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Comment by leeoniya | Hacker News Reader

i haven't been this excited about something in a long time. what i wouldn't give to hack my own phone without learning proprietary platforms.

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Then get yourself a Nexus Android phone today. The OS is completely open source, with a whole community built around hacking phones, XDA. You can get much better performance out of Java than you could ever dream to with JavaScript. Many of FF OS's hardware APIs are Mozilla specific, no different than Android's.

i run CM7 nightly on my original Evo 4G (WiMax). i have done a fair bit of customizing it, but without learning Java in addition to the huge android framework, it's a pretty gnarly task to make significant changes.

i think that firefox OS will do to the smartphone ecosystem what github did to open source contribution revival. not having to touch the OS guts, and just scripting against some additional APIs is a huge win for simplification to the whole hacking process.

the mozilla-specific stuff will start proprietary like android, but all of their work is submitted for standards adoption and is almost certainly needed in one form or another.

CM7? Why aren't you running ICS? Even the official Sprint firmware has been upgraded.

Yes, JavaScript has come a long way with the latest engines. However, it's still a long ways away from being competitive with iOS or Android NDK Apps. Even Mozilla's poster child for the potential of HTML5 in 3D gaming, Banana Bread, is 4-10x slower than its native counterpart Cube 2.

i occasionally flash CM9 and CM10 nightlies to see if performance has improved. unfortunately both are significantly slower even with third party kernels than CM7. also, there are no 4G/WiMax drivers for anything above GB, so i really have no better options. it sux i cannot run latest native browser or chrome, but i run FF mobile nightly and Opera if i need the latest goodies.

It's open source in the sense that the source is available. It's not open-source in the sense of being a community project. As for Javascript vs Java, Javascript has come a long way. Recent JS engines are pretty fast. Not to say that it can't be tricky to maintain a large base of JS code, but that's a different debate.

I for one am looking forward to it, though the lack of apps compared to the other two dominant ecosystems will be a problem.

"not open-source in the sense of being a community project." Android is no less a community project than FF OS. And it does have a great community of outside developers around it, XDA. Check out the forums.

If you want to contribute back, Google has been good about accepting patches into its AOSP project. For patches they won't accept, there's always CyanogenMod.

"JS engines are pretty fast" Good enough for simple text based apps and casual games, yes. Modern 3D games, not by a long shot. Native code, NDK, or Java under HotSpot are the only decent options creating for modern responsive 3D games.

All Mozilla phone APIs are being standardized. Some already are. None are intended to be Mozilla-specific.

You can track the implementation here: https://wiki.mozilla.org/WebAPI

Learning to use fork may be beneficial to eating everything with a spoon.

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