Some people are not getting the main goal of the Firefox OS: To give emerging markets (cheap) smartphones and keep the web as open as possible. Therefore, HTML/CSS/JS is a damn good combo to keep the web open, and to enable rapid development of apps.
The Promise of Firefox OS
71–80 of 147 posts
Re: The Promise of Firefox OS
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hi lifeisstillgood, I am one of the core Persona developers. Persona is a pretty awesome project with very ambitious goals. We obviously want to see growth explode and are working hard to make Persona great for both users and site operators. Persona's growth has been steady, primarily driven by newly developed sites. We hope that as the user base grows and support for the BrowserID protocol is natively built into the…
Thank you - I have just joined the group. I agree - Persona is an awesome project - and I like anything that is going to take the pain of managing passwords away from me. I am most interested in python / wsgi integration - if any of your collegues are working on this I will be very happy to contribute.
In some downtime at work I threw together a rough proof of concept just to see what it invloves in go[1].. It was crazy simple to get running. I hope people start using it in more places.
Re: The Promise of Firefox OS
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I surf this site on my iphone daily. Yes I occassionally downvote something I did not mean to, yes dead link annoys me if I lose what I typed. But the user experience of sharing and gathering opinions of intelligent well informed people from all corners of the world and backgrounds more than compensates. IMO of course.
And thats what I mean - Craigslist is the other "broken" site that does UX well. Its not meant to be pretty or responsive - its meant to do what I expect it to do.
If pg decided to fix the broken CR/LF issue, he might be tempted to add bootstrap, and then make it responsive, and then have a feedback form. So I quite like #lazilyproductive
Re: The Promise of Firefox OS
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
No, not sarcasm. HN sits with craigslist on the set of sites that the UX is in the community not the site.
Re: The Promise of Firefox OS
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> 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.
Uh.. because it's cross platform. The ubiquity of the web is literally the only reason why people use HTML/CSS/Javascript. All your points are valid except for the fact that you are blatantly disregarding the single biggest downside of native development: multiple-platform support. I'm sorry, the world isn't made up entirely of iPhones or Android phones.
Re: The Promise of Firefox OS
#76Earlier 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.…
(in response to marknutter's comment below, for some reason the reply button was previously not available. HN bug?): You can (and we do): iOS: http://xamarin.com/monotouch android: http://xamarin.com/monoforandroid You should give it a shot. And as much as I like HN and its content, its mobile UX is pretty shabby (dare I say incompatible? ;)).
I actually use http://cheeaun.github.com/, which is entirely web based and works wonderfully well. No updating of the app required, no mini-browser within the app, etc.
Re: The Promise of Firefox OS
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Firefox Mobile has Adblock Plus available.
Re: The Promise of Firefox OS
#78So... 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…
Simple. Web sites that are terrible in mobile will die, and will be replaced by better ones.
Re: The Promise of Firefox OS
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Compare Javascript and Java Bytecode. The respective virtual machines are IonMonkey,V8,etc vs Hotspot,Harmony,etc. All those VMs are pretty portable across various architectures and operating systems. The syntax is C-like vs binary stack machine code. Both languages come with a documented standard, reference implementations, and standard libraries.
Sure, Javascript is somewhat harder to parse than Java Bytecode. Java Bytecode usually runs faster. However, from a high-level software architecture perspective there is not much of a difference. And the parser is usually not the performance critical part in any VM.
Re: The Promise of Firefox OS
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Have you tried source maps? http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/developertools/source...