161–170 of 331 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Same 'forecasters' that had WP over 20% in 2015, lol. http://cdn.geekwire.com/wp-content/uploads/idc21.jpg
It's maybe at only 5% in LatAm and that's where I know it's been having relative success.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Absolutely right. Dan Callahan's statement on why: "with Mozilla Labs somewhat sudden dissolution, we were unexpectedly asked to demonstrate traction and commercial adoption that simply wasn't there." Commercial adoption? What does that even mean in the context of MoCo? What does MoCo sell? And 24 months? Makes no sense, even for MoCo. Google is consistently a small player in the Cloud Computing Platform space. Their…
I think that for Persona in particular, "commercial adoption" would probably have meant "random startups deploying Persona as their customers' identity provider." The idea being that a government/nonprofit/enterprise can be convinced to adopt any old ridiculous thing if you say the right things about it, but "the market" (i.e. a critical mass of SMBs) will only adopt your product if it's giving them a higher ROI than…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Will Windows Phone/ Windows Mobile be around 2019, as a die-hard WP user, I hope so. I just do not like those icon based OSes.
I suspect the Universal Windows Platform will have a significant impact. Especially the ability to dock your phone with an external display/keyboard/mouse. For a large portion of the market it displaces the need for a second computing device. Microsoft is much further along on this front than both Android and iOS.
From a software perspective, Android has supported this forever. From a hardware perspective, there've been Android devices where accompanying docking solutions was heavily marketed, though none in the last few years, because its something users keep not really wanting in practice, even if they conceptually like the idea in the abstract.
Plus, a substantial fraction of the price and size of a "second computing device" that's larger than your phone is going to be the display, so docking doesn't really solve much of anything (especially when the devices are all cloud connected.) There's zero friction moving between by Android phone and my 12" tablet -- with BT keyboard and, if I felt like using one, BT mouse. And I could use the BT keyboard and mouse with the phone itself, if I wanted to. Either device could connect to an external monitor via HDMI with an inexpensive adaptor (and either can cast its display via Google Cast.)
What, in practical terms, does docking solve?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be fair, the "low-end" devices Firefox OS were targeting were miles more powerful than what Opera Platform targeted a decade prior, and JS VMs are far quicker than they were a decade prior… I'm not sure it's so obvious that low-end devices doomed it to failure (of course, you actually worked on this stuff unlike me!). I think it's worthwhile to remember at the time Firefox OS launched much of Android ran on the Da…
(Hi Geoffrey, ltns! :) ) The execution of the code, be it javascript on some modern engine or Java/Dalvik bytecode - that isn't typically the performance bottleneck. It is fast enough now. I'm not an expert on this (this is where I thread on thin ice), but my understanding is that the HTML/CSS logdoc/layout tree model is inherently non-performant compared to a more traditional hierarchical windowed object oriented mo…
This is not to say that the browsers of today are optimally architected, of course. (In fact, I think they're quite suboptimally architected for 2015 hardware. The "it's too easy to fall off the fast paths" problem of HTML/CSS is a symptom of legacy browser architecture, not a problem with the layout/styling model.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"We" (I have since left Opera Software) really screwed it up with the desktop browser around 2004. Management (i.e. the then-CEO Jon) was too worried about recurring revenue to pull that obnoxious ad banner in the free version until it was too late. At the time the desktop Opera had superior performance compared to Mozilla/Firefox.. but wasn't free/ad-less. It was really depressing to watch. (But at the same time, I…
Do you mind sharing a few of those lucrative / non-annoying monetization models? I'm curious. And thanks for the insights into opera!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I suspect the Universal Windows Platform will have a significant impact. Especially the ability to dock your phone with an external display/keyboard/mouse. For a large portion of the market it displaces the need for a second computing device. Microsoft is much further along on this front than both Android and iOS.
I've been able to (and have done so) plug my android phone into a usb hub with mouse and keyboard and into a 1080p screen for quite a few years now. Of course, there's relatively little that truly takes advantage of that set up, and making the user experience more pleasant would make a huge difference, but android understands mouse and keyboard input just fine. Microsoft may be somewhat further along on this front, b…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I suspect the Universal Windows Platform will have a significant impact. Especially the ability to dock your phone with an external display/keyboard/mouse. For a large portion of the market it displaces the need for a second computing device. Microsoft is much further along on this front than both Android and iOS.
I've been able to (and have done so) plug my android phone into a usb hub with mouse and keyboard and into a 1080p screen for quite a few years now. Of course, there's relatively little that truly takes advantage of that set up, and making the user experience more pleasant would make a huge difference, but android understands mouse and keyboard input just fine. Microsoft may be somewhat further along on this front, b…
But that is going to soon change as MS is working with Intel to launch Intel powered phones (x86). [1]
Regardless of whether Windows phone succeeds or not, I believe the path they are taking will eventually be where all the OSes will end up. The saying "The best camera is the one that is with you" may hold true for computers in the future.
Imagine hotels & coffee shops offering a dock for rooms/tables and the only thing you need is your phone. Plug it in and voila!, your personalized desktop with all its settings and data. This might even be secure, cost effective and more efficient method for portable desktop.
[1] http://news.softpedia.com/news/microsoft-launching-intel-pow...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's more accurately described as an employee all-hands, with some volunteers invited too. 1200 employees, ~200 volunteers, not really people developing things on Mozilla platforms.
Twelve hundred employees??? And they couldn't find one or two of them to port Thunderbird to Qt.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"We" (I have since left Opera Software) really screwed it up with the desktop browser around 2004. Management (i.e. the then-CEO Jon) was too worried about recurring revenue to pull that obnoxious ad banner in the free version until it was too late. At the time the desktop Opera had superior performance compared to Mozilla/Firefox.. but wasn't free/ad-less. It was really depressing to watch. (But at the same time, I…
Do you mind sharing a few of those lucrative / non-annoying monetization models? I'm curious. And thanks for the insights into opera!
There's a fair overview available in the quarterly reports.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
(Hi. :)) It depends a lot on what you're doing, and how much data you're processing. If we go by the premise that you're processing more data locally than you would in a web app (because you don't need to worry about the latency and you don't have a server to do the pre-processing and filtering of the data before it reaches the client), then actual VM performance is more significant. The last time I looked at any pro…
I haven't done profiling of firefox os on a crappy device... but my suspicion is that it really is as simple as: even really-well-optimized html/css/js that needs to go through a browser core will suffer performance-wise compared to something with 10-15 less layers of indirection. (Like a traditional windowing toolkit.) The Android UI toolkit isn't exactly efficent (ha!), but still seems to beat Firefox OS on super-l…