21–30 of 52 posts
I hope it doesn't work out. I would hate to live in a HTML-JS only future they are trying to build. And please don't tell me about transpilation, because it's crap.
Yes, because an Objective-C or Java only future is so much brighter!
"Looking at nice dual-core dual-SIM 3G Android for $30-40 wholesale. Quad-core for $100-125. And increasingly hard to tell apart from premium" (tweet from @BenedictEvans this morning).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The low price is crucial - it's about emerging markets. Think Africa, Asia, South America.
Definitely. I just hope they bring it to flagship phones as well. I could see a lot of developers and open source advocates jumping on it. Especially if it had granular permission controls, which I believe Google had to bail on for backwards compatibility reasons [1]. [1] http://www.engadget.com/2013/12/13/google-removes-apps-ops-p...
There is no way a phone that can run firefox os won't also be suitable for android and visa versa. And free OS is free OS ? How does either add to the cost of the phone? Am I missing something? Not that more competition is not a better thing, I mean I love my firefox browser and only grudgingly use chrome.
I think the point is that Android has become quite resource-intensive an performs very poorly on low-end devices. Firefox-OS is intended to be extremely light and to perform well on even the most anemic hardware.
Some Android apps that are part of the typical Google-logo Android user experience have become resource intensive. Dalvik, even with the addition of a JIT compiler, was initially targeted at a very low resource requirement, and, apart from the JIT compiler, which is highly tuned to working in small battery powered devices, there have been no fundamental changes to the Dalvik VM until the recent release of ART as a replacement runtime.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the point is that Android has become quite resource-intensive an performs very poorly on low-end devices. Firefox-OS is intended to be extremely light and to perform well on even the most anemic hardware.
But how can a web browser be "extremely light" nowadays? It has to do all the complex layout rendering and JavaScript execution of pages that have ~50MB memory usage.
The OLPC story kind of makes me think that announcing and planning a disruptive change when the disruption is mostly price based is a tricky strategy. I wonder if Firefox might find it easier to just pick up existing low end android models and see if they can get a better experience with Firefox OS.
The low price is crucial - it's about emerging markets. Think Africa, Asia, South America.
This is really cool, but I doubt it'll do much to the market. If the Firefox OS runs a browser brilliantly on this device, it might be a disruptor in the more developed world actually. But I find it unlikely that a low-cost smartphone with the level of power one can expect could do that (even my Nexus5 still chokes on loading some pages, chews battery running the browser, etc), so > "You're talking about a clumsy sma…
That may be true, but it is changing rapidly. Ericsson, ZTE and Huawei are all betting large on rapid 3G deployment throughout sub-Saharan Africa, for example.
Even countries like Ethiopia is seeing the start of 4G deployments.
Firefox OS runs very smoothly, when being simulated on the computer. On the $70 ZTE phone, it's less than stellar, mainly because the phone has issues registering touches. Also, there are some software bugs, like momentum being saved when it should have decayed, after you lift your finger 5s later in certain scrollable views. If the newer phones have better touch screens, and the OS consistently gets improved, especi…
* async pan and zoom
* `will-change` support (avoid layers flattening) progressive tiles rendering
* better texture allocation mechanism
* CSS snapping
* position: sticky
* and many gaia code improvements (reflow and lags hunting)