Firefox OS on Android Devices | Hacker News Reader

Firefox OS on Android Devices

people.mozilla.org

232 pointsndesaulniers69 comments

It's a little slow on my Nexus 6, but really surprisingly usable.

The fact that this is even possible is pretty great. I've been getting more and more frustrated with Android lately, but being able to do things like this is still a really great feature.

Very neat way to get a feel for Firefox OS without the need for new hardware.

Probably even slower on my Nexus 5, took some time to show up, and crashed as soon as I clicked on the top search bar. Agreed it's a great thing that we can do it, but I guess I'll have to wait for Firefox OS to become really polished.

I wouldn't hope too much. Firefox the browser crashes when I browse imgur on my Galaxy Nexus, so god knows what Firefox the OS will do.

> let you use Gaia (the user interface of FirefoxOS) on your Android device, as an alternative homescreen.

So.. this is just a launcher? Not anything to do with actually running an OS, just pretty icons and such? Shame. I was really looking forward to some kind of dual-boot or co-exist setup. I guess FFOS is in the same place a lot of small and hobbyist projects are at - without the marketshare of android, you simple do not have drivers available for your platform and considering the closed nature of most SoC's, its impossible to write you own.

Its kinda sad that smartphones didnt evolve like PCs. Drivers and specs have become proprietary trade secrets and that hurts us all.

That said, a FFOS Android distro would be pretty nice, especially if it broke away from the Google world of google play services, play store, etc. Imagine CM but without all the suckitude. I could see that having a chance and the driver problem would be solved.

> without the marketshare of android, you simple do not have drivers available for your platform

Firefox OS uses Android's kernel and userspace so it has just as many drivers as Android.

...as AOSP. That at least doesn't include special drivers (e.g. cameras, FM radio).

That's a good point. I think the interesting thing is that Android drivers do exist for all these device features, so any ODM that has an Android device could respin it as a Firefox OS device.

Right. As more of an enthusiast than any sort of developer (I've flashed my share of third party Android builds but never tried to create my own) I've always understood this to be why anyone can't just port the latest version of Android to a given device. Drivers need to be baked in and without access to proprietary driver code, you're still beholden to OEMs unless your hardware is supported by AOSP.

Am I close or way off?

I haven't played with it, but if I had to take a guess, it should be functionally equivalent to FFOS (for apps, anyway). The closest parallel may be the iOS Simulator - it gives you access to the iOS APIs on your Mac. This _should_ allow you to run FFOS apps on your Android device.

Since the userspace of FFOS all runs on web tech, if this has enough of the runtime to power the homescreen, it should be able to power the apps too.

You can dual-boot FXOS and Android using MultiROM. I wrote some instructions for Nexus 5 here: https://github.com/nolanlawson/nexus-5-triple-play#readme

Author of the project here. This is still very unpolished.

So... my goal with doing that is to lower the barrier to entry and get more people to try the Firefox OS user experience. Currently it needs some dedication (either getting a supported device, or flashing your existing one), and that's obviously preventing us to get mindshare, both from users and developers.

Having simply to install an android app is vastly simpler for many people that are just curious at first. Some things will always be a bit different in the android version compared to a full flash, but I expect that to be relatively minor. I'm trying to get as much meaningful OS integration, like opening links from android apps in our browser frames, bridging our Web Activities and Android Intents, etc.

Feedback welcome at https://etherpad.mozilla.org/b2gdroid !

Please make it an official Mozilla (sub) project and keep us updated with reoccurring news. Great work, it works really smooth on a highend smartphone, comparable to Android UI and iOS.

What value would FFOS really provide on a phone that was sold with Android? Is replicating the guts all that important, if Mozilla's innovations are elsewhere?

One thing I really liked about this was the vertical scrolling of the home screen. I think it would be cool if Android did this with their home screens. That seems to be how we naturally read on our devices (webpages, news apps, email etc), so why should we have to horizontal swipe to change screens?

It does this now in Android M

That's for the app drawer only isn't it?

yep, only for the app drawer and I don't think that this new drawer design is final (or at least I hope so).

One quibble: this interaction is for the All Apps drawer/card, not the home screen(s) a.k.a. "widget panels".

I believe it is customizable by applying different themes.

> so why should we have to horizontal swipe to change screens?

Because you change screens and you don't scroll. As the swipe motion is over more than 80% of the screen that would not work from top to bottom, only scrolling feels natural.

You can definitely get vertically scrolling launchers on Android.

And Android M has a vertical app drawer by default.

I think Android had a vertical app drawer back in the pre-Gingerbread era, too (though I can't find any screenshots to prove it, atm).

http://www.technorms.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/screensh...

I think it was in the Nexus S that the rolling effect pictured in the app drawer was added to make the scrolling more interesting.

install fdroid, and then install ver1 of adw. launcher

you can also install v2 from the app store but one looks better.

you can have vertical scroll with or without snapping

forgot to add: ironically, my fireOS phone scrolls sideways just like android... sigh

If anyone is interested in trying out Firefox OS, Multiboot is a great way to try it out (if your device is supported by multiboot). Truth be told, I don't know if running Firefox OS through multiboot has any caveats, but it worked for me when I tried it.

tried using on my LG G3. it's "runs" for now. But very slow and laggy at the moment,low res, etc.

The experience is really bad. slow and laggy on my Snapdragon 801.

Nice way to get a feel but it is very laggy on my MotoG gen 1. I'd love to switch but... Whatsapp... Yeah, I hate it but it is THE thing among my friends. Same thing goes for Ubuntu Phone. Definitely a shame multibooting is not easier then it is now.

>I'd love to switch but... Whatsapp...

Good news, there's a FirefoxOS app for that. http://www.connecta2.im/

So is Firefox OS just Android fork? Because if not then this isn't as much "Firefox OS on Android" as it is "Firefox OS like home screen for Android"

No, Firefox OS is built on top of the same Linux kernel as Android, and can use the same drivers as Android, but that's pretty much the only common stuff.

Last time I looked, Gonk used a significant amount of Android code as well that wasn't drivers[1]. That being said, they are fairly significantly different at a few levels.

[1]: https://mxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/source/widget/gonk/l... is pretty much all taken from Android.

Gonk being the Linux level of Firefox OS, the parent comment is right.

Sure, Gonk is below the application level, but it isn't the kernel nor is it drivers.

No, because Linux is a kernel and Gonk is more than a kernel.

Parent is both technically incorrect as well as semantically incorrect. FirefoxOS uses a large amount of Google-written Android code.

The way that I understand it is, that since Firefox OS literally runs on Firefox, you really only need to install Firefox in order to run the OS.

So in this case you are running Firefox OS on Firefox on Android. That is obviously not ideal, but fine for testing.

I enjoyed the experience but now I want to get rid of it. How do I uninstall it?

Look for the original Android settings app on the launch screen and do the regular uninstall from the application list.

I was looking for b2gdroid when I wrote my question. Forgot that the app is called 'Fennec fabric' for some god knows what reason.

I love firefox on my phone. This is unusable on my 1 + 1

Did not work on Nexus 5 with M-Preview build.

why ... as a current firefox os user ... can't wait to get back to andriod.

As a user of a ~$800 Android flagship phone I can't wait for the day that I can leave this to rot to use my Flame (or install FxOS on this device, but .. yeah. Exynos, the worst of the worst thing you can buy today. Don't do it. Never do it).

No use derailing the thread, this project is cool!

Same. I'm really looking for an excuse to leave Android entirely and iOS isn't desirable for me either.

Firefox OS sounds ideal if it pans out well.

As a current owner of the current top of the line iOS, Android, and FirefoxOS devices. I would LOVE to ditch Android and iOS for FirefoxOS on high-end android hardware.

Android shares more and more information with every app on your phone, with each update (ex. every app get your Google email address and all wifi networks, even with "no special permissions"). iOS is closed source and walled off. FirefoxOS is a refreshing change. For the first time there is a usable mobile OS that puts users in control of everything.

From the technical point of view, it is a cool project.

From the business point of view, I don't see any value over the existing options.

From a business point of view Firefox didn't make much sense either.

After all, we had Internet Explorer, Safari and Opera as perfectly viable browsers.

Firefox existed before Safari.

I'm pretty sure Firefox predates Safari:

https://www.google.com/search?q=firefox+launch+date

https://www.google.com/search?q=safari+launch+date

"The Firefox project went through many versions before the version 1.0 was released on November 9, 2004."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox#Release_history

Opera was still paid at that time.

And still doesn't. Who could expect Google to start funding Mozilla?

Google didn't donate money to Mozilla (not large-scale anyway), it paid for being the default search engine just like it pays Apple and Opera, for instance. Very traditional business deal.

Well, it is traditional now, but it wasn't at the time.

I'm not quite sure what you mean. It was a revenue sharing deal at that time and very orthodox at that. It was new in that it was the first time a search / advertising company paid a browser vendor, but that doesn't make it a one-sided charity act or some special kind of deal that could be summarized appropriately with "Google funding Mozilla", as this only tells half of the story.

Firefox made sense from a business point of view (in the sense of making something people want, never mind its search bar money) because it had a lot of features that IE lacked, such as tabbed browsing, not being the primary target for hacking, and its cross-platform support. Those are reasons people actually used Firefox.

Firefox OS doesn't make sense the same way, because they aren't making anything that people want. As far as I can tell, it's a way for Mozillans to testify their faith in JavaScript.

For a lot of people, the appeal of Firefox at the time was that it was developed by a company whose primary goal was to improve the internet as public infrastructure.

With the mobile market being dominated by Google, Microsoft and Apple, Firefox OS makes sense in the same way.

Well, Firefox OS is about two things.

For users, it is about building a platform in which users are not locked to a proprietary silo, and are not spied upon by default.

For carriers and hardware vendors, it is about building a platform that is not 100% controlled by Google. Recall that Google can decide to revoke Android license from any vendor on arbitrary grounds, and if you lose your Android license, you pretty much lose everything (no AGPS, no Google Maps, no Google Play, etc.)

Oh, and yes, it's also a third thing: it's designed to be a cool platform for [web]developers.

So instead of losing all the Google apps with an Android fork, let's throw away all the other Android apps, too! That sounds like a great way to kick off your fine-grained-permissions-having phone project.

>For users, it is about building a platform in which users are not locked to a proprietary silo

How are they not locked into the 'silo' of FirefoxOS and the FirefoxOS APIs? If the answer is that the apps are 100% web standards compliant then users already have web browsers that can run those apps without needing to use FirefoxOS, so what is the point of FirefoxOS for users?

>Recall that Google can decide to revoke Android license from any vendor on arbitrary grounds, and if you lose your Android license, you pretty much lose everything (no AGPS, no Google Maps, no Google Play, etc.)

While this is shitty, it still just leaves you pretty much in the same place as FirefoxOS (being able to access (some of) those services through a web browser rather than a native app). If a hardware vendor is worried about losing the licence to use the native google maps app, why would they move to FirefoxOS - a platform without a native google maps app?

The entire project seems more about politics and religion than an actual business case. Which is fair enough, but isn't a recipe for commercial success or market penetration.

> How are they not locked into the 'silo' of FirefoxOS and the FirefoxOS APIs? If the answer is that the apps are 100% web standards compliant then users already have web browsers that can run those apps without needing to use FirefoxOS, so what is the point of FirefoxOS for users?

Because the other platforms don't support all of the standards developed by FirefoxOS, and will have no incentive to implement them without competition. Basic economics.

> How are they not locked into the 'silo' of FirefoxOS and the FirefoxOS APIs?

FirefoxOS is fully open source, while the Google platform is not. At the very least, that provides an environment where the source code for all the official supported platform is Free Software, which isn't true for Android.

This means that all users could share the same experience without depending on proprietary software (except maybe for drivers and BIOS specific to the hardware platform).

History lesson from an old guy: Firefox was born out of a stagnating IE (MS was pissed about the whole DOJ saga) and a bloated Netscape. Opera was a fun/weird side project (it used to fit on a floppy!) but Firefox was literally born in the dark ages of browser development to serve a clear need(s): lean, fast, modern.

Once could argue this same "need" exists for smartphone OS's. However, not so easy to swap those out, in contrast to Firefox which was an easy switch for most.

> Firefox was literally born in the dark ages of browser development to serve a clear need(s): lean, fast, modern.

Yes, and imo Firefox was the best browser for several years, until Chrome/Chromium took hold. Chrome is faster, it's developer tools are still better than Firefox's, and maybe more importantly, by usage it currently ranks highest: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers

Mozilla has really struggled in the past several years with Firefox, and Firefox OS is similarly fighting. As noted in http://www.cnet.com/news/firefox-os-in-flux-as-mozilla-loses... "Mozilla joined Microsoft, Samsung and BlackBerry in learning that it's brutally hard to compete successfully. Of the 334 million phones shipped during the first quarter of 2015, Google's Android OS accounted for 78 percent and Apple's iOS 18.3 percent, according to analysis firm IDC. That leaves just 3.7 percent for all other challengers."

> One could argue this same "need" exists for smartphone OS's.

I'm not sure if I agree completely. Firefox OS is modern in the sense that it aims to be HTML/CSS/JS-based, but in what sense is it either lean or fast? If it is HTML/CSS/JS-based, it probably won't take up less space than compiled apps would. And from others here, you can see there are complaints about its speed.

I will continue to use Firefox at home, but I think Firefox OS needs to be rethought before I'll use it. I don't think lean/simplistic and fast should be the goals. Instead I'd suggest:

(1) Freedom: How can it be used almost anywhere for almost anything? Why just mobile devices? What about building atop the Linux kernel, thereby having access to a slew of possible devices, and providing easy access to them via JS?

(2) Fun: How can it be fun to both use and develop for via well-designed but easy to use libraries along with great documentation that automatically generated and given lots of attention along with lots of examples for each version.

However, that would be a huge undertaking and I don't foresee them doing it.

at 2015 firefox aka mozilla is a waste of time and a good way to waste productivity and firefox os is one of the great example. they made open source a business and they use it .. bad ass

You could explain this a little bit more?

in less: "Firefox is like: share about us, talk about us, contribute us, do anything for us because we are the real guy of open-web, social, secure, fast, faster, fastest, open-source …." copied from this post https://medium.com/@rakibtg/excuse-me-mozilla-do-not-impose-...

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