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Mozilla Will Stop Developing and Selling Firefox OS Smartphones

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Re: Mozilla Will Stop Developing and Selling Firefox OS Smartphones

#191

Post by pcwalton »

johansch wrote: post #181
pcwalton wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The indirection is a problem with existing browser implementations (and some spec issues, such as lack of Typed CSSOM, which is the current subject of work in the WGs). There is no fundamental reason that I can see as to why there needs to be a gap between the hardware and the graphics and layout of Web apps.

That sounds intriguing. But.. how?

Look at Servo and WebRender (disclaimer: I work on both), or just read "Fast and Parallel Webpage Layout", Meyerovich 2010 for much of it :)

Re: Mozilla Will Stop Developing and Selling Firefox OS Smartphones

#192

Post by conradev »

lewisl9029 wrote: post #88
nextos wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really agree on this. They should focus on a browser that respects privacy and email that respects privacy (perhaps by resuming Thunderbird development). On top of that, I'd argue IM + video/audio chat that respects privacy is something that desperately needs better solutions. I'd push software forward, and then innovate on protocols. Peer to peer might be the only way to achieve true privacy.

Absolutely. Although the market for centralized secure messaging is currently being served adequately by the likes of Signal and Telegram, centralized messaging platforms inevitably leak metadata. I don't want to belittle the work done by teams that have already started work on distributed messaging platforms like Tox and Matrix (and my own proof-of-concept, Toc [1]), but Mozilla is in a much better position to tackl…

I would also include Ricochet[1] in the list of decentralized messaging tools, which is centered around Tor hidden services.

[1] https://ricochet.im

Re: Mozilla Will Stop Developing and Selling Firefox OS Smartphones

#193

Post by ecnahc515 »

xj9 wrote: post #184
rockdoe wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's self-destructive because users who don't block ads are keeping sites alive for the users that do block them. If all the users block the ads, the site will need to scramble for a new income model, and for some the new model might not work out. Seems like a perfect example of self-destructive/tragedy-of-the-commons behavior to me.

This is a perfect example of a changing market driving out incumbents that have been unable to adapt. The internet is probably better off without them.

There are plenty of websites which exist that have two options for revenue, either take ads, or make people pay to view your content. Some websites are purely driven by the users' content, and there isn't a real revenue model, so that's what your left with, either the users pay, or someone else does. Bills gotta be paid, but when push comes to shove, users don't pay the bills for a lot of this type of content, so ad's are the only option left.

There is no middle ground. It's not as easy as "your website offers so little that it shouldn't exist", it's simply "users block ads, and they don't want to pay for access", so there's really no great options here.

However, ad's don't have to be pure evil. Sure they might be not be preferred, but we can totally create an environment in which we have non-intrusive, non-privacy invading advertisements, it's just a matter of figuring it out.

Re: Mozilla Will Stop Developing and Selling Firefox OS Smartphones

#194

Post by nnethercote »

gedrap wrote: post #16

It was interesting to follow this experiment but have to admit it was against the odds since day 1 (and it's especially easy to say so in retrospective). In terms of regular users, there are tons of dirt cheap chinese no-name android devices that more or less work. For 100 euros, you can get an acceptable Android phone from a major manufacturer (LG, etc). FirefoxOS was competing in a similar price range, however offe…

Thank you for your positive attitude.

Re: Mozilla Will Stop Developing and Selling Firefox OS Smartphones

#195

Post by pcwalton »

chris_wot wrote: post #120
Splendor wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure if you're serious or not. If you are, here's a good place to start: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/

That's not very useful. I think you mean to link to this: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/details/ I'm going to get voted down by those who don't like dissent or opinions that they fear are "offensive" (and certainly they probably won't participate in the discussion or even attempt to answer the issues I raise!), but here is why I asked the question: Basically, I just don't see that Mozilla is actually…

> But it handles the underlying development of their browser, and as important as it is, it only goes so far in really making a big impact on promoting an open web

Rust's safety features are designed to enhance security of Web browsers, and its parallelism/concurrency features are designed to enhance Web performance. I can't think of many things that are more important to the health of the Web platform than security and performance.

Re: Mozilla Will Stop Developing and Selling Firefox OS Smartphones

#196

Post by click170 »

StavrosK wrote: post #112
wamatt wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a shame really, but as an outsider, it wasn't clear that Persona was even given a chance to fail.

That's my impression as well. A friend and I created a pastebin as a fun weekend project this weekend ( https://www.pastery.net/ ) and we used Persona for auth, since it's so damn convenient. The only problem is that it loads a bunch of files on every request, and my questions about lazy-loading went unanswered. I really wish Mozilla would change their mind and start developing this again. It feels like they expected…

With Thunderbird at least, the repo is open and available.

Does the same stand for Persona?

Perhaps instead of asking Firefox to do the legwork we should be contributing some of our own time to the projects we want to see succeed.

Re: Mozilla Will Stop Developing and Selling Firefox OS Smartphones

#197

Post by zmmmmm »

johncolanduoni wrote: post #84
gkoberger wrote: post #9

Firefox appeared at a time when there was huge potential being stifled by a stagnant monopoly in the space, and people were desperate for something good. It filled a real need, and people loved it. FirefoxOS appeared at a time when there was huge potential being actively being pushed forward and innovated on by the two largest tech companies in the space, and people already had two great options to choose from. It fi…

> And yes, I realize that users don't care about privacy. But nobody cared about web standards, either: it's all about packaging. That's Mozilla's strength. The difference with browsers was that improvements in the browser led to clear improvements in web browsing experience, which even the least technically minded could notice. What changes in privacy and identity are Mozilla going to pioneer that result in obvious…

The clearest and simplest thing they could do is implement ad blocking in an ethical manner. All the other players have commercial agendas either for or against advertising. Mozilla is really the only player that can come to the table with clean hands and implement a solution that is fair to all sides.

Re: Mozilla Will Stop Developing and Selling Firefox OS Smartphones

#198

Post by jgraham »

johansch wrote: post #148
gsnedders wrote: post #141

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…

As a practical matter, my experience of using FirefoxOS everyday is that performance is not the main issue. Of course it could undoubtedly be improved, but it's acceptable, particularly once you put it onto reasonable hardware (i.e. not the $40 phones).

Much more problematic is the lack of "premium content" i.e. services that — even if they are basically just webapps — don't work except on Android/iOS. This is a particularly vicious cycle; it's hard to convince anyone to put in the effort to support minority platforms, and it's hard to get users unless you support the same content as other platforms (see also: Windows Phone, which by all accounts is an excellent product that almost no one uses).

There's also the fact that FirefoxOS is some years behind the other platforms in terms of developers and the competition has ~infinite resources, which means that some parts are lagging behind feature wise.

Having said all of that, I don't think that Opera is a bad analog for the difficulties FirefoxOS faces, only it's not Opera Platform specifically but Presto in general. It had the same kind of issues with limited support from content creators and relatively available resources.

Re: Mozilla Will Stop Developing and Selling Firefox OS Smartphones

#199

Post by zmmmmm »

chris_wot wrote: post #120
Splendor wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure if you're serious or not. If you are, here's a good place to start: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/

That's not very useful. I think you mean to link to this: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/details/ I'm going to get voted down by those who don't like dissent or opinions that they fear are "offensive" (and certainly they probably won't participate in the discussion or even attempt to answer the issues I raise!), but here is why I asked the question: Basically, I just don't see that Mozilla is actually…

Not sure why you would say FireFox OS itself is needed, when Android is open source, and scales down almost as far as FireFox OS did in terms of hardware. If Mozilla really wanted to push an OS out, they could have taken Android and customised it with a web app support on top rather than reinventing the entire giant wheel.

Re: Mozilla Will Stop Developing and Selling Firefox OS Smartphones

#200

Post by Raed667 »

dualogy wrote: post #188
Raed667 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll be graduating in a few months and I study embedded/IoT. And as someone who spent the last 2 years digging in the corners of IoT, I agree that IoT can seem to be over-engineering problems that don't exist. But the market is there, and it is huge. (mainly industrial, energy & transport applications) IoT now is like the early personal computers, they were too expensive and almost no one knew why they needed them.

Would you recommend your favourite resources for techies to dig into this space?

Hard to say, there are so many.

- I'd start with embedded environments: Arduino / STM32(F1/F4) / RaspberryPi see how to code for them and how to make them talk to each other (UART/SPI/I2C/CAN...)

- Then I'd check how simple kernel modules are made, and try to mess around the kernel in raspberryPi and make something that outputs a value on the terminal and via I2C.

- I'd check the "concept" of middlewares and start by something simple WComp[0] (written in C#). It is not used in the industry but it gives you a pretty good sens of how things should work.

- For beginners I'd recommend to use Parse[1] for any project where you need a "cloud" infrastructure (Database, API, users, privileges,...)

- You should also check how fully distributed systems (that operate in a peer-to-peer manner) work.

- After that it comes to ressource optimisation and things like that.

EDIT (You should also check these) :

- UPnP (Universal Plug and Play) is way to get devices to automatically discover and understand each other.

- MQTT: publish-subscribe TCP/IP messaging protocol (I use it for push notifications)

[0] : http://www.wcomp.fr

[1] : https://www.parse.com/

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