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The Promise of Firefox OS

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Re: The Promise of Firefox OS

#31

Post by lifeisstillgood »

shadowmint wrote: post #23

So... it's 2013, and I'm sitting here with my blazingly fast nexus 4, and the web sites I visit are... slow. terrible. broken. spammy. Half of them have 'popups' that try to banner at the bottom of the screen, but end up flailing wilding and either taking up the entire screen, or just helpfully sitting exactly over the middle of the page. A lot of them try repeatedly to direct me to a specific page, or a native app w…

You are on a site that is not broken, slow or spammy.

It has "stickiness" and "retention" that all of those sites cannot dream of.

Good User Experience beats terrible. Good user experience makes money - trust us, the market will win.

Re: The Promise of Firefox OS

#32

Post by lucian1900 »

janjongboom wrote: post #26
lucian1900 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except Android is no more or less closed than Firefox OS. Both open source, allow sideloading and have curated app stores.

Android itself isn't, but the ecosystem that they're building is. The market is controlled by Google and the apps will only run on Android phones. Not the OS is important, the ecosystem is. That's why Apple and Google and everyone are trying to keep everyone inside.

The Firefox OS app market is controlled by Mozilla and the apps will only run on Firefox OS (for now, at least).

Everyone is free to implement the Android app API, as Blackberry have, just like they are free to implement the Firefox OS phone APIs.

The difference is very small. Firefox is more likely to have portable apps, Android offers a much higher quality API for building apps.

Re: The Promise of Firefox OS

#33

Post by rwmj »

otibom wrote: post #20
anon1385 wrote: post #15

And if your problem is with JavaScript as a language, you can already use a myriad of languages that reliably compile to it. Do you come from a Java background? You’ll probably like Dart, from Google. More of a functional kind of developer? Try ClojureScript, which is an impressive, well-maintained and well-performing implementation of Clojure on top of JavaScript. Coming from Ruby? You’ll be almost at home with Coff…

Ok so is the solution a standard bytecode for browsers ? Or is is NaCl ? Or PNaCl ? Or something like Hypercard ? Or do we tear down the monoliths that browsers are in small Unix-style components ?

Or do we tear down the monoliths that browsers are in small Unix-style components?

That last one might not be a bad idea. The first browser I used ran 'xv' to display images.

Re: The Promise of Firefox OS

#34

Post by anon1385 »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #31
shadowmint wrote: post #23

So... it's 2013, and I'm sitting here with my blazingly fast nexus 4, and the web sites I visit are... slow. terrible. broken. spammy. Half of them have 'popups' that try to banner at the bottom of the screen, but end up flailing wilding and either taking up the entire screen, or just helpfully sitting exactly over the middle of the page. A lot of them try repeatedly to direct me to a specific page, or a native app w…

You are on a site that is not broken, slow or spammy. It has "stickiness" and "retention" that all of those sites cannot dream of. Good User Experience beats terrible. Good user experience makes money - trust us, the market will win.

>You are on a site that is not broken, slow or spammy.

Is this sarcasm? I honestly can't tell. You have never experienced the expired link error? Or the 'site not available' error? HN is one of the most broken websites I frequently visit.

Also you ignored the part about tiny links. HN is full of tiny links: have you used the site on a phone and tried to upvote a post?

Re: The Promise of Firefox OS

#35

Post by johnyzee »

lucian1900 wrote: post #17
anon1385 wrote: post #15

And if your problem is with JavaScript as a language, you can already use a myriad of languages that reliably compile to it. Do you come from a Java background? You’ll probably like Dart, from Google. More of a functional kind of developer? Try ClojureScript, which is an impressive, well-maintained and well-performing implementation of Clojure on top of JavaScript. Coming from Ruby? You’ll be almost at home with Coff…

That particular problem will improve immensely with SourceMap, so you'll almost never have to look at JS.

Even without source maps it is not such a big deal as people who have no experience using cross-compilation would think. I write a very big game engine with GWT (http://www.webworks.dk/enginetest) and have no problems debugging. Clients send neat stack traces back to the server and I can even obfuscate the application code and using symbol maps deobfuscate the stack traces on the server.

I gave a presentation a couple of weeks ago with a couple of slides with example stack traces with and without deobfuscation: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1TCzHx1UH24gA1Au8LOvZ...

Re: The Promise of Firefox OS

#36

Post by bmuon »

shadowmint wrote: post #23

So... it's 2013, and I'm sitting here with my blazingly fast nexus 4, and the web sites I visit are... slow. terrible. broken. spammy. Half of them have 'popups' that try to banner at the bottom of the screen, but end up flailing wilding and either taking up the entire screen, or just helpfully sitting exactly over the middle of the page. A lot of them try repeatedly to direct me to a specific page, or a native app w…

I worked as a front-end developer for an adnetwork for two years, so I take a little responsibility for your experience. I tried my best, but there just wasn't that much interest in getting it right.

Here's why I think we're all having a hard time with advertising in mobile. Basically, adnetworks are still learning how to do it right, the same way designers and developers are still learning how to do mobile websites right. The layout issue you mention comes from a conjunction of various reasons:

* Marketing thinks mobile == iOS, which sets limited expectations and for example means developers have a hard time getting a variety of devices to test on

* Adnetworks are likely targeting mobile with the same front-end infrastructure they use for desktop. Most of them still target IE6 so they're trying the same ideas

* Old iOS versions and many other webkit browsers have big issues with fixed positioning. First they didn't support it. When they did, they still had issues rendering while scrolling and firing the correct events

* Ads in mobile require a complex layout but the standard in the industry is that the website doesn't have to do anything but insert a script tag in the page. If there was teamwork between websites and ads, they could use better layout tools like flexbox

* No adblock on mobile (yet?) :P

Hopefully it'll change.

Re: The Promise of Firefox OS

#37

Post by PommeDeTerre »

supercoder wrote: post #12

I'm starting to feel like html/js/css is starting to become the 'this will be the year of linux on the desktop' of apps. They're flexible technologies, but don't think they'll ever have the feel of purpose built native API's.

Only just starting? It was pretty apparent after the DHTML craze of the late 1990s fell flat on its face that web apps weren't any threat to native desktop apps. Then the exact same thing happened during the mid 2000s, when AJAX was all the rage. The more recent HTML5/CSS3/JavaScript fad is yet one more revival of the same failed set of ideas.

Re: The Promise of Firefox OS

#38

Post by dhimes »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #31
shadowmint wrote: post #23

So... it's 2013, and I'm sitting here with my blazingly fast nexus 4, and the web sites I visit are... slow. terrible. broken. spammy. Half of them have 'popups' that try to banner at the bottom of the screen, but end up flailing wilding and either taking up the entire screen, or just helpfully sitting exactly over the middle of the page. A lot of them try repeatedly to direct me to a specific page, or a native app w…

You are on a site that is not broken, slow or spammy. It has "stickiness" and "retention" that all of those sites cannot dream of. Good User Experience beats terrible. Good user experience makes money - trust us, the market will win.

This site is totally broken for mobile, and has been for years despite complaints.

Re: The Promise of Firefox OS

#39

Post by ZoFreX »

hosay123 wrote: post #21
anon1385 wrote: post #15

And if your problem is with JavaScript as a language, you can already use a myriad of languages that reliably compile to it. Do you come from a Java background? You’ll probably like Dart, from Google. More of a functional kind of developer? Try ClojureScript, which is an impressive, well-maintained and well-performing implementation of Clojure on top of JavaScript. Coming from Ruby? You’ll be almost at home with Coff…

How does this differ from debugging any other VM? Except in Javascript you're almost guaranteed your 'crash' will come as an exception with a stack trace – guaranteeably raised by the only executing single thread that could contribute state to the crash. Debugging a Java or a C crash is infinitely worse, since instead of comparatively pretty symbols and a verifiably correct trace, you have a vector of bytes where you…

> How does this differ from debugging any other VM?

You can run a plethora of languages on the JVM and get full debugging support - i.e. an application crash will show you where in your code things exploded, rather than showing you a trace into generated code (or more applicably in the case of the JVM, bytecode).

> Debugging a Java or a C crash is infinitely worse, since instead of comparatively pretty symbols and a verifiably correct trace, you have a vector of bytes where your stack is supposed to be, and any number of threads running third party libs that could have written all over your frame pointers, and instead of semi-structured code you have a few thousand flattened basic blocks, devoid of any type information, absolutely swamped in gotos and boilerplate prologues/epilogues.

I don't have a huge amount of experience of debugging in C, so I cannot comment on how accurate your statement is for C, but for Java it is absolutely not true. That scenario bears no resemblance at all to debugging Java applications.

Re: The Promise of Firefox OS

#40

Post by MatthewPhillips »

shadowmint wrote: post #23

So... it's 2013, and I'm sitting here with my blazingly fast nexus 4, and the web sites I visit are... slow. terrible. broken. spammy. Half of them have 'popups' that try to banner at the bottom of the screen, but end up flailing wilding and either taking up the entire screen, or just helpfully sitting exactly over the middle of the page. A lot of them try repeatedly to direct me to a specific page, or a native app w…

> So... it's 2013, and I'm sitting here with my blazingly fast nexus 4, and the web sites I visit are... slow. terrible. broken. spammy.

No, your browser sucks. Because there is virtually no competition among browsers on mobile. The vast majority of users never even think to use any but the default and therefore there is little incentive to make the big improvements they need.

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