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Comment by shadowmint | Hacker News Reader

How?

Making firefox os is great, but how do we get from here to, people making web apps that don't suck on mobiles?

Is it a market place they're going to sell apps on and curate so they're no rubbish?

Is it a platform that is so great and compelling people are going to stop making native apps for it?

Is it a new browser that is so amazing they everyone is going to swap to it, and it makes web apps responsive and amazing?

Is it an entire 'platform' that runs inside a browser?

A native app that acts like it's own 'OS' that runs on all phones?

...you get the idea. What about firefox OS is going to change anything? I'm not trolling, if you can figure it out, tell me, because then I'll pitch it, at work, and we can start down that path.

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> Is it a market place they're going to sell apps on and curate so they're no rubbish?

Yes. https://marketplace.firefox.com/ They're not interesting in locking down the device to just one app source though.

> Is it a platform that is so great and compelling people are going to stop making native apps for it?

I think that's the idea, yes :)

> Is it a new browser that is so amazing they everyone is going to swap to it, and it makes web apps responsive and amazing?

Browsers are already pretty cool; what's good for Firefox is what's good for the web (including webkit browsers). Since Firefox is pursuing consensus and standardization with all their new phone/browser ideas, it should be easier in the future to write cross-platform web/phone apps.

> Is it an entire 'platform' that runs inside a browser? A native app that acts like it's own 'OS' that runs on all phones?

It sort of is a broswer. It provides a bunch of APIs that make it possible to control phone functions from javascript. So you load a web app, and it can make phone calls and send texts and take pictures and whatever. In this video you can see the app launcher and the phone app written in HTML, CSS, and javascript. http://cnettv.cnet.com/hands-mozilla-firefox-os-boot-gecko/9...

By making the browser a true platform-a "first class citizen"-it will no longer be "that place you have your blog" and most app makers won't have to decide to go "web" or "native" (and make a different app for a growing number of phone OSes) because they'll be one in the same. It means people will care more about the web to begin with.

If that happens, we'll see more mobile OSes being created, competing and innovating because you've solved the "chicken and the egg" problem with apps. Devs won't stay with the Big 2 simply because that's where the customers are, because the customers won't stick with a phone OS they hate simply because that's where the apps are.

What I find interesting is how much the trend in mobile resembles the PC/Web boom. Ten years ago everything you did on the PC besides browsing required its own software. Not so true anymore, huh? I hope mobile continues to follow the PC's trends and make this happen next.

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