Another dead project by Mozilla, not sure when they will understand they don't have resources like Google
Google has plenty of dead projects too.
Mozilla has stopped all commercial development on Firefox OS
151–160 of 342 posts
Re: Mozilla has stopped all commercial development on Firefox OS
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unfortunately it's also JVM [edit: Java] on the phone.
It is a fork of the Java language with its own AOT/JIT compiler, nothing to do with a certified JVM.
Larry Ellison doesn't seem to agree with your "nothing to do with [...] JVM" assertion, to the tune of a 9.3 billion USD lawsuit, and indeed Google itself is developing Fuchsia with no java stack at all in it.
Moreover, it's not Linux if you have to use a Java API to do anything useful.
Re: Mozilla has stopped all commercial development on Firefox OS
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
Mozilla of course has every right to determine how it wants to allocate its resources... but to me, this action speaks loudly that you cannot really count on them to stay the course. So, from an outsider perspective, every initiative must be analyzed skeptically, since they may leave you holding the bag. This is always true to a degree, but the more true you think it is, the less likely you are to jump onto said init…
> this action speaks loudly that you cannot really count on them to stay the course. To be fair, on whom can you count? Although Google has had a success with Android, my impression is that the ground is littered with the projects that it advertised heavily but then left behind, abandoned, or killed.
The entire panorama of Silicon Valley is littered with the corpses of things tried and abandoned. I think that's the nature of software.
Re: Mozilla has stopped all commercial development on Firefox OS
#154What was the point of Firefox OS? I never really saw any kind of marketing around it beyond "Mozilla decided to make a phone OS." From what I've gleaned, the only differentiating factor was that all apps are Javascript. Like my mom cares what languages her apps are written in.
All of the phone features were available from web apps. Including the dialer, camera, accelerometers etc. It's a big improvement because if you only know HTML and JS, you can access all the features of the platform. You don't have to write a version of your app for each platform and maybe submit your app to a store. Just push your new page to the web and presto, you're on every platform.
Re: Mozilla has stopped all commercial development on Firefox OS
#155When they ditched the Firefox phone I new it was over. They didn't really give it an earnest try. Smells a lot like HP's destruction of webOS. I would not be surprised if powerful players in the industry pressured them to drop it.
Re: Mozilla has stopped all commercial development on Firefox OS
#156So we had Jolla, Ubuntu, Mozilla and even Microsoft trying to create a new major player in the mobile OSs market - all pretty much failed to do so. Is it practically impossible? Are we stuck with Android and iOS forever? This tiny selection of options worries me.
I don't count Microsoft out of the space over the long term. Unification of the Windows platform from microcontrollers to servers is fairly far along and mobile phone operating systems are, for Microsoft, just another application of the Windows 10 technology.
Windows 10 Mobile has some of the advantages of iOS in terms of security updates and the Microsoft developer infrastructure -- whether that's a good thing depends on one's technical opinion of Visual Studio versus Xcode and Android Studio in terms of programming ergonomics and features and languages.
All that said, that doesn't mean that Windows Mobile will ever be successful or that a world where it's Apple, Google and Microsoft would be significantly better.
Re: Mozilla has stopped all commercial development on Firefox OS
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
What GNU/Linux mobile? Can you elaborate on that?
I develop for SailfishOS. As I described in one of my other comments, it really is just "regular" GNU/Linux underneath: >> I develop software for SailfishOS. It's like the Linux desktop. I SSH into my phone. zypper/pkcon install some dev tools (e.g. gcc, make, git). I initialise a Python virtualenv, pull down some libraries (e.g. Flask). I want to query SMS messages? I open an sqlite database on the filesystem. I can…
I had never heard of SailfishOS before this thread. Now I really want to pick up a device with SailfishOS, but I was planning on getting on GoogleFI compatible device in the next couple months. Decisions...
In any case, thank you for your efforts. I've been waiting for UbuntuOS for all the features I didn't know Sailfish has already.
Re: Mozilla has stopped all commercial development on Firefox OS
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
But this a poor, skewing argument always made by at least one person here. For most FF is very responsive and there are no problems what so ever. And FF is not FF-OS.
> For most FF is very responsive and there are no problems what so ever. Open dev tools, type `for (;;) {}`. Notice the whole browser becomes unresponsive. This has been improved upon (as in it doesn't block the whole Firefox UI, just merely every single content tab) thanks to Electrolysis partially reaching stable but "there are no problems whatsoever" simply isn't true performance wise (and this is the most obvious…
Run an infinite for loop and look at the performance degradation is about the dumbest test you could do. That's literally asking it to not stop executing. Yeah tab isolation would mean you only crash a tab but that isn't a good example.
Re: Mozilla has stopped all commercial development on Firefox OS
#159So we had Jolla, Ubuntu, Mozilla and even Microsoft trying to create a new major player in the mobile OSs market - all pretty much failed to do so. Is it practically impossible? Are we stuck with Android and iOS forever? This tiny selection of options worries me.
For the average non-technical user, a "pure Linux" phone with no sand boxing would be a security nightmare. Just look at jailbroken iOS devices as an example. Maybe sophisticated users know how to take extra precautions in exchange for more freedom, but the average user will happily use banking apps with no idea what the other processes on the phone are doing. For this reason, Android is a good middle-ground. It's we…
Sure, android might be good enough for most people. But that's like saying porridge is good enough for most people. I want a steak, or a burger. The problem is that I don't really have a choice right now, I don't want porridge.
Additionally, even if you trust Google today, they can turn evil tomorrow and then we'd have >75% of people who are using android without any options. Diversifying the available options in the market market is good for everyone except Google.
Re: Mozilla has stopped all commercial development on Firefox OS
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
Compaq, on the other hand, was the first “PC clone” company. It’s a term that sounds rather quaint today. At the time, though, Compaq sent a shudder through the industry. Compaq reverse-engineered the IBM PC BIOS without ever looking at the BIOS code. That was harder than you might think, because IBM actually published the assembly code for the PC BIOS in its technical reference manuals. Compaq was able to prove that…
So the code was available but certainly not permitted to be used in a competing product without licensing. The BIOS had to be clean-room reverse engineered to legally build PC clones. If anything, the availability of the code made things more difficult for Compaq!
Sure, but the conversation is wandering now. The original comment wasn't about Compaq. (It didn't even mention it.) It was about the IBM PC and whether IBM "schematics and BIOS source code". Which they did.
And regarding the burden that IBM's choice strained Compaq with, in the overall impact on the industry, any difficulty was by far offset by the benefits. If we're going to focus on BIOSes, for example, the fact that the source code was available certainly helped Phoenix.