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Mozilla is building an operating system

wiki.mozilla.org

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Re: Mozilla is building an operating system

#51

Post by bzbarsky »

runjake wrote: post #28

My first question is why? Do they have a real vision other than "me too"? Does anyone else remember when Phoenix was first released to fight bloated browsers? Now it is that bloated browser and running an OS developed around its technologies isn't too appealing to me. Find your roots before you start off on some other project if you hope to have any significant success.

Did you read the article?

The vision is "users, not the device phone vendor, should be able to control what apps they can install and run".

Note that's what being built is not an OS. What's being built is a set of APIs to allow web apps to do more of the things that only native apps can do right now, so that you're not stuck using native apps that the device vendor has a stranglehold on.

Re: Mozilla is building an operating system

#52

Post by bzbarsky »

cosgroveb wrote: post #44

It seems strange to me that they announce this without even mentioning ChromeOS as if B2G was conceived in a cave.

The point here is not to build an OS. The point is to improve web APIs so that web apps can compete with native ones, and do it in an open fashion so that all web browsers can implement the new APIs. ChromeOS has done some of this, but neither far enough nor openly enough (what ChromeOS extensions are working on becoming cross-browser standards?).

Re: Mozilla is building an operating system

#53

Post by bzbarsky »

stcredzero wrote: post #32
MatthewPhillips wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The wiki page doesn't do a good job explaining it, but what they're aiming at is mobile devices. Essentially they want a phone that replaces every native functionality with html/javascript. So a web application would be your phone dialer, a web application could access your NFC chip. All of the capabilities they're going for is stuff that's in the pipeline in W3C, they want to create an OS to accelerate the process (…

Essentially they want a phone that replaces every native functionality with html/javascript. I would love to hear more about the security model.

The security model is one of the hard parts that needs working out, yes. This is just an announcement that there is a plan to work one out in case people want to participate instead of just having stuff dumped on them from on high when it's done the way Google and Apple do it.

Re: Mozilla is building an operating system

#54

Post by rpearl »

burgerbrain wrote: post #27
rpearl wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=64804 http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=36142 http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=68304 http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=90484 ...etc... Guess Google shouldn't be writing an OS either? I have three points with this post. My first is that, despite the extremely good marketing, Chrome has faults just like any other larg…

Honestly yes. Google should not be writing an OS either. But lets be fair here, Google has waaaay more resources than Mozilla (hell, most of Mozillas resources come from Google...), and a comparison between Chrome and Firefox shows that.

There is a law of decreasing returns when it comes to "resources". That is to say, an engineer only makes so much, and throwing additional engineers at a single project only gains you so much, and the gains of each additional engineer are far less.

And the comparison between Chrome and Firefox shows... nothing? In my usage, Firefox works fine and Chrome swaps like hell and crashes even when I can get it working. Clearly other people have different experiences, but I can't reproduce them.

And you would not argue that IE6 was better than Firefox 1.0, I am sure. Microsoft had waaaay more resources than Mozilla then too. That is not indicative of failure.

Re: Mozilla is building an operating system

#55

Post by bmj »

sushrutbidwai wrote: post #12
hollerith wrote: post #11

I wish they'd concentrate on making a browser that does not need to be restarted after every hour or 2 of browsing lest it become more and more unresponsive. I wish they'd concentrate on making a browser that can start scrolling before all the Javascript on the page has finished running. (I'm using FF 7 on Snow Leopard with 1 gig of RAM. Would I have to restart FF less often if I had more RAM?)

I think you need minimum 2 GB of RAM, ideally 4GB+. More than 4-5 tabs on 1G machine will deteriorate performance very easily.

I find this a bit silly. I could understand, maybe, if I had four tabs open with Flash going in each one, or perhaps a very JS-intensive UI. But if I'm doing mostly "normal" browsing and my browser needs for than a gig of RAM to operate normally, I'd say something is wrong.

Re: Mozilla is building an operating system

#56

Post by DEinspanjer »

mindcrime wrote: post #22
joakin wrote: post #15

Impressive how the most voted comments are rants about the browser. If that's insightful or useful comments hit me... I really don't understand this hate towards Mozilla that has been going around lately. Edit: Why am I being downvoted? It's a sincere opinion of a person who doesn't see a relation in critizising a project of an organisation in an article that talks about other projects. If you dont like Firefox its f…

I think it's more like "tough love" than hate. If I bitch about Firefox, it's because I want to love Firefox, but I can't. That pisses me off. If I didn't care about it, like the way I don't care about Safari or Konqueror, or Opera, I wouldn't talk about it, like I never talk about Safari or Konqueror, or Opera.

I checked your comments and you certainly aren't a regular Mozilla flamer, so I'll take what you say here at face value.

The thing that frustrates me is how many other people come out of the woodwork on any Mozilla or Firefox related post to give the story, "I used to love Firefox but it uses too much memory so I switched to Chrome and now I'm so happy". My opinion is Google has some amazing marketing and social skills to power that kind of sentiment shift. The big thing that rarely comes up in those threads is that Mozilla is a community. There are memory bugs that have been open in bugzilla for years, but there have been various people in the community working on them, sometimes in their spare time, for years as well. You look at the scope of the project, and it isn't small. It certainly isn't a hack project someone can commit a quick patch to in a day.. There are certainly paid Mozilla employees working on the code base every day, but the number doesn't compare with any of the other major browser vendors. The FirefoxFlippers™ rarely ever follow up with something like, "I tried to look at the problem and realized what a difficult thing memory management is so I took the easy path and decided to let some profit based vendor do it for me and hope that they treat me well."

My personal and probably bias experience is that I have never felt a memory issue. I tend to run a lot of add-ons and I only rarely keep a lot of tabs open because I prefer to follow a pattern of opening up a bunch of things then working my way back down to zero. I feel that most memory issues are related to bad add-ons, bad plug-ins, or bad websites, and I am very happy with the new about:memory stats that show up in Aurora. I just hope that some of the FirefoxFlippers™ who aren't just trolling for Google might take a moment to try out their easily repeatable excessive memory use-cases and drop us a line so we can work together with the community to get rid of them.

I'll now take my downmodding for ranting on a post with a comment that is only tangentially related to the topic. :/

Re: Mozilla is building an operating system

#58

Post by eropple »

DEinspanjer wrote: post #56
mindcrime wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's more like "tough love" than hate. If I bitch about Firefox, it's because I want to love Firefox, but I can't. That pisses me off. If I didn't care about it, like the way I don't care about Safari or Konqueror, or Opera, I wouldn't talk about it, like I never talk about Safari or Konqueror, or Opera.

I checked your comments and you certainly aren't a regular Mozilla flamer, so I'll take what you say here at face value. The thing that frustrates me is how many other people come out of the woodwork on any Mozilla or Firefox related post to give the story, "I used to love Firefox but it uses too much memory so I switched to Chrome and now I'm so happy". My opinion is Google has some amazing marketing and social skil…

You seem to be under the impression that the difficulty of putting out a working product is something the consumer cares about. They don't.

Results are what matters, and for all too long Mozilla's results have been poor compared to Google's.

Re: Mozilla is building an operating system

#59

Post by hackinthebochs »

DEinspanjer wrote: post #56
mindcrime wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's more like "tough love" than hate. If I bitch about Firefox, it's because I want to love Firefox, but I can't. That pisses me off. If I didn't care about it, like the way I don't care about Safari or Konqueror, or Opera, I wouldn't talk about it, like I never talk about Safari or Konqueror, or Opera.

I checked your comments and you certainly aren't a regular Mozilla flamer, so I'll take what you say here at face value. The thing that frustrates me is how many other people come out of the woodwork on any Mozilla or Firefox related post to give the story, "I used to love Firefox but it uses too much memory so I switched to Chrome and now I'm so happy". My opinion is Google has some amazing marketing and social skil…

>There are memory bugs that have been open in bugzilla for years

As one of those who used to love Firefox (back when it was marketed as being "light and fast") and now has switched to Chrome, I think this is really where the hate towards Firefox comes from. Mozilla apparently makes enough money that they can continually increase the scope of their company, while at the same time years-old memory bugs are left to linger.

Firefox became popular precisely because they were the anti-microsoft and anti-netscape browser. They have succeeded in taking netscape's place as the slow bloated web browser.

Re: Mozilla is building an operating system

#60

Post by ootachi »

pnathan wrote: post #36
joakin wrote: post #15

Impressive how the most voted comments are rants about the browser. If that's insightful or useful comments hit me... I really don't understand this hate towards Mozilla that has been going around lately. Edit: Why am I being downvoted? It's a sincere opinion of a person who doesn't see a relation in critizising a project of an organisation in an article that talks about other projects. If you dont like Firefox its f…

Honestly? Because Firefox performance is atrocious, and that is the single most salient point from the Mozilla project.

Have any evidence that Firefox performance is "atrocious"? Firefox JavaScript is faster than any other browser except Chrome (and beats Chrome on some apps like JSLint), and it has GPU acceleration while Chrome does not.
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