Firefox OS devices officially released
hacks.mozilla.org
hacks.mozilla.org
Also, don't forget that if you want to develop for Firefox OS but don't yet have a device for it, you can run the superfast Firefox OS Simulator[3], super simple and currently the best emulator for a mobile OS.
[0] https://wiki.mozilla.org/B2G
[1] http://www.movistar.es/particulares/movil/moviles-tarjeta/fi...
[2] https://plus.google.com/communities/100988731864612801878
[3] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Tools/Firefox_OS_Si...
My problem with Android is that I miserably failed to hack it alone (I wanted to mess with app permission system and make it work my way). The Behemoth seem to have quite a steep learning curve, so I quickly lost my way in its innards.
However, I was able hack Maemo (except for proprietary parts) on N900 somehow. Stack was loosely coupled, everything's deb-packaged separately, many components are not in-home inventions but are well-known software (Debian base, X11, OpenSSL, DBus, etc.). Sad thing Maemo's practically dead.
Here's a short overview of how to get started: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/introduction Not necessarily trivial, but just about everybody manages to get started in a few days at worst.
However, from what I've heard, it's Cyanogenmod 10 with Dalvik parts removed and some Ubuntu parts (no X11, Qt5 only GUIs) running in a sort of chroot environment. Doesn't sound much better than any other chrooted GNU install.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Python_for_S60. The final 2.0 build sadly broke some networking code. There were very few people complaining, so it didn't get fixed. I suggest using version 1.4.5 instead if you choose to play with it.
Thought you were talking about Firefox OS there!
If Mozilla pulled a last minute rabbit out of the hat, then I'll gladly admit my error. 6 years after the Original iPhone and with much better hardware, you’d think it would be possible for Mozilla to do this. Though it seems more likely the constraints of HTML5/JS will keep this from happening on low-end hardware.
However I am excited to see where Firefox OS might be heading even though I think they will have a though time fighting it out with other potential "third spot" platforms for starters.
And how exactly is it "different"? Firefox OS is really just a limited subset of what we already have available (and have had for years, in some cases) under these various existing systems. We can already quite successfully run HTML5/CSS/JavaScript-based apps on Android, iOS, and BlackBerry OS for instance. And this is ignoring Firefox OS's inflexibility when it comes to using languages other than JavaScript (sorry, Asm.js and Emscripten are hacks, at best), or writing native applications.
It's hard to see how it'll compete on vague notions of "openness" that most consumers really could not care any less about, while failing to compete on things that consumers do care about, like functionality and experience. It can't even really compete on price, given the existence of Android.
This makes me wonder about privacy and Firefox OS. Does it require arbitrary account with credit card paired like iOS or Windows Phone? Does it require account to get most of the functionality like Android? Does it require you to agree that Google will get your location data for network location service to function like Android? Does it not allow you to use it without sending (paid) sms to Nokia with your location, like new Nokia phones?
If it doesn't do any of those things, it is different.
If the only selling point is HTML5 based apps, other OSs also have browsers.
also, Firefox OS devices have potential to be cheaper than android devices, because there's no extortion from Microsoft, and may be consistent, unlike Android with many terrible manufacturer-made OS modifications and version fragmentation. Even now, android 2.3 devices are sold.
I already have a browser and for the looks of it, FirefoxOS still needs some performance tuning to reach the level of throw away Android and Windows phones.
I have been using mine for ~6 months without a credit card. I have downloaded a number of free applications and the only times I had to log in was when I decided to rate them. I have not tested non-free applications, but the documentation seems to indicate that you have the choice between PayPal or some operator-provided billing mechanism. I don't know the details, though.
You do not have a system-wide identity. The Marketplace supports authentication through Mozilla Persona/BrowserID, which is quite different from other single sign-on authentication schemes, insofar as it is anonymous, almost zero-knowledge, open-source and decentralized (admittedly, I don't know of any Persona provider other than Mozilla, but anyone with a http server can become a Persona provider).
All recent MacBooks I have seen insist rather hard to be paired with an account and a credit card number. I have never done the initial setup of an iOS device, but I would have assumed that it was the same or worse.
iPhone 5 + iOS 6: doesn't know a thing about my credit card, and never will.
Irrelevant as those users will not care and just punch in their credit card if asked.
The identity part? I have an account, so yes, some sort of 'identity' is revealed, but that doesn't relate to the credit card part.
They still do not know a thing about any of my credit cards, from initial setup to everyday use.
It's been a while since I set it up, but if I recall correctly you can create your "Apple ID" online and select 'None' for the credit card, then you sign in on your device with that account.
When you're creating an account on the device, I think it may force you pair a credit card though.
That is completely untrue, unless you are seeing some weird install of OS X. But you're not, you're making stuff up.
You can skip the product registration and you can skip signing in with your Apple ID and essentially have an "anonymous" install with little effort.
I had some very ugly experiences setting up one for my cousin (I stupidly didn't lie and registered her as being from Uruguay and under 18), which made the phone behave like a brick ("sorry, no apps available in your country", "sorry, you have to be over 18 under laws from another country to use most of the features of this phone").
Changing the Live account did not work, I had to reset the phone and create another account for her, lying about her age and country so the phone could work properly (she wanted to use Skype and WhatsApp, not exactly the most demanding use case).
That stupidity turned me off Windows Phone for the foreseeable future (although the hardware is top-notch).
That only applies for the United States and I guess most European countries, but it's not universal.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_majority
For example, here in Uruguay, there's a distinction between minors up to 16 years, then they can enter some contracts (for example work contracts, I don't know where downloading apps falls), and they become full adults at 18.
In the U.S. there are some restrictions up to 21 years old, but they can drive at 16 (!). My cousin was 17 at the time I was setting up her phone, I'm not sure, but I guess she might have been legally able to enter a contract with Microsft at the time.
Google is more lax with its settings, or has better lawyers. Also, if you move to another country, you CAN change your settings (it's extremely ridiculous that Microsoft doesn't let you do that).
I can totally understand that Microsoft doesn't want to go over the minutiae of every small nation to see whether someone is eligible or not to enter a contract.
I wonder what Firefox OS will do with all these legal restrictions (offload to the app developers?)
It is great that Mozilla is fighting for openness, but in terms of what street joe and street jane want, I think it will join WebOS in a few months.
Given my experience in telecommunications I don't see how sales are going to push these devices out of the shop when users come asking for other OSs.
When normal people buy a mobile, many choose a specific model, because:
- how it looks
- certain persons they know the same model
- there is a specific set of apps they want to have
- how the battery holds
- for whatever reason they want to have a contract and have a limited set to choose from, which fall anyway under the previous points
The question is how to bring these persons to buy a FirefoxOS mobile.
Sure a few geeks will buy them, but will it be enough quantity to keep the operators selling them?
Even if it the profit is big, it might not be big enough compared with whatever else they might producing instead.
You're comparing apples to oranges. WebOS was closed source with limited hardware vendors. FireFox OS is open source, open to all hardware vendors.
Good platforms tend to do well in the marketplace because they attract investment from the outside world. Android is beating iOS because it's a better platform for vendors. FireFox OS is not only a better platform for vendors than iOS, it may turn out to be a better platform for devs than both iOS and Android.
Robert Nyman of Mozilla pointed me at this:
https://blog.mozilla.org/ligong/2013/06/03/foxconn-joins-the...
"Foxconn stated that they intend to have FFOS running on all categories of the “8 screen” devices, from smartphone to tablets to laptops to TVs and outdoor signage."
Name me another mobile OS that will be running on laptops or outdoor signage. :) This, I think, is the bigger vision of FF OS that is the reason people should get interested and involved.
Right, but in Firefox you also have "native" HTML5 apps, which give access to more hardware functionality than a regular web app.
> And this is ignoring Firefox OS's inflexibility when it comes to using languages other than JavaScript
I don't see how Firefox OS is less flexible than other systems. In Android, you're forced to use Java; in iOS you're forced to use Objective C (everything else, like RubyMotion are hacks, at best).
Which negates the sole benefit of a web app in the first place since those APIs are not standard and not available on other platforms, so those apps are not portable. Maybe the APIs will become standard and implemented on Android and iOS etc, but at that point you can write those kinds of apps for Android or iOS too, so again Firefox OS offers no benefit.
Interestingly, while you seem to consider that this is a weak point of Firefox, we (Mozilla) did this on purpose and we consider this one of the strongest points of the platform: _no vendor lock-in_. If you write an application for FirefoxOS, we do not place any obstacle that can prevent the developer from distributing the application on other devices/OSes or that can prevent the user from using it on their other devices/OSes.
As you may recall, we (not just Mozilla) did this to the web a few years ago, and look where this brought us all. We are now attempting to bring the same degree of freedom to mobile. And yes, this is going to be quite a fight, but if you want to help us, that will be great :)
There is already no vendor lock-in with html based apps on Android or iOS. The complaint people have about iOS is that it is locked down with regards to native apps. Mozilla themselves have made this exact complaint about iOS -- that they wanted to write a browser for iOS but could not because a) HTML/Javascript are not suitable for writing a browser so they have to go through the app store and b) native apps in the app store on iOS face restrictions that would limit performance of a Javascript VM, so Firefox would not have competitive performance compared to Safari.
FirefoxOS solves neither of those problems.
More generally, the idea of all user facing software being targeted to a single sandboxed standard API is very restrictive and worrying. It means developers giving up complete control to a small cabal of 4 or 5 large organisations that decide what gets standardised. Organisations that have conflicting interests and financial motivations that certainly don't align with my own. That's assuming that various competing web based platforms would even be sustainable; I don't see it lasting more than 5 mins before platform specific extensions are added to provide additional value over the competitors.
I want to be able to write software for my device and have full access to the hardware without some third party being able to decide what I can and can't do with my phone. FirefoxOS doesn't get me any closer to that goal, in fact it's a step backwards. Web platforms are great for SV startups where raw user numbers are the most important thing, but to be honest I don't give a shit about the ability of the latest photo sharing startup to 'exit'. I do care about people doing much more interesting things and all I can see is web based OSs being a restriction on that. Think about how you would feel living in a world of Gopher based operating systems.
>As you may recall, we (not just Mozilla) did this to the web a few years ago, and look where this brought us all
Yes, a world where I don't control my own data anymore, it lives on some server I can't access, subject to the whims of foreign governments. Being processed by code I can't even reverse engineer never mind read the source or modify. This is great freedom for developers and governments, but utterly disastrous for the freedom of users.
We agree on this point.
The strategy chosen by Mozilla with FirefoxOS, for good or for ill, is to standardize upon the subset of applications that have no vendor lock-in, i.e. the html based apps, and then to progressively extend the set of capabilities granted to these applications, while still avoiding the lock-in. Other open mobile OSes make different choices (e.g. Ubuntu mobile), and I personally wish them success. The future will tell us which one, if any, of these attempts to make the world a little more open will succeed.
> I want to be able to write software for my device and have full access to the hardware without some third party being able to decide what I can and can't do with my phone. FirefoxOS doesn't get me any closer to that goal, in fact it's a step backwards. Web platforms are great for SV startups where raw user numbers are the most important thing, but to be honest I don't give a shit about the ability of the latest photo sharing startup to 'exit'. I do care about people doing much more interesting things and all I can see is web based OSs being a restriction on that. Think about how you would feel living in a world of Gopher based operating systems.
That is an interesting point. As all new generation, high-level platforms, FirefoxOS opens some doors and closes others.
Now, I don't know your personal interests, your experience, or exactly what low-level code you want to write, but that reminds me of something I experienced quite a few years ago. At that time, the newly released Windows 95 killed a number of low-level libraries that I had carefully hand crafted using assembly code and BIOS calls and that let me read/write floppy disks with custom formatting, hence guaranteeing that nobody could read my floppy disks without my consent (they could not be ported to Linux either, of course). It also killed my low-level asm-based libraries for direct access to the video card, the libraries that had taken me years to complete, and that I could use to write smooth 256 colors side-scrollers.
Well, I survived that loss. A few years have passed. Now, FirefoxOS is the first platform I have experienced in which I can write a small game prototype in about 2 hours. Some doors have been closed, others have opened.
It may be that FirefoxOS is not the platform of your dreams, if your dreams require you to go low-level. But I believe that, for most of us, FirefoxOS is pretty damn good.
> >As you may recall, we (not just Mozilla) did this to the web a few years ago, and look where this brought us all
> Yes, a world where I don't control my own data anymore, it lives on some server I can't access, subject to the whims of foreign governments. Being processed by code I can't even reverse engineer never mind read the source or modify. This is great freedom for developers and governments, but utterly disastrous for the freedom of users.
While the dangers you describe are very real, you seem to forget the situation we avoided – one in which every single communication on Earth had to go through Microsoft, using proprietary code and protocols, with contagious DRMs & authentication on every single one of your documents, with a single company deciding of the tools at your disposal both for office work and for development.
The fight is far from over – it may never be – and the Mozilla community is part of the frontline, but the open web was a considerable push in the right direction, one that at least gives us a fighting chance.
Open is great, but is part of the larger, political issue(s). The marketing has to appeal to the 'what does it buy me'?
> Firefox OS will need to successfully compete against BlackBerry OS, Windows Mobile, [...]
Yes, a new product needs to compete with existing products. That goes without saying.
> And how exactly is it "different"?
Frankly? Try it, you'll see. For me, it's different insofar as I can write a small game and self-publish it in a few hours. I don't have to pay anyone, I don't have to wait for anybody's permission (compare with iOS), I don't have to download a SDK, and my users will be able to run/install the self-published app immediately (compare with Android). Oh, and of course, my students can do the same, which is a big deal to me.
It's different insofar as an application written for FirefoxOS will also work on Android (and hopefully on iOS) and, in many cases, on your Desktop/Laptop. By opposition to what you seem to believe, this is not a design flaw. This is called not locking in your users. It's the kind of thing that Mozilla does.
It's different insofar as much of the development is done by the community of users. Not a privately-held company that decides what is best for us in terms of features or performance or privacy.
Oh, I almost forgot: it's different insofar as said company does not own all my private data by default.
> It's hard to see how it'll compete on vague notions of "openness" that most consumers really could not care any less about [...]
In the US, maybe. In India or Africa (or parts of China or Russia or Turkey ...), for instance? Not so. People care a lot about having a phone that they can use, which means first and foremost a phone that works in their language, even if that language is not a big commercial target. That's what openness is about, not about people like us squabbling on some high tech news aggregator.
> It can't even really compete on price, given the existence of Android.
Of course it can. On low-powered phones, FirefoxOS tends to outperform Android by a large margin. This means that you can have the same experience with cheaper phones.
Caveat: I'm a Mozillian.
> Caveat: I'm a Mozillian.
Perhaps it is. We'll see how it will play out. It's hard to say at this point.
Going for <$100 phones seems like a smart move. The user they are targeting is one that wants a smartphone and wants it cheap. They are also targeting developers in with their OS and API.
Android 1.0 wasn't that impressive when it shipped either. But look where it is now.
If you look throughout history, the operating systems that succeeded where the operating systems preferred by developers. Whether this is mixing causality with correlation, we can't really be sure, since the marketplace is in general weird, however it's safe to assume that popularity amongst users is related to popularity amongst developers.
1) Exhibit A: Windows versus OS/2 (remember IBM's OS/2 ?)
2) Exhibit B: "The Return of the Mac", by Paul Graham - http://paulgraham.com/mac.html
3) Exhibit C: Symbian in 2007 had 70% of the market-share or even more
And the rise of the hyperbolic commentators, shit!
> Of course it can. On low-powered phones, FirefoxOS tends to outperform Android by a large margin. This means that you can have the same experience with cheaper phones.
I don't want to imply you're lying or something, but is there something to support this claim? For example, I have Huawei Ascend G300 here (1)(, and apparently I can install FFOS on it. Is it going to be faster than CyanogenMod 10.1?
(1): Pretty popular model here in Eastern Europe -- of course, iPhones are way more popular because they cost about 150% of median monthly wage and thus are a great way to show you're rich.
I can only speak from my personal experience, sorry. Maybe someone else has benchmarks to back the claim.
The phone is pretty laggy even with that android, though, for example, it takes photo in about four seconds after you press the button.
[1]: http://www.modaco.com/topic/359564-b2g-firefox-os-for-the-hu...
Allow me to give a different perspective here. While in many other mobile operating systems you can build apps with HTML (saying HTML from now on but meaning HTML/CSS/JS, ok?), the API the vendors make available don't cover the same features as what is native on that platform. We can say that Firefox OS is important because of the following things:
MAKING THE WEB A FIRST CLASS CITIZEN
Makes the web a first class citizen. Its not like "you can build apps with web technology", its more like you don't need native because all you need is available thru the web apis. While in other platforms, there is a barrier on what can be accomplished with HTML alone, on Firefox OS HTML is the way. Let me give you a silly but practical example:
Suppose you have an intranet on your small company built by IT in PHP or something. This intranet has an address book for everyone in the company. Using the Web API, you can detect the contacts API and offer the user the ability to import contacts from the web directly to the phones contact book. This is done in a secure way, with permissions granted by the user, its not like "hey, open this page and flood the contact database". The security model is good. This is a silly example but it is useful for many people. Its the tiny APIs that make your life easier and your experience better.
GIVING YOU THE FREEDOM OF THE WEB
In platforms such as iOS, your only venue to distribute your apps is the iTunes App Store. All money passes thru Apple. On Android, you can have third party stores but the default setting is to allow apps from Google Play only (unless you're a kindle or nook). Most of the other platforms are about controlling the ecosystem to make money for the vendor.
On Firefox OS you have the Firefox Marketplace that is a mixture of Chrome Webstore and Google Play. It allows distribution of apps for desktop, android and firefox os (all using gecko runtime). You are not tied to Firefox Marketplace though. You have an install API that you can use on your app or your site to install apps on the users phone (Again, it asks permissions, security is good). You can even fork the Firefox Marketplace code and build your own.
Talking about payment, you have the usual credit card charging on the marketplace but you also have carrier billing (if the carrier implement it) allowing users to buy apps and have it charged to their prepaid cards or monthly bill. Remember that in many markets, people don't have credit cards. If you're not happy with both solutions you can roll your own payment solution using the payments API and receipt protocol. You are free to distribute and monetize your app as you see fit, just like on the web.
ITS NOT A REPLACEMENT FOR YOUR IPHONE OR GALAXY S3
If you have an Android device, you can just install Firefox Mobile and be happy since we'll eventually have feature parity between Firefox Mobile and Firefox OS. These Firefox OS phones are being created for emergent markets. People from U.S. and richer parts of Europe don't really realize how things are in south america and asia. An Samsung Galaxy S3 will cost USD 1000 in Rio right now while the minimum wage is about USD 350. Buying such expensive phones require a plan and saving for a long time. 78% of the Brazilian market is on feature phones.
By offering an inexpensive handset that has a full smartphone experience with a price that is affordable is key in these markets. It is about bringing the next million people online on the mobile web for the first time. Firefox OS is here to be the first smartphone for people that are still on Symbian or S40. In some markets you can buy a cheap android with decent performance, in others you can't.
Firefox OS offers the best cost-benefit ratio once you think about how much performance you have against your hardware specs. If you pick the same low-end hardware with Android or Firefox OS, Android will have a worse experience, not because Android is broken in any way, Android is great but because there are more things going on on Android than on Firefox OS. Firefox OS is just a tiny hal, gecko and gaia, while Android has a VM and lots of other things going on.
As I said before, this is not about fighting Android, its about offering a new choice for those that can't afford a good Android or iPhone. Here in Brazil, we have some very cheap Android devices since we have Samsung, LG and others building them locally. Most of these devices are pretty crap to use. The same hardware with Firefox OS would be a much better experience.
ITS ABOUT THE WEB API
The objective here is not to sell phones or be dominant. Firefox OS is about preventing vendor lock-in. Right now, each platform is an island. iOS has Objective-C/Cocoa Touch, Android has Java, Windows Phone has something that I can't recall. If you want to build cross platform apps, you're in for a world of hurt. You can use phonegap but this is not something offered by the platform vendor, this something that was built to bridge the web and native.
The Web API is the next step in this direction. Each of the APIs in the collection known as Web API is being standardized with the W3C and other interested parties. The idea is that other vendors adopt these APIs and that open web apps work anywhere equally. Firefox OS is not about an exclusive experience, it is about openness and freedom. Even if Firefox OS fail but the Web API succeeds, it will be a huge victory for the open web.
ITS ALSO ABOUT BEING CREATIVE
Right now there is a steep learning curve regarding developing native apps for most platforms. Objective-C and Java are easy languages for CS people but for the layman they are pretty hard. It requires a lot of effort to be good with them.
Why is the web a success? If the web required such effort, we'd still be using gopher and news. One of the reasons the web was a success was that it required less effort to produce something useful. I am not saying good, I am saying useful. Anyone could host a server, anyone with a text editor could build pages. Firefox OS is about bringing this to mobile. It requires less effort and your open web apps can be deployed on other platforms such as iOS and Android (with phonegap or other runtimes). Yes, these days it requires a lot of effort to build good web apps but not much to build useful ones. Firefox OS has the potential and openness to bring all web developers to mobile with ease. Open Web Apps are king of local content. Niche apps that are only useful for those in a neighborhood or profession are a web editor away from being born and available. The web is king for local content and Firefox OS is nothing but an mobile extension of the web.
WHY I THINK FIREFOX OS WILL SUCCEED?
As I said above, Firefox OS is nothing but the web and the web can't fail because it already succeeded. Right now the only technology that bridges smart tvs, video games, smartphones, desktop and laptop computers together is HTML/CSS/JS.
Remember how much progress we had in JS runtimes the last year, try to imagine where we're going to be next year. Javascript is already reaching 1.5x native speed in some cases, two years from now, this won't matter because it will as fast as it needs to be. One could argue that for most mobile app needs, it is already fast enough.
Apps built for Firefox OS can be deployed as web pages and made available on a server. They can be sold on Chrome webstore and Firefox Marketplace. They can be wrapped with phonegap and deployed to iOS, Android, Windows Phone, BB10, Bada, Tizen and webOS. They can be wrapped in other runtimes and be used on Smart TVs and video games. The web is the king of cross platform, of vendor neutrality and without lock-ins.
I think that the future belong to HTML based solutions and all platforms that embrace it.
PS: I am a Mozilla Rep and a Firefox OS Launch Team member in Brazil.
> Firefox OS offers the best cost-benefit ratio once you think about how much performance you have against your hardware specs. If you pick the same low-end hardware with Android or Firefox OS, Android will have a worse experience, not because Android is broken in any way, Android is great but because there are more things going on on Android than on Firefox OS. Firefox OS is just a tiny hal, gecko and gaia, while Android has a VM and lots of other things going on.
Let's look at some of the components that a modern mobile OS needs:
* Kernel
* Hardware abstraction layer
* OpenGL ES implementation and compositor
* 2D vector graphics API
* UI toolkit
Android and Firefox OS both also have a VM to run managed code, along with a JIT compiler. Android's VM, Dalvik, was specifically designed to be memory efficient in the case where several apps are running as separate Unix processes. Is the same true of SpiderMonkey?
So Android and Firefox OS share many of the same types of fundamental components, and in some cases, the same components (the kernel, some aspects of the HAL). But on top of this, Firefox OS and its apps add:
* Markup language processor and layout engine designed for hypertext documents, not UIs
* Parser for a poorly designed programming language (JS), and advanced JIT optimizations that in effect extract the latent static types from a dynamically typed language. By contrast, Dalvik accepts bytecode as input, and the program is already statically typed, so the JIT compiler can be much simpler
* Hacks on top to turn this combination of hypertext markup language and poorly designed programming language into a tolerable UI toolkit and application platform
So how can you say that Firefox OS is more resource-efficient than Android? Perhaps the Android platform developers have gotten sloppy lately, since they're primarily concerned about high-end phones. But that can be remedied. What matters is that, as far as I can tell, the Android platform was designed for efficiency, while the Web platform was not.
I hesitate to bash the Web platform, because for better or worse, it seems to be the best way of achieving Mozilla's mission, and I believe social ends outweigh technical means. But I believe I have accurately described the current reality.
Thanks for your reply. =D
In the high-end market, it doesn't matter, everyone is good. In the low-end market, Firefox OS has better performance than Android.
From a high level analysis, your comment appears spot on but unfortunately it is not that simple. Dalvik VM is GREAt and we all know the bad parts of JS. The problem is that there is a lot going on on android phones. Its not as if there is only Dalvik and your app. In Firefox OS Gecko is so close to the hardware that it doesn't need to go thru hops. Firefox OS can be said to be nothing but a browser running on bare metal. Android is not slow, but on low-end hardware it is not as responsive as it should be. Pick a Galaxy Ace for example, its specs are similar to ZTE Open (ZTE Open has better specs) and the price is similar but the experience is much better and more responsive on ZTE Open.
Dalvik was created to be efficient, and it is. My comment is not about Dalvik being bad, it is not. Its about low end phones running android offering a bad experience. I don't know if you ever used those phones or if you ever tried a Firefox OS phone.
> Hacks on top to turn this combination of hypertext markup language and poorly designed programming language into a tolerable UI toolkit and application platform
HTML evolved. The current standards and practices are pretty good. Check out new JS proposals, the language is evolving and becoming better. While you may perceive the combination of HTML/CSS/JS as something horrible, others like it. Check out enyojs at http://enyojs.com for example, it is a great framework for app development that shows the potential for pure web based solutions.
As you said:
> What matters is that, as far as I can tell, the Android platform was designed for efficiency, while the Web platform was not.
And yet, the web runs pretty well inside a browser in Android right? Even with all Android around it, open web apps running in a browser (when built correctly) do pretty great. Now remove Android and just leave the browser. Imagine how much complexity went away. How much CPU cycles and memory you saved if you have nothing but a web runtime.
We all agree that Android is a great platform. As I said, this is not an attack on Android. Firefox OS is a return to simplicity where you have just a web based architecture that is being optimized and refactored into a great mobile platform. We're not picking Desktop Firefox and shoehorning it into a mobile device. Firefox OS is being built for mobile.
You certainly know your tech and so I will leave you with an invitation. Android development is not open, Google releases new versions of Android when it wants to and then you see the source code. Even so, Android is hard to hack. On the other hand, Firefox OS is developed in the open. All source code, including whats is being worked on is live on github.
Better than me sprouting opinions and experiences here is for knowledgeable people such as you to check the code out. See how it is being built and how things work together. Help shape a better platform for everyone. Everyone is encouraged to contribute to Firefox OS. If you think SpiderMonkey (or IonMonkey or OdinMonkey) is slow, help improve it, we could all use some help! :D
https://github.com/mozilla-b2g/
As I said, one of the key thinks about Firefox OS is how open it is. Want to try to develop new features? Check out the repo, hack away and if it good enough, talk about a pull request on IRC.
If you want to check out the system without building it, pick the Firefox OS Simulator, it is just a add-on for Firefox at https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/firefox-os-simulato...
For example, you will notice that we use the Android kernel and parts of Android SDK tools such as adb and fastboot. The cool think about open source is that you can reuse the good bits and not use what you don't want to.
So I invite you to check out the platform. The web may appear badly designed and not build for performance but there are more and more people working on it and it just grows and surprises us. No one believed in JS for gaming until people saw the unreal engine running inside the browser without plugins. JS and its friends will keep improving and cross-plaform open solutions tend to win in the long run.
> * Markup language processor and layout engine designed
for hypertext documents, not UIs
> * Parser for a poorly designed programming language
and advanced JIT optimizations.
This doesn't mean Firefox OS is more resource efficient than Android. Without benchmarks on same hardware neither can claim performance high ground.
Short answer: yes, SpiderMonkey has been designed to be quite memory efficient.
> But on top of this, Firefox OS and its apps add:
Actually, let me clarify something, if not for you, then for our readers: "on top of this" means essentially "on top of the kernel and HAL," rather than "on top of Android."
> [valid points] So how can you say that Firefox OS is more resource-efficient than Android? Perhaps the Android platform developers have gotten sloppy lately, since they're primarily concerned about high-end phones. But that can be remedied.
All your technical points are valid. However, you have not taken into account the fact that Android is much larger than that not to mention, conceptually, very old. Just the Core Libraries, for instance, offer at least three or four ways of reading/writing files. Most of these APIs should be removed for the sake of performance, as they were based on Java 1.0 designs from the 1990s, a time at which industry believed that disk speed would keep improving as fast as CPU speed and that concurrency was too expensive to be used. But these APIs cannot be removed, simply because too much code depends upon them, both in Android itself and in applications that Google would not want to lose. Sadly, this means that all such code is a performance hog, especially on mobile devices, since mobile storage is horribly slow in comparison to PC storage.
Now, while I am less familiar with the rest of the architecture of Android, I seem to remember this is true of many features and that many features are accidentally implemented several times in the kernel, Dalvik, the libraries and/or the frameworks, in the interest of (partial) compatibility with Posix, Linux, J2SE, etc – and tutorials.
While it would theoretically be possible to get rid of all these inter-layer duplications, and to only keep the good APIs, this effectively means breaking too much of both Android itself and of many applications. Google cannot afford to do that, as they would risk driving away all developers and users. Moreover, Google does not need to do that, as Android has always been targeted towards high-end phones. A new operating system, by opposition, with everything to win and nothing to lose, can start from a blank state. Moreover, since Firefox OS offers only high-level APIs and no NDK-style access, it is easier and will remain easier for a number of years, to perform whichever low-level refactorings are necessary to improve performance and/or memory efficiency without breaking applications.
Note that this is almost the reverse of Chrome vs. Firefox. Firefox is burdened by the number of add-ons that need to be supported, and the low-level APIs provided to these add-ons, while Chrome, starting with a blank slate and restricted public APIs, managed to rise the stakes of performance quite harshly.
And perhaps my earlier point about HTML+CSS and web layout engines being designed for documents, not UIs, was too handwavy. One might argue that there is a sort of Greenspun's tenth rule of UI toolkits: Any sufficiently complex UI toolkit contains an ad hoc, informally specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of HTML and CSS -- and then probably contains a full Web browsing engine, too.
It seems to me that the Web technology stack has plenty of inelegance of its own. But no platform is perfect. Maybe the Web platform, exposed to developers on its own without making the lower layers available, really is the best we've got.
Can you explain why you think the Java storage APIs are ill-suited to mobile devices?
All the early reviews of Firefox OS describe it as laggy and slow. For example this one from the verge: "Lag is a major concern — apps took multiple seconds to load, to change toggles, and to make UI transitions"[1]
Or this one from CNET: "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."[2]
>"designed for documents, not UIs, was too handwavy" Not for anyone who's had to work with DOM for Web apps. We know all too well as its name suggests that it was never designed for apps and is well past its expiration date.
My 3yr old similarly spec'd SGS runs CM 10, Jellybean like a champ. My mom's worse spec'd 3GS is still smooth and fluid. Of course, a low end Android phone running the most resource intensive skin, TouchWiz, is going to perform poorly, but in my experience vanilla AOSP scales down quite nicely on low-end hardware.
So how does this phone benefit Joe User? It's an android kernel, but the user is cut off of the diverse android app ecosystem. The performance looks terrible, and the user is locked into the Firefox browser, like Safari on iOS.
[1]http://www.theverge.com/2013/2/24/4024530/ztes-open-is-the-f...
[2]http://reviews.cnet.com/smartphones/geeksphone-keon/4505-645...
But that's not the point. FFOS can't really offer that much to rich people in US or Western Europe where iPhones grow on trees and streets are paved with high-end Android phones. It is not supposed to compete with the next iPhone or Nexus, but with the next Nokia Asha, cheap Bada phone or the next cheap ZTE, Alcatel or Huawei Android phone that is still sold with Android 2.3.
The reviews by CNet and The Verge were accurate a long time ago – given the date, CNet's review was done with an early beta, and I have no clue about the date at which The Verge's review was done, but I suspect that the review was published long after the actual review. I have seen the speed of my phone increase considerably since then, both when I was running 1.0.x and now that I'm running 1.1.x.
If you want to know for yourself the actual performance of a FirefoxOS phone, the only way is certainly to get your hands on one. My personal experience is that, comparing with equivalently-spec'd unmodified Android phones, my FirefoxOS phone runs absolutely great. I have not attempted to compare with Cyanogen-ed phones.
> The user is locked into the Firefox browser, like Safari on iOS.
Actually, with effort, it should be possible to port WebKit/KHTML or any other rendering engine to FirefoxOS, e.g. by using Emscripten or Mandreel. Of course, this port will have to use the platform's display API (typically, Gecko's implementation of <canvas>) and the platform's VM, so the benefit might be limited. But if somebody considers this useful or fun, please, by all means, do port any other browser to FirefoxOS, we will be glad to help you.
That's not quite the answer you would get from Apple if you wanted to port Firefox or old-generation Opera Mobile (not Turbo) to iOS.
> So how does this phone benefit Joe User? It's an android kernel, but the user is cut off of the diverse android app ecosystem.
Several comments have already provided an answer to that question. I will try and sum up a few of them quickly:
- all your private data doesn't belong by default to some company; - the Mozilla community has proved time and time again how it is able to provide applications localized for regions/minorities that big companies simply ignore, and I expect that this will also be the case for FirefoxOS phones; - payment APIs implementations are adapted to local markets, i.e. in countries where people typically don't have a credit card, they do not have to use one if they wish to buy an application; - users are even more free from the Marketplace than on Android - I expect that this means we'll soon see numerous marketplaces specialized in local interests (e.g. Venezuelian marketplaces, Catalan marketplaces, but also a company's internal marketplace, etc.), or in application domains (e.g. Gaming, e-books, adult stuff, safe-for-kids stuff, etc.); - cheaper phones through higher-performance on entry-level hardware – recall that, in Spain, the phone is sold at 69€ including 30€ prepaid communications, without contract; - no vendor lock-in – if you change phone or if you use your desktop computer, your applications follow you; - breaking monopolies in regions in which you have the choice between a feature phone or a 600$ smartphone + contract.
I realize that people following Hacker News are no Joe Users and that they often have access to technologies that Joe User hasn't even heard about, both in terms of hardware and in terms of software (e.g. Cyanogen). But this first generation of FirefoxOS phones is not designed with them in mind. It is designed primarily for Joe "I'm ignored because my region or my language is not fashionable or rich enough" User.
I haven't heard of any such plans, but that would be fun. Ah, the good (?) old days of the Lisp machine...
> Any sufficiently complex UI toolkit contains an ad hoc, informally specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of HTML and CSS -- and then probably contains a full Web browsing engine, too.
Let it be said that the Mwcampbell Law was first enunciated on Hacker News on the Ninth of July, 2013.
> Can you explain why you think the Java storage APIs are ill-suited to mobile devices?
Generally, it's a set of simple things. The File API, for instance, should forbid execution of any I/O call on the UI thread, or on any high-priority thread, as the duration of any I/O call is unbounded (Dalvik can be executed in a "strict mode" that prevents I/O calls on the UI thread, which is good, unfortunately that's not the default mode).
Also, the default manner of doing any copy with the File API is a read/write loop, which is very inefficient in terms of memory copies, especially when Linux offers in-kernel copy.
etc.
For example, see LLVM and GCC. LLVM is better compiler simply because it has much less legacy code to understand, maintain and support, less platforms, and mostly because it's twenty or more years younger. Similar thing can be stated about screen and tmux, apache and nginx, X and of course wayland (the whole point of Wayland is to do just this), and perhaps other tools.
While this may look sad, it shows, that despite the fact that everyone is still using algorithms from the 60's to find shortest path in a graph (1) it shows that our field is evolving. And that's a good thing.
(1): at least I hope. If there's a new one, please tell me!
I am rooting for Firefox OS to be a serious contender within a couple of years. I think it has a strong chance to be #3. Likewise I don't think it has any chance whatsoever of taking the #1 or #2 spots - those are going to stay as they are for many years to come.
The question is, how would it fare against other similar projects, such as Ubuntu Touch?
I like the Firefox OS concept because it has a better chance at being popular amongst non-technical folks and because, even if it had like 5% of the market share and no more, even so it would bring benefits to everybody, including developers, including end-users - because those Web APIs are also pushed by Mozilla for standardization.
The discussion above was about the huge geek appeal, not about the general appeal. That's why I answered that Jolla has a better geek appeal. Although they work hard to address the general public needs as well, in order not to make their system targeted to the tech crowd only.
liliputing.com/2013/06/android-gets-cheaper-meet-the-100-quad-core-phone-59-dual-core-tablet.html
My guess is that Mozilla see the low end as the most vulnerable angle. Apple aren't going low end. Android aren't excluding it, but <$100 phones are an afterthought.
There is always demand at the lower end. Handset makers are happy to fill it. Android might be the best current option, but Google aren't focused on this segment specifically and I think most app developers are developing for high or midrange phones first. A lot of stuff doesn't work well on a cheap android. By focusing on less power and smaller screens, they will encourage developers to make simpler apps that run well on this hardware.
It's still early to tell if they have an advantage over android in this market, but it makes sense in theory.
I don't see them as much of a competitor in the UK/US/etc.- the people there that want a smartphone have one that's much more higher powered.
But in countries where most people can't currently afford smartphones, this offers them the chance of having one. And if they can then start to cannibalise sales from beneath, they have a chance of being a real global competitor.
I see around me a few people replacing their work computer with a cellphone. That cellphone is more useful for them, cheaper, easier to carry and, with respect to what they manage to use it for, more powerful.
Of course, that's just a few samples, so I have no idea about general trends.
If people are trying to replace their desktop, perhaps it will take a couple additional years for pocket computers to be "good enough" at those tasks. But that won't break the inevitable trend. That will just postpone it a bit.
I can buy a brand new unlocked Nexus 4 for $305 CDN. This is a top tier smartphone.
When identical Chinese-manufactured electronics are priced differently it's usually because of import tariffs (Brazil) or vastly more generous consumer protection laws (Europe).
I wish my experience with mobile phones were the same as with laptops: every two years or so I step into a shop and buy a low-end machine on sale, go home and install the latest Ubuntu LTS version.
When I first read about Firefox OS I thought I would have the experience as described above. I would buy ANY phone, donwload the Firefox OS, install it and enjoy mobile life from a different perspective. As I said, I think we are "almost there". Maybe that's where Ubuntu Mobile is aiming to.
Now, whenever I need a laptop, I buy the best Lenovo I can find (well, not the absolute best, I aim for best-ish; price curves on laptops are stupid at the very high-end).
So far, it has worked better than the expendable machine style.
Oh for a laptop trade-in program.
Someone has to write the drivers AND have an incentive. [1]
[1] https://autonome.wordpress.com/2013/01/15/firefox-os-devices...
I really want to love it. I love Firefox, but Firefox OS is very much "not there" based on my experience. The browser is significantly worse than Firefox for Android. As far as I can tell, Sync is not available at all. Tapping the URL bar just/always puts your cursor where you tapped (does not select the text for easy replacement). Lots of smaller fit/polish things seemed much worse.
And the device experience is really strange. There's the "marketplace" but also the .. I don't know what it's called, two swipes to the left of the app launcher screen. The experience is very poor compared to Android/iOS; using familiar "apps" is really the mobile site for that service, and doesn't work as well as the Android apps I'm used to. (I.E.: Rating a movive in IMDB takes one tap to load another page, one tap to open the select box, another to pick the value, then another to submit that form. Versus one tap on Android.)
Lots of the "real apps" from the marketplace are also immediately greyed out if you lose data. Including simple games that totally should work offline. (Though I was recently surprised by how many games refused to run without an internet connection on my Android tablet recently, also.)
You should complain with the app authors and get them to improve their mobile website and/or their manifest. This will be beneficial to everyone.
Lower costs, too: Telefónica will be paying for most of the marketing, the sales channels, they might also be providing engineering help...
i.e. will it now have the asm.js optimisations and similar?
More generally, FirefoxOS does not automatically get the latest version of Gecko, because the process for mobile operating systems is more complex. The operating system must first pass certification by (if I recall) both the constructors and the operators. This operation is both long and costly, so it is probably impossible to follow the Firefox desktop/Android 6 week release cycle for the time being.
However, if I had to guess, I would assume that FirefoxOS will receive about one big update every few months, with all the new features and optimizations of Gecko. I know, for instance, that some of the optimizations I have added recently to Gecko have missed the release train for the next version of FirefoxOS (I believe that's still 1.1) but should be part of the release after that.
Updating the underlying kernel would be more arduous.
Firefox OS is its own Operating System, so it won't be "released for desktop/Android." The initial versions was forked from gecko 18 so it's missing many SpiderMonkey optimizations such as the Baseline Compiler, Type Inference, Odin Monkey, and Ion Monkey. Luckily, updates (or building from source) have these and add quite an improvement! Whenever I updated my iphone, I felt every update left it slower. Now imaging upgrading your phone it it getting faster!
Anybody interested in porting FirefoxOS to every single Android device on Earth? :)