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There is something magical about Firefox OS

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Re: There is something magical about Firefox OS

#211

Post by danielweber »

drbawb wrote: post #200
danielweber wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Oh, I did have issues with the emulator. When I was just starting, I thought my hello-world program was broken because nothing was happening, but that was just the emulator taking so long to start up. Once I learned to keep it running I could iterate much faster, although I still had to be careful.

Still, I got a decent-enough Android phone off of eBay for less than $30. Now I only pull up the emulator as the last part of testing before sending the app off to Amazon.

Re: There is something magical about Firefox OS

#212

Post by georgemcbay »

stcredzero wrote: post #195
sixothree wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

One of the great things about Android is that you don't have to be running it on a "high end" phone. Why bother with another new OS for your low-end handset when Android runs pretty well on low-end devices and you still get most of the benefit of Android (Google Apps like Nav, etc, don't require much processor power, they run great even on sub-$100 (off-contact price) phones).

Re: There is something magical about Firefox OS

#213

Post by unhammer »

pkolaczk wrote: post #132
robhawkes wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd be surprised at what JavaScript can do nowadays… https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/demos/detail/bananabread

There is nothing surprising in it. 3D rendering is done mostly by hardware (OpenGL), not JS. But try to code something more sophisticated computationally for CPU, not a one function long microbenchmark where the JIT can guess all the types because code is simple. Something like simulating a complex mechanical or electrical system or some discrete optimisation stuff. Then it quickly turns out carefully hand crafted JS…

I haven't counted how many times I've read "magnitude" in this discussion … Does anyone actually have some numbers to back up the claims?

Re: There is something magical about Firefox OS

#214

Post by pkolaczk »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #155
pkolaczk wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is nothing surprising in it. 3D rendering is done mostly by hardware (OpenGL), not JS. But try to code something more sophisticated computationally for CPU, not a one function long microbenchmark where the JIT can guess all the types because code is simple. Something like simulating a complex mechanical or electrical system or some discrete optimisation stuff. Then it quickly turns out carefully hand crafted JS…

The JIT should very easily be able to guess all the types in a complex mechanical or electrical system, or in discrete optimization. Matrices are fairly consistently typed. I don't think that JS would do much worse than "naive C" in such a situation. To do well on these sorts of problems, you need to pull in a library that properly uses the CPU's vector unit or the GPU, no matter whether you're using C or JS.

If it did whole-program optimization, it theoretically could. But it is probably too costly. You don't have that much time and resources to optimize JIT, as you have doing static compilation. That's why, contrary to common beliefs on static vs dynamic compilation, still static compilers win in most cases, compared to even very mature things like JVM or .NET CLR, even though they have much easier task than JS.

Re: There is something magical about Firefox OS

#215

Post by Joeri »

dangoor wrote: post #129
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.

Well-optimized C is likely to always be faster than well-optimized JavaScript. It is also possible that circuitlab is not well-optimized JavaScript. I will say that it also depends on the problem domain. You can make a fast 3D game in JavaScript because WebGL does hardware acceleration of the graphics. You can also make a fast todo list in JavaScript because, well, it's a todo list :)

I don't think C will always be faster. A JIT-compiled language can theoretically be optimized better than a precompiled binary, because the JIT engine can recompile hot code based on observed behavior on the actual system with the actual data.

Re: There is something magical about Firefox OS

#216

Post by im3w1l »

Joeri wrote: post #215
dangoor wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well-optimized C is likely to always be faster than well-optimized JavaScript. It is also possible that circuitlab is not well-optimized JavaScript. I will say that it also depends on the problem domain. You can make a fast 3D game in JavaScript because WebGL does hardware acceleration of the graphics. You can also make a fast todo list in JavaScript because, well, it's a todo list :)

I don't think C will always be faster. A JIT-compiled language can theoretically be optimized better than a precompiled binary, because the JIT engine can recompile hot code based on observed behavior on the actual system with the actual data.

Theoretically, a c-compiler could produce self modifying code.

Re: There is something magical about Firefox OS

#217

Post by zabraxias »

JackC wrote: post #125
robhawkes wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fx OS on the SGS2 runs BLAZING fast compared to the device in the video. The reason why we don't shout about that? Because we're not launching with that device and it's not right to raise expectations in that way.

FWIW, I agree with masklinn that it's a little weird not to mention WebOS in the article. In particular when you wrote "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!" I let that sink in back in 2009 when they announced WebOS. I was pretty ex…

WebOS was targeted as an Android/iOS alternative on higher-end devices using proprietary APIs. It was also being developed by a company with shareholders who were purely focused on the bottom line.

I am not trying to criticize them but there are inherit differences between the two projects. I am thinking Mozilla is also partly betting its reputation of protecting user information while being developer friendly.

The free market will decide of course but at least initially that free market won't be North America.

Re: There is something magical about Firefox OS

#218

Post by ilaksh »

Can you Mozilla guys focus on making it so that HTML5 apps can install from web pages with an Install button and then show up on the home screen like a normal app? Please. So that HTML5 developers don't have to rely on people creating bookmarks or typing web addresses and can give users a similar experience as native.

Re: There is something magical about Firefox OS

#219

Post by callahad »

omarqazi wrote: post #194
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…

The video does look a bit rough, but that's neither final code nor final hardware. For what it's worth, actually touching one of the Firefox OS dev phones is pretty impressive: it feels much smoother than it looks on that video.

It's not quite up to iOS or Android 4.1 performance, but it's running on far less powerful hardware. It definitely feels better than the initial releases of Android in terms of responsiveness.

> 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.

The HTML5 version of Cut the Rope works pretty great on Firefox OS; the experience is effectively identical to Android and iOS.

Re: There is something magical about Firefox OS

#220

Post by callahad »

grayrest wrote: post #201
ravichhabra wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any developer version that we could buy? I don't mind if we have to pay more. Need to test this for Burma market. Edit: Didn't read carefully. You already mentioned that developer versions would be available worldwide soon. Any mailing list to subscribe for the announcement?

> Any developer version that we could buy? Like all Mozilla projects, this is developed completely in the open. You can get an original Galaxy Nexus and flash it over to the latest nightly relatively easily. It probably works on other phones, but the nexus is what they gave out at JSConf so that's what I use. ;) https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Boot_to_Gec...

Correction: Nexus S, not Galaxy Nexus :)
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