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Comment by wwayer | Hacker News Reader

I'm sore about it too. I had one of the original phones and I loved it. It was simple and elegant. The author mentioned something about spending too much time copying Android. That was definitely misplaced effort. Why not spend the time making something original? IMO, Mozilla spends too much time in general copying others. Look at the Firefox browser. It seems more and more like Chrome every release. I much preferred the original Firefox.

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They should've just made the phone boot directly into the browser, and then focus all energy on making the browser better. One app. No screens, widgets, dialer, anything. Add all of that as open web APIs as users demand them. Don't bother with UI beyond proof of concept, let the web optimize it.

You sacrifice the best things about a web OS if you wrap it in a traditional OS UI.

The implication that "a web OS" is what people want raises some question marks. I use the web a lot on my phone--for reading documents. I use applications for interacting with services because, still (and this is years after FirefoxOS), the experience of using a mobile web app, especially for integrating with hardware, is awful. There may be something of a chicken-and-the-egg problem here, but at the same time--if it's awful, it's awful, and so going towards real applications is the only thing that makes sense unless you want to make devices that are awful. Nobody wants to make devices that are awful.

Letting "the web optimize" your dialer, though, is perhaps the most dangerous idea I've heard in a while. Core applications under no circumstances should be optimized by the web because that's how you get malware masquerading as those core applications. No bueno.

> the experience of using a mobile web app, especially for integrating with hardware, is awful

I think the implication is that if FirefoxOS had focused on making it not awful, they would have done really well.

It'd be awesome to have a phone for which app development is all done in HTML / CSS / JS while still remaining fast and efficient.

Lots of things would be awesome. You have to have something that is not awful to get people invested in pulling something off.

Palm - we are going to build a device that will let you build apps using web technologies. Developers rebel, Palm releases a native SDK.

Apple - you don't need native apps you can build great web apps. Developers and users rebel, a native SDK is introduced 9 months later.

Blackberry - you can build apps using Adobe based web technology. You get the picture...

None of those examples are what I described. Palm came closest, but still was web-like apps, not actual web apps.

That's just the point. Every mobile platform that come out has tried to tell the "you don't need native apps you can build web apps story" at some point besides Android.

Instead of web apps, Google stuck the world with a sub optimal Java implementation that they spent years trying to optimize.

None of those platforms told that story. None of those platforms released with web apps only.

Apple only allowed web apps at first. Palm's first SDK for WebOS was based on web technologies. BlackBerry's first SDK was based on Adobe Air.

They are chasing market share, they used to have the goal of being the best preforming, most customizable, and most secure/private browser... The market share came with all those things.

Today they see Google Dominating because of Pure marketing, so they want to chase that dragon... They are killing everything Mozilla stood for in the process.

Chrome won not because of pure marketing. Chrome is a very good browser is why.

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