Mozilla is building an operating system

https://wiki.mozilla.org/B2G

by vilya • 15 years ago

140 85 15 years ago

wiki.mozilla.org

Zumzoa• 15 years ago

Already being discussed here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2805708

yid• 15 years ago

Wouldn't it make more sense to replace gnome/kde with gecko? Isn't that essentially what the win8 demo was all about? So many questions, so little cloud...

MatthewPhillips4• 15 years ago

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 (and create new standards as well).

j_col• 15 years ago

You mean like webOS?

stcredzero• 15 years ago

Essentially they want a phone that replaces every native functionality with html/javascript.

I would love to hear more about the security model.

kenjackson• 15 years ago

The project is DOA unless they also go and buy spectrum. Because no one is going to allow this phone on their network.

They need to buy some 4G spectrum and then this becomes interesting. Until then its just a failed project.

MatthewPhillips4• 15 years ago

Does Mozilla have any mobile patents?

dstein• 15 years ago

How well is it going to be received compared with the level of effort required? ChromeOS is pretty bad and Google has been working on it for a long time.

ck2• 15 years ago

I realize they can do more than one thing at once but how about getting threaded tabs into a current build of Firefox first. Coders talented enough to make an O/S certainly should be able to make threaded tabs happen.

starwed2• 15 years ago

They just hit a pretty important milestone for that.

http://felipe.wordpress.com/2011/07/20/initial-electrolysis-...

hollerith6• 15 years ago

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?)

sushrutbidwai• 15 years ago

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

bmj• 15 years ago

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.

Ronkdar2• 15 years ago

Running FF5 on Win7, 2 GB of RAM. I leave it open all day with no issues. 5+ tabs at all times.

hollerith6• 15 years ago

You have caused me to resolve to buy more RAM. Thanks.

gage• 15 years ago

To me, it's clear that they have spent more time making a rendering engine that is more compatible with CSS and Javascript. Every other popular browser(including Opera) has some serious Javascript and CSS rendering issues where it counts. From my development experience Firefox is the most developer friendly browser, by miles.

mindcrime4• 15 years ago

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.

Amen, brother. I have been a Mozilla / Firefox / Seamonkey / etc. fanboy for years, but even I finally gave up and moved to using Chrome primarily, and it was mainly due to that very problem. For years now they've battled memory issues (I say "issues" since they continue to insist that there aren't any "leaks" per-se) that kill performance... one release will work great, then the next release, it's back to more of the same... next release, things get better... another release, and it's time for a RAM upgrade again... it's like they seem to be totally incapable of truly, finally, getting a handle on the memory usage situation. :-(

owenmarshall2• 15 years ago

Firefox has made memory overhead a serious priority in the Fx7 & Fx8 development cycles, with some impressive results:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=666058#c31

burgerbrain6• 15 years ago

Too little, too late. It took them literally years to admit that they had a problem. I've long since migrated, and I know many other people that have as well.

hollerith6• 15 years ago

FF 7.0a2 (got Jul 24 from the Aurora channel) is less responsive than FF 3.6 was on my machine -- although I cannot be sure that the unresponsiveness is due to memory pressure rather than, e.g., insufficient parallelism of the UI relative to the part that executes Javascript.

dman2• 15 years ago

I am not on snow leopard yet so I dont know how much 1gig of RAM is by Snow Leopard standards but for reference how does Chrome / Safari do in comparison?

hollerith6• 15 years ago

I haven't used Chrome enough to say because if you increase the text size on Chrome to where I like it then the text spills over the right side of the window (at least on 13.3-inch Macbooks) with the result that one has to scroll back and forth horizontally for every line of text. I admit that my preference for large text is unusual though.

Safari was unresponsive (spinning beach ball) even more of the time than FF has been.

nxn2• 15 years ago

Well, as a user you have the option of using another browser. Though, admittedly, with 1 gig of RAM I can't think of any decent one that wont give you problems after a few hours of browsing -- maybe chrome?

As a web developer, I wish they'd concentrate on making a browser that lets you change the line-height of a button/input element. Such a simple change, yet the problem has been around since 2006, if I recall correctly.

bzbarsky6• 15 years ago

It's not a simple change, because sites actually rely on not being able to _decrease_ the line-height. I tried allowing sites to change the line-height and had to back that out because of sites breaking. You can read the whole sordid story at https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=349259

Note that the change to allow changing line-height specifically on <button> did stick, and will ship in the next Firefox release in 3 weeks or so.

digitalnalogika• 15 years ago

Try disabling all add-ons, it got me to really low RAM usage and I had AdBlock & Firebug only earlier.

hollerith6• 15 years ago

Will disabling Flashblock improve performance?

(The only other extension I use is Adblock plus.)

Should I disable the plug-ins the come with FF?

experimental2• 15 years ago

I wish they'd concentrate on making a browser that can start scrolling before all the Javascript on the page has finished running.

That's weird, that's what happens to me in Chrome, not Firefox.

joakin• 15 years ago

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 fine, but it's a wonderful project with millions of users and that cannot be denied.

Sending my opinion to oblivion because of pointing how unrelated the firefox rant comments are to the article makes no sense.

norswap• 15 years ago

Building an os is hard stuff, and if you can't produce a browser without memory leaks (or a caching strategy I can't possibly start to fathom), you're not headed in the right direction.

rpearl2• 15 years ago

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 large piece of software. The point is that they have good engineers on the problems. So does Mozilla.

My second is claim is that a Firefox-based solution is good for the web. Even if it isn't as successful as Android, it will open up the web more! Android is a farce of open source (I cannot get the kernel code running on my phone. That is a blatant GPL violation. Nobody is doing anything about it. I cannot get the Android userland code running on my tablet. That is just not open source.) At the moment, Android is scarcely more open than iOS.

My last claim is that many of the "memory leaks" in Firefox are either caching--memory which is not being used is memory which is being wasted--and those which are truly memory leaks tend to be from binary extensions. The new extension SDK should mitigate this, since it is sandboxed JS code instead, from what I understand (disclaimer: i do not work on the extension API, nor do I write extensions, and I could by way off here.)

f7u12• 15 years ago

I'd have to trust Mozilla to keep up in the browser space before I considered using an OS developed by them.

mindcrime4• 15 years ago

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.

DEinspanjer5• 15 years ago

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. :/

pnathan2• 15 years ago

Honestly?

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

ootachi2• 15 years ago

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.

hn_decay2• 15 years ago

I am in complete agreement. And quite honestly it grows tiring actually refuting the various anti-Firefox rants with actual fact -- it is a bit of a hobbyhorse of some people while they cheer on whatever team they're waving the flag of.

It honestly must be emotionally exhausting to work for Mozilla projects. For all of the incredible work they have done (Firefox is the reason Apple still exists...I'll argue that point if anyone would like), there are so many anti-Firefox fanboys who appear in every single Mozilla discussion to express their ridiculous anecdotes or to make uninformed, naive performance observations.

burgerbrain6• 15 years ago

I wonder what your theory is on how these "anti-Firefox fanbois" are created?

I used to be a "Pro-Firefox fanboi", had the apparel and everything. Now I no longer use it and on occasion like to publicly comment about my new dislike of it.

Since the facts are apparently not on my side, what is going on here?

nextparadigms• 15 years ago

I'd like to see what Mozilla comes up with. Bring it on Mozilla!

runjake2• 15 years ago

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.

dman2• 15 years ago

What is your definition of bloat - size of download, application startup times, number of features, speed while being used, memory usage?

Firefox 5 without addons does not seem to be bloated to me by any of the above definitions. In terms of featuresets just for reference - Netscape communicator used to ship with a mail client, browser, news client, html editor and a calendar.

runjake2• 15 years ago

not so much the size of the download, but all of the rest, yes.

I feel that Firefox is nearly at the point Netscape was at the point Phoenix (the original name of Firefox) came into being.

5.0 does seem a little faster.

For what it's worth, I still run Firefox (5.0) on a regular basis, including as I post this comment.

bzbarsky6• 15 years ago

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.

bluelu• 15 years ago

Will it also run Internet Explorer?

cosgroveb• 15 years ago

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

paran• 15 years ago

You sir have hit the nail on the head. The article reads as is they invented something revolutionary. I do think there is great potential in browser os market and a little competition is all that's required to pave the way for the 'next big thing'! This might just do good for the ChromeOS.

bzbarsky6• 15 years ago

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?).

sabret00the3• 15 years ago

In that case, wouldn't it be more effective to throw Mozilla's weight behind an open source mobile Operating System that actually has a chance of going mainstream ala MeeGo?

jerhewet• 15 years ago

tl;dr -- Mozilla thinks it's a good idea to write an operating system in Javascript.

suyash• 15 years ago

Telephony Apps and api natively in the browser- yay!!!

vilya• 15 years ago

I wonder if they're planning to write it in Rust? It would be interesting to see how an OS written in a more modern language than C would turn out - especially since other attempts like Microsoft's Singularity seem to have gone quiet.

matmann2001• 15 years ago

I can't wait until Safari starts building its own operating system...

andhow• 15 years ago

Boot To Gecko is not a project to build an operation system.

IIUC, Mozilla is planning to reuse Linux and core components of Android. If anything, I would think Boot To Gecko would be better thought of as a shell around the OS. Using process separation (underway for a while now in the Electrolysis project) bugs/leaks/crashes in Gecko should be isolated and not significantly more disruptive than in normal Firefox.

I think the major value provided by (and work required for) Boot To Gecko will be on creating open standards (in the open) for access to the device so that web platform can be a first class citizen of the device.

Mozilla is building an operating system

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