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The Promise of Firefox OS

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Re: The Promise of Firefox OS

#61

Post by shadowmint »

firefoxman1 wrote: post #54
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…

Really, this is the top comment? Everything you just listed is exactly what FirefoxOS is trying to fix.

How?

Making firefox os is great, but how do we get from here to, people making web apps that don't suck on mobiles?

Is it a market place they're going to sell apps on and curate so they're no rubbish?

Is it a platform that is so great and compelling people are going to stop making native apps for it?

Is it a new browser that is so amazing they everyone is going to swap to it, and it makes web apps responsive and amazing?

Is it an entire 'platform' that runs inside a browser?

A native app that acts like it's own 'OS' that runs on all phones?

...you get the idea. What about firefox OS is going to change anything? I'm not trolling, if you can figure it out, tell me, because then I'll pitch it, at work, and we can start down that path.

Re: The Promise of Firefox OS

#62

Post by cxhristian »

bmuon wrote: post #36
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…

  No adblock on mobile (yet?) :P
Rooted Android phones can install apps[0] that block most ads (I think it only blocks connections to the ads and doesn't do any fancy CSS rules).

And Firefox on Android has Adblock Plus browser extension which as far as I know blocks ads like it does on the desktop version. No root needed for this.

[0]: AdAway (I use this) https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.adaway

Adblock Plus for Android (Seems to have some non-root support, I haven't tried it): https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.adblockplu...

This app above is not the same as the browser extension mentioned before

Re: The Promise of Firefox OS

#63

Post by chris_wot »

Offler wrote: post #48
PommeDeTerre wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think those eras had browsers that weren't capable of delivering on the promise. If you only work with IE9+ (all the other browsers are quite good now) you will be working in a run time environment that is far superior to those available in the DHTML/Ajax era. Another issue is that very few people know how to do large scale JS applications, where I work we do (130,000K+ lines of code, 900+ classes) but it has taken…

900+ classes, in Javascript?

Re: The Promise of Firefox OS

#64

Post by chris_wot »

pornel wrote: post #28
otibom wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ?

JavaScript is the standard bytecode.

I'm not following: Javascript is an interpreted language, not a bytecode standard. You can't compile Javascript to bytecode and run it anywhere.

Re: The Promise of Firefox OS

#65

Post by davidw »

marknutter wrote: post #57
ricw wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not at all. Dead serious. If HTML/CSS/javascript had been properly developed we wouldn't even have to deal with all the issues surrounding web dev. All these issues have been addressed by OS development decades ago (e.g. duplex connectivity, UX layout, MVC split, performance, just to name a few), yet we still have to deal with them now. Million of man-hours have been wasted due to them.. So no, this is not trolling.…

Mobile apps have made it possible to write your app once and have it work on multiple platforms? Gee, I must have missed that (as I post to HN, a web app that works on multiple platforms).

In addition to that, you can deploy your apps on your own terms, rather than Apple's or Google's.

Re: The Promise of Firefox OS

#66

Post by mephju »

This is a real question and no trolling:

Why is nobody building a second kind of browser, one which is not based on html and css. A browser which is geared towards app execution and development. A browser which can run apps which can be programmed in a way that is similar to programming Android apps. Where I can for example have a footer without doing some css hacks. DNS and most of our backends could still be reused but the client stuff would have to be written again. Delivering apps and linking between them like the web does is awesome. Building sophisticated apps is not awesome but on Android and iOS it is. Why not take the best of both worlds...now....not in 10 years when some standards might agree on something. Just think about how very important the web is. Everyone is using it. The whole world largely depends on it, but it's increasingly not up to the task. And why do web developers seem to be so satisfied with the state of the technology which drives the web. Oh, you think css is great because you can code a hack for putting a footer on the bottom of the page even when there is no content in the attention area? What? It's so strange.

Why has nobody ever tried to create such a browser?

Re: The Promise of Firefox OS

#67

Post by anon1385 »

hosay123 wrote: post #50
anon1385 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Debugging a Java or a C crash in infinitely worse, since instead of comparatively pretty symbols and a verifiably correct stack 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 My experience of crashes in C is that the OS typically provides a decent backtrace including function names, not just…

On many architectures almost any stack overrun will overwrite the frame pointer in C, resulting in a corrupted stack trace. As mentioned in my second comment, I slightly conflated what C and JVM crashes look like – the comparison was poor. > I've honestly no idea what you are talking about here. Java code swamped in gotos? Yes, the JVM has goto and your favourite compiler probably emits it, it's just not exposed in J…

Maybe eventually we will have 'sufficiently smart transpilers' and interactive debuggers for languages that target javascript and don't expose the 'JSVM' but that is not the case at the moment. Mozilla said "And if your problem is with JavaScript as a language, you can already use a myriad of languages that reliably compile to it", i.e. if you don't like javascript you don't need to use javascript. This is what I was responding to, because I don't see it being true in the near future (next several years at least).

Re: The Promise of Firefox OS

#68

Post by jackalope »

bmuon wrote: post #36
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…

When I open an app or browser on my smartphone, I'm usually focusing on a single task, where ads are intrusive and take away precious real estate from an already tiny screen. It's an enormous relief to use an app or site that just does what you want it to do and nothing more.

Ironically, it's on my smartphone that I'm most likely to use an app that's completely focused on advertising. When I'm looking for a movie or nearby restaurant, I love being able to read reviews and eventually move on to a dedicated web page where I can get more info (movie times, menus, etc.). There are apps that do this very well.

There are plenty of ways to get consumers to happily view advertising and promotional material, but inserting unrelated/unwanted ads into apps and websites just creates a frustrating user experience, especially on mobile.

Re: The Promise of Firefox OS

#69

Post by rimantas »

marknutter wrote: post #57
ricw wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not at all. Dead serious. If HTML/CSS/javascript had been properly developed we wouldn't even have to deal with all the issues surrounding web dev. All these issues have been addressed by OS development decades ago (e.g. duplex connectivity, UX layout, MVC split, performance, just to name a few), yet we still have to deal with them now. Million of man-hours have been wasted due to them.. So no, this is not trolling.…

Mobile apps have made it possible to write your app once and have it work on multiple platforms? Gee, I must have missed that (as I post to HN, a web app that works on multiple platforms).

Don't kid yourself. Anyone writing web app "once and have it work on multiple platforms" is just writing different workaround for the different platforms into the same codebase.

HTML was created to markup structure of the document, CSS was created to style the look of that document. JavaScript was created to add some interactity. The idea of the HTML web was about documents, not apps.

Now compare that to the native SDK's which were created for apps develpoment and specifically targeted to solve specific problems. Anyone claiming that web technologies today or tomorrow will be a good replacement for native SDKs has very little idea about native SDKs. Myriad of frameworks trying just so hack some MVC with webtech is a good indicator about the suitability for the task.

Sure, with enough time you can bolt-on enough feature on the top of HTML and JS to make it bearable for apps development: but it will be just that — stuff bolted on the tool created to solve completely different problems.

I don't know why looking at every problem like a nail just because all you have is a hammer is suddenly a good idea.

Re: The Promise of Firefox OS

#70

Post by bergie »

zokier wrote: post #49
bergie wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One big difference here is that Firefox OS (just like PhoneGap/Cordova) is aiming at standardizing the APIs, not at just being another framework . That by itself will make the web richer regardless of how FFOS fares on the market.

And what makes those "standards" different from "another framework"? A rubber stamp from W3C?

Yeah, and usually a compliance test suite. And nowadays browser vendors even seem to be quite active in implementing these things.

See for instance http://blog.chromium.org/2013/02/hello-firefox-this-is-chrom... and https://hacks.mozilla.org/2013/02/hello-chrome-its-firefox-c...

In general, I'm curious about the hatred here on HN towards W3C. Sure, standards often move slowly, but it is still the best way to achieve interoperability.

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