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Comment by j45 | Hacker News Reader

Good to hear - the HTML & JS approach as the entire mobile OS was a good 3-5 years ahead of it's time.

Sadly though, this is move 3-5 years too late. WebOS was great in its day, but I can't imagine there has been a lot of R&D invested in the progress of the tools or OS.

You're probably right. Reading some of the notes below though, seeing how the lead designer of WebOS ended up putting so much of the ideas into Android is a small consolation.

Still, if a talented team like at a place like Essential was to take a look at this... A mobile platform that is PWA first probably isn't too far off a future that iOS and Android would be considering too :)

Then it subsequently had its time with Firefox-OS?

FirefoxOS, Tizen, and WebOS all used this concept. (As well as Ubuntu Mobile, to a lesser extent.)

Can't talk about Tizen as I've never played with that but I was quite involved with webOS and Firefox OS. Firefox OS was quite different from webOS, in webOS you had an application layer based on Web technologies and you could also develop native stuff if you wanted. You had many services such as database and stuff running locally through "palm://" requests.

Firefox OS used Web technologies more extensively than webOS. It was not only the app runtime, it was a lot of the OS parts too as you see on this chapter from the "Gaia from above book":

https://leanpub.com/gaiafromabove/read#leanpub-auto-chapter-...

The native layer in Firefox OS was quite thin and a lot was delegated to web code running in the b2g process. WebOS took a different path.

Mozilla approach helped advance the notion that the web platform could do things that people didn't realize it could such as internal OS stuff. Still, this had the side-effect of adding a ton of APIs to Gecko making it harder for the team working on the desktop browser to maintain it. With the end of Firefox OS and the inevitable "purge of those APIs" from the source code we've reached a point where we can't recreate Firefox OS using a recent Gecko. While webOS could (with a lot of work from LG) be moved into recent Chromium due to its usage of the web runtime as just a runtime.

Had Mozilla approached a similar architecture, we could potentially still have Firefox OS going on. Unfortunately, even picking webOS and trying to replace Chromium with Gecko is quite hard as Gecko doesn't have a good embedability history.

I love this release by LG, it could lead to some really interesting appliances and maybe even a new Linux desktop experiment. I don't see it on phones anytime soon, LuneCE has more chance of shipping on phones than this release but I can see this replacing digital signage, POS stuff and even thin clients on desktop/laptop form factor.

Maybe, but not in the way WebOS did it. Palm Pre devices weren't top of the line but they had enough power to run HTML and JS apps. FirefoxOS seemed to focus on devices that really didn't have enough power, with hardware designed to hit a price rather than any performance metrics.

There may not be a market for a straight-up Linux system with first-class HTML and JS apps anymore, but judging it based on FirefoxOS isn't really fair.

You must be remembering a different webOS than I am. I remember 20-40 second app launch times.

People love their rose-colored glasses.

Not the way WebOS did it.

It was really an early state of JS based applications that pre-dated a lot of current JS application development.

In some ways, the ability to build entire mobile apps only in HTML/JS still remains unique compared to iOS/Android.

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