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There is something magical about Firefox OS

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Re: There is something magical about Firefox OS

#191

Post by mbrubeck »

azakai wrote: post #181
pkolaczk wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So how come e.g. www.circuitlab.com which is a simulator written in pure JS is two orders of magnitude slower on Chrome or Firefox than native *SPICE implementations in C? It is actually even much slower than the already pretty slow Falstad's Java applet.

Two orders of magnitude? That can't be explained by the difference between C and JS. There must be some other difference, like which algorithms are used, or that the C one relies heavily on inline assembly or such. The expected difference between C and JS should be more like one order of magnitude in the worst cases (and much better in the best).

Since azakai is too humble to mention his own qualifications, I want to point out that is the author of the Emscripten LLVM-to-JS compiler, and the BananaBread first-person-shooter demo linked above, so when he talks about the limits of JS performance compared to C, he really knows what he's talking about. :)

Re: There is something magical about Firefox OS

#192

Post by mbrubeck »

dhx wrote: post #158

Most of the discussion so far has focussed on the development environment (APIs, languages, etc) and performance issues. I would therefore like to raise the question “how will Firefox OS encourage a consistent and usable experience across applications?” Gnome[1], iOS[2] and Windows have comprehensive human interface guidelines and the systems tend to be user-friendly as a result. The latest WHATWG HTML standards do m…

UX design guidelines are coming; the designer who is working on them gave a talk at MozCampEU last week. (Only the slides are available for now, but a more detailed write-up should be posted soon.)

https://wiki.mozilla.org/MozCampEU2012/Design-Principles-beh...

Re: There is something magical about Firefox OS

#193

Post by wmf »

robhawkes wrote: post #26
lifeisstillgood wrote: post #22

I apologise for writing a long post - I have not time to write a short one There is a reason MBAs are taught market analysis. Its important to position your product for maximum effect (usually maximum profit, but that may not be the case here) The arguments for FirefoxOS seem to be 1. It's OSS 2. It's Web-technologies only 3. It's aimed at the "emerging" markets' mobile users 4. It runs on cheaper hardware better tha…

Thanks for the comment, I really appreciate it! To be clear, I'm not educated in business so my thoughts are my own (potentially naive) conclusions. However, there are some very sound business decisions behind us chosing to go with Brazil first, and to go with cheaper, low-end devices. I'm sure they know what they're doing more than I do! As an aside, we do have versions of Fx OS running on high-end devices and it ru…

However, there are some very sound business decisions behind us chosing to go ... with cheaper, low-end devices. I'm sure they know what they're doing more than I do!

I'm not sure. Gecko is faster and lighter than Dalvik now? Since when?

Re: There is something magical about Firefox OS

#194

Post by omarqazi »

cs702 wrote: post #77

According to this blog post, Firefox OS is already providing native-like performance in a standard JavaScript+HTML+CSS environment. (By "native-like" I mean fast enough that the application will feel native to users.) If this is true, then I would agree Firefox OS is a game changer, because it means that ALL modern web applications can run unmodified at native-like speeds on mobile devices. The number of apps availab…

Watch the video. That's not native performance. It will never be native performance, because there will always be the layer of the rendering engine between your application and device. The best they'll ever do is "close enough to native that you don't notice", and they're certainly not there yet. And the number of apps is already in the millions? Give me an example of one app out there that's in the same ballpark of quality as the stuff you can find on iOS or even Android.

Re: There is something magical about Firefox OS

#195

Post by stcredzero »

sixothree wrote: post #136
zacharyvoase wrote: post #4

> In short, Firefox OS is about taking the technologies behind the Web, like JavaScript, and using them to produce an entire mobile operating system. Just let that sink in for a moment — it's a mobile OS powered by JavaScript! This kind of happened before: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_webOS What went wrong? Well, apparently[1] there were some big performance issues—and IIUC Gecko has some of those already. [1]: ht…

The world can only process the introduction of so many mobile operating systems at once? I get the impression it was seen as competition to Android, but failed because Palm was a two-bit player in comparison to the Google juggernaut. Maybe if it were being introduced today it would stand more of a chance. edit: oh and as to the failing of the author to acknowledge WebOS speaks to the author's knowledge or honesty, ta…

> The world can only process the introduction of so many mobile operating systems at once?

If there's a subset of the world for whom an iPhone or a high end Android smartphone is just a pipe dream, then the pipe-dream devices won't be much of a distraction.

Re: There is something magical about Firefox OS

#196

Post by grayrest »

pkolaczk wrote: post #124
robhawkes wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

JavaScript doesn't run at the speed of native, but it certainly runs fast enough on things like Fx OS (or desktop browsers) to run 'native-like' apps. It really depends what you want to do with it. For example, this is JavaScript: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/demos/detail/bananabread

So how come e.g. www.circuitlab.com which is a simulator written in pure JS is two orders of magnitude slower on Chrome or Firefox than native *SPICE implementations in C? It is actually even much slower than the already pretty slow Falstad's Java applet.

In addition to the responses from the Mozilla guys, I'll also point out that the limiting factor in speed for most web applications is not javascript runtime speed but dom manipulation, reflow, and repaint. The tricks for optimizing these tend to be somewhat browser dependent and not generally known by the web development community.

Re: There is something magical about Firefox OS

#197

Post by MatthewPhillips »

bornhuetter wrote: post #165
MatthewPhillips wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Be warned that it doesn't work on all GS2 devices though.

Do you know if it works on an original Desire?

No idea. If the Desire is a SGS2 device then it probably works. Actually, best way to find out is to see if Cyanogen supports the phone because B2G uses the Cyanogen code to pull drivers. Last time I tried (April), the T-Mobile SGS2 wasn't supported by Cyanogen (or B2G) because it significantly different internals.

Re: There is something magical about Firefox OS

#198

Post by [deleted] »

praptak wrote: post #48
robhawkes wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd be surprised at how well JavaScript performs when allowed.

The scary part of JavaScript is not performance, it is the hell of inconsistency. '1' - 0 is 1. Guess what '1' + 0 is? Nope, it's '10'. Crockford's JavaScript truth table is mind-bending. On top of that, semicolon insertion.

[deleted]

Re: There is something magical about Firefox OS

#199

Post by [deleted] »

praptak wrote: post #48
robhawkes wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd be surprised at how well JavaScript performs when allowed.

The scary part of JavaScript is not performance, it is the hell of inconsistency. '1' - 0 is 1. Guess what '1' + 0 is? Nope, it's '10'. Crockford's JavaScript truth table is mind-bending. On top of that, semicolon insertion.

[deleted]

Re: There is something magical about Firefox OS

#200

Post by drbawb »

danielweber wrote: post #168
h2s wrote: post #55

You could set your watch by the HN response to a story like this. Pure doom, gloom and naysaying. Smartphones these days live and die by their app ecosystem. I would love to be working on mobile apps, but for the expense of buying an iPhone, an Android phone and a Windows phone, plus licenses for software to develop for all three. Not to mention the daunting prospect of dealing with Objective C, Java and C# simultane…

I would love to be working on mobile apps, but for the expense of buying an iPhone, an Android phone and a Windows phone, plus licenses for software to develop for all three. Well, do you really need to develop on all three? Among the reasons I got into Android development was because the upfront cost was $0. I just needed any laptop or desktop made in the past ~5 years, which I think all of us have already. After se…

> Made in the past ~5 years.

I'm dubious unless they've made serious improvements to the emulator since I last used it. (I haven't updated my SDK in probably 3-6 months.)

I ran it on a fairly beefy laptop (although ~1.5-2 years at the time) and it was not an environment I'd consider "fun" to program in.

They have ways to image the emulator for faster load-times, but that's not that much of an improvement, and it only affects the emulator boot-up time, not the application speed.

I should try it again on my new desktop, complete with SSD and gobs of RAM.

But honestly I would not develop for Android [relying solely on the emulator] on a machine much older than a year or two.

I guess your mileage varied, but my experience developing for Android [w/o physical hardware] on fairly recent hardware was not pleasant. Had it been a hobby, and not my career, I would've been entirely put off with the experience. I probably wouldn't have gotten a phone, and I would've moved on to developing for another platform.

Possibly WebOS, I remember it caught my eye back when the Pre launched; and I think it had the whole $0-up-front aspect in its favor.

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