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

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

#141

Post by spiralpolitik » Mon, Mar 02, 2015, 12:18 PM UTC

onion2k wrote: post #122

spiralpolitik wrote: post #121

Firefox OS is a great idea, and if it was 2010 it would probably stand a good chance at succeeding with the correct launch strategy. But its not 2010. This weekend I had a chance to play with a Jolla smartphone. Hardware wise it pretty good, and had some really good ideas, but the software was half baked. While in time both Jolla and Firefox OS could become great products, but time ran out a while back. You now have…

There are a lot more people who can write a web app than a mobile app, by a factor of 10 at least. Give them a platform where it's trivial to make an app (easier than, say, Cordova/PhoneGap), and make it free, and you could easily disrupt the mobile market to a small degree. If FirefoxOS is a success the next challenge will come from the fact that iOS and Android could easily have HTML5 apps too with a native Webview…

At this point "a small degree" won't amount to anything. Look at how much money Microsoft have had to burn through to get the few percentage points they've managed to amass. And they still can't get developers onto their ecosystem despite the bribes they've thrown out.

It's go big or go home time and Mozilla simply don't have the resources to do it.

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

#142

Post by themartorana » Mon, Mar 02, 2015, 1:07 PM UTC

pjc50 wrote: post #130

themartorana wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Man, webOS ruled in this market before the epic journey that was its downfall. I had to drag unwilling family members kicking and screaming to iOS, unable to give a good explanation for why it was missing so many conveniences webOS had. It would be nice if another OS could be as instantly familiar as it was, as willing to be as simple or as complex as its user asked it to be. It's funny how even today iOS and Android…

This sounds interesting, could you list some of these conveniences?

From before iOS 5, webOS had pull down menus, wifi quick-select (STILL missing in iOS) card-based interface, card-based background-pause multitasking, backgrounded music player, card-based multitasking switcher with swipe-up to close, and the list continues. If these sound familiar it's because iOS ripped off so many of them.

http://www.theverge.com/2013/6/11/4418188/apple-ios-7-design...

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

#143

Post by abrowne » Mon, Mar 02, 2015, 1:22 PM UTC

sutro wrote: post #131

abrowne wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Verizon has the best coverage in rural areas, at least where people I know live: southeast Minnesota, western Wisconsin, and Iowa. Many of my (and my friends') relatives in these areas still use flip phones or have reluctantly upgraded to iPhones or Android. Verizon is wise to have an option that's not a smartphone and not total junk. I just upgraded my ZTE Open C to FxOS 3.0. This phone is similar, but worse, in spe…

Any tips or links you can share for getting your Open C to FxOS 3.0? Did you have to first upgrade the base image from JellyBean to KitKat? Were you able to shallow flash a nightly image or did you have to build everything yourself? I have an Open C and am on 2.1, but haven't yet tried to move past that. Thanks!

I had played with using the Flame images a while back, but I had never gotten around to building anything myself. Just a couple days ago I read that the EU Ebay version (but not the FR version!) is the same as (or similar enough to) the US version, so the MozFR builds here work: http://builds.firefoxos.mozfr.org/doc/en/devices/zte-open-c-...

I haven't tried SIM/phone-related function yet, but everything else is working for me.

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

#144

Post by currywurst » Mon, Mar 02, 2015, 1:42 PM UTC

hackuser wrote: post #79

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…

OT: Do you have any recommendations for elderly users? Any resources would be great, too. I've looked around but it's hard to find current, reliable information on a somewhat unusual topic. The specs I find myself dealing with are the following, which I think are typical: * Very little knowledge of mobile computer conventions, or any computer conventions: Icon literacy, swiping, tapping, home screens, etc. Some don't…

Strangely enough, Windows Phone 8.1 is a great option for this demographic. The typographic is big and bold. There are very few "places" in the UI.

The OS is pretty efficient with battery, and IE 11 is a reasonable browser.

Outlook syncs well with gmail and I guess access to the latest greatest games is not a concern.

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

#145

Post by coldpie » Mon, Mar 02, 2015, 1:44 PM UTC

blueskin_ wrote: post #137

tome wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is XPrivacy?

http://repo.xposed.info/module/biz.bokhorst.xprivacy It filters permission requests so when an app tries to use one, it gives you a popup with allow/deny temporarily/permanently options, so if an app wants to access something it shouldn't (location, contacts, device ID, etc.), you can feed it empty/fake data transparently to it.

This requires rooting, which (unfortunately) comes with all sorts of strings attached and ugly rough edges. I'd rather have the idea of a flexible permissions model built into the OS.

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

#146

Post by Gurkenmaster » Mon, Mar 02, 2015, 2:00 PM 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 a joke, even v8 is faster than it and it's not a JVM. That's why Oracle was trying to sue Google.

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

#147

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Mar 02, 2015, 2:29 PM UTC

TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #4

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.

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.

[deleted]

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

#148

Post by Kankuro » Mon, Mar 02, 2015, 2:30 PM UTC

TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #4

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.

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.

My experience: I considered porting Ankidroid (a flashcard app) from Android to FirefoxOS (because it is a must-have for my phone). Its storage is based on SQLite, which is ported into Javascript via emscripten. Problem: it only support in-memory operations. Because my SQLite file is 70Mo+ large, it is not an option.

In SQLite you can write a abstraction layer for the I/O, but the operations are synchronous, and all the I/O operations in Firefox OS are asynchronous (so it would require modifying heavily the library). So I gave up, and maybe I will start the day FirefoxOS provides supports natively SQLite. Sad thing: Firefox addons have native support for SQLite.

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

#149

Post by ralmidani » Mon, Mar 02, 2015, 6:07 PM UTC

I really want to support Firefox OS and abandon Android. But Mozilla keeps missing the mark as far as I'm concerned. I don't want a flip phone, or a low-spec phone, or one that's only available in Japan. I just want something with a decent quad-core and more than 1gb of ram that I can purchase in the US and that will come with a warranty.

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

#150

Post by vanadium » Tue, Mar 03, 2015, 5:16 AM UTC

tracker1 wrote: post #106

vanadium wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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." Not true at all, actually; I was doing this back in 2009 on Palm's webOS platform as one of the first wave of devs with early SDK access. IMO, webOS' adoption of HTML5/JS apps as "native" was too ahead of its time, and unfortunately early enough where the i…

I have to say that WebOS on the touchpad was probably my first positive tablet experience as a user.. the UI made total sense and worked incredibly well... I think that Android and iOS have finally caught up, but there's something to be said for webOS' simplicity in design. It was definitely ahead of its' time.. I didn't stick with it long, as the browser became very dated, very quickly.. but overall it is still one…

The webOS UI design and interaction model was something pretty damned amazing for its time, and still unparalleled in certain aspects. No doubts there.