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Mozilla to open first-world front in Firefox OS war

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Re: Mozilla to open first-world front in Firefox OS war

#41

Post by jbigelow76 »

veeti wrote: post #25
MichaelGG wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Android's open enough for me, but what I find unhappy is that Google seems intent on tricking people into revealing more and more information. It often reminds me to turn on history tracking, despite having said no many times. Every time I use the Play store, it tries to get me to enter a phone number. The way it does this is by popping up a dialog, with no buttons except continue . It makes it look like you MUST do…

>MS could fix it all immediately by offering Android app compatibility. Did you also switch over to the Blackberry and Jolla?

I'd like to see a critical mass of AOSP vendors emerge that would convince Android devs to look beyond the Play store. MS shipping their own flavor of Android, along with Amazon and then BB and Jolla offering Android app compatibility could begin to turn that tide. Especially with MS being able to offer some "foundational" type apps (Bing maps, email client, MS Office, Cortana) that could address some of the holes in not utilizing Google Play services.

I don't see it happening though, MS would have to declare that their unified Windows 10 OS is a failure before it even launches.

Re: Mozilla to open first-world front in Firefox OS war

#42

Post by fabrice_d »

codewithcheese wrote: post #12

I hope Mozilla make a phone aimed at tech first movers (hacker news crowd etc), we seem to be the most likely to support attempts at openness. It would have to be high end though. A bit like Ubuntu tried to do with the Edge.

If you have a Sony z3 or z3c, you can build and flash firefox OS on it. These are really nice devices imho.

Re: Mozilla to open first-world front in Firefox OS war

#43

Post by lambda »

bla2 wrote: post #31

I'd rather they'd push Firefox on Android more. Firefox OS seems stillborn, but Firefox/Android is a good product and mobile could need more browser competition.

I feel like one thing they could do to promote Firefox OS would be to make it possible to run Firefox OS applications on Android; create an installer/app store that would allow you to install them as if they were native apps, but they would be using a shared runtime.

That would really help to make it worthwhile to develop FxOS apps; actually having a large installed base of phones that they could be used on, in order to help bootstrap the ecosystem up.

Re: Mozilla to open first-world front in Firefox OS war

#44

Post by lukifer »

JimDabell wrote: post #15
SwellJoe wrote: post #2

I'm unreasonably excited about Firefox OS. Android really isn't open enough for my taste, and my trust of Google has diminished over the years, as they've encroached on more and more of the web and my data on that web. Apple has always been awful for the open web. And I'd rather write JavaScript and HTML than Java.

> Apple has always been awful for the open web. Apple played a massive part in the success of the mobile web and responsive design. The release of Mobile Safari and WebKit was a watershed moment. Before that point, the mobile web largely consisted of separate, pretty awful sites on WML. Afterwards, most mobile platforms had a default web browser based on WebKit, and the mobile web transformed as a result. I'm not say…

For the first couple years, you're right, but they've coasted on that success for far too long. They've been dragging their feet on fixes and features since then. The fact that they haven't been as bad as MS in the IE6 days is hardly worthy of praise.

Re: Mozilla to open first-world front in Firefox OS war

#45

Post by tzs »

ghinda wrote: post #27
JimDabell wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Apple has always been awful for the open web. Apple played a massive part in the success of the mobile web and responsive design. The release of Mobile Safari and WebKit was a watershed moment. Before that point, the mobile web largely consisted of separate, pretty awful sites on WML. Afterwards, most mobile platforms had a default web browser based on WebKit, and the mobile web transformed as a result. I'm not say…

I don’t want to sound like a broken record, but Webkit was originally a fork of KHTML, which is LGPL, so they were required/forced to release it under the same license. And based on the their upstream contributions[1] it doesn’t look like it was a gesture of goodwill. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebKit#Split_development

> I don’t want to sound like a broken record, but Webkit was originally a fork of KHTML, which is LGPL, so they were required/forced to release it under the same license

No, they were forced to release parts of it under the same license. There was a lot of original Apple code that could be separated out easily and released under any license they wanted (or kept proprietary) as long as they released them as object files so could modify and relink in the modified LGPL parts.

The parts that Apple was not required to release under LGPL they released under BSD.

Re: Mozilla to open first-world front in Firefox OS war

#46

Post by mkr-hn »

jbigelow76 wrote: post #41
veeti wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>MS could fix it all immediately by offering Android app compatibility. Did you also switch over to the Blackberry and Jolla?

I'd like to see a critical mass of AOSP vendors emerge that would convince Android devs to look beyond the Play store. MS shipping their own flavor of Android, along with Amazon and then BB and Jolla offering Android app compatibility could begin to turn that tide. Especially with MS being able to offer some "foundational" type apps (Bing maps, email client, MS Office, Cortana) that could address some of the holes in…

Amazon is already working on the services. My Kindle Fire got a maps app (powered by Nokia Here) in one of the newer updates.

Re: Mozilla to open first-world front in Firefox OS war

#47

Post by archagon »

leppr wrote: post #17
vijayr wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it possible to write good mobile apps in JS and HTML, compared to Android or iOS? I don't know much about mobile programming, but it seems much harder for JS to compete with native apps, no?

Correct me if I'm wrong but I don't think you can write native apps for Android or iOS either. Also recently there's been way more effort on improving JavaScript VMs than Java's.

I'm pretty sure that's wrong on both counts. Android has the NDK and iOS apps can be written in straight C/C++.

Re: Mozilla to open first-world front in Firefox OS war

#48

Post by tvararu »

Got to try a Firefox OS phone (or three) last week at a short hackathon in Telefonica Digital's offices in London.

The first device I tried (and apparently the one with the beefiest hardware) was an Alcatel One Touch Fire. My enthusiasm took a sharp turn downward from the moment I unlocked the device; accomplished by sliding the screen left to right, the animation was jerky, did not track my finger accurately, and skipped to the end when I let go of the screen halfway through the width of the screen.

One of the hosts was quick to point out that the lock screen interaction was actually custom programmed by Alcatel, and so is the rest of the user interface, at which point he pointed to try a different device running something closer to "stock Firefox OS."

I'm enthralled by the promise of helping the web win by creating a device category where the web is a first-class citizen, but I'm doubtful it will happen if manufacturers outsource their tasteless UI customizations to web dev interns.

Sunspider came out at roughly 1600ms, which places the mid-2013 Alcatel somewhere in the performance bracket of an iPhone 4 (mid-2010, flagship device). Despite the rough benchmarks, I ran some Famo.us demos and they were surprisingly usable, and I could easily get a physics-backed drag interaction to run smoothly inside the browser.

I'm waiting to try out a Firefox OS phone with cutting edge hardware.

Re: Mozilla to open first-world front in Firefox OS war

#49

Post by tzs »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #28

I would love to try a firefox OS phone. Verizon seems like an odd choice in the U.S., to me they seem like a 'premium' brand somewhat more expensive than their competitors, while Firefox OS, at least prior to know, seems to have been positioning itself as a budget option.

It's also worth raising an eyeball over (but probably not dropping a monocle over) Mozilla being one of the strongest proponents of strong (e.g., Title II) network neutrality regulation, and Verizon being probably the telecoms most opposed, and like the one that will put the most effort into lobbying and using to overturn net neutrality.

Re: Mozilla to open first-world front in Firefox OS war

#50

Post by jrochkind1 »

abrowne wrote: post #37
jrochkind1 wrote: post #28

I would love to try a firefox OS phone. Verizon seems like an odd choice in the U.S., to me they seem like a 'premium' brand somewhat more expensive than their competitors, while Firefox OS, at least prior to know, seems to have been positioning itself as a budget option.

Verizon has the best coverage in rural areas, at least where people I know live: southeast Minnesota, western Wisconsin, and Iowa. Many of my (and my friends') relatives in these areas still use flip phones or have reluctantly upgraded to iPhones or Android. Verizon is wise to have an option that's not a smartphone and not total junk. I just upgraded my ZTE Open C to FxOS 3.0. This phone is similar, but worse, in spe…

aha! That makes some sense, thanks.
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