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Comment by slacka | Hacker News Reader

All the previews I've read say that Firefox OS needs high-end hardware to deliver a responsive UI.

"Its unresponsive screen makes typing a laborious process requiring painstaking precision. Every action from swiping to tapping onscreen controls takes a beat until you see results, so using the phone for a prolonged period steals minutes of your time. Lag carries into the camera, which is slow to launch, snap, and reset."[1]

For $90, I would rather have a refurbished iPhone 3GS. A 3GS has 16GB of internal storage vs this phones 512MB and runs Apple's latest iOS 6. With native performance you get a silky smooth experience from the homescreen to apps even on budget hardware.

[1] http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-57591716-94/firefox-os-phon...

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There's something wrong with your quote and/or the previews that you have read.

For one thing, the link you provide doesn't contain that quote anywhere that I can see. Perhaps you intended to post a different link?

Secondly, I have been using a Firefox OS developer preview phone for several months (one less powerful than the ZTE, I believe), and the UI is extremely snappy. As all 1.0s it still has rough edges that I only hope will be softened by future upgrades, but I find the user experience generally pleasant.

Finally, you can certainly grab a refurbished iPhone if you prefer. iOS 6 is certainly visually nicer than Firefox OS 1.0. But the whole point of FirefoxOS is freedom from silos. One of the consequences is that the appstore will not simply drop support on you whenever Apple (or whoever owns your silo) decides that they want to force you into buying a new phone. Unless I'm mistaken, another of the consequences is that any application bought on FirefoxOS will still belong to you if decide to move to an Android phone or to your Windows/MacOS/Linux personal computer (sorry, no iPhone support, Apple wouldn't want that kind of thing to happen). Oh, and of course, with a Firefox OS phone, you can just write and deploy your own apps without having to ask anybody's permission. I wrote a (small) game during a conference and released it a few days later, before the Marketplace was even open. If visual effects are more important to you than this kind of freedom, yes, by all means, go ahead and buy a refurbished iPhone.

Caveat: I'm a Mozillian.

The benefits you list for Firefox OS may not apply to iOS, but they do apply to Android, too. I can install apps on my Android phone without using any app store, for instance. I can freely write my own Android apps, and distribute them myself, without having to pay anyone or get permission to do so. I don't have to upgrade to a newer version of Android if I don't want to.

If I can already get all of that with Android, and so much more (such as decent performance, the ability to develop apps in languages other than JavaScript, access to a huge number of existing applications, and so on), what is it that should be compelling me to use Firefox OS instead?

Furthermore, various incidents since the release of Firefox 4 have also shaken my trust in Mozilla. Time and time again, we've seen decisions made with very limited community input, and apparently little regard to the impact that they'll have. I'm talking about how the approach to releases was changed in a way that broke extensions time and time again, for a long time. I'm talking about how the status bar has been removed, and the menu bar was hidden by default. I'm talking about how the protocol isn't shown in the URL bar. I'm talking about the latest incident from today, where the preferences dialog option for disabling JavaScript will apparently be removed in Firefox 23.

Incidents like those make me very skeptical of the "openness" claims we hear time and time again with respect to Firefox OS.

All of those decisions were made with quite a bit of community input. The people who claim they were not are the people who disagreed with them.

Firefox had to be switched to a faster release model to keep pace with Chrome. That's what competition does. Firefox adapted and excelled. Some extension developers took a while to catch on and understand the new process. But as there are 6 weeks of time to test each new version and generally extensions don't change unless there is an API change, it's not much of an issue. Any commercial developer that falls down on this is simply irresponsible.

The status bar is there and shows up whenever it needs to (during loading or hovering over a link). There's no need for it to be there the rest of the time. Any old-school extensions that had UI elements in the status bar simply moved to the toolbar.

The protocol is shown in the URL bar whenever it's something besides http (so for ftp, https, chrome, etc). http is redundant as it's assumed. Same reason we don't use it when giving web addresses via other media.

You can still disable JavaScript in the about:config window and using all kinds of extensions to add UI elements if you want a quick toggle. It's being removed since it's not very useful anymore as much of the web requires JavaScript. Lots of developers don't even bother testing sites for when JavaScript is disabled anymore (nor do they really need to as no one disables it except a core group of a couple million geeks and these folks know that if a site breaks, they need to whitelist it in NoScript).

(I won't reply on your remarks regarding Mozilla and UX, as JohnTHaller has done this quite nicely.)

It is true that power users can install apps without going through the Android Play Store. Regular users (i.e. your customers, if you are a developer)? I wouldn't be so sure. That's your first clue that Android is not the pinnacle of mobile OS.

For most users, Android is effectively a silo. Worse than that, it is a silo in which all your otherwise private data belongs to a single company. As a user, this is a pretty big clue to me that Android is not the platform I want for me, or for my children.

As for developing apps in languages other than JavaScript, well, here are "a few" other languages that you can use: https://github.com/jashkenas/coffee-script/wiki/List-of-lang... . This includes C, C++, C#, Python, Java, etc. Heck, even I have developed a language in that list :)

Caveat: I am a Mozillian (and I'll stop writing this at the bottom of my messages, I grow tired of it).

Android is a much worse platform in terms of language choice. There are no production-quality languages that will run on Davlik other than Java and your only other choice is C++ with your own UI.

On Firefox OS, I can use JavaScript, or the languages that compile down to JavaScript (CoffeeScript, TypeScript or Dart, for instance).

On Android, I can use Java, C, C++, C# (via Xamarin), JavaScript, or the languages that compile down to JavaScript.

Yet somehow Android "is a much worse platform in terms of language choice"?

Yep, JavaScript/web is not a first-class runtime on Android. You must write a Java wrapper application that uses a 3rd party (PhoneGap) framework to get access to most APIs. And IIRC Android web views still use Android Browser, which is terrible.

This "first-class runtime" distinction you mention doesn't really matter much in practice.

In each case there's some variant of Linux, on top of that is a JavaScript and web browser implementation, and on top of that is the application implemented in JavaScript.

The use of something like PhoneGap in the Android case, to package the JavaScript code, markup, styles and to interface with the native browser, is quite peripheral. The majority of end users won't care, as long as the app works.

In the end, the fact remains that developers can use JavaScript to develop apps for Android. But these Android developers also have numerous other options available to them, including Java, C, C++ and C#. This final part is not true for Firefox OS. That inherently means that Android is a much better platform in terms of language support, contrary to what you're suggesting.

Given that the languages that compile to JavaScript include Java, C, C++ and C#, both offers are roughly the same.

Now, on one side, the default language is Java + proprietary APIs. Through the NDK, this can be extended to native stuff and through Cordova/Phonegap, this can be extended to HTML5-ish stuff. On the other side, the default language is JavaScript + portable-but-not-available-everywhere APIs. Through Emscripten, this can be extended to native stuff and through the list I posted earlier, this can be extended to gazillions of languages. While you seem to prefer Java, it really strikes me as roughly equivalent in terms of freedom of choice for the language.

Both platforms are impressively richer than iOS, one defaults to Java, the other to JavaScript, news at 11.

Look at you, pretending asm.js and emscripten don't exist.

Asm.js is just a mangled subset of JavaScript.

Every Emscripten demo I've seen so far has either not worked, or been horribly slow. As far as I'm concerned, it really isn't a viable option at this point for anything remotely serious. It may be an interesting experimental idea, but it still needs a massive amount of work before it's seriously usable.

In the end, they're merely an abuse of JavaScript, rather than providing proper support like NDK provides for C and C++ under Android, for instance.

That's right, move them goalposts [1]. Thanks for the reply, always a fan of your comments.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moving_the_goalposts

The "goalposts" haven't "moved".

Asm.js is still just JavaScript. Emscripten isn't currently production-grade software, and it still just compiles down to JavaScript.

I hope you understand that either of those options is still a case of using JavaScript. Are you seriously disputing that?

We can develop production-grade applications using Java, C, C++, C# and JavaScript for Android. We can only do a very small fraction of that when using Firefox OS. Firefox OS clearly provides far fewer viable options than Android does.

>The "goalposts" haven't "moved".

>Emscripten isn't currently production-grade software, and it still just compiles down to JavaScript.

took you two sentences to contradict yourself and move the goalposts again. Nowhere were we talking about "production grade".

> I hope you understand that either of those options is still a case of using JavaScript. Are you seriously disputing that?

That's a strawman fallacy. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man

I cannot even uninstall the Google apps from my Android phone.

There is nothing wrong with the previews I read, but I did accidentally paste the wrong link. Here it is:

http://reviews.cnet.com/smartphones/geeksphone-keon/4505-645...

Hard as it is for me to admit, MS did an amazing job with Windows Mobile 8. For low-end hardware it gives a silky smooth OS performance. On the apps side though, I wasn't too impressed with the Nova 3 and Asphalt 7 on the phone I tested. I'm not sure if this is a fault of the OS, hardware, or just that iOS developers have more experience optimizing for that platform. Given the same hardware, I'd put money on iOS, Win8, and even Android (w/ NDK) outperforming Firefox OS.

Indeed, it seems that their experience was not very good using a pre-release version of FirefoxOS. Given that my less powerful phone is very responsive, I am confident that this is a temporary glitch that has been fixed already or, at worst, will be soon.

So I'll take your bet :)

Hard as it is for me to admit, MS did an amazing job with Windows Mobile 8.

Why is that hard to admit?

After upgrading to an iPhone from a Treo 700w (and Win Mo 2003 phone before that), it's hard for me to admit to myself or believe that MS has made such a 360 in mobile UX.

180° maybe?

I used Firefox since from the Firebird days until the memory bloat in 4.0 drove me to Chome. Now every time I try to go back, I find Firefox behind the competition. For example, when I loaded up FF to test out ASM.js, I found I was still on version 18 because your silent auto updater only works when you run as administrator. You expect all your users to run as root in 2013? Really?

OK cidadel under ASM.js was pretty cool and memory boat seemed under control. Nice job BTW! So I set FF as my default browser. Next day I come to HN and open some CSS3 hair demo in a new tab. Next thing I know my browser is completely unresponsive. Until I find the offending tab and close it. Back to multi-process Chrome as my default.

As a Mozillian can you please explain why Mozilla is wasting their resources trying to power budget phones with a bloated outdated browser? Fix your browser, and by then, maybe the mobile hardware will be fast enough to justify the performance hit from running everything inside a JavaScript VM.

> You expect all your users to run as root in 2013? Really?

> As a Mozillian can you please explain why Mozilla is wasting their resources trying to power budget phones with a bloated outdated browser?

Do you really expect anyone that isn't a developer to be running on a desktop in 2018? Really?

Are you predicting that in 5 years only developers will have laptops? (I presume that your definition of a desktop includes laptops given the browser application we are talking about)

> As a Mozillian can you please explain why Mozilla is wasting their resources trying to power budget phones with a bloated outdated browser? Fix your browser, and by then, maybe the mobile hardware will be fast enough to justify the performance hit from running everything inside a JavaScript VM.

I have several answers to that. Firstly, budget phones running everything inside a JavaScript VM works today. We have now proved it. Almost every optimization/new technology we have achieved along the way has also been made available to Firefox for Android and Firefox Desktop, so it's hardly an exclusive or. One of these new technologies is the much-wanted support for multi-process. It is not ready for deployment, far from it, but it is now field-tested, so I hope that we will all be able to benefit from this feature soon.

Also, if you are a developer, you are certainly aware that this is not how things work. You simply cannot wait until a product is perfect before getting started with another product, because this is the road to never releasing anything, ever.

Finally, glad that you returned to Firefox, however briefly :), and glad that you liked some of the experience. I hope we'll have you back once we have finally released a multi-process version. Or once you grow weary of Google owning all your data :)

Thanks for the reply. It was an honest question. I'm in IT and am responsible for FF being on the default image of hundreds of PC installs. I want to see FF desktop competitive, so that we all have a choice again.

It's great that Mozilla is experimenting with new tech like FF OS, but It takes a great deal more resources to turn an experiment into a shipping product. And it's clear from the state of their desktop browser that their focus in on FF OS.

It's clear that Mozilla is resource limited. I was also pushing for Thunderbird to replace Outlook, but after Mozilla's announcement that they were ending feature updates, that is never going to happen now.

Pray tell, what feature updates do you need for an email client? Faster email delivery?

the ability to connect to 10+ IMAP accounts and not use 700MB of RAM would be a nice feature. I can either run Thunderbird or Firefox on my netbook, but not both.

I have no problem with that on this end. Perhaps it's just your install.

standard ubuntu builds, across multiple computers. Perhaps not.

No features come to mind, but I'd really like to see the UI improved. For instance, cramping all those rows of subject lines so close without any line spacing sucks.

I tried figuring out the CSS needed to fix it, but was unable to locate any real documentation on it.

> It's great that Mozilla is experimenting with new tech like FF OS, but It takes a great deal more resources to turn an experiment into a shipping product. And it's clear from the state of their desktop browser that their focus in on FF OS.

Fortunately, despite our limited resources, we manage to improve the Firefox browser considerably, too.

- We finally beat Chrome in terms of performance: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/chrome-27-firefox-21-ope... - We have recently added the so-called "Social API", which is a way for websites to extend the browser. - We have recently added asm.js. - We keep extending and improving the developer tools. - We keep adding support for new HTML5 tags/objects including WebAudio, the Clipboard API, the Web notification API, etc. - WebRTC has finally graduated. - etc.

It seems that you care a lot about multi-processes and, sadly, we don't have that yet. Doing it right (i.e. much better than Chrome, we hope) takes time, but we are working hard on it.

Oh, and if you want to add yourself to our resources, don't hesitate to ping me :)

The updater no longer requires you to run as administrator except the first time it installs its updater service. From then on, it will update without the UAC prompt. Chrome doesn't require running as admin to update because it bypasses Windows' security by running outside of Program Files, which can cause additional security issues.

What additional security issues might those be? The only security issue I can see with that design is that is each user on the machine would need to update individually and thus users that login only infrequently would often have an out of date version of Chrome.

On Windows Vista, 7 and 8, things installed into the Program Files directory can't be altered without UAC kicking in and requiring admin rights. That's why apps require admin rights to update. This prevents viruses and other things from altering installed apps unless it's using an unpatched security issue. To allow updates to be done without needing admin rights, Firefox installs an updater service that only it has access to and that can only update its own files. This allows updates without UAC/admin and while still preserving the Windows app security model.

Google Chrome gets installed into the APPDATA directory. In that location, any process running on the system under the current user can alter Chrome's files, since it isn't within Program Files and isn't subject to UAC/admin. This makes a standard Chrome install inherently less secure than Firefox, Opera, etc installed according to Windows' guidelines within Program Files. Google makes available another Chrome installer that installs into Program Files, but it isn't promoted to users (so they're unaware of the security differences) and it can't be updated without UAC/admin rights.

I’ve seen dozens if not hundreds of infected machines. By far the most common infection vector comes from unpatched browsers or their plugins.

It looks like my browser was not updating because of a 1.5 year old bug #711475 which is still marked at “New”. If it hadn't been for my interest in asm.js, I'd still be sitting at version 17 or 18, despite auto-updates and background service both being checked.

Not auto-updating the browser is a much bigger security risk than your hypothetical issue for Chrome.

I'm not familiar with auto-update, but reading at Bugzilla, it seems that auto-update has been working for a few months at least. The bug to which you linked seems to be about letting users update Firefox without having to wait for the auto-update, which is something else entirely.

Or did I misunderstand what feature you are referring to?

What difference does that make if malware can just install a separate infested version of the browser side-by-side, set it as the default browser, and adjust all desktop/start menu shortcuts to point to this new browser?

Firefox OS is multi-process like Chrome.

There is nothing technical in the browser engine that prevents Gecko from being multi-process; support for it is actually integrated quite deeply into the engine, more like WebKit2 than Chromium. The reason that Firefox isn't multi-process is purely an application-level issue, not an engine-level one.

Exactly my point. I was talking about Mozilla diverting resources from FF Desktop to FF OS. As a result, their desktop browser has fallen behind "modern browsers" like IE and Chrome. It's lacking key features like multi-process and auto-updating.

No, what you wrote is "As a Mozillian can you please explain why Mozilla is wasting their resources trying to power budget phones with a bloated outdated browser?"

As I explained, the engine is not "bloated" or "outdated", at least in regards to multi-process or auto-update. Firefox OS uses the Gecko engine, but not the Firefox front end. The Gecko browser engine has full support for both of these features.

"For $90, I would rather have a refurbished iPhone 3GS."

You might be surprised (as I was) but Windows 8 is the most responsive mobile OS I've ever seen. Maybe it's even the best mobile OS at the moment.

You can get a new Nokia Lumia 521 for about $150. A very underestimated phone.

I gotta agree, the main experience of WP8 is amazing. Maps is extremely fluid and the development tools are great.

You can really see problems with the 521 on IE. The browser performance reminds me of Android 2.3.

Now, the Lumia 9xx series is rock solid. But I haven't been able to give up my 4s (Nokia should really be giving them away)

Just bought the Nokia 521 for $100 (ebay, still in box). It's an awesome phone. Windows Phone 8 has the best UI on the market by a long shot. Makes Android feel unusable and iOS old and clumsy. Downside is fewer apps, but all the big names are there.

Can I use a browser other than IE on it?

I'm not sure you can already but in the near future, yes: Firefox, Opera and Chrome.

Hum. Last time I checked, Windows 8 for ARM explicitly prevented non-IE browsers from launching.

On Windows Phone 8? I've been using Windows Phone since the launch of WP7 and I've never heard of a competitor's browser being allowed, nor of a decision to change this. Windows 8 possibly, but the OP seems to be confused between the two because Windows 8 doesn't run on anything ARM made by Nokia.

http://www.google.com/homepage/windows8/ says "not yet available for Windows RT" so maybe there is hope?

I suspect any hope will have to be provided by a court of justice. Or a X-Wing.

Ah, well, people seem to believe that my above post is a troll, so let me elaborate.

Windows 8 explicitly blocks the installation of any browser other than Internet Explorer (+ skins) on ARM. This is not due to a technical reason. This is due to the fact that Microsoft imitates Apple's policy that prevents any browser other than Safari (+ skins) on iOS [1]. While anti-trust rulings have forbidden Microsoft from doing this on PCs, Microsoft claims that ARM-based computers are not PCs and that the anti-trust rulings therefore do not apply. I therefore suspect that Microsoft will continue with this behavior unless a court of justice decides that ARM-based computers are also PCs. Hence my above comment.

And if anyone wonders why we need open platforms for mobile devices, that's a pretty good reason.

One source among many: http://www.linuxstall.com/microsoft-blocks-chrome-and-firefo...

[1] Yes, technologically speaking, Chrome for iOS is a reskinned Safari bundled with utilities.

When I visit, I get "not available on Windows RT", no sign of "yet". Perhaps someone from Google saw this discussion and updated it.

http://i.imgur.com/zILTywr.png

Despite both using the NT kernel on ARM, Windows 8 RT is not Windows Phone 8.

That's simply not true.

There's UC Browser. It probably uses IE's rendering engine since the big names (FF, Opera) are missing.

You can't have IE in Kid's Corner (the guest mode) so you'll want UC Browser as an alternative. There are also alternative phone dialers since you can't have the default phone dialer in Kid's Corner.

I can safely say that Windows Phone is the nicest OS I've casually used. It's much more responsive than iOS and Android, and it just feels a lot nicer to use from day-to-day.

My main gripe with Windows Phone isn't the OS, but the phones themselves. They just don't look that nice, and they retain the old-fashioned "brick" feel of old Nokia phones.

I have a Galaxy Nexus now, but if Microsoft were to release their own Nexus-like range of phones that were both high-spec and looked great I'd happily switch.

Agreed. I'm on my first Windows Phone, and I don't see myself going back. Granted I'm not a "power-user" so the app store is big enough for 95% of my needs, but that's still saying something. The aesthetics and performance are just great.

I own the HTC 8X, which I don't think is very brick-like either. I love the textured back, and my friends and colleagues love the way it looks and feels.

No no no, don't complain about the brick-ness, Nokia may listen. I love being able to constantly drop my phone all over the place.

Are the new phones still as sturdy as they were before? I admit that I miss my old Nokia 3310 at times, and being able to throw it around anywhere without a single dent.

I've owned both the Nokia 710 and the new 521 and as an excessive phone-dropper have had no problems. I have also dropped both of these phones in water, picked them up, dried them off with a paper towel, and simply moved on with my day.

I bought a prepaid $80 phone from AT&T fusion 2, put on cyanogenmod and it works great. Compared to my friends windows phone, mine still is highly competitive (although I must admit mine is slightly slower when things are booting/loading) and I only get something like 256 MB of ram and am running android 2.3.

I agree, Windows 8 is the snappiest mobile OS I have come across. Got my parents the Nokia Lumia 521 (for $120 @ Walmart - an absolute steal) and they love it. Big tiles, information right on the screen, offline maps, easy to use etc.

However there are still some downsides you need to be aware of if you planning on getting one:

[1] Windows is highly paranoid about security (Irony), no application can access the call logs, messages or even basic settings such as brightness etc. So don't expect to find apps that customize your phone to your liking.

[2] Apps - Saw your friend using that awesome Starbucks app and want it? Nope you won't find it on the store like many many others. To make it worse, Google is hellbent on never creating apps for Windows Phone. Luckily there are better or acceptable alternatives for most of their core products.

[3] Phones - Not many choices. If you want a solid phone stick with the Nokia brand. The exclusive apps will itself win you over.

Keep up the pro-microsoft posts! maybe we can see a resurgence in Windows Phone adoption!

>Keep up the pro-microsoft posts!

Yeah I listed one pro and three cons, that is definitely a pro MS post. According to you, anyone who says anything good about MS or Google is a shill. Glad we aren't living anymore in the 90's M$-hate slashdot era.

>resurgence

If 8+% market share is "resurgence", I have no idea what you are going to say about Firefox or Ubuntu Mobile OS.

"posts" would connote more than one, correct?

also, good job with that strawman you put up there. you sure knocked it down real well.

>"posts" would connote more than one, correct?

Yes, the same applies for you calling everyone who doesn't share your view a "shill". So according to my posts, I am pro MS, pro Firefox, anti Chrome, pro Google etc. I sure hope I dint invalidate the "pro MS" with the cons this time. Has it every occurred to you that maybe people talk positively or negatively about product X or Y, not because they are a shill, but because they can relate to it or have some experience with it? I humbly request you to change your mindset from the pre-2000 slashdot era, grow up and stop calling everyone who doesn't share the same views as you a "shill".

> Yes, the same applies for you calling everyone who doesn't share your view a "shill".

Check out your Argumentum Ad Hominem! [1]

> "shill"

> shill

> "shill"

are you quoting me when you say "shill"? where did I use that word? If I didn't use it, doesn't that make this a Strawman Fallacy? [2]

>I humbly request you to change your mindset from the pre-2000 slashdot era

Perfect example of Association Fallacy [3].

> grow up

followed by an Appeal to emotion! nice! [4]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guilt_by_association

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_emotion

As a user of GP Peak I can testify the UI is almost snappy enough, but once you open up Firefox (or any other app that relies on web) everything slows down considerably, the devices freezes or is extremely slow to respond to input and the battery is hammered. Half an hour of attempts to browse the web and do stuff can halve it.

Other than that, the phone itself performs it's basic functions just fine and the battery life is quite good if you don't touch any of the "smart" features.

Having said that, the device is a developer preview and I like Mozilla and their mission and I hope they will succeed with subsequent versions.

Have you tried the nightly builds? My Keon ran significantly faster with them. Unfortunately, a few things were still a bit broken, so I reverted to the normal builds for day-to-day use. Still, there seems to be plenty of room for software-based improvements on modest hardware.

Yes, I have tried the nightly at some point, indeed I saw some improvements, but also broken stuff: - scrolling in firefox produced really weird "oscillations" that never really went away unless quitting the application. - youtube stopped working (not that i can use it reasonably otherwise) etc. I guess I should try it again one of these days.

Yeah, nightly builds are not suitable for daily use, but they do show that the same hardware and stack can deliver much better performance in the very near future.

I've played with the low power developer Firefox Geekphones and the UI was very responsive.

Also an iPhone is the opposite of a free phone, so this is no competition for Firefox OS.

> Also an iPhone is the opposite of a free phone, so this is no competition for Firefox OS.

Now, I'm a big anti-apple/open source proponent too, but just having that as a selling point isn't gonna win them a whole lot of users; just look at what happened with the OpenMoko project.

After watching the demo, I think it might've made a decent competitor back when Gingerbread was still fresh, but now I'm not so sure. If there's one thing I do admire about Apple, it's that they seem to really only release stuff that's 'fully baked', even if not everybody agrees with the decisions they make.

OpenMoko is virtually unheard of even within the tech world. Firefox is a good, strong brand for the OS to ride on.

By "fully baked" do you mean a phone that can only run web apps? (Note that I'm talking about the original iPhone, not Firefox OS).

I meant more in terms of performance and UX than features. If Firefox OS delivers on displaying web apps really darn well, then more power to it, but the demo didn't really stand out in that way either. Most likely the poor hardware, but again, that's still part of the end user experience which is crucial imo. Ubuntu's mobile os seems to perform much more smoothly from the demos I've seen for example, but I'm not sure how the hardware compares to the sets that were used for these Firefox os demos.

Indeed, when comparing ubuntu's mobile os running on a galaxy nexus with firefox os running on very cheap hardware, you should expect a difference. I would be interested in seing how ubuntu mobile runs on a 69 euro phone.

Yeah, I'd be curious to see that too. However, end users don't usually care about hardware specs directly, they care about the end experience. And if you're pushing for a new platform right now, you have to really try and build an ecosystem around it as soon as possible by earning enough fans and developers to keep the platform sustainable. And as developers, I know we like to think we're rather objective about a technology's 'true' merits, but UX impacts our decisions too. So if Ubuntu ships their OS on hardware that will provide a better experience than any FFOS phone out there, Imma place my bets on the OS that shipped with the better overall UX out the gate (even if it's not as cheap initially). I mean, it's not like we didn't already see this partially play out with WebOS. Even Windows phones are struggling and they seem to have a really nice UX...

This is why I'm more excited about Ubuntu Mobile than Firefox OS. With Ubuntu, I get an open ecosystem with native performance and am not locked into using the Firefox browser. If the gesture system on Ubuntu is done as well as the BlackBerry 10, it will be a welcome change from iOS's and Android's UI.

It refers to polish and usability, not filling feature checkboxes. Yes, the original iPhone was "fully baked". It didn't have every feature that everybody wanted (and I'll agree that this was a big missing feature), but what it did, it did extremely well.

No it didn't. It was a mediocre-to-crappy phone, mediocre to-crappy browser, and mediocre-to-crappy ipod, a mediocre-to-crappy GPS navigator, and mediocre-to-crappy Youtube player, a plain old crappy camera. Putting a layer of gloss on the UI doesn't change that.

Now of course, we live in the world of apps and the iPhone has become what it was always destined to be: a mediocre-to-crappy, yet socially acceptable, gameboy. Ha-ha, only serious.

No really, having all those things in one touchscreen device was pretty cool, and certainly pointed the way to the future. The predictable myth-making around Apple is as boring as ever though.

It's just I can remember when the myth-making was around the iPod and "it only does one thing, and it does it really well", and suddenly the iPhone comes along and does everything and anything, usually (though not always) quite a bit worse than dedicated devices. And suddenly perfection gets redefined (yet again) to whatever Apple is currently doing.

It's not "myth-making." I was there, and the only reason I didn't keep my original iPhone was because AT&T sucked way too hard at the time. It was plenty "baked". You may disagree with Apple's design or implementation decisions, but it was definitely not unfinished.

> If there's one thing I do admire about Apple, it's that they seem to really only release stuff that's 'fully baked'

Unfortunately, they overbaked Maps.

Don't you think that the NSA debacle makes ordinary people more and more people sensitive about there freedom?

Trust is the baseground of any purchase.

Freedom is not only the selling point to customers but also and more importantly to the telephone companies. It seems that they appreciate that freedom a lot. They have the marketing power to make the phones a success in the mass market.

Idk what class of hardware they were using on the demo video, but it at least appeared quite laggy.

Same here, I've been using the lowest version for a few months and the UI is much, much, much more responsive than on the low-end Android phones I have tested.

At some point we will really need be careful when talking about "native performances". FirefoxOS is written in JS on top of Gecko which is as "native" as it can be. if an app's UI is well written, all of the computationally expensive stuff happens in gecko. A good way to see that it is not about being native it is to compare Android and FirefoxOS on the exact same phone. "native performances" still makes sense if you are talking about building physics engines or whatever kind of heavy simulations, but not for 90% percent of the smartphone apps today.

  > "native performances" still makes sense if you are talking 
  > about building physics engines or whatever kind of heavy
  > simulations, but not for 90% percent of the smartphone
  > apps today.

You have no idea what does it cost to have 60fps scrolling of the non-trival view.

Update: after watching this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iu8q-oISbas I do not understand how anyone can call UI responsive and maintain a straight face. Or I do not know what are you comparing it to. Just take a look how the contacts app works :(

I do have ideas. I also have a decent knowledge about how Gecko's graphics engine works internally. And again, the expensive operations (actual image rendering, layout computation, compositing, etc.) all happen in the platform, that is in "native" C++ code. What it costs to to have a good scrolling experience is to write your app in a way that doesn't cause the engine to over-invalidate and compute reflows all the time. Or it costs beefier hardware, but then this is not part of the debate of web vs native.

iPhones only have internal storage. Firefox phones come with an expansion slot; you can get a micro SD card to add 16GB for $11 on amazon.

Who cares? Geeks need to stop thinking like geeks. I know it's not easy but knowing what's important to the average consumer is critical.

melling, being able to accept a microSD card is a big deal even to people who are non-techie. My wife takes many, many pics and having a 32gig microSD card is very good if you like take pics, record vids, have music and have a bunch of kids Tv shows to calm a child. I don't even take many pics, and my Samsung Galaxy player with 5 gigs internal and 32 gigs sdcard is almost filled.

While useful, of course, I don't think it's as big of a deal as you suggest it is. If it were, the iPhone wouldn't be as popular as it is, for instance.

Just because the iPhone is popular without microSD expansion doesn't mean the feature isn't a big deal. It's still important enough to be a deal breaker for some people. It's definitely not a feature only geeks care about as the OP seems to think.

This isn't thinking like a geek, I'm sorry. comparing the internal storage on an Android/Firefox OS phone to an iPhone is comparing apples with oranges[1]; consumers know about SD cards and have done for years.

[1] no pun intended, although given my Keon's case colour, it is quite a good one :)

Geeks aren't the only people using SD cards in cameras, USB drives with computers, and Blu-ray discs in their home theater setup. External data storage isn't a tough concept for people. (With that said, it'd be better if we didn't have to worry about it.)

At higher price people will complain about lack of standard apps. I doubt there is a phone-friendly HTML5 Angry Birds out there.

IIRC, there is/was a Chrome Store version of Angry Birds. Not sure what the mobile performance would be though (or the gestures support for that matter).

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