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Mozilla is building an operating system
- Zumzoa 15y agoAlready being discussed here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2805708 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2805708
- yid 15y agoWouldn't it make more sense to replace gnome/kde with gecko? Isn't that essentially what the win8 demo was all about? So many questions, so little cloud...
- MatthewPhillips 15y agoThe wiki page doesn't do a good job explaining it, but what they're aiming at is mobile devices. Essentially they want a phone that replaces every native functionality with html/javascript. So a web application would be your phone dialer, a web application could access your NFC chip. All of the capabilities they're going for is stuff that's in the pipeline in W3C, they want to create an OS to accelerate the process (and create new standards as well).
- j_col 15y agoYou mean like webOS?
- MatthewPhillips 15y agoNo, I meant like web applications.
- stcredzero 15y agoEssentially they want a phone that replaces every native functionality with html/javascript. I would love to hear more about the security model.
- MatthewPhillips 15y agoBrowser asks the user for permission to do stuff, the really sensitive stuff is pushed back to happening on click events, the even more sensitive stuff runs through code validation. What extra security is needed than what we already have with the above?
- bzbarsky 15y agoThe security model is one of the hard parts that needs working out, yes. This is just an announcement that there is a plan to work one out in case people want to participate instead of just having stuff dumped on them from on high when it's done the way Google and Apple do it.
- kenjackson 15y agoThe project is DOA unless they also go and buy spectrum. Because no one is going to allow this phone on their network. They need to buy some 4G spectrum and then this becomes interesting. Until then its just a failed project.
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- MatthewPhillips 15y agoDoes Mozilla have any mobile patents?
- dstein 15y agoHow well is it going to be received compared with the level of effort required? ChromeOS is pretty bad and Google has been working on it for a long time.
- ck2 15y agoI realize they can do more than one thing at once but how about getting threaded tabs into a current build of Firefox first. Coders talented enough to make an O/S certainly should be able to make threaded tabs happen.
- starwed 15y agoThey just hit a pretty important milestone for that. http://felipe.wordpress.com/2011/07/20/initial-electrolysis-patches-for-desktop-firefox-now-in-mozilla-central/ http://felipe.wordpress.com/2011/07/20/initial-electrolysis-...
- hollerith 15y agoI wish they'd concentrate on making a browser that does not need to be restarted after every hour or 2 of browsing lest it become more and more unresponsive. I wish they'd concentrate on making a browser that can start scrolling before all the Javascript on the page has finished running. (I'm using FF 7 on Snow Leopard with 1 gig of RAM. Would I have to restart FF less often if I had more RAM?)
- sushrutbidwai 15y agoI think you need minimum 2 GB of RAM, ideally 4GB+. More than 4-5 tabs on 1G machine will deteriorate performance very easily.
- bmj 15y agoI find this a bit silly. I could understand, maybe, if I had four tabs open with Flash going in each one, or perhaps a very JS-intensive UI. But if I'm doing mostly "normal" browsing and my browser needs for than a gig of RAM to operate normally, I'd say something is wrong.
- Ronkdar 15y agoRunning FF5 on Win7, 2 GB of RAM. I leave it open all day with no issues. 5+ tabs at all times.
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- joakin 15y agoImpressive how the most voted comments are rants about the browser. If that's insightful or useful comments hit me... I really don't understand this hate towards Mozilla that has been going around lately. Edit: Why am I being downvoted? It's a sincere opinion of a person who doesn't see a relation in critizising a project of an organisation in an article that talks about other projects. If you dont like Firefox its fine, but it's a wonderful project with millions of users and that cannot be denied. Sending my opinion to oblivion because of pointing how unrelated the firefox rant comments are to the article makes no sense.
- norswap 15y agoBuilding an os is hard stuff, and if you can't produce a browser without memory leaks (or a caching strategy I can't possibly start to fathom), you're not headed in the right direction.
- rpearl 15y agohttp://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=64804 http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=64804 http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=36142 http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=36142 http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=68304 http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=68304 http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=90484 http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=90484 ...etc... Guess Google shouldn't be writing an OS either? I have three points with this post. My first is that, despite the extremely good marketing, Chrome has faults just like any other large piece of software. The point is that they have good engineers on the problems. So does Mozilla. My second is claim is that a Firefox-based solution is good for the web. Even if it isn't as successful as Android, it will open up the web more! Android is a farce of open source (I cannot get the kernel code running on my phone. That is a blatant GPL violation. Nobody is doing anything about it. I cannot get the Android userland code running on my tablet. That is just not open source.) At the moment, Android is scarcely more open than iOS. My last claim is that many of the "memory leaks" in Firefox are either caching--memory which is not being used is memory which is being wasted--and those which are truly memory leaks tend to be from binary extensions. The new extension SDK should mitigate this, since it is sandboxed JS code instead, from what I understand (disclaimer: i do not work on the extension API, nor do I write extensions, and I could by way off here.)
- nextparadigms 15y agoI'd like to see what Mozilla comes up with. Bring it on Mozilla!
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- runjake 15y agoMy first question is why? Do they have a real vision other than "me too"? Does anyone else remember when Phoenix was first released to fight bloated browsers? Now it is that bloated browser and running an OS developed around its technologies isn't too appealing to me. Find your roots before you start off on some other project if you hope to have any significant success.
- dman 15y agoWhat is your definition of bloat - size of download, application startup times, number of features, speed while being used, memory usage? Firefox 5 without addons does not seem to be bloated to me by any of the above definitions. In terms of featuresets just for reference - Netscape communicator used to ship with a mail client, browser, news client, html editor and a calendar.
- runjake 15y agonot so much the size of the download, but all of the rest, yes. I feel that Firefox is nearly at the point Netscape was at the point Phoenix (the original name of Firefox) came into being. 5.0 does seem a little faster. For what it's worth, I still run Firefox (5.0) on a regular basis, including as I post this comment.
- sabret00the 15y agoHow can "Firefox be nearly at the phone of Netscape" when it doesn't ship with a mail client, irc client or any of the other related stuff that no one needed? People hear words like bloat and jump on the bandwagon. That's disappointing for a site such at this. I personally see more memory usage for the same workload (number of tabs) on Chrome over Firefox. However Chrome's memory is distributed across more processes so it's easier to hide in plain sight. That said, I'm starting to come round to the train of thought about a user being able to control what they install. Not all users require the developer tools, in the same way that not all users require the ability to read news feeds and in the very same way that some users want enhanced share options in their browsers.
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- bluelu 15y agoWill it also run Internet Explorer?
- cosgroveb 15y agoIt seems strange to me that they announce this without even mentioning ChromeOS as if B2G was conceived in a cave.
- paran 15y agoYou sir have hit the nail on the head. The article reads as is they invented something revolutionary. I do think there is great potential in browser os market and a little competition is all that's required to pave the way for the 'next big thing'! This might just do good for the ChromeOS.
- bzbarsky 15y agoThe point here is not to build an OS. The point is to improve web APIs so that web apps can compete with native ones, and do it in an open fashion so that all web browsers can implement the new APIs. ChromeOS has done some of this, but neither far enough nor openly enough (what ChromeOS extensions are working on becoming cross-browser standards?).
- sabret00the 15y agoIn that case, wouldn't it be more effective to throw Mozilla's weight behind an open source mobile Operating System that actually has a chance of going mainstream ala MeeGo?
- bzbarsky 15y agoIt depends on the goal. If the goal is to have an open source mobile operating system, then maybe. If the goal is to have it not matter which exact mobile operating system you use, so new mobile operating systems have an easier time entering the market.... then no. In case it's not clear, Mozilla is not building a kernel or anything here. They're just building capabilities for web apps to be able to do whatever mobile apps can do now.
- jerhewet 15y agotl;dr -- Mozilla thinks it's a good idea to write an operating system in Javascript.
- suyash 15y agoTelephony Apps and api natively in the browser- yay!!!
- vilya 15y agoI wonder if they're planning to write it in Rust? It would be interesting to see how an OS written in a more modern language than C would turn out - especially since other attempts like Microsoft's Singularity seem to have gone quiet.
- matmann2001 15y agoI can't wait until Safari starts building its own operating system...
- andhow 15y agoBoot To Gecko is not a project to build an operation system. IIUC, Mozilla is planning to reuse Linux and core components of Android. If anything, I would think Boot To Gecko would be better thought of as a shell around the OS. Using process separation (underway for a while now in the Electrolysis project) bugs/leaks/crashes in Gecko should be isolated and not significantly more disruptive than in normal Firefox. I think the major value provided by (and work required for) Boot To Gecko will be on creating open standards (in the open) for access to the device so that web platform can be a first class citizen of the device.