There is something magical about Firefox OS

http://rawkes.com/articles/there-is-something-magical-about-firefox-os

by robhawkes • 14 years ago

445 257 14 years ago

I wish they would add softkey support and toro support for the Galaxy Nexus. I'd love to try a build out.

CrazedGeek• 14 years ago

Are you sure it doesn't already work? The build prerequisites page[1] makes it sound like all variants should work. I've run it on maguro, but it's definitely the most well-supported of the variants. The lack of softkeys made it astoundingly painful; I ended up using a USB OTG keyboard just to navigate.

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Boot_to_Gec...

Robby2012• 14 years ago

I'm really in love with Boot2Gecko, it's the future

zacharyvoase• 14 years ago

> In short, Firefox OS is about taking the technologies behind the Web, like JavaScript, and using them to produce an entire mobile operating system. Just let that sink in for a moment — it's a mobile OS powered by JavaScript!

This kind of happened before: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_webOS

What went wrong? Well, apparently[1] there were some big performance issues—and IIUC Gecko has some of those already.

[1] http://www.slashgear.com/hp-ipad-2-webos-testing-double-touc...

dshankar• 14 years ago

Doesn't the article you link to point our performance issues with the TouchPad _hardware_?

ngokevin• 14 years ago

WebOS had a proprietary Javascript SDK or something lame. Firefox OS runs on pure HTML5 standards.

masklinn3• 14 years ago

> WebOS had a proprietary Javascript SDK or something lame.

WebOS was straight webkit with additional APIs for telephony and hardware access, and a bundled framework to help with laying out.

Said framework having been extracted for regular in-browser JS[0]

> Firefox OS runs on pure HTML5 standards.

Firefox OS runs straight Gecko with additional APIs for telephony and hardware access, without a framework to help getting started.

It's the exact bloody fucking same thing.

[0] http://enyojs.com/

sp332• 14 years ago

There might have been some proprietary bits, but you can download the code for the WebOS desktop and build it to a useable state from here: https://github.com/openwebos/build-desktop

masklinn3• 14 years ago

> This kind of happened before: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_webOS

Yeah, and I find the complete and utter lack of any mention of WebOS in TFA troubling.

> What went wrong? Well, apparently[1] there were some big performance issues

Your link points to insufficient hardware though, not software issues. Hardware which seems to have been the main recurring problem on all WebOS machines (according to reports, there were also issues with the software being shipped far too early for v1.0, against the wishes of the engineers working on it)

klausa• 14 years ago

Well, considering that the same chipset (APQ8060) was also used in some variants of Galaxy S II, I really don't think so that Touchpad hardware was that bad.

And the fact that after installing Android 4.0.4 on it, it feels like whole new machine (speed-wise) - I really blame webOS here.

randallu• 14 years ago

WebOS was written in C++, eventually with a lot of Qt (the window manager, the dock, system dialogs, etc). The apps were written as web pages, though.

FxOS is all web pages (even the IME!) though currently has the same basic PalmOS launcher model that iOS and Android have; no multitasking window manager.

robhawkes26• 14 years ago

Thanks for the comment, the WebOS question is one I see a lot.

One of our engineers answered this recently on Quora, I hope it helps explain the differences a bit: http://www.quora.com/How-does-Mozillas-Boot-2-Gecko-compare-...

nikcub• 14 years ago

I might not be reading this right, but in my mind this summarized as:

* WebOS added custom API's to handle parts of the phone hardware that are not web standard, for eg. phone calls, SMS

* The Firefox project also added custom API's, except they are submitting them for standardization as web interfaces

Why not just implement the WebOS API's and thus make them a standard, or are they considered flawed in some way that the B2G project now solves?

This option would have had the added bonus of immediate interop with WebOS applications, developer learning curve, documentation, etc.

gjulianm• 14 years ago

Gecko will have an awesome performance. I went to Telefónica offices in Madrid a few weeks ago. They showed us a prototype (ZTE phone) running one of the lastest builds of Firefox OS (not the nightly, though). We touched it and it had pretty good perfomance. It was somewhat snappy on scrolling items, but overall a similar performance that you get on a medium-cost Android phone.

Then we asked about that device. It was a crappy ZTE with 600 MHz CPU and with the poorest Qualcomm chipset. This blew out my mind: a non-optimised system was running with acceptable performance on the lowest of smartphones. I can't imagine how will this perform when it's fully optimised on a high-end smartphone. They're doing a great work.

andrewcooke2• 14 years ago

any idea when/if it will be available to buy? or what markets they are aiming at (latin america?)?

newman3145• 14 years ago

webOS also suffered from execution issues (as a company). They were forever rewriting things under the hood as a fair number of things were duct-taped together.

For example, they moved from a Java based solution to JS using v8 from webOS 1.x to 2.x.

Hopefully, Firefox OS will not suffer from the same issues. And I would certainly like to hear more about the under-the-hood architecture. It's pretty eye candy but things like power management quickly jump to the forefront when you actually try to use the device as a phone on a regular basis.

As far as the webOS performance issues go, it was less the hardware and more the fact that most of the software were not optimized and shipped with an ENORMOUS amount logging turned on. Put simply, Palm essentially did a "make debug_build" and shipped it.

Not trying to be harsh, just what I have observed from poking around webOS.

robhawkes26• 14 years ago

You might be interested in this: https://wiki.mozilla.org/B2G/Architecture

masklinn3• 14 years ago

> For example, they moved from a Java based solution to JS using v8 from webOS 1.x to 2.x.

Wow, you may want to do some basic checking on your assertions there:

* webOS never used Java, Luna (webOS-to-be) was a skunkworks alternative to the Java-based Prima project. there was java stuff below from Prima, it was not the application core and was never made available to developers

* webOS always used both Webkit and V8 for its application runtime (Palm was the first company to ship a mobile V8 port)

http://blogs.gurulabs.com/dax/2009/06/palm-pre-webos.html

http://www.theverge.com/2012/6/5/3062611/palm-webos-hp-insid...

sixothree• 14 years ago

The world can only process the introduction of so many mobile operating systems at once? I get the impression it was seen as competition to Android, but failed because Palm was a two-bit player in comparison to the Google juggernaut. Maybe if it were being introduced today it would stand more of a chance.

edit: oh and as to the failing of the author to acknowledge WebOS speaks to the author's knowledge or honesty, take your pick.

ktizo• 14 years ago

I pick option 3. The author probably knows about WebOS and didn't think that it was necessary to go over it for this article.

[edit] If someone offers you n options, always pick option n + 1.

stcredzero4• 14 years ago

> The world can only process the introduction of so many mobile operating systems at once?

If there's a subset of the world for whom an iPhone or a high end Android smartphone is just a pipe dream, then the pipe-dream devices won't be much of a distraction.

oneandoneis2• 14 years ago

"Firefox OS is based on the same concepts as WebOS so it's doomed"?

Isn't that a bit like saying "OS X is based on BSD so it will only be of interest to hackers"?

Execution is important - just because somebody screwed up an idea before doesn't mean that nobody else can make it work.

antidaily• 14 years ago

Looks pretty but painfully slow in that demo video.

robhawkes26• 14 years ago

We have plenty of challenges to overcome but it's nothing that can't be fixed. We're fully aware of some of the frame-rate issues on the really low-end devices (like in the video) and are actively working on improving that (it's a main priority to get 60FPS).

coffeeaddicted2• 14 years ago

Constant framerate is the thing that matters most to games. 60 fps or just 30 fps doesn't matter as much as that it's constant. You can even play a racer for example at 15 fps, but you fly out the curve the moment a 60 FPS game has a 250ms freeze at the wrong moment.

Just mentioning this as it's something a lot of people not doing games are missing (and maybe one of the main reasons why c/c++ still are dominant in game programming - I mean what's the point of coding in Java when the only way to get a constant FPS is to work throughout with static variables for example?). So if you want games - makes sure you have realtime guarantees.

MatthewPhillips7• 14 years ago

> We have plenty of challenges to overcome but it's nothing that can't be fixed. We're fully aware of some of the frame-rate issues on the really low-end devices (like in the video) and are actively working on improving that (it's a main priority to get 60FPS).

This is the real boom to the web community. The fact that Mozilla has to make these things work. I get frustrated when I do a translate3d(-100%,0,0) on Chrome for Android and it's not buttery smooth. Or I use onscroll to achieve an infinite scroll list and it causes scrolling to be laggy.

I'm sure the Chrome (and Safari) teams are aware of these issues and working on them, but to Mozilla they are absolutely essential. This will put pressure of Apple and Google to put a stronger emphasis on web app performance.

macavity23• 14 years ago

It's an interesting project, and I'm all for competition, but honestly I don't see the value proposition for an OEM to put this on a phone instead of Android. Rendering JavaScript faster is great, but does that really outweigh all the benefits of the Android ecosystem?

robhawkes26• 14 years ago

You'd be surprised, Mozilla is going to launch this with Telefonica next year in Brazil. That's happening.

We're also working with plenty of other partners to bring this to other areas, so there is definitely interest.

I think what appeals to them is the open, customisable nature. Also, remember that this isn't meant to compete with Android and iOS, it solves other problems beyond performance and feature-set.

mmahemoff• 14 years ago

I don't know the stats, but I'm fairly convinced anecdotally there's still a huge segment of users who don't know or care about apps, and don't much know or care about the OS either. They'll use whatever ships with the phone.

If you're an OEM, how would you target these people? As long as you can get a clean, attractive, easy-to-use OS, you'll take an interest in one that's easy for you to customise, and ship with solid default apps, some of which you can monetise on. I think Firefox OS offers that possibility to OEMs, they get to completely control the experience and keep the relationships with customers. And the customisation process - being HTML5 - is arguably simpler and less of a specialised skill.

scriptproof2• 14 years ago

"Android has a cost" (Steve Ballmer). And it could increase (Apple)...

pjmlp• 14 years ago

Who assures you that this JavaScript OS is safe from litigation?

bzbarsky• 14 years ago

Part of the value proposition is that instead of waiting for the big code drop (from Google, in Android's case) and then having to scramble to do whatever they need to customize for their phones an OEM can be involved in Firefox OS development all along. And some are.

See also item two in the list at http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/how_to_spot_openwashing...

kayoone• 14 years ago

"Just let that sink in for a moment — it's a mobile OS powered by JavaScript!"

Scary thought ;)

tsahyt2• 14 years ago

It is. Sounds like a big waste of performance to me.

robhawkes26• 14 years ago

You'd be surprised at how well JavaScript performs when allowed.

cincinnatus2• 14 years ago

Web standards apps will always have to make bad compromises. We need browser byte code.

robhawkes26• 14 years ago

What sort of compromises?

mtrimpe2• 14 years ago

JavaScript is browser byte code. Just like Java byte code it's not that great for a lot of cases but, just like Java, eventually the JIT will get pretty decent.

zobzu• 14 years ago

I think the only major advantage of Firefox OS is that it helps you run full HTML5 apps.

The apps are cached, auto-updated, and easy to code. They run on the phone and on the desktop alike. That's it. The only OS that really compares, is actually Chrome OS, except Chrome OS has not been ported or made to run on phone hardware.

If it's not fast enough, it will not work. If it is, it has a small chance of making a difference.

robhawkes26• 14 years ago

Let's just hope that it's fast enough then!

To be fair, I think there is much more too it than just HTML5 apps. Think beyond the single mobile phone device… it's more about how concepts will change if many different types of devices run apps and can communicate via the same languages (JavaScript, for example).

The other advantage is that it's free, and open for others to take and turn into whatever they want it to be. That's kinda cool.

j_col4• 14 years ago

Giving how shockingly similar Firefox OS is to webOS (now also open source), I would have much rather that they support that OS instead of reinventing the wheel.

Some strange strategic decisions coming out of Mozilla inc. these days, I would much rather see them focus on their browser instead (and Thunderbird!).

robhawkes26• 14 years ago

You might appreciate this piece on Fx OS and WebOS: http://www.quora.com/How-does-Mozillas-Boot-2-Gecko-compare-...

j_col4• 14 years ago

Yes I read that from your other comment, the engineer begins with:

> There are many similarities

Indeed. And he then goes on to admit that a new version of Enjo JS will address many of the perceived shortcomings in webOS:

> This is a simplification, and I should also note that Enyo 2 (the next version of the webOS application framework, not yet released) is designed to be less platform-specific and allow Enyo apps to run on both webOS and in standard web browsers: http://enyojs.com/

Enyo JS 2 is now available for download: http://enyojs.com/

So again, why reinvent the wheel? What's the real benefit of boot-to-Gecko versus boot-to-Webkit (webOS)?

nnethercote• 14 years ago

Yes, it's a shame Mozilla has completely halted desktop Firefox development in order to develop Firefox OS instead.

(Wait, what's that? A company/community can work on more than one thing at a time?)

j_col4• 14 years ago

> (Wait, what's that? A company/community can work on more than one thing at a time?)

But that's the whole point: they're not, at least not in the case of Thunderbird. Firefox OS clearly has a higher priority for them than Thunderbird.

lifeisstillgood6• 14 years ago

I apologise for writing a long post - I have not time to write a short one

There is a reason MBAs are taught market analysis. Its important to position your product for maximum effect (usually maximum profit, but that may not be the case here)

The arguments for FirefoxOS seem to be

1. It's OSS 2. It's Web-technologies only 3. It's aimed at the "emerging" markets' mobile users 4. It runs on cheaper hardware better than the competition

1 and 2 are great. And no-one but us cares, except in 20 years when no child has even seen a line of code because OSS gets wiped out as all PCs are replaced by mobile devices.

(This is the reason I want this to succeed, and I want laptops to be certified FreeBSD compliant. It matters!)

Anyway this is about market positioning, not OSS. So.

Its a well-known truism that don't be in the middle of any market - you get squeezed from both ends.

The emerging markets have adapted enormously well to only having SMS and no smartphones (see anyone in Mumbai). That is not going to go away, so the true bottom end of the market is SMS capable devices. They will probably just give them away.

If Firefox OS says we are not as good as iOS then thay are squarely putting themselves in the middle of the market.

Aim higher folks. The world is not segmented into feature phones and smartphones. It is segmented into one market "I want to use a networked mobile app to get laid or get cash." You will never be the bottom end - that belongs to sending cash by SMS, or selling your harvest with a text.

So its the top of the market - what the cool kids have.

And so, 1 & 2 might just be our saviours. Apple made a great new product that was catnip to the coolest kids in the West. Firefox OS is geeky cool - it might just appeal to the coolest kids not in the West. And they will want to buy the 'best' phone - aim high folks.

I hope you succeed.

robhawkes26• 14 years ago

Thanks for the comment, I really appreciate it!

To be clear, I'm not educated in business so my thoughts are my own (potentially naive) conclusions.

However, there are some very sound business decisions behind us chosing to go with Brazil first, and to go with cheaper, low-end devices. I'm sure they know what they're doing more than I do!

As an aside, we do have versions of Fx OS running on high-end devices and it runs amazingly well. It's not our market though (for now) so it's merely a cool "look what we could do with the power" moment.

I hope we succeed too.

_urga• 14 years ago

You are right to start with low-end devices:

Get it running brilliantly on cheap hardware. Don't waste anything. Make the OS efficient. Do things in the most direct way possible with a minimum of red tape. Expose the bare metal to Javascript. Put the bare minimum features in the OS and let open source grow around that.

rwmj• 14 years ago

Has to be said from experience that I'd never assume business people know what they are doing. Check it yourself.

Marketing isn't that complex. Unfortunately business people do tend to hide behind a facade of secrecy (often for good reasons -- you don't want to reveal your hand to your competitors because someone in your org leaks inside information). But that can also be used to hide poor / complete lack of analysis and bad decision making.

lifeisstillgood6• 14 years ago

Its good to see you on here (I tend not to see authors of posts on HN - maybe its me)

Fantastic work - and if you dont mind answering dumb questions, what device would you recommend getting if I fancy playing (B2G_build_prerequisites has a list of a few - but I have no idea how to be sure I get specifc models, or if I can buy an Otoro in UK. Basically, really horrible starting questions :-)

Happy to be told just google harder

Cheers

wmf• 14 years ago

However, there are some very sound business decisions behind us chosing to go ... with cheaper, low-end devices. I'm sure they know what they're doing more than I do!

I'm not sure. Gecko is faster and lighter than Dalvik now? Since when?

simonh2• 14 years ago

>1 and 2 are great. And no-one but us cares, except in 20 years when no child >has even seen a line of code because OSS gets wiped out as all PCs are replaced by mobile devices.

While these guys are off saving the world from the evils of proprietary software, is it ok if I just get on with teaching my kids to program using Codea on our iPad?

Edit: Ok, I too wish Apple devices in particular were a little less locked down, but hysterical prognostications about the end of hacker culture don't do the cause any favours.

jmathai2• 14 years ago

> While these guys are off saving the world from the evils of proprietary software, is it ok if I just get on with teaching my kids to program using Codea on our iPad?

If it weren't for these guys we'd be much worse off than we are today. Firefox single handedly dethrowned IE.

It's philosophical but in the same way that IE was at one time the best browser and quickly became the worst - it's not unimaginable that iOS will do the same.

I'm a pragmatist myself but if it weren't for folks like RMS and Mozilla there would be no voice at all for FLOSS. I don't agree with RMS on many things but it's vital that someone as unwavering as him pushes back.

stcredzero4• 14 years ago

> If Firefox OS says we are not as good as iOS then thay are squarely putting themselves in the middle of the market.

That's only if people actually perceive feature phones as the same "market" as smartphones. I very much doubt this is true. 2nd hand smartphones are already widespread in 3rd world markets. Having a "real smartphone" will have considerable cachet, functionality notwithstanding.

tl;dr - "mobile phone" isn't a market. "Mobile phone" is one market and "smartphone" is another people aspire to.

lifeisstillgood6• 14 years ago

I really struggle with that - it's the app that counts. Having a web browser is probably the main dividing line, but having sms networjs that really allow your business to trade over SMS means to me that the functionality counts - it would be nice to buy an iPhone but if a LCD SMS device will allow me to sell my goods each week, then high end and low end are far wider than we presume

dmpk2k• 14 years ago

What's the £50 device? I'm not going to buy a Galaxy variant to play with Firefox OS, but £50 is a different story.

robhawkes26• 14 years ago

It's a ZTE Kis. You can't use it yet because it's a development version but we're working on getting devices available to developers before we launch properly.

The Kis is merely a test device for now.

dochtman• 14 years ago

I really want a cheap test device so I can start hacking on B2G. Sure, I guess I could get a second-hand SGS2, but those are still pretty expensive to use a test device.

kgabis2• 14 years ago

This looks like a terrible idea for a mobile OS, where every cycle should count. What about battery life? I think that for now, and foreseeable future, the only reasonable choice for mobile devices are native code based apps and system.

robhawkes26• 14 years ago

Battery life is very, very good. I can leave this thing on for days and it's still running. Now obviously that's not running too much in the background but there is no reason why a JavaScript phone would have a detrimental effect on battery life.

You should try it out sometime, it's really not 'terrible' when you get hands on. But your opinion is one I see a lot and we're hoping to change it in the future, slowly ;)

newman3145• 14 years ago

Have you made any actual power measurements using say powertop etc?

webOS can be left on for days and days IF you turn all the radios off, underclock, undervolt...

Given that most smartphones last for at most a day with actual usage (not sitting there in sleep mode), I would like to see more quantification as to what the usage pattern is that enables you to leave it for days and days.

zokier• 14 years ago

> I think that for now, and foreseeable future, the only reasonable choice for mobile devices are native code based apps and system.

So basing a mobile OS on something like Java (or C#/Silverlight) would be completely silly in your opinion?

kgabis2• 14 years ago

I don't think it's the best possible option. Afaik WP7's core apps are native, not in C#/Silverlight.

lifeisstillgood6• 14 years ago

Mozilla seem almost apologetic about Firefox OS.

  "aiming at middle market"
  "performs well on low end hardware"

I think this is a mistake in positioning - this is still an expensive piece of hardware for most of the world (50 USD is not low-end if minimum wage in Brazil is 322 USD /mth)

Instead this has the potential to be "the best" phone in most emerging markets - the most desireable OS, because it can appeal to the very same people who iPhone appealed to - the cool and influential geeks and designers.

Shout from the rooftops guys, its high-end, high-value, cool. Let the network providers sort out how to put 50 USD worth of hardware into the hands of boys and girls in the favelas. Just make sure everyone wants one.

And that means not apologetically aiming for the middle market.

Aim higher.

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_minimum_wages_by_countr...

edit: this was an edit on my other post here, but it is so different in tone it just was better reposting.

andrewcooke2• 14 years ago

it doesn't really work like that. emerging markets have people as rich as rich americans and they know about, want, and own iphones.

(i live in s america and would love the kind of thing being described. but i am pretty odd and currently use a dumbphone that cost $20 - i know plenty of people with fancy phones here.

so i would like what you suggest to work, but in practice i think people would perceive it as aimed at "second class citizens" - kind of condescending, in a way. you have to remember that even though people have less money on average (and higher prices for imported goods) they swim in a similar media context - can access the same internet sites, see the same aspirational movies, etc)

lifeisstillgood6• 14 years ago

I think that getting my cool, trend-leading designer friends is possible - apple is not undefeatable. And while google is not very evil, Mozilla is nearly saint-like in comparison.

So, yes we do all live in the same global media village, but things will change. It will be harder to knock Apple off top spot in the US or UK because of the installed base. But the battle for hearts and minds is at the top of the market - if you dont compare yourself to apple, no one else will.

nandemo• 14 years ago

> (50 USD is not low-end if minimum wage in Brazil is 322 USD /mth)

That's not true.

First of all, low-end refers to the range of the product. A 50-USD cell phone is low-end because there aren't many models that cost less than that (modulo subsidies etc) just like a U$15k new car is low-end, notwithstanding the fact that relatively few people can afford one in Brazil.

Besides, the bulk of households in Brazil earn more than the minimum wage. C class in the graph below corresponds to people in households earning around 2~4x minimum wage. While in developed countries these people would be definitely considered "poor", in Brazil they're basically "lower-middle class". And yes, many of them can afford low-end cell phones.

http://www.asiacomentada.com.br/2011/03/melhoria-da-distribu...

anil_mamede• 14 years ago

Looks nice but it's not fluid.

robhawkes26• 14 years ago

It will be, we're actively working on performance now. We have no reasons to believe that we can't get it 'fluid'.

h2s• 14 years ago

You could set your watch by the HN response to a story like this. Pure doom, gloom and naysaying.

Smartphones these days live and die by their app ecosystem. I would love to be working on mobile apps, but for the expense of buying an iPhone, an Android phone and a Windows phone, plus licenses for software to develop for all three. Not to mention the daunting prospect of dealing with Objective C, Java and C# simultaneously. This is a ludicrous prospect for a lone developer.

Give me a platform that costs nothing to develop for and lets me use my existing skills. If there's a website version of my application, let me share components between the two versions instead of locking my mobile version up in your platform's chosen systems programming language and development environment. Firefox OS ticks all these boxes.

I just might be the most average developer out there these days: a web developer. If you enable people like me to develop applications for your device without any bullshit, then you automatically have a bigger set of possible contributors than the competition.

That is why I am cautiously optimistic about Firefox OS. If you build it, we will come.

PommeDeTerre• 14 years ago

I'm confused by your statement about "the daunting prospect of dealing with Objective C, Java and C# simultaneously. This is a ludicrous prospect for a lone developer."

Perhaps that's true for a hobbyist. But any professional software developer should already be familiar with at least one (if not all) of those languages, and should be able to pick up the others with very little work.

Once you know C#, for instance, you'll quickly see that Java is essentially a subset of it these days. Sure, there are differences, but they're quite minor. The same goes for Objective-C, to some extent. The syntax is a bit different, but most of the concepts are similar enough. Even the most commonly-used libraries for each don't actually differ that much in practice.

In fact, many developers with experience in industry will have already had to use multiple languages at the same time throughout their careers. They'll already know how to work on several projects simultaneously, using several languages, and many more libraries.

In fact, I'd suspect that most of these professionals would feel very handicapped if they were forced to use JavaScript for all development. JavaScript has proven time and time again to not be a good language for anything but short scripts. Languages like C++, Java, C#, and Objective-C have core features that make large-scale, distributed software development possible. JavaScript lacks these, and anyone working on a large JavaScript code base will know the pains that arise.

It won't be good for Firefox OS if only the most inept developers are attracted to it. That's not the kind of ecosystem that produces useful applications.

pfisch3• 14 years ago

Everything this person said is the truth.

bejar37• 14 years ago

I mostly agree with your points, although I personally think that the JavaScript ecosystem is maturing quite rapidly through node and amd.

jmmcd• 14 years ago

The point is not that the these three languages are hard or obscure or that using all three is hard. The point is that maintaining the same code in parallel in three languages is a Wrong thing to do. DRY. Big companies can get away with it because they can throw manpower but it's still wrong.

SoftwareMaven• 14 years ago

It's not a function of knowledge. It's a function of time.

harshaw• 14 years ago

"JavaScript has proven time and time again to not be a good language for anything but short scripts." Perhaps this is just troll bait...

define short. Yeah, maybe javascript isn't good when building a large app with > 100K LOC that uses a bunch of existing code built in C. However, you sure as shit can built a very sophisticated product with javascript. Learn how to use prototypes and you have OO (or avoid that if you don't like it). Use modules (many ways to do this). geez.

Maybe this just struck a cord with me because I am in the middle of a huge project that uses a metric shit-ton of configure scripts that seem screwed up six ways to sunday. I feel handicaped by all the BS that you have to do to get stuff working C++/java that is so trivial elsewhere.

bthomas• 14 years ago

Could they have used Firefox OS as an opportunity to bring another language to the browser, rather than javascript to native? ie. if you could write [Objective C/Java/C#/etc] libraries for Firefox OS and they could be compiled and served to a browser client.

robhawkes26• 14 years ago

You'd be surprised at what JavaScript can do nowadays… https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/demos/detail/bananabread

bmuon• 14 years ago

It's not about languages. With a certain level of experience languages can be learned to a useful point in a weekend. The problem is the knowledge of the platform, the APIs, the problems each platform has, which parts you should use, which parts you should avoid, what performs better, what hangs your app, what renders things poorly. All those things require a lot more time to learn.

kibwen3• 14 years ago

You're right, the difficulty isn't the language in use. Languages are easy. But learning each of the platform-specific APIs is a much more daunting task. Learning web-based APIs are no less daunting, but given that a huge proportion of new developers are starting out with web dev, being able to leverage their existing knowledge is a powerful advantage.

pfisch3• 14 years ago

You can use C# for all three with monotouch. But honestly it doesn't matter much. Objective C is very similar to C# which is very similar to Java. It is really just slightly different syntax.

And you can always just embed a webview and use html + js if you really want, though that is much harder to work with and less versatile imo.

That is the reason I am not cheering for firefox OS. Why on earth would I want to be limited by html and javascript. Show me a high end game that is written in html 5, or really even a mid tier one. This does not include webgl.

robhawkes26• 14 years ago

There are loadds of high-end games written in JS: Cut The Rope. Bejeweled. Angry Birds. As well as many more lesser known ones that push things as far as possible.

You say "doesn't include WebGL", but WebGL is just the visual output… a game like BananaBread requires epic performance from JavaScript aside from WebGL: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/demos/detail/bananabread

WebGL is one of the main reasons why we can do so much more with JavaScript games so it's silly to cast it aside. Canvas is more than capable for most things, but WebGL is the future of the high-end that you're talking about.

hessenwolf3• 14 years ago

"Smartphones live and die by their app ecosystem"

Have you got a source on this? I am just curious. I love my smartphone, but I basically use whatsapp and the internetm, mp3, video, and fbreader 99.5% of the time.

jsnell3• 14 years ago

a) Your set of 99.5% apps are going to be different from those of other people. You need a lot more coverage than that to make a substantial percentage of people happy.

b) It's often not enough to just have an app for a specific task, it needs to also tie into a specific ecosystem. For example I don't need generic VoIP software on my phone, but I absolutely must have access to Skype. For somebody else it might be WebEX instead.

c) Even when there's no ecosystem lock-in like that, there are very difficult categories of apps for new platforms to get access to. Maps would be a prime example. It's absolutely core to the smartphone experience, and perhaps the second most important function of the device.

The existing mobile web experience for maps is rubbish compared to the native apps even for basic things. But it'll get worse once you get into things like off-line use or turn by turn navigation. So who is going to fix that? Unlikely to be Nokia or Google unless Firefox OS becomes wildly successful. Nobody else really has cost-effective access to good data.

cageface• 14 years ago

Not to mention the daunting prospect of dealing with Objective C, Java and C# simultaneously.

Who does this? The vast majority of mobile developers I know specialize on one platform. A small handful are competent on two. Most companies that care enough to be on more than one platform will hire out to specialists for that platform.

danielweber3• 14 years ago

I would love to be working on mobile apps, but for the expense of buying an iPhone, an Android phone and a Windows phone, plus licenses for software to develop for all three.

Well, do you really need to develop on all three?

Among the reasons I got into Android development was because the upfront cost was $0. I just needed any laptop or desktop made in the past ~5 years, which I think all of us have already.

After several weeks -- when I decided I didn't hate it completely, and I got tired of using the emulator -- I got an old phone off of eBay, and I actually spent less on that than I did on a book from O'Reilly.

It's very easy to start programming for Android.

drbawb2• 14 years ago

> Made in the past ~5 years.

I'm dubious unless they've made serious improvements to the emulator since I last used it. (I haven't updated my SDK in probably 3-6 months.)

I ran it on a fairly beefy laptop (although ~1.5-2 years at the time) and it was not an environment I'd consider "fun" to program in.

They have ways to image the emulator for faster load-times, but that's not that much of an improvement, and it only affects the emulator boot-up time, not the application speed.

I should try it again on my new desktop, complete with SSD and gobs of RAM.

But honestly I would not develop for Android [relying solely on the emulator] on a machine much older than a year or two.

I guess your mileage varied, but my experience developing for Android [w/o physical hardware] on fairly recent hardware was not pleasant. Had it been a hobby, and not my career, I would've been entirely put off with the experience. I probably wouldn't have gotten a phone, and I would've moved on to developing for another platform.

Possibly WebOS, I remember it caught my eye back when the Pre launched; and I think it had the whole $0-up-front aspect in its favor.

hermanhermitage• 14 years ago

Terrific stuff.

I still think there is a use case for a static C like language (with explicit memory management) for some kernels.

The same way that WebGL has HLSL, it would be nice if there was a WebCPU API with C as the 'shader' language.

(Alternative is LLJS approach - but that has other issues).

udp• 14 years ago

I couldn't agree more. It's all good being purist JavaScript for most applications, but having some kind of native code support is really important when it comes to things like games.

Jyaif• 14 years ago

*WebGL has GLSL (HLSL is Microsoft territory)

cs702• 14 years ago

According to this blog post, Firefox OS is already providing native-like performance in a standard JavaScript+HTML+CSS environment. (By "native-like" I mean fast enough that the application will feel native to users.) If this is true, then I would agree Firefox OS is a game changer, because it means that ALL modern web applications can run unmodified at native-like speeds on mobile devices. The number of apps available for the platform is already in the many millions. Very exciting!

Edits: changed "ALL existing web applications" to "ALL modern web applications," which better reflects what I intended to say; added a bit of context in response to robhawkes's comment below.

robhawkes26• 14 years ago

JavaScript doesn't run at the speed of native, but it certainly runs fast enough on things like Fx OS (or desktop browsers) to run 'native-like' apps. It really depends what you want to do with it.

For example, this is JavaScript: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/demos/detail/bananabread

pkolaczk7• 14 years ago

So how come e.g. www.circuitlab.com which is a simulator written in pure JS is two orders of magnitude slower on Chrome or Firefox than native *SPICE implementations in C? It is actually even much slower than the already pretty slow Falstad's Java applet.

omarqazi2• 14 years ago

Watch the video. That's not native performance. It will never be native performance, because there will always be the layer of the rendering engine between your application and device. The best they'll ever do is "close enough to native that you don't notice", and they're certainly not there yet. And the number of apps is already in the millions? Give me an example of one app out there that's in the same ballpark of quality as the stuff you can find on iOS or even Android.

aaronblohowiak• 14 years ago

There is always a rendering engine unless you're writing pixels to the buffer directly. The thing is that Cocoa/CocoaTouch's rendering and compositing is much faster than Webkit's. Why that is, is left as an exercise for the reader.

callahad2• 14 years ago

The video does look a bit rough, but that's neither final code nor final hardware. For what it's worth, actually touching one of the Firefox OS dev phones is pretty impressive: it feels much smoother than it looks on that video.

It's not quite up to iOS or Android 4.1 performance, but it's running on far less powerful hardware. It definitely feels better than the initial releases of Android in terms of responsiveness.

> Give me an example of one app out there that's in the same ballpark of quality as the stuff you can find on iOS or even Android.

The HTML5 version of Cut the Rope works pretty great on Firefox OS; the experience is effectively identical to Android and iOS.

TwistedWeasel• 14 years ago

never say never.

Technology evolves and in time hardware improves to a point where the performance difference between native code and something that runs through an intermediate layer is not noticeable in a user interface (although there will always be a difference, it just wont be be relevant any more).

maxym• 14 years ago

The HTML5 version of Cut the Rope is one example:

http://www.cuttherope.ie/

Here are some other high quality HTML5 games:

http://worldsbiggestpacman.com/ http://www.wordsquared.com/ http://www.pirateslovedaisies.com/ http://browserquest.mozilla.org/

mhd2• 14 years ago

He mentions it being a "hackable dream for developers". I wonder if we're ever going to get something that's hackable by users. Or in other words, bridges the gap between the common user and the elite app-store backed developer…

With all its sensors and social and personal applications, there seems to be a high potential for individual customizations and connections, probably more than what your average PC-of-yore office suite would warrant. Yet there's nothing like VBScript or (A)Rexx on mobile devices. (Some of you might remember Apple's NewtonScript, from their superior mobile device they're still trying to ignore)

Part of that is that it's all in the hand of the people financially benefitting from it, i.e. us developers. You could easily make a new site/app that connects social platform A and social platform B. Which is part of why we've got that huge mess of redundant, barely interoperable cloud ad sellers and allowance pinchers.

What if teens could trade JavaScripts to do the same? Script their calculator app to better fit their teacher's views and their curriculum? Connect their text messaging app with the hip new microblogging platform. Set up little JS "cron jobs" whenever they enter a certain WLAN range (or GPS quadrant)…

Apart from security issues there's little technological reason to prevent this. But it seems all over the place we've moved away from interoperation. From what I see, end-user scripting is pretty low. Nobody's talking about document-centric desktops anymore (ah, OS/2, how I miss thee). It's all about apps and services, maximum hype, maximum profit.

robhawkes26• 14 years ago

Theoretically, this is definitely possible and something that I'd love to see. I know we have some guys within Mozilla working on things that are more 'hackable' for the general user, rather than developers.

maxerickson• 14 years ago

Scripting layer for Android if fairly close to what you are talking about:

http://code.google.com/p/android-scripting/

It does not seem to be explosively popular. But it has to be sought out and installed and all that stuff, so who knows.

mhd2• 14 years ago

Well, this allows scripting languages to access the Android runtime APIs, something I'm picturing would require the applications themselves to be scriptable. This would require some integrated hooks, like Apple's AppleEvents or Microsoft's COM.

Or just a standard class interface, if you're scripting in the main application development language, which is why this would be an easy fit for a JavaScript-based system.

chj• 14 years ago

Is there any bridge between JS and native code?

Yes, I know it is hard to support development and debugging of a hybrid of script and native code, but regarding battery life and computation intensive apps, JS is not an option. Unless this OS is for really low end phones.

MatthewPhillips7• 14 years ago

What makes you think that? Android runs non-native apps and the battery life can be very good (depending mostly on hardware of course).

ralfn• 14 years ago

You seem to assume an existential difference between "native" and "not-native" that does not actually exist.

Is Objective C native? Not yet. Is the ARM executable native? Yes. Is javascript native? No. Is the executable code generated by the jit native? Yes.

mtgx2• 14 years ago

Mozilla, please don't allow carriers or manufacturers to modify your OS! You need to set the right tone from the very beginning. Otherwise you'll never get that kind of power back later on.

Sell it to them as an alternative to Android. That's all they need to know if they want it or not. If they want more, you can go elsewhere.

podperson3• 14 years ago

If it's an alternative to Android that doesn't let Carriers "add value" then it's an alternative they won't use. Open Source, in this case, becomes a race to the bottom in every respect.

We need carriers to be dumb pipes we buy data plans from; then this entire class of problem goes away. Until then, any platform that doesn't let carriers charge us different amounts for bits from different places is going to die on the vine.

pezz• 14 years ago

So how do we curb this voracious appetite of needing to get into every bit (data, apps, ads, other value adds) of being a telco?

I agree with what you're saying, but how do we get to a state where we can have "dumb pipes", yet have an open, privacy driven and easily user controllable OS on a device?

Is there an alternative to always needing to "add value"? Isn't earning our coin off carrier charges, data etc enough?

nathan_long2• 14 years ago

>> If it's an alternative to Android that doesn't let Carriers "add value" then it's an alternative they won't use.

Ideally, they shouldn't "use" any phone, because they are not the user. We should buy whatever phone we please somewhere else, with financing if necessary, and then buy service from the carriers. The whole "subsidizing" thing is a scam unless you get cheaper service by bringing your own phone, or after your phone is paid off.

Getting some popular third-party phone vendors in the US and making phone subsidies a line item in your cell phone bill are the first steps toward carriers as dumb pipes and towards true choice in phones.

neutronicus• 14 years ago

How is owning infrastructure anything other than a low-margin hot-potato if you let yourself be turned into a dumb pipe?

robhawkes26• 14 years ago

We are working on that, but there is only so much we can do if we want this to be open. If carriers want to use the Firefox OS branding and our system then there will be certain limitations on what they are expected to do in return.

This is new to us, but I'm confident we'll come up with something satisfactory.

Saying that, we can't stop someone taking the code from GitHub and producing their own non-Fx OS system and not referring to Fx OS.

polshaw2• 14 years ago

I think the key is making it easy for users to 'reset' the device to stock FxOS. I would hope the firefox brand was strong enough to keep carriers from releasing their own variants to avoid mozilla's requirements.

NegativeK• 14 years ago

It's open source. Mozilla can't (and shouldn't be able to) prevent carriers and manufacturers from tinkering.

And per the article, one of the benefits of the OS is the ability to modify the GUI and default apps with simple HTML+CSS+JavaScript.

icebraining• 14 years ago

They can prevent them from calling it FirefoxOS, though; in fact, they do just that with regular Firefox (see Iceweasel).

polshaw2• 14 years ago

>There are a few intense games, like Biolab Disaster, that perform stunningly on even the £50 low-end device that I'm testing on — we're talking between 40 and 60FPS.

You have to be kidding me, my amiga 500 (released 1987, 7mhz) offers similar games to that (but better graphics). That puts it literally 20 years behind modern smartphones today, where the cutting edge games are in a similar position vs xbox 360 games.

Firefox OS clearly isn't going to appeal to anyone looking for gaming on release-- However, i do not want to shit on it, unlike many..

I think it is a great idea, could do wonders for openness as well as the advancement of web technologies, and the web as a platform. I can certainly see FFOS devices becoming a standard smartphone for 'regular folks'.. web browsing and the kind of things that web-apps could easily do; media playback, calendar and clock apps.. i'm sure this covers 80% of all smartphone apps today anyway. As time goes on and performance (and web features) continues to increase, with 3/4 smartphone platforms (plus 3/4 more 'desktop' platforms), the appeal of developing once for all platforms is going to become an overwhelming advantage.

It is very different to webOS, which suffered from limited, expensive devices, constricting user base, which failed to inspire developers. Is it the most computationally efficient way of doing most things? no. Does it offer other advantages that could offset this? absolutely.

robhawkes26• 14 years ago

Thanks for the comment, I appreciate it.

If you start comparing these mobile HTML5 games with any device or platform that was originally build to run games well then you'll always see issues – though we are working on improving that. Games on the Web are probabably never going to be quite the same, and nor should they be.

Still, things are improving each and every day and I think that's the most important thing here. We know things aren't perfect and we also know that we're no where near the limit of performance yet.

I'm really excited to see what those advantages you mention turn into in the future. There is a lot of potential here, way beyond performance and how things compare to other devices.

gnuvince• 14 years ago

Can we please stop putting JavaScript everywhere? It's not a good language and people have a tendency to produce frailer code with it than they would otherwise.

robhawkes26• 14 years ago

What makes you say this?

JackC2• 14 years ago

This kind of request strikes me as kind of similar to the movements to standardize English spelling. There are groups out there who, for at least a hundred years, have been saying "can we please stop spelling the same sounds in five different ways? It's not a good approach to language and people waste a lot of time that they wouldn't otherwise." It's true, but at the same time, there are reasons they're not making any progress.

JavaScript shows up in new places because everyone already knows it, because it's relatively easy to write a JS app and deploy it to every single platform, because anyone who wants to learn it can probably jump into a REPL from Facebook by hitting cmd-shift-J, because there's a huge amount of code already written in it, because there's intense competitive pressure to optimize the interpreters, etc. etc. etc. The same kind of reasons that English is hard to replace. If you want to improve the situation, you can't just point out the flaws, you have to offer a smooth transition from here to a better language.

But actually, that's already happening. JS is actively, incrementally improving. (As one random snapshot: https://brendaneich.com/2011/05/my-jsconf-us-presentation/) So the answer is, no, we cannot stop putting it everywhere. That is not going to happen. But we can make it better.

rglover• 14 years ago

Really excited to play with this. Also excited to see the people working on it are really geeked. It's going to get really interesting as a web developer over the next couple of years. If you can use HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to manipulate an OS, then wow. Can't wait to see where this goes.

akrymski• 14 years ago

So it's an OS that requires apps to be written in JavaScript (an interpreted language that was designed by Netscape for web scripting and nonprofessional programmers) and HTML (a markup language designed to display static documents in the browser). None of these technologies were designed to help developers create software applications, so why is this magical?

Let's look at few possible reasons:

1. JavaScript/HTML/CSS are better tools for developing software than anything else out there. No.

2. It's open source. So is WebOS, Android.

3. It's more efficient - same software can run on cheaper hardware. No, Java & Objective C are more processor-efficient. If Firefox OS runs on $100 hardware, than iOS can run on $50. The fact that nobody is making an ulta-cheap smartphone is because there's little demand for one (it's like making a shitty Porsche)

4. Developers can package existing web applications as native mobile applications. There's already a thing called PhoneGap for that.

5. More teenagers know JavaScript than any other language

It seems like #5 is the only valid reason. A lot of kids don't know Objective C or Java, so they must love Firefox OS if they just know the web stack. But sometimes you've got to ask yourself - why rewrite an OS in a new cool language? Just because you can? Look how far Apple has come with Obj-C, why constantly replace the hammer? Having said that, the force of teenagers is not to be underestimated.

kibwen3• 14 years ago

To be clear, the OS is not written in Javascript. It's simply Mozilla's Gecko platform (the same engine used by Firefox, written in C++ since time immemorial) running directly on top of Linux. Nothing was rewritten to get this to work: Gecko was originally designed to be a portable application platform rather than "just" a layout engine (and it was this concomitant complexity that led Apple and Chrome to use Webkit (which is just a layout engine) for their own browsers).

It's literally just a web browser running directly on a smartphone. Any web apps that you're using right now will Just Work on Fx OS. No rewrites required.

One last point: it seems intuitive that Java would be more processor-efficient than Javascript, but SpiderMonkey is waaaaay more mature than Dalvik (Android's Java VM). I'd like to see some hard performance numbers before making that call.

marknutter• 14 years ago

People use javascript not because of what it was originally created for but because of what it has become and is currently being used for. But most of all, because of its ubiquity. Last time I checked, Objective-C doesn't run in a web browser.

Your whole post smacks of elitism. What's with the "More teenagers know JavaScript than any other language" and "A lot of kids don't know Objective C or Java" comments? Are you just trolling, or trying to be insulting?

carloslopes• 14 years ago

Rob, could you put on the article which devices we already can build the OS?

I want to buy one but i don't know what is already supported :)

abrowne• 14 years ago

Take a look at the list here: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Boot_to_Gec...

wprater• 14 years ago

Sounds a lot like webOS; huge amounts of potential, only to be plagued by 'being ahead of the game'. Probably still 5 years out, sadly. I really like the idea of a JavaScript OS.

Why was webOS not mentioned in the article? They have a very nice linux stack, telephony, and radio interfaces as well. Not to mention it's been open sourced (both OS and framework)

https://github.com/openwebos http://enyojs.com

timparker• 14 years ago

I just wish Firefox wasn't coping iOS. Slide open, 4 x 4 grid with a dock, swipe between panes. It's just sad that companies think this is the 'standard' for any phone os and stick to it. Metro gets some respect from me for taking a fresh approach, this, unfortunately doesn't.

bryanlarsen3• 14 years ago

Why don't you criticize Toyota for using a circular steering wheel and similar feeling clutches, brake pedals and gas padels while you're at it?

Slide open: given a large touch screen, what's the easiest interaction that has a low likelihood of being accidental?

panes: there are basically two possible metaphors that work well: paged or infinite scrolling. Is it copying if random chance would have a 50% chance of choosing the same answer?

swipe between panes: given a paged screen, what gesture but the same one used for turning pages in a book makes any sense at all?

4x4 grid: given a 3-4" screen and given an icon the size of a human thumb, how many icons fit?

dock: given a paged, gridded metaphor and a need to have the most commonly used functions always available, does anything make any sense but to keep a set of icons pinned and visually distinct? Sure, they could have moved them to the top or to the side or to the middle or something, but that's just change for the sake of change.

benwerd• 14 years ago

Yes. I was introduced to Firefox OS in detail at Mobile 2.0 the other day, and I instantly fell in love. This is what the world needs: an open platform designed for the people who don't already have an Internet connection, let alone an iPhone. If they succeed in their mission, and current partnerships with telcos like Telefonica suggest that they will, then they could quite possibly change the world. I'm sold, and completely on board.

needle0• 14 years ago

I saw a talk on FxOS (then B2G) earlier this year, and asked a question about how FxOS will handle native SDKs, considering practically every single mobile OS that used VMs to run apps had eventually capitulated and provided native SDKs for speed and codebase compatibility. The Mozilla guy who responded was very adamant on keeping HTML/CSS/JS the one and only dev environment for the OS.

Perhaps JS optimization has come far enough that speed is not a problem, but how is FxOS going to handle codebase compatibility for bringing large preexisting native-code projects (eg. games) into it? Compiling the entirety of Unreal Engine 3 in Emscripten, for instance, seems a bit far-fetched.

dhx2• 14 years ago

Most of the discussion so far has focussed on the development environment (APIs, languages, etc) and performance issues.

I would therefore like to raise the question “how will Firefox OS encourage a consistent and usable experience across applications?” Gnome[1], iOS[2] and Windows have comprehensive human interface guidelines and the systems tend to be user-friendly as a result.

The latest WHATWG HTML standards do make an attempt to improve user interface consistency by adding new, specific tags. While this will help to some extent, I do not think it will solve the underlying problem. Web developers are accustomed to creating whatever interfaces they like with little regard to usability considerations including consistency with other websites. Different colours, typography, borders, page structures, navigation styles, etc between websites and applications produces a difficult user experience.

[1] http://developer.gnome.org/hig-book/3.5/

[2] https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#documentation/usere...

mbrubeck2• 14 years ago

UX design guidelines are coming; the designer who is working on them gave a talk at MozCampEU last week. (Only the slides are available for now, but a more detailed write-up should be posted soon.)

https://wiki.mozilla.org/MozCampEU2012/Design-Principles-beh...

dhx2• 14 years ago

Thanks for the link to the presentation.

As is the case with other mobile platforms I noticed a wide array of button styles. Small symbolic buttons in applications such as the photo gallery and messages screen, large glossy buttons for the radio and calculator, blue rectangular buttons for the time and date selection screen and a long red button for cancelling a call. Some applications are dark and 2D, others are light, colourful and 3D.

I do like a lot of the work shown off in the presentation but still get the feeling that applications/screens on the phone are not tightly integrated or connected. This isn't criticism of Firefox OS. Rather it is an observation that I have for all mobile platforms I have used.

I will look out for the detailed write-up to get the details of what is planned.

colig• 14 years ago

I enjoyed reading this. I mostly know Java and not so much Javascript, but there's something delightful in the idea the writer lays out. As much as I like Android, it isn't really 'hackable' by the average user, and Firefox OS seems capable for that.

naitbit• 14 years ago

Are web technologies on the phone really the best way to empower users? Sure Firefox and Linux are open source(and I love them for that), but what about online apps? User does not have any control over the web page. If web page changes or disappears he can do nothing(and it can happen with no warning). Storing local copy of webpage may not be possible(because huge part of app may be on server side). Even proprietary desktop apps are better[1] because they do not change on each startup and you could always try to reverse engineer them. Web app also can store user data on server giving him no way to recover and it gives more spoofing opportunities. Sure we can try to teach users about to choose open source web pages, or pages that can work in offline mode, but unfortunately most web pages does not fit these categories.

I'm impressed by what Firefox OS managed to achieve using web technologies, but I posted this as a warning that users may chain themselves to some proprietary webapp even stronger than to native one. Hopefully Firefox Os will force more webapps to provide offline mode.

[1] Of course DRM tries to take away this advantage from desktop apps.

pmelendez• 14 years ago

This is actually a question for you guys... I realized that this can be very revolutionary for us as developers (making our lives way easier).

What I can't see is how this would "going to change everything" from an user perspective. I only can see this as increasing the amount of apps in stores very quickly. But stores already feel very dense with numbers like 500k apps.

Can anyone tell me what I am missing? because I can't see this changing everything.

Apocryphon• 14 years ago

A really minor point- why is it that the phone icon nowadays has defaulted to a handset turned to that angle, with green as the color? That looks similar to the phone icon in some of the Samsung phones that look more like iOS.

Is green and at 2 o'clock simply how we think of calling someone now?

jere• 14 years ago

I came to post this. Seriously, why is this necessary? Are they trying to provoke a lawsuit?

I get that green is usually associated with starting a call and red ending a call, but why? Why not blue or purple or orange or yellow or black?

Good point on the angle. But why even use the same handset icon? You could use a candlestick phone, a wall phone, a rotary phone.... for fuck's sake, you could use an icon representing the phone itself.

se85• 14 years ago

Javascript performing well on mobile is NOT magic, its just good engineering.

The big problem I see with Firefox OS is that it is not going to take much to make the entire "App Store" full of app's that perform horribly, and in return that will make Firefox OS look bad as a result.

Abstracting away all the complexities of making JavaScript/HTML/CSS perform well on mobile into a set of API's that anyone can use regardless of skill doesn't seem feasible to me but I could be wrong and If they have actually pulled this off, great! But it's still not magic.

peterwwillis• 14 years ago

Firefox OS is the start of something huge. It's a revolution in waiting. A breath of fresh air. A culmination of bleeding-edge technology. It's magical and it's going to change everything.

I'm glad you didn't use any hyperbole.

it's a mobile OS powered by JavaScript!

And you thought a Java-powered operating system was crappy...

So you might be thinking, "This sounds great, but why use JavaScript to build a phone?" And you'd be right, that's a really important question to ask. The good news is that there are plenty of reasons why this is a good idea, besides making Web developers weak at the knees.

I'm pretty sure this is the only reason to do this. Nobody but web developers are going to give a shit. Grandma doesn't care what OS her iPad runs on. It just needs to work really well. I am wondering how you're going to get real-time priority on threads for the phone app over your slow HTML5 game threads if they're run by the same interpreted scripting engine.

Why the huge performance improvements over browsers in Android on identical devices? It's because of the lack of stuff going on between Gecko and the hardware, meaning things like JavaScript can run at full pelt. So much for JavaScript being slow!

What lack of stuff ? What's going on in this "JavaScript OS" that is different than in a Java OS? What calls are not happening? What memory is not being allocated? What graphics are not being displayed? What the hell are you talking about?

What Firefox OS aims to do here is to use the native everywhere-ness of the Web to provide a platform that allows applications to be enjoyed on a mobile device, a desktop computer, a tablet, or anywhere else that has access to a browser. Wouldn't you want to be able to pick up your Angry Birds game on the desktop where where you left it on your phone? I certainly would!

I think you actually missed the point of the quote right before that paragraph. It's an incredibly powerful idea to make a mobile platform that's as free-to-use as a web browser. A security nightmare, yes. A competing-open-product-that-implements-unsupported-features nightmare, yes. But it could change things, for better or worse.

Because Firefox OS is constructed using HTML, JavaScript and CSS it means you only need basic Web development skills to reach in and completely change the device experience. You could literally change one line of CSS and completely change the way the icons on the homescreen look, or re-write some core JavaScript files that handle phone-calls.

I could have sworn I heard of something like this before... Web Oh Ess or something?

Has the whole world gone nuts? What the hell was wrong with just having a web browser and native apps side by side? You could use your web apps for a universal free experience, and for apps which need a lot of performance like games you would write a fast, minimal native app. Now we're reinventing a reinvention of the wheel, poorly.

Have you people even used S60? That shit was easily skinnable, had tons of developer resources, a free marketplace (once you signed your app), it was fast, stable, cheap. Now it's dead of course (thanks Android) and all we have to fill the space is bloated incompatible buggy crap.

posabsolute• 14 years ago

Yea well there is something not magical about it too which is normal users do not care what you write your apps in.

We already have 3 good options for OS, We have the cool iOS, the ios copy, android, and the alternative from microsoft.

What we have here is a glorified Android that you can write apps in js, yay, 100 bucks it will never take off.

anuraj• 14 years ago

Yes. Probably the only platform that will run HTML5 apps proper. Web developers should wholheartedly lap it up. But the issue is - consumer adoption.

Fando• 14 years ago

Cool, well done Mozilla! Is this similar to WebOS?

ilaksh2• 14 years ago

Can you Mozilla guys focus on making it so that HTML5 apps can install from web pages with an Install button and then show up on the home screen like a normal app? Please. So that HTML5 developers don't have to rely on people creating bookmarks or typing web addresses and can give users a similar experience as native.

fzzzy3• 14 years ago

This already works.

ilaksh2• 14 years ago

How do you do it? And on Android as well as iOS? And its the same installation and launch process?

That wasn't working last I checked.

ink_• 14 years ago

The mozilla project has really pulled it's socks up of late, some of the stuff from the labs: Very awesome Shumway - https://github.com/mozilla/shumway Very awesome PDF.js - https://mozillalabs.com/en-US/pdfjs/ IHeartCode - https://mozillalabs.com/en-US/iheartcode/ Prospector Experiments - https://mozillalabs.com/en-US/prospector/ Gladius - https://mozillalabs.com/en-US/gladius/ EntropyWave - https://mozillalabs.com/en-US/entropywave/

And by all accounts FF itself has had some serious work done to sort close the performance gap between it and Chrome.

I love Chrome, it's a top notch browsers, only the omnibox (addressbar) seems be deliberately designed to inflict pain and suffering on the user. You could be forgiven for thinking that it's been deliberatly in some kind of bizarre social experiment. Does anybody here prefer it to the Firefox Awesomebar?

I'm seriously considering switching back to FF. God.

the_expert• 14 years ago

Can it run in a virtual machine? Some folks might not want to give up their current super fast and reliable OS for one that runs only one complex, often insecure and sometimes error-prone application. In a VM I think this could be very useful.

rsync• 14 years ago

I want this, but for UNIX.

I want a standalone operating system that runs on android hardware that gives me low level access, via unix commands and stdio, to phone functions.

So I don't want the javascript dialer, I want /usr/bin/dialer ... I don't want the javascript sms client, I want to run:

/usr/bin/sms --retries=4 --number 800-555-1212 > Hi Joe, I can't make it to the meeting^D ... sent.

So yeah. This article reminded me how much I want something very much like ffox OS, but for unix core principles, like stdio, and not for open web apps (nice as they are).

confluence• 14 years ago

I hope Firefox pulls this off - native app programming is a complete pain in the ass (especially with multiple platforms). You'd have thought us programmers would've figured this out years ago - seeing as all languages are turing complete and in turn should all run everywhere, all the time, at equivalent speeds (it's all assembly/machine code in the end).

Can anyone try out:

http://anirudhjoshi.github.com/fluid_table_tennis/ on the Firefox OS and tell me its performance?

goggles99• 14 years ago

The magic is that it will disappear before ever gaining any kind of recognition or prominence. Why would I choose this over the Open Sourced WebOS?

repoman• 14 years ago

This is another attempt to solve the glory cloud os? another browser-based OS? stop making the whole world dancing. It's a lame concept.

There is something magical about Firefox OS

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