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Firefox OS Participation Hub

62 points by ariestiyansyah 11y ago

striking 11y ago
Tried the homescreen replacement for Android. It was not good, at all. The jank was impressively terrible and the interface was fairly broken. Dunno why anyone put the time into making an Android adaptation of something so totally incomplete. I guess this might work someday, but I honestly don't understand the point of making an interface out of just HTML and CSS. The performance is truly awful, and will never get better until the models that govern those technologies are refined. It's impossible to optimize CSS, for example. (Although Javascript is definitely getting better, it's still not "native" speed either.) I hope some rethinking comes to this project.
- fabrice_d 11y ago
  Thanks for testing! Which device are you using? That should not be "terribly janky" in general. It's pretty smooth on my testing devices (nexus 4, nexus 5 and sony z3c). The second part of your comment makes close to no sense. There are a lot optimizations done in a web rendering engine, both on the css/layout/painting part and in the js engine. A modern web engine goes to the GPU as much as possible, and is very comparable to what a "native" toolkit does (I'm not convinced that android's xml layout/views are really more native than html/css).
  - bluehex 11y ago
    I am on Nexus 5 and had a similar experience as OP when trying the home screen replacement. A bunch of the home-screen icons were missing and when I clicked on them they opened a completely different App that wasn't even on the screen. Trying to click on rows in the settings App did nothing, or hung, before finally responding. I'm not sure if a jank is the right word (it wasn't in the scrolling performance sense) but it felt quite buggy and unresponsive.
  - striking 11y ago
    OnePlus One, although I'll remark that it was a long time ago.
- frik 11y ago
  I tried the FirefoxOS homescreen a few months ago. It runs just as fast as Android Java based UI apps on my high end smartphone. On a low end phone or one with little RAM, both Android and FirefoxOS will feel slower (now imagine running FirefoxOS as Android homescreen).
- pcwalton 11y ago
  > It's impossible to optimize CSS, for example. That's a bold claim, and it does not square with my experience optimizing CSS implementations. In fact, CSS at its core is well suited for parallel implementations, saturating all CPUs on typical workloads, and its declarative rendering structure maps more naturally to hardware-accelerated graphics APIs than traditional vector graphics APIs do. Why, specifically, do you think CSS is unoptimizable?
  - striking 11y ago
    CSS is an imprecise language that targets indiscriminately and is difficult to statically analyze. But I'll admit that I was wrong about it being totally impossible to optimize. The fact that it's declarative makes it at least multithreaded. Also, shadow DOM and web components may even fix my disagreements with it anyway.
    - pcwalton 11y ago
      > CSS is an imprecise language that targets indiscriminately and is difficult to statically analyze CSS as specified is imprecise, yes, but individual browser implementations implement their own precise behaviors. (This is no worse than native UIs.) CSS has a lot of weird quirks, but techniques such as Gecko's display lists have gone a long way toward taming this complexity by lowering to a simpler form. This opens up aggressive optimizations at the engine level (which is not to say that browser engines are currently doing all optimizations that are possible!) What's nice about CSS in terms of analysis is, again, its declarative nature: the fact that common layouts are implemented declaratively means that browser engines have a lot of freedom to optimize them in different ways.
  - cwzwarich 11y ago
    As somebody who has optimized both CSS implementations and native rendering engines / UI frameworks, the main reason why I am fundamentally skeptical about the performance of CSS as an application platform is incremental layout. No one has ever implemented CSS with incremental layout in a way that is even close to being competitive with native UI code. If you want to make a responsive UI, doing work incrementally and amortizing the cost of actions across frame intervals is more important than raw performance. This is especially true on mobile, where frequency / voltage controllers for CPUs and GPUs are tuned to work best on consistent workloads rather than bursty workloads.
- chc4 11y ago
  I've been using it the past two days, and it's really just...not good. The idea is fine: introduce people to FirefoxOS without having them cut Android apps cold turkey. The implementation isn't, however, which probably has something to do with the entire "run an entire other graphics frontend powered by a web browser as your home screen". Graphical glitches with the icons, being unable to use any of the bundled apps (Browser, Music, Gallery, etc.) because it just results in an instant crash, likely due to being out-of-memory killed, unresponsive gesture support (dragging from the side of the screen takes multiple tries, even after you figure out that's a feature and only way to go back). The most important issue is definitely that if the home screen is unloaded, pressing the home button results in a 10 second long FirefoxOS booting process before you can launch any other app. If someone wants to start up Snapchat by pressing the home button and launching the app, but has to wait 10 seconds for your home screen to reload, you're dead in the water. This is entirely possible to be due to me using a fairly low-spec phone...but that's the entire market for FirefoxOS...
  - toyg 11y ago
    No, FFOS is moving away from the low-cost strategy. Its target is now hobbyists / tweakers, which are likely to have high-end devices.
    - Rotten194 11y ago
      Did they finally realize that targeting low-end devices with a web stack was totally ridiculous?
- detaro 11y ago
  The homescreen replacement thing really doesn't do it justice, comparing it to my short experience playing with a phone running it natively. And the abilities to customize things are an awesome vision, although it is a bit early to judge if it actually works out. (I'm somewhat skeptical, but I dislike all other mobile OSes as well, so even a not-perfect improvement would be welcome)
hardwaresofton 11y ago
As a person who runs (as my main phone) a FirefoxOS (2.5) on a LG Nexus 5, I'd like to note that those who would like to try out FFOS on a device (maybe an old left over one, if you're not sure), are welcome to! The water's nice and warm, just dive right in :). The build and flash documentation is nice and relatively easy to follow, given the technical level of the goal that you're trying to accomplish (building a mobile OS and flashing a phone). I'd love it if the page that was linked noted more ways to contribute to the community -- at present, it seems like there are two (but should be more): - Port FFOS (I'm actually doing this on one phone I had laying around, and it's actually pretty difficult because I am new to porting mobile android-based OSes) - Try FFOS on android What about app reviews? last I checked, that was also a great way to contribute to the platform (assuming they're still done by volunteers). Also, contributing code, mashing bugs (a link to the bugtracker), i18n help all seem like things people could do to help (when I last built from master, some translations were still lacking)
sohkamyung 11y ago
I tried the Firefox OS Android app on my Nexus 7 (2012). I don't know if tablet form-factors are a target but if it is, the icon sizes need some rework. My Nexus 7 has a 7" screen and on it, the home screen icons are incredibly huge: at least 2-3 times the diameter of the standard Android App icons and look really out of place on my screen.

Tried the homescreen replacement for Android. It was not good, at all. The jank was impressively terrible and the interface was fairly broken. Dunno why anyone put the time into making an Android adaptation of something so totally incomplete. I guess this might work someday, but I honestly don't understand the point of making an interface out of just HTML and CSS. The performance is truly awful, and will never get better until the models that govern those technologies are refined. It's impossible to optimize CSS, for example. (Although Javascript is definitely getting better, it's still not "native" speed either.) I hope some rethinking comes to this project.

fabrice_d 11y ago
Thanks for testing! Which device are you using? That should not be "terribly janky" in general. It's pretty smooth on my testing devices (nexus 4, nexus 5 and sony z3c). The second part of your comment makes close to no sense. There are a lot optimizations done in a web rendering engine, both on the css/layout/painting part and in the js engine. A modern web engine goes to the GPU as much as possible, and is very comparable to what a "native" toolkit does (I'm not convinced that android's xml layout/views are really more native than html/css).
- bluehex 11y ago
  I am on Nexus 5 and had a similar experience as OP when trying the home screen replacement. A bunch of the home-screen icons were missing and when I clicked on them they opened a completely different App that wasn't even on the screen. Trying to click on rows in the settings App did nothing, or hung, before finally responding. I'm not sure if a jank is the right word (it wasn't in the scrolling performance sense) but it felt quite buggy and unresponsive.
- striking 11y ago
  OnePlus One, although I'll remark that it was a long time ago.
frik 11y ago
I tried the FirefoxOS homescreen a few months ago. It runs just as fast as Android Java based UI apps on my high end smartphone. On a low end phone or one with little RAM, both Android and FirefoxOS will feel slower (now imagine running FirefoxOS as Android homescreen).
pcwalton 11y ago
> It's impossible to optimize CSS, for example. That's a bold claim, and it does not square with my experience optimizing CSS implementations. In fact, CSS at its core is well suited for parallel implementations, saturating all CPUs on typical workloads, and its declarative rendering structure maps more naturally to hardware-accelerated graphics APIs than traditional vector graphics APIs do. Why, specifically, do you think CSS is unoptimizable?
- striking 11y ago
  CSS is an imprecise language that targets indiscriminately and is difficult to statically analyze. But I'll admit that I was wrong about it being totally impossible to optimize. The fact that it's declarative makes it at least multithreaded. Also, shadow DOM and web components may even fix my disagreements with it anyway.
  - pcwalton 11y ago
    > CSS is an imprecise language that targets indiscriminately and is difficult to statically analyze CSS as specified is imprecise, yes, but individual browser implementations implement their own precise behaviors. (This is no worse than native UIs.) CSS has a lot of weird quirks, but techniques such as Gecko's display lists have gone a long way toward taming this complexity by lowering to a simpler form. This opens up aggressive optimizations at the engine level (which is not to say that browser engines are currently doing all optimizations that are possible!) What's nice about CSS in terms of analysis is, again, its declarative nature: the fact that common layouts are implemented declaratively means that browser engines have a lot of freedom to optimize them in different ways.
- cwzwarich 11y ago
  As somebody who has optimized both CSS implementations and native rendering engines / UI frameworks, the main reason why I am fundamentally skeptical about the performance of CSS as an application platform is incremental layout. No one has ever implemented CSS with incremental layout in a way that is even close to being competitive with native UI code. If you want to make a responsive UI, doing work incrementally and amortizing the cost of actions across frame intervals is more important than raw performance. This is especially true on mobile, where frequency / voltage controllers for CPUs and GPUs are tuned to work best on consistent workloads rather than bursty workloads.
chc4 11y ago
I've been using it the past two days, and it's really just...not good. The idea is fine: introduce people to FirefoxOS without having them cut Android apps cold turkey. The implementation isn't, however, which probably has something to do with the entire "run an entire other graphics frontend powered by a web browser as your home screen". Graphical glitches with the icons, being unable to use any of the bundled apps (Browser, Music, Gallery, etc.) because it just results in an instant crash, likely due to being out-of-memory killed, unresponsive gesture support (dragging from the side of the screen takes multiple tries, even after you figure out that's a feature and only way to go back). The most important issue is definitely that if the home screen is unloaded, pressing the home button results in a 10 second long FirefoxOS booting process before you can launch any other app. If someone wants to start up Snapchat by pressing the home button and launching the app, but has to wait 10 seconds for your home screen to reload, you're dead in the water. This is entirely possible to be due to me using a fairly low-spec phone...but that's the entire market for FirefoxOS...
- toyg 11y ago
  No, FFOS is moving away from the low-cost strategy. Its target is now hobbyists / tweakers, which are likely to have high-end devices.
  - Rotten194 11y ago
    Did they finally realize that targeting low-end devices with a web stack was totally ridiculous?
detaro 11y ago
The homescreen replacement thing really doesn't do it justice, comparing it to my short experience playing with a phone running it natively. And the abilities to customize things are an awesome vision, although it is a bit early to judge if it actually works out. (I'm somewhat skeptical, but I dislike all other mobile OSes as well, so even a not-perfect improvement would be welcome)

hardwaresofton 11y ago

As a person who runs (as my main phone) a FirefoxOS (2.5) on a LG Nexus 5, I'd like to note that those who would like to try out FFOS on a device (maybe an old left over one, if you're not sure), are welcome to! The water's nice and warm, just dive right in :). The build and flash documentation is nice and relatively easy to follow, given the technical level of the goal that you're trying to accomplish (building a mobile OS and flashing a phone). I'd love it if the page that was linked noted more ways to contribute to the community -- at present, it seems like there are two (but should be more): - Port FFOS (I'm actually doing this on one phone I had laying around, and it's actually pretty difficult because I am new to porting mobile android-based OSes) - Try FFOS on android What about app reviews? last I checked, that was also a great way to contribute to the platform (assuming they're still done by volunteers). Also, contributing code, mashing bugs (a link to the bugtracker), i18n help all seem like things people could do to help (when I last built from master, some translations were still lacking)

sohkamyung 11y ago

I tried the Firefox OS Android app on my Nexus 7 (2012). I don't know if tablet form-factors are a target but if it is, the icon sizes need some rework. My Nexus 7 has a 7" screen and on it, the home screen icons are incredibly huge: at least 2-3 times the diameter of the standard Android App icons and look really out of place on my screen.