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The Promise of Firefox OS

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Re: The Promise of Firefox OS

#111

Post by zanny »

ricw wrote: post #52
marknutter wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is just trolling, come on now.

Not at all. Dead serious. If HTML/CSS/javascript had been properly developed we wouldn't even have to deal with all the issues surrounding web dev. All these issues have been addressed by OS development decades ago (e.g. duplex connectivity, UX layout, MVC split, performance, just to name a few), yet we still have to deal with them now. Million of man-hours have been wasted due to them.. So no, this is not trolling.…

If only I could write web documents in yaml + python.

I do agree, and I hope people aren't downvoting you like crazy, because the only reason html/css/js exist is because it is entrenched. Same reason people use C and C++. They both took a market you can't easily shift away from (by both being effectively an ABI) and are now indisputable.

Fuzzy XML with a curly braces C style semicolon delimitered design language? A programming language with no standard library besides a math module, so your website ends up being 3mB of JS libraries and 100kB of actual document?

Though I wouldn't say mobile apps are absolutely a "blessing". The Android XML + Java morass is barely a step above html + javascript, and I'd argue it has even less productivity. I end up getting the most freaky bugs in layouts trying to get them working on multiple devices and waste so much time on that blasted syntax.

Re: The Promise of Firefox OS

#112

Post by kunai »

Interesting. I'd love to see Firebooks in the future along with Chromebooks. It would be nice to have two cloud-based operating systems for the desktop out there.

Re: The Promise of Firefox OS

#113

Post by anon1385 »

sanxiyn wrote: post #80
anon1385 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe eventually we will have 'sufficiently smart transpilers' and interactive debuggers for languages that target javascript and don't expose the 'JSVM' but that is not the case at the moment. Mozilla said "And if your problem is with JavaScript as a language, you can already use a myriad of languages that reliably compile to it", i.e. if you don't like javascript you don't need to use javascript. This is what I was…

Have you tried source maps? http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/developertools/source...

Right now source mapping is only working between uncompressed/combined JavaScript to compressed/uncombined JavaScript

Which was exactly my point. The tools for targeting javascript from other languages are non-existent at the moment, never mind mature enough that I would want to rely on them in production.

As an aside, am I the only person who reads things like this and is filled with a sense of foreboding:

The spec mentions cross site script inclusion issues that could arise from the consumption of a source map. To mitigate this it's recommended that you prepend the first line of your source map with ")]}" to deliberately invalidate JavaScript so a syntax error will be thrown.

Re: The Promise of Firefox OS

#114

Post by Suan »

mephju wrote: post #66

This is a real question and no trolling: Why is nobody building a second kind of browser, one which is not based on html and css. A browser which is geared towards app execution and development. A browser which can run apps which can be programmed in a way that is similar to programming Android apps. Where I can for example have a footer without doing some css hacks. DNS and most of our backends could still be reused…

This thought has been in my head ever since I read this HN comment last night: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5199006

To everyone saying that this has been tried and failed with Java Applets / Silverlight / Flash: what those technologies did was try to shoehorn app-like environments into the browser, which of course annoyed users because it broke all kinds of expectations when compared to visiting regular HTML pages.

What I (and I think, the OP) have in mind is an actual 2nd "browser". A different standalone app. I envision something where "webapp" authors can post manifests at URL endpoints which define the UI and behavior (not unlike styling in Android), and this 2nd browser will "render" the webapp using native widgets and controls. This brings with it a number of things:

  - OMG! The basic keyboard shortcuts all my other native apps have are now available, instead of some poorly hacked-together javascript-detected version
  - Rich user interaction with the app and the controls is now a first-class citizen - no more weird highlighting of the entire page, or unexpected popping-up and disappearing of elements on misclicks
  - Right click can actually be used, without hacks!
  - Opening a new "window" with a new app actually creates an OS-level window with the icon and name being the webapp's favicon - furthering the notion that you're actually using an app and not visiting a website.
  - It still retains the main advantages of the web - it's cross-platform and ubiquitous (and users don't have to go through the hassle of explicitly installing and updating native apps)
  - I'm sure developing highly interactive webapps for this platform would be a lot simpler, more fundamentally sound, and more enjoyable than the huge hack that is HTML5/AJAX now
  - etc etc
It would really surprise me if nobody has thought through this idea in more detail than me, or if there isn't someone out there working on something like this already...

(EDIT: formatting)

Re: The Promise of Firefox OS

#115

Post by Ntrails »

chris_wot wrote: post #58
bmuon wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked as a front-end developer for an adnetwork for two years, so I take a little responsibility for your experience. I tried my best, but there just wasn't that much interest in getting it right. Here's why I think we're all having a hard time with advertising in mobile. Basically, adnetworks are still learning how to do it right, the same way designers and developers are still learning how to do mobile websites…

Frankly, if all the ad networks in existence fall over and die from their own crudulence, I'll not shed any tears whatsoever. Any site that uses crap ads that affect my user experience will really have to be something special for me to continue to use them. I'm happy to leave these sites for other sites that don't do stupid things to users.

If only it were that easy to shift away from facebook...

The ability to properly adblock is actually a genuine factor that could make my next mobile something other than an iPhone

Re: The Promise of Firefox OS

#116

Post by Millennium »

mephju wrote: post #66

This is a real question and no trolling: Why is nobody building a second kind of browser, one which is not based on html and css. A browser which is geared towards app execution and development. A browser which can run apps which can be programmed in a way that is similar to programming Android apps. Where I can for example have a footer without doing some css hacks. DNS and most of our backends could still be reused…

Your way has been tried, by not one but two companies. Their browsers were called IE4 and NS4, and the blame for the Web "not being up to the task" is pretty much entirely theirs.

Re: The Promise of Firefox OS

#117

Post by marknutter »

cheeaun wrote: post #92
marknutter wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually use http://cheeaun.github.com/ , which is entirely web based and works wonderfully well. No updating of the app required, no mini-browser within the app, etc.

I think you mean http://hackerwebapp.com/ ? ;)

oh, haha, right!

Re: The Promise of Firefox OS

#119

Post by pragmatictester »

VaucGiaps wrote: post #2

I would have liked to have heard a story like this one at FOSDEM. You had a room full of interested IT people/devs/... and missed selling the 'spirit' of fOS. Too bad...

https://fosdem.org/2013/schedule/event/firefox_os/ https://fosdem.org/2013/interviews/2013-jonas-sicking/ https://fosdem.org/2013/schedule/event/automating_firefox_os...

Re: The Promise of Firefox OS

#120

Post by electrograv »

mephju wrote: post #100
electrograv wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've thought about this a lot myself. The language issue ultimately leads you to conclude that we need a browser with a built-in VM, rather than a built-in scripting language. It makes so much more sense, as a clean and elegant solution. "I know! I'll make my own new browser with an embedded VM and newer cleaner APIs, and revolutionize the web! It'll be amazing, allowing native-like performance from the browser. WebG…

Great to hear someone is looking into this even though it's only a side project! But I am not sure the GUI engine would really take THAT long. How long did the Android guys need for their GUI solution?. It would be interesting to know that. And no, I actually don't know people working on projects like this :)

Yeah it's not an impossibly complex task, which is why I'm working on it, one step at a time. But it's much more involved than it sounds at first.

Of course a simple "widget" library is relatively easy to make, provided you already have powerful drawing and text functions. Then you realize, integrating text entry and copy paste consistent with the operating system gets much more tricky if you're making all your own widgets from scratch. More complex rich markup is even harder though... getting text to flow around correctly while achieving the layout you want at the same time. I think CSS does a fairly good job here, but I think we can do better.

A lot of the work before you even get to this stage though lies in good cross platform drawing and text rendering. OpenGL support is a 'must', of course. Then, 2D and vector graphics need to be implemented. OpenVG is supposed to provide this, but is useless as a cross platform solution, because it's only supported on a handful of mobile only systems. So I'd either have to implement all of OpenVG through OpenGL (and I certainly don't look forward to implementing the mess that is SVG) to get HW acceleration, or make my own VG library.

But that doesn't even solve text rendering. Text rendering western fonts is relatively easy, but it gets much more complex when you need to support unicode cursive fonts like Arabic with HW acceleration consistently. Fortunately the actual shape generation is already solved in the GNU world, but caching fonts efficiently on the GPU and with smooth antialiasing is another matter. It would be nice to just use the operating systems text renderer, but not only would the results be inconsistent across platforms, but I don't think it's possible to do this on an OpenGL framebuffer on all platforms.

So once I have HW cached text rendering, and vector graphics, only then can I even start thinking about building a widget library on top of it.

So it's much more complex than it initially sounds when you have to essentially reinvent the entirety of what the OS GUI API should provide. And if you can't settle for lowest-common-denominator functionality provided by all OSes, then reinventing the wheel is your only remaining option.

I know how to do all this, it's just a lot of work. If I was working on it full time it would go fairly quickly, but it doesn't seem to be a very profitable task so that's not feasible right now.

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