Hands-on with Mozilla’s Web-based “Firefox OS” | Hacker News Reader

Hands-on with Mozilla’s Web-based “Firefox OS”

arstechnica.com

42 pointsw0ts0n23 comments

"Still, Firefox OS could have a big impact on the Web even if it never gains significant market share. By pushing the Web forward, Mozilla is helping to ensure that mobile websites will continue to be relevant even as developers create hundreds of thousands of proprietary apps. Firefox could lose the battle for the smartphone OS market but still win the war for open standards."

I think this is the big point. Mozilla doesn't have to win. We're all winning from it's push. It's like when you compare a startup to an open source project. If the startup fails, it's a complete failure. If an open source project doesn't succeed in becoming popular, we still have it's legacy bare open on which to build on. The majority of startups failing don't contribute anything to humanity. The majority of open code does, in their small, incremental ways.

> You can import contacts from Facebook or your SIM card, but not from Gmail

Thankfully gmail contact import landed recently

It's unfortunate that they are handing these out to the press at a time when developers still cannot get a device.

We only have a limited number of devices, and won't sell any ourselves. For sure we would be happier if geeksphones were available for all to use...

I know fabrice, this isn't your fault, but I consider it a PR mistake to give these to the press when developers cannot pay for them. Sends the message that press is more important than developers (which may be true, but not the message you want).

If this had been a blog post from Twitter about how they integrated Web Activities into their mobile web app, that would have been really awesome.

You mean, something like http://blog.twitter.com/2013/02/twitter-for-firefox-os.html ?

Having Firefox OS hardware isn't that important at this stage - it's just an Android fork that runs on a handful of commercially-available Android devices. It would be great if Mozilla had a buildbot like Cyanogen's that posted images on a publicly-accessible FTP server for the 8 or so devices they support.

I'd be willing to try Firefox OS on my Galaxy Nexus, and probably even write apps for it. But, I don't really want to download GBs of toolchain and Gonk source to compile my own image to be able to do these things.

We can't distribute builds for most of these devices for legal reasons.

If you can, can you point out the legal reasons?

We can't redistribute binary blobs (gpu drivers for instance) that you need when building the images to flash phones. They are exceptions though, like the nexus S.

So can we expect images for nexus 4?

Would making the Nexus line Tier One devices change this? Or perhaps a utility that backs up your local drivers, flashes the open binaries, then pushes the encumbered ones back to the device?

it seems like their biggest problem is that when they run into problems with the way that something functions their fix is "we're working with company X to change code so that it works better with our OS"

Well, it can't be helped, Mozilla is not a big corporation, they don't have enough resource to reinvent every popular web service.

Yes, but if you're going to make a twitter app that just points to twitter's web app and then it doesn't behave in a sane way, you can't expect twitter to write code fixing those issues.

Why not? Is both in the interest of Mozilla and Twitter to have a good service on Firefox OS. Unless these corrections do not break something on other more popular OS obviously.

Perhaps it is not clear from the article, but the twitter app is a third-party application in the marketplace written by Twitter not Mozilla: http://blog.twitter.com/2013/02/twitter-for-firefox-os.html

This seems like the most optimal way forward to me - what is the alternative? Detecting and working around suboptimal behavior in websites that were not intended to be applications?

Helping people who wish to build an application with html+css+javascript (and using the new JS APIs exposed), as opposed to a website, feels to me like a better path forward for everyone. It certainly gives the developers more control and less surprising behavior.

> You can log into a Google, Yahoo, or CalDav account to sync with an online calendar. I had no trouble logging into my Google account for this purpose, and I could create and edit events as well as viewing them.

I wonder if Mozilla plans to launch their own contacts & calendar sync service based on their Firefox Sync infrastructure. Letting Google know everything might be too much for the privacy-sensitive Mozilla folks. On the other hand, I would be very wary of any sync service that is modeled on Firefox Sync. It syncs when it wants to. It takes hours, if not days, for my PC bookmarks and history to show up on my phone (Firefox for Android).

> things got awkward if we wanted to read a website linked from a tweet. Clicking on a link causes Twitter to load the tweet in a separate browser window. After reading an article, there was no obvious way to navigate back to Twitter. The browser's back button was grayed out because as far as the browser was concerned we had merely opened the page in a new window.

I don't see any reason why, in 2013, a web page should open in a new window. The desktop version of Firefox opens "new windows" in new tabs instead, and has done so for as long as I can remember. Every modern browser except IE does this by default. Even the mobile version of Firefox supports tabs, albeit in a slightly unusual manner. If everything is going to be a web page anyway, why not open things in new tabs by default? Everyone already knows how tabs works. Pressing Back would return to the tab that opened it.

If you use the twitter site from Firefox OS browser, links will just open in a new tab as you expect. What they where using is the twitter app. In this situation, external links are openened as _target=blank and we redirect these page loads to the browser app.

I understand that you can't control all the third-party apps. Still, I am a little disappointed that there remains such a strong distinction between the "browser app" and other apps when the entire OS is essentially a very powerful browser.

Hm.. I see what you mean. The nice thing is that anyone can experiment and build a different system app that would be more like a browser with apps in tabs if you want. Getting all the UX right and please everybody is hard ;)

I disagree - apps run in their own process, and can have separate privileges from the browser process. Web applications on Firefox OS are not the same as tabs in a desktop browser.

Twitter might not be the best example, admittedly :)

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