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Comment by pjmlp | Hacker News Reader

"Firefox OS is the first device platform built entirely to open Web standards, with every feature developed as an HTML5 application."

Palm WebOS has that title.

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I don't think so. In WebOS there was a Web App Runtime[1] but not the whole stack is built on top of web. Contrary to Firefox OS where the device boots into a web browser, so there is no notion of 'Compiled' or 'native' apps.

[1] http://siliconangle.com/files/2011/12/webos-architecture.png

And Firefox OS has the same problems: bad performance and memory management, no apps, slow hardware.

You can say no apps about any new phone OS but FFOS especially it's missing the point.

There shouldn't be any damn apps, if you have 'The Internet' you're good. There's no manufacture defined walls between them. If there's 'FF Apps' they should work just as well on and android, iphone, windows/ whatever.

Anything cheap will have slow hardware.

I'm not sure how you can blame OS for "no apps" (business decisions), "slow hardware" (hardware manufacturer's decision, also did you notice "entry-level smartphone" in the title?). If you add "bad performance" in that context, wouldn't it be better to first check it on "fast hardware"?

Basically the only problem from this list that depends on the OS is "bad memory management". Do you mind expanding on exactly what is bad about it?

For optimum performance (especially games), you have to understand Javascript garbage collection pretty well; basically create all your objects up front in some sort of cache, to avoid stutter during GC. It's not impossible, but an annoyance that you only really have to worry about on mobile platforms (due to more limited resources).

Sure, you have to understand your platform, especially when you use GC-enabled languages. But a) asmjs is only going to improve the situation b) there's a list of people proving it's not only possible, but also not that bad in practice https://unity3d.com/showcase/gallery/?platform=324&genre=&ga...

More APIs than not aren't web standards but Mozilla's ones. And I don't see companies with real mobile OS offering (Google, Apple, Microsoft) implementing them anytime soon. So, it will stay Mozilla only APIs, not standard.

Every Web API has to start life as a vendor standard somewhere.

Also the standards are not really open. Where can I submit a pull request?

http://www.w3.org/2008/webapps/

Doesn't matter. Web-as-App is a flawed concept that everyone has tried and failed. Firefox is expecting a different result?

The concept is not flawed, just because some implementations have not been popular and have failed commercially. If anyone was going to produce a good implementation, I would count on Mozilla.

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