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Firefox OS devices officially released

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Re: Firefox OS devices officially released

#111

Post by bad_user »

shmerl wrote: post #108
nakedrobot2 wrote: post #59

I think Firefox OS has potentially huge geek (read: early adopter) appeal, which Blackberry and Windows Mobile do not have - they are dead. Tizen, Jolla, and others are just obscure specks. I am rooting for Firefox OS to be a serious contender within a couple of years. I think it has a strong chance to be #3. Likewise I don't think it has any chance whatsoever of taking the #1 or #2 spots - those are going to stay as…

Jolla has a better appeal I think. Firstly it's a full pledged Linux, not limited to JavaScript applications only. Secondly one will be able to run Firefox OS applications on Jolla as well, since the browser there is using Gecko.

Jolla also inherits all the problems associated with desktop Linux and it would also have most of the same problems that Android does (fragmentation, upgrade cycle, etc...).

I like the Firefox OS concept because it has a better chance at being popular amongst non-technical folks and because, even if it had like 5% of the market share and no more, even so it would bring benefits to everybody, including developers, including end-users - because those Web APIs are also pushed by Mozilla for standardization.

Re: Firefox OS devices officially released

#112

Post by shmerl »

bad_user wrote: post #111
shmerl wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jolla has a better appeal I think. Firstly it's a full pledged Linux, not limited to JavaScript applications only. Secondly one will be able to run Firefox OS applications on Jolla as well, since the browser there is using Gecko.

Jolla also inherits all the problems associated with desktop Linux and it would also have most of the same problems that Android does (fragmentation, upgrade cycle, etc...). I like the Firefox OS concept because it has a better chance at being popular amongst non-technical folks and because, even if it had like 5% of the market share and no more, even so it would bring benefits to everybody, including developers, inc…

What are those problems inherited from desktop Linux? I don't like the concept of limited systems like Firefox OS (for me personally) since I prefer more flexible and feature rich systems, but I see nothing wrong with them in general, they can be useful in some cases.

The discussion above was about the huge geek appeal, not about the general appeal. That's why I answered that Jolla has a better geek appeal. Although they work hard to address the general public needs as well, in order not to make their system targeted to the tech crowd only.

Re: Firefox OS devices officially released

#113

Post by happycube »

aaronharder wrote: post #66
pjmlp wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fully agree. It is great that Mozilla is fighting for openness, but in terms of what street joe and street jane want, I think it will join WebOS in a few months. Given my experience in telecommunications I don't see how sales are going to push these devices out of the shop when users come asking for other OSs.

One big difference from WebOS is that the company behind FirefoxOS will not likely abandon it within 12 months of kicking it off. 4th or 5th place in the market might represent enough scale to be considered a "success" as far as Mozilla is concerned.

The phones are also being built by multiple large ODM's, and not just one company that's barely staying afloat (Palm) or a company suffering at the time from a horrible CEO (HP)...

Re: Firefox OS devices officially released

#114

Post by angry-hacker »

at-fates-hands wrote: post #101
diggan wrote: post #15

This is my lucky day to be in Spain! Have been following the project from the B2G[0] days and will order a phone ASAP. If you are in Spain, you can order the phone from Telefonica[1] and if you are like me and want to talk with other Firefox OS nerds, there is a Google Plus community for that[2] Also, don't forget that if you want to develop for Firefox OS but don't yet have a device for it, you can run the superfast…

This is awesome. Can you give some more specs on the phone and possible price point in Spain?

€69 with €30 in prepaid credit, no contract

Re: Firefox OS devices officially released

#115

Post by mcantelon »

pjmlp wrote: post #23
PommeDeTerre wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox OS will need to successfully compete against BlackBerry OS, Windows Mobile, bada and the other quite obscure mobile OSes long before it'll have a chance to even begin competing against Android or iOS. Many of these alternative systems have actually shipped on numerous devices, and have actual users. And how exactly is it "different"? Firefox OS is really just a limited subset of what we already have available…

Fully agree. It is great that Mozilla is fighting for openness, but in terms of what street joe and street jane want, I think it will join WebOS in a few months. Given my experience in telecommunications I don't see how sales are going to push these devices out of the shop when users come asking for other OSs.

>I think it will join WebOS in a few months.

You're comparing apples to oranges. WebOS was closed source with limited hardware vendors. FireFox OS is open source, open to all hardware vendors.

Good platforms tend to do well in the marketplace because they attract investment from the outside world. Android is beating iOS because it's a better platform for vendors. FireFox OS is not only a better platform for vendors than iOS, it may turn out to be a better platform for devs than both iOS and Android.

Re: Firefox OS devices officially released

#116

Post by lbenes »

mwcampbell wrote: post #91
Yoric wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Android and Firefox OS both also have a VM to run managed code, along with a JIT compiler. Android's VM, Dalvik, was specifically designed to be memory efficient in the case where several apps are running as separate Unix processes. Is the same true of SpiderMonkey? Short answer: yes, SpiderMonkey has been designed to be quite memory efficient. > But on top of this, Firefox OS and its apps add: Actually, let me cla…

Your argument is quite plausible. Android has indeed accumulated several APIs: ANSI C, POSIX, various Khronos APIs (OpenGL ES, OpenMAX), a subset of J2SE, and Android APIs (both Java and native, with some overlap between the two). I can accept that offering only web APIs leaves much more room for streamlining the lower layers of the stack. Maybe a future Firefox OS phone will run a new processor that was specifically…

No, they are not plausible. The whole idea of using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript as the back end technology for a low-end smartphone is nuts. Even the best HTML rendering engines are CPU and memory hogs. CSS was never designed for and is nearly impossible to hardware accelerate, and JavaScript is notoriously difficult to optimize and even the best VMs run orders 3-10x slower than native code, while the JS VM takes up much more memory than the efficient dalvik.

All the early reviews of Firefox OS describe it as laggy and slow. For example this one from the verge: "Lag is a major concern — apps took multiple seconds to load, to change toggles, and to make UI transitions"[1]

Or this one from CNET: "unresponsive screen makes typing a laborious process requiring painstaking precision. Every action from swiping to tapping onscreen controls takes a beat until you see results, so using the phone for a prolonged period steals minutes of your time... Lag carries into the camera, which is slow to launch, snap, and reset."[2]

>"designed for documents, not UIs, was too handwavy" Not for anyone who's had to work with DOM for Web apps. We know all too well as its name suggests that it was never designed for apps and is well past its expiration date.

My 3yr old similarly spec'd SGS runs CM 10, Jellybean like a champ. My mom's worse spec'd 3GS is still smooth and fluid. Of course, a low end Android phone running the most resource intensive skin, TouchWiz, is going to perform poorly, but in my experience vanilla AOSP scales down quite nicely on low-end hardware.

So how does this phone benefit Joe User? It's an android kernel, but the user is cut off of the diverse android app ecosystem. The performance looks terrible, and the user is locked into the Firefox browser, like Safari on iOS.

[1]http://www.theverge.com/2013/2/24/4024530/ztes-open-is-the-f...

[2]http://reviews.cnet.com/smartphones/geeksphone-keon/4505-645...

Re: Firefox OS devices officially released

#117

Post by Yoric »

mwcampbell wrote: post #91
Yoric wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Android and Firefox OS both also have a VM to run managed code, along with a JIT compiler. Android's VM, Dalvik, was specifically designed to be memory efficient in the case where several apps are running as separate Unix processes. Is the same true of SpiderMonkey? Short answer: yes, SpiderMonkey has been designed to be quite memory efficient. > But on top of this, Firefox OS and its apps add: Actually, let me cla…

Your argument is quite plausible. Android has indeed accumulated several APIs: ANSI C, POSIX, various Khronos APIs (OpenGL ES, OpenMAX), a subset of J2SE, and Android APIs (both Java and native, with some overlap between the two). I can accept that offering only web APIs leaves much more room for streamlining the lower layers of the stack. Maybe a future Firefox OS phone will run a new processor that was specifically…

> Maybe a future Firefox OS phone will run a new processor that was specifically designed to execute JavaScript.

I haven't heard of any such plans, but that would be fun. Ah, the good (?) old days of the Lisp machine...

> Any sufficiently complex UI toolkit contains an ad hoc, informally specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of HTML and CSS -- and then probably contains a full Web browsing engine, too.

Let it be said that the Mwcampbell Law was first enunciated on Hacker News on the Ninth of July, 2013.

> Can you explain why you think the Java storage APIs are ill-suited to mobile devices?

Generally, it's a set of simple things. The File API, for instance, should forbid execution of any I/O call on the UI thread, or on any high-priority thread, as the duration of any I/O call is unbounded (Dalvik can be executed in a "strict mode" that prevents I/O calls on the UI thread, which is good, unfortunately that's not the default mode).

Also, the default manner of doing any copy with the File API is a read/write loop, which is very inefficient in terms of memory copies, especially when Linux offers in-kernel copy.

etc.

Re: Firefox OS devices officially released

#118

Post by Yoric »

glogla wrote: post #97
Yoric wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, hello PommeDeTerre. Haven't we had roughly the same conversation last week on another thread? > Firefox OS will need to successfully compete against BlackBerry OS, Windows Mobile, [...] Yes, a new product needs to compete with existing products. That goes without saying. > And how exactly is it "different"? Frankly? Try it, you'll see. For me, it's different insofar as I can write a small game and self-publish it…

I'm curious about this: > Of course it can. On low-powered phones, FirefoxOS tends to outperform Android by a large margin. This means that you can have the same experience with cheaper phones. I don't want to imply you're lying or something, but is there something to support this claim? For example, I have Huawei Ascend G300 here (1)(, and apparently I can install FFOS on it. Is it going to be faster than CyanogenMo…

> I don't want to imply you're lying or something, but is there something to support this claim?

I can only speak from my personal experience, sorry. Maybe someone else has benchmarks to back the claim.

Re: Firefox OS devices officially released

#119

Post by thelukester »

kimlelly wrote: post #25
diggan wrote: post #15

This is my lucky day to be in Spain! Have been following the project from the B2G[0] days and will order a phone ASAP. If you are in Spain, you can order the phone from Telefonica[1] and if you are like me and want to talk with other Firefox OS nerds, there is a Google Plus community for that[2] Also, don't forget that if you want to develop for Firefox OS but don't yet have a device for it, you can run the superfast…

This is currently the most open mobile OS. Count me in!

Count you in on the openness alone? Who are you, RMS? There's already an extremely open OS out there. In fact Firefox OS is based off of it. You can download the source code, build it yourself, and submit patches. You can even change the default app store. It comes with a rich app ecosystem and a beautifully designed and responsive UI. The latter two are what people in the real world care about when choosing a smartphone.

Re: Firefox OS devices officially released

#120

Post by ndesaulniers »

gebe wrote: post #57
diggan wrote: post #15

This is my lucky day to be in Spain! Have been following the project from the B2G[0] days and will order a phone ASAP. If you are in Spain, you can order the phone from Telefonica[1] and if you are like me and want to talk with other Firefox OS nerds, there is a Google Plus community for that[2] Also, don't forget that if you want to develop for Firefox OS but don't yet have a device for it, you can run the superfast…

I can't say that I have used the Firefox OS simulator extensively but I have been fiddling around with it a little bit and a lot of stuff didn't seem to work for me at least (like landscape mode, buttons in the notification menu, scroll seem to behave very weird in lists and/or gets stuck quite often resulting in me accidentally clicking on stuff, strange text formatting so that text gets printed outside of the scree…

File bugs and we'll take a look! [1]

[1] https://github.com/mozilla/r2d2b2g/issues

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