311–320 of 331 posts
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And how is the app ecosystem on other open source mobile operating systems?
The internet is pretty fine, except for a prevalence of webkit only sites on mobile.
I think a native app will always give a better experience because they can always just contain a browser view (it's basically a superset). Plus native code will always be more efficient and in mobile, that matters.
As a smartphone OS, I don't see what problems Firefox OS solves. Both iOS and Android have great browsers, and can pin webapps to their homescreens.
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I suspect the Universal Windows Platform will have a significant impact. Especially the ability to dock your phone with an external display/keyboard/mouse. For a large portion of the market it displaces the need for a second computing device. Microsoft is much further along on this front than both Android and iOS.
I've been able to (and have done so) plug my android phone into a usb hub with mouse and keyboard and into a 1080p screen for quite a few years now. Of course, there's relatively little that truly takes advantage of that set up, and making the user experience more pleasant would make a huge difference, but android understands mouse and keyboard input just fine. Microsoft may be somewhat further along on this front, b…
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Amazon DOES have to do that. Each version of their OS is based on a version of Google's version of Android. And they have to follow Google in re-implementing every Google API as an Amazon API as quickly as possible so they don't lose compatibility with apps.
Good point. Still, any AOSP fork needs to track Google's version only if they want to run applications built for Google's version of Android. The first iteration of Firefox's mobile OS didn't run any Android apps so it would be no loss if their fork of AOSP also didn't run Android apps. That's why I would suggest renaming so that people don't think they can install Android apps.
Also, currently Android has been ruled as copyright infringement from Oracle over Java APIs. It may be advisable to avoid building your own new OS on those same APIs.
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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.
Why would the user care about "ethical" manner (especially since it still allows ads) over crude, remove all ads, manner?
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Why would the user care about "ethical" manner (especially since it still allows ads) over crude, remove all ads, manner?
Are you asking why do people care about ethics? That's a philosophical question almost. But at some point people do. We agree to laws that people shouldn't murder each other, even if you find it might be manifestly in your interests to knock someone off. I think most "ordinary" people do feel at least a tiny bit guilty about nuking every single ad on web sites that they use regularly. I know I do.
No. I'm asking why the parent thinks people WILL care about such ethics.
Between "ethical ad-removal: keeps some ads" and "non-ethical: it removes all of them", I don't think most people will give it a second though to go for the "no ads" option.
And they certainly won't go out of their way to find if there an "ethical ad-removal" option even exists in the first place.
>I think most "ordinary" people do feel at least a tiny bit guilty about nuking every single ad on web sites that they use regularly. I know I do.
I think those are probably outliers. The same way people (millions) didn't give a damn about skipping ads with their TiVo's or what have you.
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Nonsense. Tor Browser is actually based on Mozilla Firefox and it has been alive for long. Nobody would be so mad to call the web browser vendor a terrorist organization.
Clearly you don't follow the UK news, the UK govt. have been toying with banning Tor (encryption in general) for a couple of years. Here is a recent article about it http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/mar/11/tor-should...
I always wondered why they didn't try a tablet first. Like the Chromebooks, but in tablet form, heavy on Firefox branding. Maybe this too is something that would've been an 'also-ran' or market failure, but I still want one even as I type this.
I signed up for the contribution program, received a tablet, built and ran updates on it, participated in Discourse discussions and wanted to do more. Sadly, builds started breaking, they weren't attended to, and the program died a slow death.
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Are you asking why do people care about ethics? That's a philosophical question almost. But at some point people do. We agree to laws that people shouldn't murder each other, even if you find it might be manifestly in your interests to knock someone off. I think most "ordinary" people do feel at least a tiny bit guilty about nuking every single ad on web sites that they use regularly. I know I do.
> Are you asking why do people care about ethics? No. I'm asking why the parent thinks people WILL care about such ethics. Between "ethical ad-removal: keeps some ads" and "non-ethical: it removes all of them", I don't think most people will give it a second though to go for the "no ads" option. And they certainly won't go out of their way to find if there an "ethical ad-removal" option even exists in the first place…
You're making up a choice that doesn't exist. No browser presents people with that choice. The choice is: by default you get ads. If they don't upset you, you do nothing. Only if they upset you a lot, you will seek out an ad blocker. Ethical ad blocking means blocking things that significantly degrade the experience of the page or harms the user (such as through privacy violation), while not blocking things that don't harm the user.
So the answer to your question, why WILL people care about ethics - I think they care about not being harmed by slow pages and privacy violation. That is a way of saying they care about other people being ethical to them, and not harming them. A browser that doesn't harm them by default is something they will like. Other browsers will not implement such defaults because there is no standard to support it and the parties who currently make browsers cannot agree on one because they are fundamentally conflicted by their commercial interests.