Mozilla to open first-world front in Firefox OS war • Hacker News Board

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

#81

Post by hackuser » Mon, Mar 02, 2015, 1:21 AM UTC

MichaelGG wrote: post #7

SwellJoe wrote: post #2

I'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…

> Every time I use the Play store

Try F-Droid, a repository of FOSS apps with a focus on user confidentiality. They offer some security assurance by building and signing the apps from the orginal source, and offer nice functionality such as automatic updates (which you can disable, of course). Their store and related app is a fork of Aptoide. I often can find good solutions on F-Droid, but the repository is small.

https://f-droid.org/

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

#82

Post by DigitalSea » Mon, Mar 02, 2015, 1:31 AM UTC

Firefox is going to have to fight to get any kind of market share. As Microsoft has shown, you can have great hardware, great interface and tonnes of money behind you, but it does not buy you market share. As long as Mozilla is prepared for the uphill battle they are about to fight, I think they might have a chance.

They really need to carve out a niche like they've done in non first-world countries. Merely being the same as Android or iOS is not going to be enough. They need to get developers on board, but even so, will they have the games that most consumers like to play?

It's a tricky situation, but one nonetheless I am excited to see what happens from.

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

#83

Post by asutherland » Mon, Mar 02, 2015, 1:33 AM UTC

listic wrote: post #16

What is the official way to learn about Firefox OS releases? I can't figure out which version of FxOS has which status, despite being subscribed to mailing lists. Flame update page [1] has images for 2.0, 2.1, 2.2 and 3.0. LG/KDDI Fx0 has apparently shipped in Japan with version 2.0 [2] on December 25, 2014. All this suggests that at least version 2.0 has been released. Yet Wikipedia page [3] doesn't have release dat…

The release management page is https://wiki.mozilla.org/Release_Management/B2G_Landing. You can probably think of the code complete date as the lower bound on a production device shipping with that version of the software.

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

#84

Post by contingencies » Mon, Mar 02, 2015, 1:39 AM UTC

A strong opportunity for FirefoxOS growth is supporting ad-hoc and mesh link layers and providing an intelligent APIs that support that access without compromising security.

It's the anti-Google, anti-carrier, anti-corporate, anti-surveillance, anti-government, pro-efficiency, pro-security, pro-developing world feature everyone wants but nobody can have because none of the mobile OSs support it.

Read bug+PDF @ https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=945047

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

#85

Post by fabrice_d » Mon, Mar 02, 2015, 1:42 AM UTC

icebraining wrote: post #62

fabrice_d wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not being tied to an app silo is pretty unique. Unfortunately most people are either ok with that or haven't yet realized. Uphill battle for sure.

Not really. Android lets you sideload apps pretty easily, and it even has third-party repositories like F-Droid.

That does not make the transition from iOS to Android or vice versa easier. Once you have invested in one ecosystem, you lose your investment if you switch. That does not happen on the web, where you can switch from a browser to another with a very marginal cost.

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

#86

Post by Grazester » Mon, Mar 02, 2015, 1:52 AM UTC

leppr wrote: post #38

Grazester wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the latter, why is that? Is it that Java's VM is already very mature and the community doesn't feel that urgency on "improving" it? Another question. What does Java VM have to do with Android?

I'm not a mobile developer so you shouldn't ask me but basically because of web browsers there's a JS VM in every PC and smartphone nowadays which isn't necessarily the case with Java. And Android runs its applications on a Java VM called Dalvik: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dalvik_(software)

Dalvik is not a Java VM though it is a VM. As of Lollipop Android left the whole VM thing behind and moved to ART so there is no stagnation on that front You linked to the page that states it all but its like you didn't bother to read it yourself.

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

#87

Post by eropple » Mon, Mar 02, 2015, 1:57 AM UTC

fabrice_d wrote: post #42

codewithcheese wrote: post #12

I hope Mozilla make a phone aimed at tech first movers (hacker news crowd etc), we seem to be the most likely to support attempts at openness. It would have to be high end though. A bit like Ubuntu tried to do with the Edge.

If you have a Sony z3 or z3c, you can build and flash firefox OS on it. These are really nice devices imho.

Doing this blows up your camera's low-light performance. Don't do this unless you don't like your phone (and I like mine, so I sure won't).

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

#88

Post by millstone » Mon, Mar 02, 2015, 2:02 AM UTC

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.

What replacement did you mean? Google removed H.264 support from Chromium, and announced that they would remove it from Chrome.

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

#89

Post by Grazester » Mon, Mar 02, 2015, 2:02 AM UTC

jbigelow76 wrote: post #32

SwellJoe wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tinkered with Android development when the original Google Developer Phone came out (aka G1). And, after years of not paying it any attention, because my focus was on server development, I've started learning my way around it again. It's not even the same world. So much of the tedium of developing in Java has gone away, due to better libraries, much better tooling, and just all around a bigger/better ecosystem. Mak…

JavaScript is the path a lot of people want to walk for making mobile apps. Firefox OS is the first to make it the primary way to develop apps for the platform. It has been possible to write fully native (not webview wrappers) Windows Phone apps in HTML and JavaScript for the last four or so years, but web developers didn't really adopt the platform (and those that did primarily used C# and XAML). You can scoff that…

If I had the choice to program in C# or Java I wouldn't touch Js. I can't take the language seriously when the are languages that does things so much better being offered.

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

#90

Post by quanticle » Mon, Mar 02, 2015, 2:13 AM UTC

z3t4 wrote: post #65

on_and_off wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Andro…

Isn't the point of JS that you do not need an SDK!? If I need to use something else then notepad to write a program for FFOS - that would be a big turn-off.

I think you're mistaking a SDK (software development kit) with an IDE (integrated development environment). A SDK is nothing more than a set of libraries that allow you to write code for the target hardware. In this case, the SDK consists of a Firefox extension that you can install, which gives you an emulator that will simulate the phone hardware.

You can totally write FirefoxOS apps in Notepad if you want to. It is just HTML, CSS and Javascript (and a JSON manifest that tells the OS where the entry point for your app is).