Comment by Yoric | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Yoric | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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?

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.

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.

> 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.

> 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 :)

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

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.

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.

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.

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?

> 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)

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