don’t want to sound like a broken record, but Webkit was originally a fork of KHTML, which is LGPL, so they were required/forced to release it under the same license. And based on the their upstream contributions[1] it doesn’t look like it was a gesture of goodwill. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebKit#Split_development

The well-known fact that WebKit has an origin story in KHTML is completely irrelevant to the point being made. Apple was the one who put substantial engineering effort into making the mobile web work well, and released their work with the most open licenses they could.

Re: Mozilla to open first-world front in Firefox OS war

#53

Post by xorcist »

SwellJoe wrote: post #24
JimDabell wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Apple has always been awful for the open web. Apple played a massive part in the success of the mobile web and responsive design. The release of Mobile Safari and WebKit was a watershed moment. Before that point, the mobile web largely consisted of separate, pretty awful sites on WML. Afterwards, most mobile platforms had a default web browser based on WebKit, and the mobile web transformed as a result. I'm not say…

OK, I'll give them credit for strong-arming the web into giving up its addiction to Adobe Flash. That was a win for the open and standards-based web.

That credit should probably go to Google, and to a lesser extent to Firefox (which at least tried).

Google used the strong weight of Youtube to make sure all web browsers implemented a replacement, a long and tiresome process that took the better part of ten years. They bought companies and gave patents away along the way.

I'm not sure exactly what Apple did. Please enlighten me.

Re: Mozilla to open first-world front in Firefox OS war

#54

Post by aubergene »

I was given a Firefox OS phone at Mozfest last year. I lost my other phone earlier this year and so used it exclusively for four weeks. I'm sorry to say it's pretty terrible at this stage. I was using v2 of Firefox OS.

The problems are broadly that it was slow, unreliable and poorly designed. It would just become completely unresponsive a couple of times a week, requiring the battery to be removed to restart. There are very few well known apps. Twitter seems to be the only one, and it was so slow for scrolling that I gave up using it. The included apps were just placeholders to install apps, almost all of them only worked online. I wouldn't recommend getting one to anybody. I'm sure you could buy a cheap secondhand Android and have a better experience. It was worse than Android 1.6.

There's such a huge mountain of work for the Mozilla developers to get this to be in anyway competitive to Android. I think Mozilla would be better to concentrate their resources elsewhere.

Re: Mozilla to open first-world front in Firefox OS war

#55

Post by Brakenshire »

I help a lot of middle aged and elderly people who are not all that tech literate, and get asked a lot for recommendations, and I definitely think there is a niche for something between feature phones and smart phones. A lot of people are not interested in putting in the investment of time and money to get up to pace using Android or an iPhone. There's quite a big step to using those devices, for instance in managing data use, or in the way that phone functions recede amongst new smartphone features. With Android as a new user you can even for all intents and purposes lose your dialler, by pressing and holding the icon incorrectly.

iOS isn't interested in meeting that market, because of low cost, and if they did attempt it both Android and iOS might well suffer in trying to alter and dilute their brands and the unity of their interfaces.

It also works quite well as an target market, because a lot of the apps that would be expected are quite simple, and shouldn't be too difficult to create using web technologies - maybe news or magazine apps, cinema or TV listings, weather and so on.

Combine the right interface with a price of £50-£100, a good battery life, and a credible promise over security and privacy, and it definitely seems like an option which could get into the retail stores, and a place in the market of perhaps 2-3%, which is a good place to start.

Re: Mozilla to open first-world front in Firefox OS war

#56

Post by xiaq »

Firefox OS, being based on HTML/CSS/JavaScript, sounds a lot more hackable than Android to me. Well, you can hack Android pretty heavily - forking CyanogenMod, writing Xposed plugins, etc., but Java is just obscure and the compile/deploy/debug cycle is too cumbersome for casual hacking.

Hence I look forward to Firefox OS as platform I can easily hack, but I am not sure whether it really is. Could someone with experience tell me:

* How easy is it to deploy a FxOS app? How is the remote debugging experience?

* How easy is it to hack the core apps (e.g. phone, SMS)?

* How easy is it to hack the "framework" (e.g. window manager, status bar)? Is it even written in JavaScript?

Re: Mozilla to open first-world front in Firefox OS war

#57

Post by mmahemoff »

Brakenshire wrote: post #55

I help a lot of middle aged and elderly people who are not all that tech literate, and get asked a lot for recommendations, and I definitely think there is a niche for something between feature phones and smart phones. A lot of people are not interested in putting in the investment of time and money to get up to pace using Android or an iPhone. There's quite a big step to using those devices, for instance in managing…

I agree there's a good opportunity for simpler phones that still get some of the benefits of smartphones rather than a 10 year old Nokia.

That said, I don't see much in the article to suggest this is what Mozilla is going after. Yes, some of the devices will be cheap, but there are plenty of cheap Android and Windows phones too.

Even if an OS did target just this market, the problem would still be a lack of apps. They might not be the kind of users who install 10 home screens full of apps, but many of them will be interested in a handful of apps in different categories, so the long-tail marketplace still matters. That's where there's an advantage to an Android phone customised for simple usage, but still with the ability for a user (or their tech-savvy friends/family) to install a wide range of apps if/when they want to.

Re: Mozilla to open first-world front in Firefox OS war

#58

Post by SwellJoe »

xorcist wrote: post #53
SwellJoe wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK, I'll give them credit for strong-arming the web into giving up its addiction to Adobe Flash. That was a win for the open and standards-based web.

That credit should probably go to Google, and to a lesser extent to Firefox (which at least tried). Google used the strong weight of Youtube to make sure all web browsers implemented a replacement, a long and tiresome process that took the better part of ten years. They bought companies and gave patents away along the way. I'm not sure exactly what Apple did. Please enlighten me.

Apple kept Flash off the iPhone, at a time when nearly all web video was in Flash, and when iPhone was the phone to have. There was much gnashing of teeth, but Jobs and Apple stood firm, and demanded the world come to them (which is their way, but in this case what they were doing was for good and not evil).

It definitely wasn't just Apple. Google and Mozilla certainly played a huge role, and I definitely consider them much better web citizens than Apple (Mozilla best of all, obviously), but a lot of sites switched to HTML5 video only because they wanted to be watchable on iOS devices.

Re: Mozilla to open first-world front in Firefox OS war

#59

Post by Brakenshire »

lambda wrote: post #43
bla2 wrote: post #31

I'd rather they'd push Firefox on Android more. Firefox OS seems stillborn, but Firefox/Android is a good product and mobile could need more browser competition.

I feel like one thing they could do to promote Firefox OS would be to make it possible to run Firefox OS applications on Android; create an installer/app store that would allow you to install them as if they were native apps, but they would be using a shared runtime. That would really help to make it worthwhile to develop FxOS apps; actually having a large installed base of phones that they could be used on, in order…

> I feel like one thing they could do to promote Firefox OS would be to make it possible to run Firefox OS applications on Android; create an installer/app store that would allow you to install them as if they were native apps, but they would be using a shared runtime.

Good news! That already exists in Firefox for Android, it's called Firefox Marketplace, it works by packaging up the apps as apks, which means they can operate as native android apps with access to native device APIs.

Re: Mozilla to open first-world front in Firefox OS war

#60

Post by fabrice_d »

xiaq wrote: post #56

Firefox OS, being based on HTML/CSS/JavaScript, sounds a lot more hackable than Android to me. Well, you can hack Android pretty heavily - forking CyanogenMod, writing Xposed plugins, etc., but Java is just obscure and the compile/deploy/debug cycle is too cumbersome for casual hacking. Hence I look forward to Firefox OS as platform I can easily hack, but I am not sure whether it really is. Could someone with experie…

* deploying apps is super easy - either host them on a web server or push them from firefox's webIDE, and remote debugging using the firefox devtools just works.

* hacking core apps is totally doable. You need a rooted device to update them though. Currently the best ones would be nexus 5 or sony z3(c).

* everything that is displayed is html/js/css. What you call "framework" here is part of the system app (https://github.com/mozilla-b2g/gaia/tree/master/apps/system). It's a fairly large app, but it's where a lot of the fun stuff is!

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