15 ms·

Why I care about Firefox OS fading away

82 points by SunboX 11y ago

benlower 11y ago
IMO the bigger reason to lament the loss of competition here is the app model: Firefox OS was pushing for "apps" to be web apps. That seemed a lot more open to me than pushing for apps to be proprietary (Android, iOS, Windows, etc.). As great as mobile devices are, their walled gardens stifle creativity, privacy, and choice.
- Sanddancer 11y ago
  Apple was pushing for "apps" to be web apps when they first released the iPhone as well [1], with Steve Jobs going as far as to say that native apps would potentially "damage the phone system". It wasn't until after the iphone was jailbroken, and people kept insisting on more powerful development choices that they started on their app store. People have been saying that webapps are the future for a decade now. At this point, I have to say it's never going to happen. [1] http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2007/06/11iPhone-to-Support-Third-Party-Web-2-0-Applications.html http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2007/06/11iPhone-to-Support-...
  - Spooky23 11y ago
    Don't forget Facebook's HTML5 focus.
  - benlower 11y ago
    Fair points. I think it's more nuanced. Native apps are great and necessary for many scenarios. However, there are a ton of native apps that could be just as functional as a responsive web site. Sure there were issues with discoverability which the app stores helped with in the beginning (now I think it's just as hard to get noticed in the store as it is on the open web). I don't think "web apps are the future of mobile". But I do think there is a better separation of native apps and mobile/responsive web apps.
    - wwweston 11y ago
      What's more -- a significant number of apps ARE a wrapper around a UIWebView or something like it.
      - adamdoupe 11y ago
        We've studied this and found that ~85% of the free apps on the Google Play store use a WebView (I like the term "mobile web app"): http://adamdoupe.com/publications/large-scale-study-of-mobile-web-app-security-most2015.pdf http://adamdoupe.com/publications/large-scale-study-of-mobil...
        nodamage 11y ago
        There's a big difference between an app that 'uses a WebView' to render specific pieces of content or clicked links, and an app that is basically a thin wrapper around a WebView. Can you clarify whether your ~85% number is referring to the former or the latter?
        adamdoupe 11y ago
        Sure! The short version is that I don't know. We were looking for instances of insecure WebView usage, so from a security perspective small piece vs. entire app doesn't matter too much (and is difficult to measure, especially when looking at 1.1M apps). However, some of the other numbers from our analysis can be useful to draw a picture of WebView usage. We statically looked for uses of WebView, and 85% of the 1.1M apps used a WebView. Of those 998,286 apps: - 97% enable JavaScript (which is off by default) - 36% use the JavaScript Bridge Interface (which is a fairly good indicator of heavy WebView usage) - 94% implement a shouldOverrideUrlLoading method of the WebView (another good indicator that the developer is using the WebView for something non-trivial) - 27% implement an onReceivedSslError method of the WebView (indication that the developer is using the WebView for something non-trivial). (Sadly, 29% of the apps that implement onReceivedSslError intentionally IGNORE all SSL errors.) So I guess the takeaway is that 85% is an upper bound, the real number of WebView-only apps is absolutely lower, however it's clear that WebViews are significantly used in mobile apps.
  - kitsunesoba 11y ago
    I think that one day, web apps by default could work, but before that can happen the web must see sweeping change. The lackluster performance and high resource usage associated with web apps is a direct consequence of the complex patchwork nature of each component involved. Quite simply, the web was not designed to be used the way we’re using it, and evolving standards have made browser rendering engines horrifically complex (and in some cases convoluted). What’s needed is a fundamental reimagining of HTML, CSS, and the DOM at minimum with little to no regard for legacy. In the 90s, we didn’t know what we needed but now the picture is crystal clear. Should we use this knowledge to design a new web, I’m positive that the result would be just as open as the web is now while performing tens or hundreds of times better — it’d likely be good enough to make web apps competitive with native apps under a far wider set of circumstances.
    - pcwalton 11y ago
      You'll have to explain why in details, not at a high level. In particular the fact that a replacement could perform "tens or hundreds of times better" is an extraordinary claim. CSS has tons of problems, but almost every replacement for CSS that I've seen proposed would almost certainly have worse performance characteristics than CSS, optimally implemented, would. Most of them kill parallelism and kill opportunities for optimal GPU usage—they're proposed cures that are worse than the disease. The problem is mostly that browsers don't implement CSS as well as they could due to legacy, not that the technologies are fundamentally flawed (though this is not to say that they're not improvable, far from it). To create a better architecture, you first need to have an in-depth understanding of what the problems in CSS actually are. Otherwise, you'll just trade one set of mistakes for another. (In particular, a CSS replacement that optimizes for Web developer productivity will not necessarily have acceptable performance characteristics—too often, people assume that "easy to develop in" implies "runs fast", which in fact these concerns are often in direct opposition.)
      - ben0x539 11y ago
        can't wait for servo "strict mode" css!!
    - 11y ago
  - bad_user 11y ago
    I've seen this anecdote given as rationale, but you can't say that the "web app" model on iPhones failed when Safari doesn't give you the needed functionality to make web apps. For example iPhone Safari does not do push notifications, an essential ingredient if you want web apps, whereas Chrome on Android does. With Chrome on Android you can do Facebook's Messenger without installing anything. And while iPhone Safari led the way with some useful additions, like the possibility of specifying higher resolution icons for "Add to Homescreen", they dropped the ball on such improvements since iPhone 3G. In fact iPhone Safari is behind in implementing web standards. Apple also rejected Adobe's Flash and I concede that was for good reasons, but that left a huge void in how media, like video and games, could be delivered. You know, things like HTML5 Video and WebGL came after that. You also have to take into account that the first two models (iPhone 1 and iPhone 3G) had poor resolution, poor hardware and poor battery life by today's standards. So you know, if Safari on iPhone 1 is the anchor by which you judge native apps, well of course native apps are better. You also make it sound like "the people" forced Apple to open their SDK. Oh come on, you can't be that gullible. An SDK was inevitable. What's the point of building your own OS if you can't lock people into its APIs? That's a lesson Microsoft taught us. The only reason for its delay was them taking the time to figure out how to control it. Do you remember when Google Voice along with other apps where rejected because they "duplicated existing functionality"? You may not see it, but web apps have been winning for some time and there's no end in sight. When Google Voice was rejected by Apple, Google still delivered its functionality by means of a web app. When the Google Maps integration app was replaced by Apple with their own, which I might say it is inferior and unusable in my city, for a while iPhone users used Google Maps on the web, as it's very much usable. All it takes for web apps on mobile phones to be more common is for the browser makers to implement the needed functionality. Right now the front-running in implementing web standards relevant for mobile phones is Google's Chrome and sadly not Firefox (though I hope that will change). And I must say it works well.
- AnthonyMouse 11y ago
  How is it that web apps are supposed to be open and apps are supposed to be proprietary, as though Microsoft OneDrive is "open" and IPFS is "proprietary"?
  - benlower 11y ago
    Is IPFS proprietary? Have they even gotten far enough along yet to really know? OneDrive having a web client doesn't make it open. If you think about OD as just a way to access and share files then it's probably open since the web client will run in any modern browser. However if you think of OD as a platform of sorts then I wouldn't consider it open since, to my knowledge, MSFT controls everything about it and it's not standardized.
- orangecat 11y ago
  Firefox OS was pushing for "apps" to be web apps. That seemed a lot more open to me than pushing for apps to be proprietary This argument is made frequently, and I don't get it. With a typical web app, you have no idea what the backend is doing, and your data is stored on servers owned by third parties. At any time they can revoke your access, go out of business, share your data with others, or change the app in user-unfriendly ways. An open source Android app that runs and stores data locally (perhaps with an option for cloud storage) seems much more "open" than that.
  - m52go 11y ago
    Yeah, but with a mobile app you have all those downsides...and you have to deal with the whims of a walled-garden gatekeeper like Google or Apple. That is, I can't just create an app and throw it up on a server like I can with a website. It needs to be "approved" first. That's a HUGE barrier to openness that the web never had, and hopefully never will have in the future. And, even though mobile apps run natively, I don't think one can be very confident that they're any more private than a typical website...analytics & the drive for data is there regardless of medium.
    - soylentcola 11y ago
      Not to nitpick, but people create native apps all the time and throw them up on servers for download and installation. In fact I have a handful on my phone right now. It's one of the main reasons I've gravitated toward Android on mobile and away from the more mixed iOS/Android devices I used to buy. My first smartphones running PalmOS and Windows Mobile allowed me to download and install apps from trusted developers and I disliked the dodgy hurdles I had to jump in order to do the same on iOS. I agree completely about the privacy thing though. I guess it's a bit easier to see when a native app is sending data over the network with the right tools but in general, there's just as much room for abuse with either model.
  - petecox 11y ago
    'typical web app' is NOT the default deployment model for Firefox OS. Apps on the Marketplace are deployed to a device and run locally, offline - complete with an intricate permissions model. The only 'web' aspect is being written in HTML/JS/CSS and the extent to which they integrate with the cloud. No less open than the github hosted, Android app scenario you mention. Maybe Firefox OS does need an f-droid equivalent for a free app catalogue though, if and when Mozilla pull the Marketplace servers down. So be aware of the distinction between mobile web 'apps' and mobile web sites.
- pjmlp 11y ago
  Nokia was probably the first vendor to try out web apps with Web Widgets on Symbian. Web is never going to be as feature rich as native, until the browser becomes nothing more than yet another JavaScript VM.
- DyslexicAtheist 11y ago
  I too think that losing the possibility for an open model to distribute apps is the biggest loss. I did a very enthusiastic article when the news broke about FirefoxOS aiming to become a more open alternative. It's both funny and sad now reading my enthusiasm from back then http://blog.valbonne-consulting.com/2013/07/19/steve-jobs-is-dead-is-the-app-store-next/ http://blog.valbonne-consulting.com/2013/07/19/steve-jobs-is... time to move on I guess
Analemma_ 11y ago
I don't want to sound like the know-it-all smartass here, but from the moment Firefox OS was announced I gave it a negligible probably of amounting to anything and was really baffled that Mozilla decided to focus their efforts in that direction. I don't think they appreciated just how brutal and unforgiving the smartphone market is. Apple makes money on it, but they spend billions on R&D and billions more on marketing. Samsung makes money, but a lot less than they used to and only because they own their entire component pipeline and also spend billions on marketing. Google makes money, because they own the operating system that 80% of the phones use and use it to push people to their wide array of services. Everyone else is breaking even at best, and hemorrhaging cash at worst. Think how many billions Sony and Microsoft and Nokia and Palm and Blackberry spent on their smartphone efforts only to get shoved to the sidelines. This is a market where you've gotta pay big in order to play; to be honest it was downright silly of Mozilla to expect that they could get a foot in the door.
- benlower 11y ago
  Everything you say here is 100% true. Mozilla believes in the open web and, I'm speculating, they didn't like the direction of closed mobile ecosystems so they had a go and tried a different approach. I applaud them for trying.
  - nnethercote 11y ago
    That's exactly it. Mobile apps are killing the web. Firefox OS was an attempt to combat that. This was no secret (e.g. https://wiki.mozilla.org/Booting_to_the_Web https://wiki.mozilla.org/Booting_to_the_Web) but it's something that most people have overlooked. It was always going to be a huge challenge.
    - aikah 11y ago
      > Mobile apps are killing the web. It's like saying desktop apps are killing the web which is stupid. You need both. Yes you need strong standards and open technologies but a random mobile game or a contact list on my phone isn't the web. > Firefox OS was an attempt to combat that It wasn't going to work anyway given the poor performances of Firefox OS. That's what killed it more than anything else. They chose to go for low end devices with web techs ? we all know how web techs perform in general, badly, compared to solutions based on Java, C , C++, Swift and co ... This true on desktop and even more true on limited devices such as phones. Firefox OS is open source and it's a good think, but aside from open source developers,most buyers don't care about that.
Sanddancer 11y ago
The death of FirefoxOS was inevitable, because of two words that the supporters dread. Native Apps. If your problem did not match the things that Javascript was good at, you were completely out of luck. Every other platform has a way of writing your app in different languages. The iphone has native swift and cocoa, plus javascript, plus lua, plus a whole host of other choices. Android has java, javascript, and anything else that can be run via jni. Windows has WinRT, which doesn't offer native code, but does offer anything that can be run under the CLR -- C++, C#, Javascript, etc. Firefox OS's sticking with just javascript meant that it was hamstrung from the start, with much less ability to create apps that really stood out, leaving it to wallow in mediocrity.
- pcwalton 11y ago
  There aren't any substantive differences between the CLR and the minified JS+asm.js model (or, even more so, the minified JS+Web Assembly model). There are differences, but they're details. CLR IL is quite high level. In general, I feel people oversimplify the "Web vs. native" performance debate to differences in programming languages, because programming languages are easy to tell apart (unlike for example rendering stacks) and it's easy to benchmark them. But I probably wouldn't even put the JS vs. Obj-C or JS vs. Java dichotomy in the top 5 reasons for any performance difference.
  - Sanddancer 11y ago
    There are rather substantive differences. For starters, the CLR doesn't have to be the IL anymore; since Roslyn and the WinRT framework, you can compile down to native code. However, the most important things are what the CLR gives to the developer that Javascript doesn't. Syntax-wise, the CLR's threading is much more flexible -- you can have your workers talk to each other directly when that's the most convenient way of doing things, instead of the Web Workers model where everything has to pass through the main thread. The CLR also supports more than two number types, which is useful in a number of situations, such as art programs, where most if not all of your actions are going to be against smaller types. Web Assembly fixes some of these problems, like providing reasonable number types, but at the same time, ignores other flaws that still exist, like a lack of vector types, which is something nearly every modern processor has and uses for improved performance. The problem with Javascript, and its various extensions and adjuncts is that it still suffers from the same walled-off mindset that it has for the past fifteen years. Numbers are numbers and you're crazy if you want anything other than these beautiful 64 bit floats, a compact, easy to parse bytecode format is an affront to the open web, even if the alternative is a hack that is just as unreadable, and threading will just lead to programs crashing. Javascript may be fine if you're delivering a web page, but the tools it gives make it woefully unusable for near anything else.
smegel 11y ago
> „Tier 3“ What's the down-up bunny ears? Does this mean anything or just a typo?
- thristian 11y ago
  I think it's the German convention for quotation-marks, like French use «guillemots» and Japanese uses 「corner brackets」.
- metasean 11y ago
  Quotation marks are done differently in different languages [1]. The author of the article is André Fiedler [2], and he's from Saxony/Germany, where they apparently use, what you called down-up bunny ears [3]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotation_mark#Summary_table_for_all_languages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotation_mark#Summary_table_f... [2] https://github.com/SunboX https://github.com/SunboX [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotation_mark#German_.28Germany_and_Austria.29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotation_mark#German_.28Germa...
boondaburrah 11y ago
My main problem with all these "well, it failed" alternative operating systems for phones are: I couldn't even buy them in the first place. I tried, but there was no hardware available in my region that ran on my network etc. The closest thing we've got is the nexus, but what we need is a 'standard' (de-facto or otherwise) phone like x86 PCs had to be in order for linux to take off.
- benlower 11y ago
  yes was nearly impossible to buy one for me here in US
- denniskane 11y ago
  >in order for linux to take off We need Linux on the Web! https://linuxontheweb.appspot.com https://linuxontheweb.appspot.com
  - comex 11y ago
    That isn't Linux.
Neener54 11y ago
I managed to get a developer phone with Firefox OS at a dev conference. I can say that hands down it's the worst phone I've ever tried using. I used it as my primary phone for a week and the operating system made me avoid doing anything. Making a phone call was the most pleasant, but if I had to send a text or try and use one of the apps I just found myself locking the phone. The webapp as a phone app idea was just really unpleasant especially if you had limited connectivity. I admire Mozilla for trying, but that OS would have taken a miracle to get it working in a good fashion.
- hotcool 11y ago
  I seriously considered buying a ZTE - until I checked out user reviews online. The os is universally hated.
simula67 11y ago
> Let's say Android does not implement the new cool feature If there is enough demand for it, someone can do a Kickstarter, raise enough money, build it and push it into Android. Or some other company can fork Android, add the cool new feature and steal Android's market share.
ksec 11y ago
The bigger question is What will happen to those who has Firefox OS shipped like Panasonic TV. ( Actually that is likely to be the only popular Devices using it ) At first they say Firefox OS isn't going away and it will support IoT, so development will continue. Panasonic even made a PR just so people don't freak out and stop buying their TV set. Now it is moved to Tier 3 support... I really don't know whether i should blame Mozilla or Panasonic on this one.
seba_dos1 11y ago
I don't really care. And that makes me sad. I was really excited about Firefox OS when Mozilla was announcing it. I've been playing for years with free smartphones like Neo Freerunner, GTA04 and (surprisingly free) Nokia N900, and the situation on Android market was far from being good for me. I still cannot really change my phone without downgrading my user experience. Firefox OS offered me some hope. Unfortunately, it turned out that Firefox OS was just Android-me-too, without much of added benefits when it comes to user freedom. Sure, the development model was more like baazar than cathedral, but how did it matter if most of the Firefox OS devices out there were as blocked and closed as Android ones? Mozilla even had a certification program you needed to pass in order to use Firefox OS brand with your device - and guess what? Closed crap like ZTE Open was passing the certifications. Mozilla was basically endorsing devices you had to break into in order to be free to use them as you wish. How is that different from Android? I had high hopes, but Firefox OS disappointed me.

82 points by SunboX 11y ago

IMO the bigger reason to lament the loss of competition here is the app model: Firefox OS was pushing for "apps" to be web apps. That seemed a lot more open to me than pushing for apps to be proprietary (Android, iOS, Windows, etc.). As great as mobile devices are, their walled gardens stifle creativity, privacy, and choice.

Sanddancer 11y ago
Apple was pushing for "apps" to be web apps when they first released the iPhone as well [1], with Steve Jobs going as far as to say that native apps would potentially "damage the phone system". It wasn't until after the iphone was jailbroken, and people kept insisting on more powerful development choices that they started on their app store. People have been saying that webapps are the future for a decade now. At this point, I have to say it's never going to happen. [1] http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2007/06/11iPhone-to-Support-Third-Party-Web-2-0-Applications.html http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2007/06/11iPhone-to-Support-...
- Spooky23 11y ago
  Don't forget Facebook's HTML5 focus.
- benlower 11y ago
  Fair points. I think it's more nuanced. Native apps are great and necessary for many scenarios. However, there are a ton of native apps that could be just as functional as a responsive web site. Sure there were issues with discoverability which the app stores helped with in the beginning (now I think it's just as hard to get noticed in the store as it is on the open web). I don't think "web apps are the future of mobile". But I do think there is a better separation of native apps and mobile/responsive web apps.
  - wwweston 11y ago
    What's more -- a significant number of apps ARE a wrapper around a UIWebView or something like it.
    - adamdoupe 11y ago
      We've studied this and found that ~85% of the free apps on the Google Play store use a WebView (I like the term "mobile web app"): http://adamdoupe.com/publications/large-scale-study-of-mobile-web-app-security-most2015.pdf http://adamdoupe.com/publications/large-scale-study-of-mobil...
      - nodamage 11y ago
        There's a big difference between an app that 'uses a WebView' to render specific pieces of content or clicked links, and an app that is basically a thin wrapper around a WebView. Can you clarify whether your ~85% number is referring to the former or the latter?
        adamdoupe 11y ago
        Sure! The short version is that I don't know. We were looking for instances of insecure WebView usage, so from a security perspective small piece vs. entire app doesn't matter too much (and is difficult to measure, especially when looking at 1.1M apps). However, some of the other numbers from our analysis can be useful to draw a picture of WebView usage. We statically looked for uses of WebView, and 85% of the 1.1M apps used a WebView. Of those 998,286 apps: - 97% enable JavaScript (which is off by default) - 36% use the JavaScript Bridge Interface (which is a fairly good indicator of heavy WebView usage) - 94% implement a shouldOverrideUrlLoading method of the WebView (another good indicator that the developer is using the WebView for something non-trivial) - 27% implement an onReceivedSslError method of the WebView (indication that the developer is using the WebView for something non-trivial). (Sadly, 29% of the apps that implement onReceivedSslError intentionally IGNORE all SSL errors.) So I guess the takeaway is that 85% is an upper bound, the real number of WebView-only apps is absolutely lower, however it's clear that WebViews are significantly used in mobile apps.
- kitsunesoba 11y ago
  I think that one day, web apps by default could work, but before that can happen the web must see sweeping change. The lackluster performance and high resource usage associated with web apps is a direct consequence of the complex patchwork nature of each component involved. Quite simply, the web was not designed to be used the way we’re using it, and evolving standards have made browser rendering engines horrifically complex (and in some cases convoluted). What’s needed is a fundamental reimagining of HTML, CSS, and the DOM at minimum with little to no regard for legacy. In the 90s, we didn’t know what we needed but now the picture is crystal clear. Should we use this knowledge to design a new web, I’m positive that the result would be just as open as the web is now while performing tens or hundreds of times better — it’d likely be good enough to make web apps competitive with native apps under a far wider set of circumstances.
  - pcwalton 11y ago
    You'll have to explain why in details, not at a high level. In particular the fact that a replacement could perform "tens or hundreds of times better" is an extraordinary claim. CSS has tons of problems, but almost every replacement for CSS that I've seen proposed would almost certainly have worse performance characteristics than CSS, optimally implemented, would. Most of them kill parallelism and kill opportunities for optimal GPU usage—they're proposed cures that are worse than the disease. The problem is mostly that browsers don't implement CSS as well as they could due to legacy, not that the technologies are fundamentally flawed (though this is not to say that they're not improvable, far from it). To create a better architecture, you first need to have an in-depth understanding of what the problems in CSS actually are. Otherwise, you'll just trade one set of mistakes for another. (In particular, a CSS replacement that optimizes for Web developer productivity will not necessarily have acceptable performance characteristics—too often, people assume that "easy to develop in" implies "runs fast", which in fact these concerns are often in direct opposition.)
    - ben0x539 11y ago
      can't wait for servo "strict mode" css!!
  - 11y ago
- bad_user 11y ago
  I've seen this anecdote given as rationale, but you can't say that the "web app" model on iPhones failed when Safari doesn't give you the needed functionality to make web apps. For example iPhone Safari does not do push notifications, an essential ingredient if you want web apps, whereas Chrome on Android does. With Chrome on Android you can do Facebook's Messenger without installing anything. And while iPhone Safari led the way with some useful additions, like the possibility of specifying higher resolution icons for "Add to Homescreen", they dropped the ball on such improvements since iPhone 3G. In fact iPhone Safari is behind in implementing web standards. Apple also rejected Adobe's Flash and I concede that was for good reasons, but that left a huge void in how media, like video and games, could be delivered. You know, things like HTML5 Video and WebGL came after that. You also have to take into account that the first two models (iPhone 1 and iPhone 3G) had poor resolution, poor hardware and poor battery life by today's standards. So you know, if Safari on iPhone 1 is the anchor by which you judge native apps, well of course native apps are better. You also make it sound like "the people" forced Apple to open their SDK. Oh come on, you can't be that gullible. An SDK was inevitable. What's the point of building your own OS if you can't lock people into its APIs? That's a lesson Microsoft taught us. The only reason for its delay was them taking the time to figure out how to control it. Do you remember when Google Voice along with other apps where rejected because they "duplicated existing functionality"? You may not see it, but web apps have been winning for some time and there's no end in sight. When Google Voice was rejected by Apple, Google still delivered its functionality by means of a web app. When the Google Maps integration app was replaced by Apple with their own, which I might say it is inferior and unusable in my city, for a while iPhone users used Google Maps on the web, as it's very much usable. All it takes for web apps on mobile phones to be more common is for the browser makers to implement the needed functionality. Right now the front-running in implementing web standards relevant for mobile phones is Google's Chrome and sadly not Firefox (though I hope that will change). And I must say it works well.
AnthonyMouse 11y ago
How is it that web apps are supposed to be open and apps are supposed to be proprietary, as though Microsoft OneDrive is "open" and IPFS is "proprietary"?
- benlower 11y ago
  Is IPFS proprietary? Have they even gotten far enough along yet to really know? OneDrive having a web client doesn't make it open. If you think about OD as just a way to access and share files then it's probably open since the web client will run in any modern browser. However if you think of OD as a platform of sorts then I wouldn't consider it open since, to my knowledge, MSFT controls everything about it and it's not standardized.
orangecat 11y ago
Firefox OS was pushing for "apps" to be web apps. That seemed a lot more open to me than pushing for apps to be proprietary This argument is made frequently, and I don't get it. With a typical web app, you have no idea what the backend is doing, and your data is stored on servers owned by third parties. At any time they can revoke your access, go out of business, share your data with others, or change the app in user-unfriendly ways. An open source Android app that runs and stores data locally (perhaps with an option for cloud storage) seems much more "open" than that.
- m52go 11y ago
  Yeah, but with a mobile app you have all those downsides...and you have to deal with the whims of a walled-garden gatekeeper like Google or Apple. That is, I can't just create an app and throw it up on a server like I can with a website. It needs to be "approved" first. That's a HUGE barrier to openness that the web never had, and hopefully never will have in the future. And, even though mobile apps run natively, I don't think one can be very confident that they're any more private than a typical website...analytics & the drive for data is there regardless of medium.
  - soylentcola 11y ago
    Not to nitpick, but people create native apps all the time and throw them up on servers for download and installation. In fact I have a handful on my phone right now. It's one of the main reasons I've gravitated toward Android on mobile and away from the more mixed iOS/Android devices I used to buy. My first smartphones running PalmOS and Windows Mobile allowed me to download and install apps from trusted developers and I disliked the dodgy hurdles I had to jump in order to do the same on iOS. I agree completely about the privacy thing though. I guess it's a bit easier to see when a native app is sending data over the network with the right tools but in general, there's just as much room for abuse with either model.
- petecox 11y ago
  'typical web app' is NOT the default deployment model for Firefox OS. Apps on the Marketplace are deployed to a device and run locally, offline - complete with an intricate permissions model. The only 'web' aspect is being written in HTML/JS/CSS and the extent to which they integrate with the cloud. No less open than the github hosted, Android app scenario you mention. Maybe Firefox OS does need an f-droid equivalent for a free app catalogue though, if and when Mozilla pull the Marketplace servers down. So be aware of the distinction between mobile web 'apps' and mobile web sites.
pjmlp 11y ago
Nokia was probably the first vendor to try out web apps with Web Widgets on Symbian. Web is never going to be as feature rich as native, until the browser becomes nothing more than yet another JavaScript VM.
DyslexicAtheist 11y ago
I too think that losing the possibility for an open model to distribute apps is the biggest loss. I did a very enthusiastic article when the news broke about FirefoxOS aiming to become a more open alternative. It's both funny and sad now reading my enthusiasm from back then http://blog.valbonne-consulting.com/2013/07/19/steve-jobs-is-dead-is-the-app-store-next/ http://blog.valbonne-consulting.com/2013/07/19/steve-jobs-is... time to move on I guess

Analemma_ 11y ago

I don't want to sound like the know-it-all smartass here, but from the moment Firefox OS was announced I gave it a negligible probably of amounting to anything and was really baffled that Mozilla decided to focus their efforts in that direction. I don't think they appreciated just how brutal and unforgiving the smartphone market is. Apple makes money on it, but they spend billions on R&D and billions more on marketing. Samsung makes money, but a lot less than they used to and only because they own their entire component pipeline and also spend billions on marketing. Google makes money, because they own the operating system that 80% of the phones use and use it to push people to their wide array of services. Everyone else is breaking even at best, and hemorrhaging cash at worst. Think how many billions Sony and Microsoft and Nokia and Palm and Blackberry spent on their smartphone efforts only to get shoved to the sidelines. This is a market where you've gotta pay big in order to play; to be honest it was downright silly of Mozilla to expect that they could get a foot in the door.

benlower 11y ago
Everything you say here is 100% true. Mozilla believes in the open web and, I'm speculating, they didn't like the direction of closed mobile ecosystems so they had a go and tried a different approach. I applaud them for trying.
- nnethercote 11y ago
  That's exactly it. Mobile apps are killing the web. Firefox OS was an attempt to combat that. This was no secret (e.g. https://wiki.mozilla.org/Booting_to_the_Web https://wiki.mozilla.org/Booting_to_the_Web) but it's something that most people have overlooked. It was always going to be a huge challenge.
  - aikah 11y ago
    > Mobile apps are killing the web. It's like saying desktop apps are killing the web which is stupid. You need both. Yes you need strong standards and open technologies but a random mobile game or a contact list on my phone isn't the web. > Firefox OS was an attempt to combat that It wasn't going to work anyway given the poor performances of Firefox OS. That's what killed it more than anything else. They chose to go for low end devices with web techs ? we all know how web techs perform in general, badly, compared to solutions based on Java, C , C++, Swift and co ... This true on desktop and even more true on limited devices such as phones. Firefox OS is open source and it's a good think, but aside from open source developers,most buyers don't care about that.

Sanddancer 11y ago

The death of FirefoxOS was inevitable, because of two words that the supporters dread. Native Apps. If your problem did not match the things that Javascript was good at, you were completely out of luck. Every other platform has a way of writing your app in different languages. The iphone has native swift and cocoa, plus javascript, plus lua, plus a whole host of other choices. Android has java, javascript, and anything else that can be run via jni. Windows has WinRT, which doesn't offer native code, but does offer anything that can be run under the CLR -- C++, C#, Javascript, etc. Firefox OS's sticking with just javascript meant that it was hamstrung from the start, with much less ability to create apps that really stood out, leaving it to wallow in mediocrity.

pcwalton 11y ago
There aren't any substantive differences between the CLR and the minified JS+asm.js model (or, even more so, the minified JS+Web Assembly model). There are differences, but they're details. CLR IL is quite high level. In general, I feel people oversimplify the "Web vs. native" performance debate to differences in programming languages, because programming languages are easy to tell apart (unlike for example rendering stacks) and it's easy to benchmark them. But I probably wouldn't even put the JS vs. Obj-C or JS vs. Java dichotomy in the top 5 reasons for any performance difference.
- Sanddancer 11y ago
  There are rather substantive differences. For starters, the CLR doesn't have to be the IL anymore; since Roslyn and the WinRT framework, you can compile down to native code. However, the most important things are what the CLR gives to the developer that Javascript doesn't. Syntax-wise, the CLR's threading is much more flexible -- you can have your workers talk to each other directly when that's the most convenient way of doing things, instead of the Web Workers model where everything has to pass through the main thread. The CLR also supports more than two number types, which is useful in a number of situations, such as art programs, where most if not all of your actions are going to be against smaller types. Web Assembly fixes some of these problems, like providing reasonable number types, but at the same time, ignores other flaws that still exist, like a lack of vector types, which is something nearly every modern processor has and uses for improved performance. The problem with Javascript, and its various extensions and adjuncts is that it still suffers from the same walled-off mindset that it has for the past fifteen years. Numbers are numbers and you're crazy if you want anything other than these beautiful 64 bit floats, a compact, easy to parse bytecode format is an affront to the open web, even if the alternative is a hack that is just as unreadable, and threading will just lead to programs crashing. Javascript may be fine if you're delivering a web page, but the tools it gives make it woefully unusable for near anything else.

smegel 11y ago

> „Tier 3“ What's the down-up bunny ears? Does this mean anything or just a typo?

thristian 11y ago
I think it's the German convention for quotation-marks, like French use «guillemots» and Japanese uses 「corner brackets」.
metasean 11y ago
Quotation marks are done differently in different languages [1]. The author of the article is André Fiedler [2], and he's from Saxony/Germany, where they apparently use, what you called down-up bunny ears [3]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotation_mark#Summary_table_for_all_languages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotation_mark#Summary_table_f... [2] https://github.com/SunboX https://github.com/SunboX [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotation_mark#German_.28Germany_and_Austria.29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotation_mark#German_.28Germa...

boondaburrah 11y ago

My main problem with all these "well, it failed" alternative operating systems for phones are: I couldn't even buy them in the first place. I tried, but there was no hardware available in my region that ran on my network etc. The closest thing we've got is the nexus, but what we need is a 'standard' (de-facto or otherwise) phone like x86 PCs had to be in order for linux to take off.

benlower 11y ago
yes was nearly impossible to buy one for me here in US
denniskane 11y ago
>in order for linux to take off We need Linux on the Web! https://linuxontheweb.appspot.com https://linuxontheweb.appspot.com
- comex 11y ago
  That isn't Linux.

Neener54 11y ago

I managed to get a developer phone with Firefox OS at a dev conference. I can say that hands down it's the worst phone I've ever tried using. I used it as my primary phone for a week and the operating system made me avoid doing anything. Making a phone call was the most pleasant, but if I had to send a text or try and use one of the apps I just found myself locking the phone. The webapp as a phone app idea was just really unpleasant especially if you had limited connectivity. I admire Mozilla for trying, but that OS would have taken a miracle to get it working in a good fashion.

hotcool 11y ago
I seriously considered buying a ZTE - until I checked out user reviews online. The os is universally hated.

simula67 11y ago

> Let's say Android does not implement the new cool feature If there is enough demand for it, someone can do a Kickstarter, raise enough money, build it and push it into Android. Or some other company can fork Android, add the cool new feature and steal Android's market share.

ksec 11y ago

The bigger question is What will happen to those who has Firefox OS shipped like Panasonic TV. ( Actually that is likely to be the only popular Devices using it ) At first they say Firefox OS isn't going away and it will support IoT, so development will continue. Panasonic even made a PR just so people don't freak out and stop buying their TV set. Now it is moved to Tier 3 support... I really don't know whether i should blame Mozilla or Panasonic on this one.

seba_dos1 11y ago

I don't really care. And that makes me sad. I was really excited about Firefox OS when Mozilla was announcing it. I've been playing for years with free smartphones like Neo Freerunner, GTA04 and (surprisingly free) Nokia N900, and the situation on Android market was far from being good for me. I still cannot really change my phone without downgrading my user experience. Firefox OS offered me some hope. Unfortunately, it turned out that Firefox OS was just Android-me-too, without much of added benefits when it comes to user freedom. Sure, the development model was more like baazar than cathedral, but how did it matter if most of the Firefox OS devices out there were as blocked and closed as Android ones? Mozilla even had a certification program you needed to pass in order to use Firefox OS brand with your device - and guess what? Closed crap like ZTE Open was passing the certifications. Mozilla was basically endorsing devices you had to break into in order to be free to use them as you wish. How is that different from Android? I had high hopes, but Firefox OS disappointed me.