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Comment by qwtel | Hacker News Reader

> we built an OS and application suite that on low end hardware compared often favorably than the equivalent on Android

I haven't heard this before. I assumed firefox os failed because the web stack proved to be too crufty for the low end hardware. Are you aware of any resources that go into more detail?

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Most of the code and metrics are now outdated but https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox_OS/Performance will have some historical perspective, http://eideticker.mozilla.org/#/android/lg-g2x/mozilla-centr... was our test for comparison between android and fxos.

When we started it was an open question whether we could build a fast enough platform to compete with native applications, thats no longer a question I think about.

People think the web is slow because opening facebook.com takes >200 requests loading >4MB over the network of which a large chunk blocks any rendering (and all of which interferes with it). Build a web application which loads its UI from disk, caches application data, only touches the network for updates, does not block rendering waiting on bundles of JavaScript and uses proper practices for JS / dom manipulation (use transforms over animating top/left, dont attach process heavy scroll handlers) and your web app will be as fast as a native app

I think the problem is that web apps is new and we are still experimenting, but new developers, and there are a lot of them, now start with learning a framework, that compiles to another framework that compiles to a framework that complies to JavaScript and HTML. I think we need to take some steps back, and try writing plain old HTML, CSS and JavaScript and also teach new developers how to do so.

That's a lot of do this/do that. With native apps you get all that for free with no effort and there is always a lot of room for optimization. The web on the other hand is hostile to apps.

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