13 ms·

An unexpected revival of Firefox OS

275 points by redbell 4y ago

Ancapistani 4y ago
I’d love to see FirefoxOS come back. I had a mini “candy bar” phone years ago that ran it, and although it was terribly low-spec, it had a better user experience than my flagship Android phone at the time.
rjzzleep 4y ago
Isn't KaiOS pretty popular on feature phones? Or has the buzz on those died down a bit?
- junon 4y ago
  It's like the leading OS for non-smart phones.
  - slim 4y ago
    it's not. S3/symbian is still leading
    - Huh1337 4y ago
      Really? There's around 170 million KaiOS devices. I was unable to find stats for Symbian. Is it still so much? I thought the platform is dead for years.
      - ZiiS 4y ago
        tbh most 10 year old Symbian devices probably still work.
        Huh1337 4y ago
        Yeah, I have a few in my drawer. The actual question is, does anybody turn them on for anything more than few hours of nostalgia? Last time I tried, it wasn't able to browse the web due to SSL errors. Also, did they ever get to support 4G? Where I live they already turned 3G off, so mobile internet in my Symbian devices doesn't work. I'd be very surprised if somebody actually uses it as their daily driver. Maybe as a really-dumb phone, only for calling and SMS - but anything smarter than that doesn't work anymore. Even the maps are a decade without any further updates.
    - junon 4y ago
      I went down the path of looking at "dumb" phones to offset my technology use as a SWE for personal reasons. Almost every phone was Kai.
- throw_m239339 4y ago
  The problem is that KaiOS is just a "big browser" so its usefulness entirely depends on how much developers care about the mobile web, well they don't. The mobile web today is horrible to browse, websites are slow, most aren't designed with mobile first in mind, mobile has become an afterthought because companies want users to use their "native apps" where they have full control over ads, tracking and what not. Go to i.reddit.com and compare that version with the regular mobile website, there is no debate, i.reddit.com is bloody fast and light while whatever the regular mobile website uses is slow as hell. Why is that? Because reddit new design wasn't designed to be efficiently browsed on mobile phone. Same could be said with any ticket/hotel booking, eshops, or governmental mobile website. 99% of these aren't designed for mobile at first place. Slapping a CSS with some media queries isn't designing for mobile. KaiOS isn't a failure, the mobile web absolutely is since developers stopped caring about it.
  - Apocryphon 4y ago
    I wonder what all of the PWA booster developers feel about the mobile web.
  - toastal 4y ago
    It's not just mobile web. You need good accessibility--especially for keyboard--for this to work. But a lot of developers don't make their sites work without a pointer device. This is a problem on the web at large though. For instance, I needed to get a BIOS upgrade for my mouse issue on my Lenovo laptop, but their support site a) required JavaScript and b) wasn't using tabindex or keyboard accessible buttons/links to navigate it. Why this is required to get me a simple ISO or zip is pretty ridiculous. I should be able to use a TUI browser to get such downloads for my device and it doesn't require any interactivity. Beyond this, PWAs aren't the most popular because of Apple if I'm speculating. The PWA experience on Apple's OSs are so handicapped that it's often seen as a waste of time to develop for as Android users are the only ones that might bother installing the app and desktop discoverability is horrible (Fx stopped support for SSB before it even went to stable). Also there isn't a FxOS or KaiOS system that is actually used in the anglosphere where most developers still come from so the need to support is overlooked.
- isolli 4y ago
  From the article: "KaiOS turned out to be disappointingly closed and oriented to tracking users and shipping advertising"
kibwen 4y ago
FirefoxOS was one of those hail-mary longshots that you always thought would be destined for failure but you had to respect the fact that they had the guts to attempt it anyway. (Though to be fair, Rust was the same sort of project, so sometimes long shots pay off.) It showed that Mozilla understood the existential risk of ceding control of the platform itself to your direct competitors. I'd love to see it come back and I'm sad that I never got my hands on one of the original phones.
- frozenport 4y ago
  Lot of people got pissed off they wasted resources on it
  - mumblemumble 4y ago
    Although, in fairness, that could be said of literally every project Mozilla has launched that isn't either a Web browser or MDN.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - Gigachad 4y ago
      I think they have a pretty good future in web services. I'd be happy to pay for a mozilla password manager/vpn/email hosting/cloud storage. But for some reason they only sell the VPN and not in Australia.
      - coffeeblack 4y ago
        That’s a rebranded Mullvad VPN.
      - OJFord 4y ago
        If you want the VPN in Australia, you can get it directly from Mullvad - they do have servers there.
ofrzeta 4y ago
I still own one of the Firefox developer phones pictured in the article (orange shell) that got donated to me on the promise to port some app to HTML5.
- gidorah 4y ago
  I too still own the same one. I did run it as my main phone in 2012.
  - jfk13 4y ago
    I had a Sony Xperia running FxOS as my (only) phone until this year, when it finally succumbed to its swelling battery. But I'll admit I am a fairly minimal phone user.
qualudeheart 4y ago
Can it run android apps in an emulator?
- cube00 4y ago
  Even if it can, Google Play services won't be allowed to function within it.
- fabrice_d 4y ago
  No, running android apps is not a goal for that project.
yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
> Furthermore, the Capyloon page proposes WebAssembly and IPFS integration as the main priorities of the project, but it is not made immediately clear how this integration works in practice. Yeah, I remain interested in Capyloon because it's a plausibly-decent-looking smartphone OS that isn't Android, but the IPFS emphasis always struck me as... well, I can kind of understand the "putting the user in control" angle, but pragmatically I would not have started there. Of course, it's a FOSS project by volunteers so if that's what people happen to be interested in then that's what'll happen:)
- fabrice_d 4y ago
  Very honest question: where would you rather start and focus on? Feel free to join the matrix channel (https://matrix.to/#/#capyloon:matrix.org https://matrix.to/#/#capyloon:matrix.org) if you want to chat about it!
hedora 4y ago
It would be great to see a minimalist version of this that is just completely rock solid. I don't care about many apps. I need maps, and a camera. My streaming service can play from a browser tab. Someone could make a decent podcast site that does the same. The OS should make it easy and reliable for such sites to use 10's of GB of local cache space. Beyond those requirements, I'm mostly good. (A calculator, flashlight app, etc would also be nice.) Anyway, I hope that (unlike 100% of these open source initiatives so far), they focus on keeping it simple.
- iudqnolq 4y ago
  > I don't care about many apps. I need maps ... As someone with a hobby project in this area I can confidently say that's not simple. Either you implement a new simple map app (very hard), or you add a comparability layer to run an existing map app (never done it, assume very hard and also not minimalist). Edit: Here's an example of an impressive 10k LOC attempt at a new map renderer. Look at what it supports so far. (This map is representative, the renderer just doesn't support things like text yet) https://webgl.demo.maplibre-rs.maplibre.org/ https://webgl.demo.maplibre-rs.maplibre.org/
  - puzzlingcaptcha 4y ago
    There is a map app for KaiOS that essentially just wraps openstreetmap https://github.com/strukturart/o.map https://github.com/strukturart/o.map
    - iudqnolq 4y ago
      Thanks! I forgot that on KaiOS you can just use web libraries. That's using leaflet.js, a excellent older library that's perfectly fine for most use cases.
  - usrusr 4y ago
    Wouldn't web actually be a good example for browsers to leave the native behind? A lot of native map use has never moved beyond the generation of mapsforge (vectors rendered in the fly into bitmap tiles that are then used as bitmaps), because apparently that's good enough. In the browser, there's everything that evolved around MBTiles and the only thing missing would be some offline repository API filling the gap between a system map and isolated PWA containers.
deepnet 4y ago
https://capyloon.org/ https://capyloon.org/ Capyloon for freedom, runs most anywhere ( Desktop too ) It runs FirefoxOS apps. Runs on top of Android on any phone as a GSI. Comes with a SDK out of the box Pragmaticly free in that it runs anywhere
meitham 4y ago
I was grumpy Android user at the time FirefoxOS came out. To me it was the dream phone that will get me away from Google tracking so I bought a Flame device as my only phone. This meant I had to convince everyone in my family and network to move away from apps unsupported on my new open device, so moved to Signal instead of WhatsApp for example. I was very disappointed to see the project killed by Mozilla but still went ahead and got a Banana phone with KaiOS, only to discover it has as many trackers as Google but without much of the usable features! This was the straw for me that broke my faith in open phones and went full iPhone since.
- jacooper 4y ago
  The best semi-open phone experience you can get is a Pixel with CalyxOS or GrapheneOS. Everything will work because its built on android, but with full privacy and better security.
  - Tijdreiziger 4y ago
    Not GP, but I looked into that option. The problem to me seems that most popular apps depend on Google Play Services in some way. So your options are (a) use microG (which seems pretty janky), or (b) install the real Play Services, which puts you back at square one.
    - 3np 4y ago
      Or c) use alternatives to those most popular apps. Also, "seems pretty janky" is quite the shallow dismissal.
      - Tijdreiziger 4y ago
        Re: alternatives -- see this comment chain a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33103321 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33103321 Re: jank -- per the official microG wiki [1], most of the functionality is only partially implemented and/or has bugs. I don't see how it's shallow to consider that as janky. [1] https://github.com/microg/GmsCore/wiki/Implementation-Status https://github.com/microg/GmsCore/wiki/Implementation-Status
PinkMilkshake 4y ago
I still have my Firefox phones. I cannot bring myself to throw them away and let go of the dream.
creshal 4y ago
> Firefox OS, also known as Boot2Gecko from the "Gecko" rendering engine of Firefox, was a surprisingly clean and smooth experience, and its official deprecation in 2016 was probably more of an adoption issue than a technical problem. > > Even Firefox OS's user interface was very nicely designed, with visible inspiration from HP WebOS and Palm OS. Clean lines, a lively flat design, and an easy-to-use app development toolkit made it a compelling alternative to Android and iOS. Except nobody adopted it seriously, and it died in 2016. …did the author ever try to use a FirefoxOS as their daily driver, or did they just play around with it for a bit? • The SDK had constant breaking changes • Update policy from hardware vendors was worse than Android's (Alcatel never updated their "flagship" FxOS phone outside the US) • Together, it meant that most users couldn't use the app store • The UI/UX was very obviously just half-assedly cobbled together. It was flat only because that's easier to do when you have no designers on staff, and none of it was clean compared to stock Android 4 I never tried writing an app, so I can't comment on the quality of the SDK, but since it broke constantly and most app authors apparently gave up, going by all the incompatible corpses rotting in the app store, I also question the "easy-to-use SDK" part. The default apps were also kinda awful, I still remember the camera app having an overflow issue where too bright pixels were rendered as black, e.g. Overall, FxOS failed not because people didn't understand its hidden genius, it failed because it was awful.
coffeeblack 4y ago
Now would be the time. With more and more languages getting Wasm compile targets, apps can now be completely running in the browser.
panick21_ 4y ago
I never even slightly thought FirefoxOS would be successful. We had MeGoo, a much better mobile OS. That was the real chance of having an open mobile OS.
- NayamAmarshe 4y ago
  Man, I'm still sad about MeeGo. Nokia was our best shot but fortune was not in our favor.
  - panick21_ 4y ago
    It was literally the best phone OS in 2011. Not the best in terms of apps of course. What really pisses me off is that they literally didn't even sell the N9 in major markets. Like wtf are you doing. This was a high margin phone, ready for production. It should even have been out much earlier. The follow up phone was getting close to release. They also had the N950 almost ready for release. And in theory they also had a lower prices phone with MeGoo that was supposed to be out, but it was killed because of their internal competition. Nokia just really stuck around far to long on SynbianOS and that group had way to much power inside of Nokia. I really wanted the N900 and I was just waiting and ready to buy some N1000 that I was sure would soon come out. But it never came. By the time the N9 came out it was already pretty late and they had already killed the platform.
    - NayamAmarshe 4y ago
      It was a trojan horse by Microsoft. They sent one of their own to destroy Nokia from the inside and takeover the company. Everything went downhill right after he became the CEO. https://www.wired.com/2013/09/microsoft-nokia/ https://www.wired.com/2013/09/microsoft-nokia/
      - panick21_ 4y ago
        The book "Operation Elop" comes to a different conclusion. Its more a case of Nokia board-members WANTING this situation, that's why the allowed this direction and were more then happy to pawn of that whole business to Microsoft.
neilv 4y ago
I had a few FirefoxOS devices when it was new. The idea was very appealing, and I had my own open source handheld intentions for it. One interesting aspect was that it was being marketed as a firmware for low-end phones, but obviously seemed desirable for midrange and high-end as well. One concern was that the build process (built atop Android) seemed crazy-unauditable and possibly unsustainable. I hoped that the FirefoxOS parts would eventually be transplanted to atop a more manageable open source hardware/device layer. Towards the end, there was also an unclear funding(?) partnership, involving the home screen and a particular company, which didn't seem consistent with my goals for an open and trustworthy device. I don't know how that partnership turned out, and can't immediately find info on it. Today, with how far we've stretched "Web"-based JS, massive stacks, software provenance, and control of data, I'd be more interested in a device implemented 1/100th as huge, and 10000x as trustworthy.
Hitton 4y ago
This article is weird. Looks like an important part was lost in editing.
- ajot 4y ago
  I'm still not sure if Capyloon is open source or privative, TFA is not very clear.
  - fabrice_d 4y ago
    It's open source, and all new code is released under AGPL. See the frontend repo at https://github.com/capyloon/nutria/ https://github.com/capyloon/nutria/ for instance.
James-Livesey 4y ago
 Firefox OS inspired me to build my own Debian-based operating system that uses web technologies for its UI and apps. It uses Electron as the runtime[0] and works both on desktop (AMD64 arch) and mobile (on the PinePhone). It's very much a work-in-progress project and is by no means complete, but it's progressing nicely over the past few months and I'm sure will become quite a complete OS functionality-wise in no time. Feel free to check it out here if it piques your interest: https://liveg.tech/os https://liveg.tech/os (There's also plenty of videos that I've previously made that showcase some of the key moments in its development: [1]) Capyloon IMO is also an awesome OS platform that achieves very similar goals to this project, and it'll be great to see what they build next within the world of non-mainstream web-centric operating systems! -- [0]: A tad controversial, I know — but the rationale is that using one Electron app as the desktop environment means that you don't have to run Slack/Discord/Spotify etc. in their own Electron apps; instead, they can run as web apps that share the same Chromium instance. That way, you don't have completely separate Chromium instances/processes running at once, where they'd otherwise all be consuming lots of RAM due to their startup overhead. [1]: Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pmOR2J9fDZM&list=PL3aAeH1lqy3fWFE5gIf4d_gM4B3yycYTD https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pmOR2J9fDZM&list=PL3aAeH1lqy... — Prism is a prototype smartphone that runs LiveG OS, and gShell is the desktop environment.
- forgotpwd16 4y ago
  Looks cool. The fact that same shell runs on both mobile and desktop conceptually reminds me what Canonical was trying to do. Being based on web technologies, couldn't you make a browser runnable demo for the interface? Such as the Flutter-based shell https://web.dahliaos.io https://web.dahliaos.io is doing.
  - James-Livesey 4y ago
    Oh wow, didn't know that dahliaOS had this! The only barrier that I can see would prevent this from happening for gShell is that web browsers don't support the `webview` element that Electron lets you use (it's basically an iframe but without all the CORS restrictions and the likes, so you can see why browsers don't support it). I suppose one cool side-project would be to set up a service similar to Microsoft's Windows 365 that would stream a desktop environment to something like a `canvas` element — that way, we could get around all the CORS stuff. Also, yeah what Canonical did with Ubuntu and Ubuntu Touch is pretty cool in terms of convergence (apparently it's really stable, too). I do find having the sidebar UI on mobile a bit odd, but I should imagine that it'd be something to get used to. Phosh and KDE Mobile I think are both convergent, too.
azangru 4y ago
> Nokia's Maemo (now Leste). I thought the successor to Maemo was Sailfish...
- stonogo 4y ago
  Leste IS Maemo, just the free parts, with effort to replicate the closed parts. Maemo's successor was MeeGo, and Sailfish is the successor of MeeGo.
yomllee999 4y ago
You'd better support Ubuntu Touch. At least there's some community around it and it already runs on several phones.
Octabrain 4y ago
Skimming through the comments about how bad is KaiOS has destroyed my pretensions of getting rid of my Android smartphone and use a dumbphone instead. For me, it would be great to have a simple, privacy oriented phone with a decent camera and, in terms of apps, just maps, Spotify, Telegram, Whatsapp (sadly still having friends/family there) and MFA. (Banking app from the bank I use would be great but that's too much to ask for). I guess the sweet spot is gonna be in a middle range smartphone compatible with Graphene or Lineage and install a minimalistic launcher in it.
- 0x38B 4y ago
  I enjoyed my Nokia 2720 flip phone for half a year. It’s got a Google Maps web app that supports voice search, enough for looking up hours or a phone number. The camera is bad, but enough for photos of products or things to remember. If you know what you’re getting into, it’s not a bad (smart) dumb phone, especially if you are looking to get away from a smartphone. I rooted mine to install a QR code reader and app for ePubs.
ho_schi 4y ago
CSS and HTML are both from the web but different things. It makes sense to use CSS to control the style (therefore it is named Style-Sheets) in toolkits like Gtk and Qt! While JavaScript is an interpreted language for the web but not for applications. Yes. JavaScript can be used on the desktop, we name it usually Electron. It actually replaced Flash! It allows companies to copy their web-code to the desktop and relabeling it as application. This is cheap. The users suffer from slow applications, which require a network connection, which consume high amounts of resources (memory) and provide bad integration. This is expensive. Microsoft Teams tries currently to switch from Electron (which includes Chrome) to Chrome itself. I'm rather happy with the GNOME-Shell. It comes with its own implementation of GJS which changes the situation. The GNOME-Shell itself suffered from memory leaks which are fixed for some years: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/-/issues/64#note_296648 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/-/issues/64#note_... I'm thankful for the authors description. Replacing language A by B or B by C doesn't improve the implementation. Every implementation requires a lot work and constant care. And the comment describes how they control memory usage rather well in C/C++ with ASAN (GCC or CLANG) and Valgrind, suffered from incompatibilities between GObject and JavaScript and memory leaks within JavaScript. The implementation with JS allows for immediate manipulations of GNOME-Shell through developers but I wonder if the would prefer a native language when doing it again. At least that would reduce complexity and remove the dependency on the interpreter.
jonsger 4y ago
I would be pretty happy if Mozilla would make the desktop Firefox (the one for Windows/Mac/Linux) responsive. So it becomes usable on Linux on mobile phones :)
Kukumber 4y ago
No way this OS could have worked, html+js based OS on a resource constrained device is the stupidest idea ever, reminds me of the java based blackberry OS, a shit show What's the most popular mobile OS? and what they created to power their interface and to gradually replace their old toolkit? yeah, it's not a html+js based OS ;) If they ever want to revive Firefox OS, they'll need a better frontend story

275 points by redbell 4y ago

I’d love to see FirefoxOS come back. I had a mini “candy bar” phone years ago that ran it, and although it was terribly low-spec, it had a better user experience than my flagship Android phone at the time.

rjzzleep 4y ago

Isn't KaiOS pretty popular on feature phones? Or has the buzz on those died down a bit?

junon 4y ago
It's like the leading OS for non-smart phones.
- slim 4y ago
  it's not. S3/symbian is still leading
  - Huh1337 4y ago
    Really? There's around 170 million KaiOS devices. I was unable to find stats for Symbian. Is it still so much? I thought the platform is dead for years.
    - ZiiS 4y ago
      tbh most 10 year old Symbian devices probably still work.
      - Huh1337 4y ago
        Yeah, I have a few in my drawer. The actual question is, does anybody turn them on for anything more than few hours of nostalgia? Last time I tried, it wasn't able to browse the web due to SSL errors. Also, did they ever get to support 4G? Where I live they already turned 3G off, so mobile internet in my Symbian devices doesn't work. I'd be very surprised if somebody actually uses it as their daily driver. Maybe as a really-dumb phone, only for calling and SMS - but anything smarter than that doesn't work anymore. Even the maps are a decade without any further updates.
  - junon 4y ago
    I went down the path of looking at "dumb" phones to offset my technology use as a SWE for personal reasons. Almost every phone was Kai.
throw_m239339 4y ago
The problem is that KaiOS is just a "big browser" so its usefulness entirely depends on how much developers care about the mobile web, well they don't. The mobile web today is horrible to browse, websites are slow, most aren't designed with mobile first in mind, mobile has become an afterthought because companies want users to use their "native apps" where they have full control over ads, tracking and what not. Go to i.reddit.com and compare that version with the regular mobile website, there is no debate, i.reddit.com is bloody fast and light while whatever the regular mobile website uses is slow as hell. Why is that? Because reddit new design wasn't designed to be efficiently browsed on mobile phone. Same could be said with any ticket/hotel booking, eshops, or governmental mobile website. 99% of these aren't designed for mobile at first place. Slapping a CSS with some media queries isn't designing for mobile. KaiOS isn't a failure, the mobile web absolutely is since developers stopped caring about it.
- Apocryphon 4y ago
  I wonder what all of the PWA booster developers feel about the mobile web.
- toastal 4y ago
  It's not just mobile web. You need good accessibility--especially for keyboard--for this to work. But a lot of developers don't make their sites work without a pointer device. This is a problem on the web at large though. For instance, I needed to get a BIOS upgrade for my mouse issue on my Lenovo laptop, but their support site a) required JavaScript and b) wasn't using tabindex or keyboard accessible buttons/links to navigate it. Why this is required to get me a simple ISO or zip is pretty ridiculous. I should be able to use a TUI browser to get such downloads for my device and it doesn't require any interactivity. Beyond this, PWAs aren't the most popular because of Apple if I'm speculating. The PWA experience on Apple's OSs are so handicapped that it's often seen as a waste of time to develop for as Android users are the only ones that might bother installing the app and desktop discoverability is horrible (Fx stopped support for SSB before it even went to stable). Also there isn't a FxOS or KaiOS system that is actually used in the anglosphere where most developers still come from so the need to support is overlooked.
isolli 4y ago
From the article: "KaiOS turned out to be disappointingly closed and oriented to tracking users and shipping advertising"

kibwen 4y ago

FirefoxOS was one of those hail-mary longshots that you always thought would be destined for failure but you had to respect the fact that they had the guts to attempt it anyway. (Though to be fair, Rust was the same sort of project, so sometimes long shots pay off.) It showed that Mozilla understood the existential risk of ceding control of the platform itself to your direct competitors. I'd love to see it come back and I'm sad that I never got my hands on one of the original phones.

frozenport 4y ago
Lot of people got pissed off they wasted resources on it
- mumblemumble 4y ago
  Although, in fairness, that could be said of literally every project Mozilla has launched that isn't either a Web browser or MDN.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - Gigachad 4y ago
    I think they have a pretty good future in web services. I'd be happy to pay for a mozilla password manager/vpn/email hosting/cloud storage. But for some reason they only sell the VPN and not in Australia.
    - coffeeblack 4y ago
      That’s a rebranded Mullvad VPN.
    - OJFord 4y ago
      If you want the VPN in Australia, you can get it directly from Mullvad - they do have servers there.

ofrzeta 4y ago

I still own one of the Firefox developer phones pictured in the article (orange shell) that got donated to me on the promise to port some app to HTML5.

gidorah 4y ago
I too still own the same one. I did run it as my main phone in 2012.
- jfk13 4y ago
  I had a Sony Xperia running FxOS as my (only) phone until this year, when it finally succumbed to its swelling battery. But I'll admit I am a fairly minimal phone user.

qualudeheart 4y ago

Can it run android apps in an emulator?

cube00 4y ago
Even if it can, Google Play services won't be allowed to function within it.
fabrice_d 4y ago
No, running android apps is not a goal for that project.

yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago

> Furthermore, the Capyloon page proposes WebAssembly and IPFS integration as the main priorities of the project, but it is not made immediately clear how this integration works in practice. Yeah, I remain interested in Capyloon because it's a plausibly-decent-looking smartphone OS that isn't Android, but the IPFS emphasis always struck me as... well, I can kind of understand the "putting the user in control" angle, but pragmatically I would not have started there. Of course, it's a FOSS project by volunteers so if that's what people happen to be interested in then that's what'll happen:)

fabrice_d 4y ago
Very honest question: where would you rather start and focus on? Feel free to join the matrix channel (https://matrix.to/#/#capyloon:matrix.org https://matrix.to/#/#capyloon:matrix.org) if you want to chat about it!

hedora 4y ago

It would be great to see a minimalist version of this that is just completely rock solid. I don't care about many apps. I need maps, and a camera. My streaming service can play from a browser tab. Someone could make a decent podcast site that does the same. The OS should make it easy and reliable for such sites to use 10's of GB of local cache space. Beyond those requirements, I'm mostly good. (A calculator, flashlight app, etc would also be nice.) Anyway, I hope that (unlike 100% of these open source initiatives so far), they focus on keeping it simple.

iudqnolq 4y ago
> I don't care about many apps. I need maps ... As someone with a hobby project in this area I can confidently say that's not simple. Either you implement a new simple map app (very hard), or you add a comparability layer to run an existing map app (never done it, assume very hard and also not minimalist). Edit: Here's an example of an impressive 10k LOC attempt at a new map renderer. Look at what it supports so far. (This map is representative, the renderer just doesn't support things like text yet) https://webgl.demo.maplibre-rs.maplibre.org/ https://webgl.demo.maplibre-rs.maplibre.org/
- puzzlingcaptcha 4y ago
  There is a map app for KaiOS that essentially just wraps openstreetmap https://github.com/strukturart/o.map https://github.com/strukturart/o.map
  - iudqnolq 4y ago
    Thanks! I forgot that on KaiOS you can just use web libraries. That's using leaflet.js, a excellent older library that's perfectly fine for most use cases.
- usrusr 4y ago
  Wouldn't web actually be a good example for browsers to leave the native behind? A lot of native map use has never moved beyond the generation of mapsforge (vectors rendered in the fly into bitmap tiles that are then used as bitmaps), because apparently that's good enough. In the browser, there's everything that evolved around MBTiles and the only thing missing would be some offline repository API filling the gap between a system map and isolated PWA containers.

deepnet 4y ago

https://capyloon.org/ https://capyloon.org/ Capyloon for freedom, runs most anywhere ( Desktop too ) It runs FirefoxOS apps. Runs on top of Android on any phone as a GSI. Comes with a SDK out of the box Pragmaticly free in that it runs anywhere

meitham 4y ago

I was grumpy Android user at the time FirefoxOS came out. To me it was the dream phone that will get me away from Google tracking so I bought a Flame device as my only phone. This meant I had to convince everyone in my family and network to move away from apps unsupported on my new open device, so moved to Signal instead of WhatsApp for example. I was very disappointed to see the project killed by Mozilla but still went ahead and got a Banana phone with KaiOS, only to discover it has as many trackers as Google but without much of the usable features! This was the straw for me that broke my faith in open phones and went full iPhone since.

jacooper 4y ago
The best semi-open phone experience you can get is a Pixel with CalyxOS or GrapheneOS. Everything will work because its built on android, but with full privacy and better security.
- Tijdreiziger 4y ago
  Not GP, but I looked into that option. The problem to me seems that most popular apps depend on Google Play Services in some way. So your options are (a) use microG (which seems pretty janky), or (b) install the real Play Services, which puts you back at square one.
  - 3np 4y ago
    Or c) use alternatives to those most popular apps. Also, "seems pretty janky" is quite the shallow dismissal.
    - Tijdreiziger 4y ago
      Re: alternatives -- see this comment chain a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33103321 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33103321 Re: jank -- per the official microG wiki [1], most of the functionality is only partially implemented and/or has bugs. I don't see how it's shallow to consider that as janky. [1] https://github.com/microg/GmsCore/wiki/Implementation-Status https://github.com/microg/GmsCore/wiki/Implementation-Status

PinkMilkshake 4y ago

I still have my Firefox phones. I cannot bring myself to throw them away and let go of the dream.

creshal 4y ago

> Firefox OS, also known as Boot2Gecko from the "Gecko" rendering engine of Firefox, was a surprisingly clean and smooth experience, and its official deprecation in 2016 was probably more of an adoption issue than a technical problem. > > Even Firefox OS's user interface was very nicely designed, with visible inspiration from HP WebOS and Palm OS. Clean lines, a lively flat design, and an easy-to-use app development toolkit made it a compelling alternative to Android and iOS. Except nobody adopted it seriously, and it died in 2016. …did the author ever try to use a FirefoxOS as their daily driver, or did they just play around with it for a bit? • The SDK had constant breaking changes • Update policy from hardware vendors was worse than Android's (Alcatel never updated their "flagship" FxOS phone outside the US) • Together, it meant that most users couldn't use the app store • The UI/UX was very obviously just half-assedly cobbled together. It was flat only because that's easier to do when you have no designers on staff, and none of it was clean compared to stock Android 4 I never tried writing an app, so I can't comment on the quality of the SDK, but since it broke constantly and most app authors apparently gave up, going by all the incompatible corpses rotting in the app store, I also question the "easy-to-use SDK" part. The default apps were also kinda awful, I still remember the camera app having an overflow issue where too bright pixels were rendered as black, e.g. Overall, FxOS failed not because people didn't understand its hidden genius, it failed because it was awful.

coffeeblack 4y ago

Now would be the time. With more and more languages getting Wasm compile targets, apps can now be completely running in the browser.

panick21_ 4y ago

I never even slightly thought FirefoxOS would be successful. We had MeGoo, a much better mobile OS. That was the real chance of having an open mobile OS.

NayamAmarshe 4y ago
Man, I'm still sad about MeeGo. Nokia was our best shot but fortune was not in our favor.
- panick21_ 4y ago
  It was literally the best phone OS in 2011. Not the best in terms of apps of course. What really pisses me off is that they literally didn't even sell the N9 in major markets. Like wtf are you doing. This was a high margin phone, ready for production. It should even have been out much earlier. The follow up phone was getting close to release. They also had the N950 almost ready for release. And in theory they also had a lower prices phone with MeGoo that was supposed to be out, but it was killed because of their internal competition. Nokia just really stuck around far to long on SynbianOS and that group had way to much power inside of Nokia. I really wanted the N900 and I was just waiting and ready to buy some N1000 that I was sure would soon come out. But it never came. By the time the N9 came out it was already pretty late and they had already killed the platform.
  - NayamAmarshe 4y ago
    It was a trojan horse by Microsoft. They sent one of their own to destroy Nokia from the inside and takeover the company. Everything went downhill right after he became the CEO. https://www.wired.com/2013/09/microsoft-nokia/ https://www.wired.com/2013/09/microsoft-nokia/
    - panick21_ 4y ago
      The book "Operation Elop" comes to a different conclusion. Its more a case of Nokia board-members WANTING this situation, that's why the allowed this direction and were more then happy to pawn of that whole business to Microsoft.

neilv 4y ago

I had a few FirefoxOS devices when it was new. The idea was very appealing, and I had my own open source handheld intentions for it. One interesting aspect was that it was being marketed as a firmware for low-end phones, but obviously seemed desirable for midrange and high-end as well. One concern was that the build process (built atop Android) seemed crazy-unauditable and possibly unsustainable. I hoped that the FirefoxOS parts would eventually be transplanted to atop a more manageable open source hardware/device layer. Towards the end, there was also an unclear funding(?) partnership, involving the home screen and a particular company, which didn't seem consistent with my goals for an open and trustworthy device. I don't know how that partnership turned out, and can't immediately find info on it. Today, with how far we've stretched "Web"-based JS, massive stacks, software provenance, and control of data, I'd be more interested in a device implemented 1/100th as huge, and 10000x as trustworthy.

Hitton 4y ago

This article is weird. Looks like an important part was lost in editing.

ajot 4y ago
I'm still not sure if Capyloon is open source or privative, TFA is not very clear.
- fabrice_d 4y ago
  It's open source, and all new code is released under AGPL. See the frontend repo at https://github.com/capyloon/nutria/ https://github.com/capyloon/nutria/ for instance.

James-Livesey 4y ago

Firefox OS inspired me to build my own Debian-based operating system that uses web technologies for its UI and apps. It uses Electron as the runtime[0] and works both on desktop (AMD64 arch) and mobile (on the PinePhone). It's very much a work-in-progress project and is by no means complete, but it's progressing nicely over the past few months and I'm sure will become quite a complete OS functionality-wise in no time. Feel free to check it out here if it piques your interest: https://liveg.tech/os https://liveg.tech/os (There's also plenty of videos that I've previously made that showcase some of the key moments in its development: [1]) Capyloon IMO is also an awesome OS platform that achieves very similar goals to this project, and it'll be great to see what they build next within the world of non-mainstream web-centric operating systems! -- [0]: A tad controversial, I know — but the rationale is that using one Electron app as the desktop environment means that you don't have to run Slack/Discord/Spotify etc. in their own Electron apps; instead, they can run as web apps that share the same Chromium instance. That way, you don't have completely separate Chromium instances/processes running at once, where they'd otherwise all be consuming lots of RAM due to their startup overhead. [1]: Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pmOR2J9fDZM&list=PL3aAeH1lqy3fWFE5gIf4d_gM4B3yycYTD https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pmOR2J9fDZM&list=PL3aAeH1lqy... — Prism is a prototype smartphone that runs LiveG OS, and gShell is the desktop environment.

forgotpwd16 4y ago
Looks cool. The fact that same shell runs on both mobile and desktop conceptually reminds me what Canonical was trying to do. Being based on web technologies, couldn't you make a browser runnable demo for the interface? Such as the Flutter-based shell https://web.dahliaos.io https://web.dahliaos.io is doing.
- James-Livesey 4y ago
  Oh wow, didn't know that dahliaOS had this! The only barrier that I can see would prevent this from happening for gShell is that web browsers don't support the `webview` element that Electron lets you use (it's basically an iframe but without all the CORS restrictions and the likes, so you can see why browsers don't support it). I suppose one cool side-project would be to set up a service similar to Microsoft's Windows 365 that would stream a desktop environment to something like a `canvas` element — that way, we could get around all the CORS stuff. Also, yeah what Canonical did with Ubuntu and Ubuntu Touch is pretty cool in terms of convergence (apparently it's really stable, too). I do find having the sidebar UI on mobile a bit odd, but I should imagine that it'd be something to get used to. Phosh and KDE Mobile I think are both convergent, too.

azangru 4y ago

> Nokia's Maemo (now Leste). I thought the successor to Maemo was Sailfish...

stonogo 4y ago
Leste IS Maemo, just the free parts, with effort to replicate the closed parts. Maemo's successor was MeeGo, and Sailfish is the successor of MeeGo.

yomllee999 4y ago

You'd better support Ubuntu Touch. At least there's some community around it and it already runs on several phones.

Octabrain 4y ago

Skimming through the comments about how bad is KaiOS has destroyed my pretensions of getting rid of my Android smartphone and use a dumbphone instead. For me, it would be great to have a simple, privacy oriented phone with a decent camera and, in terms of apps, just maps, Spotify, Telegram, Whatsapp (sadly still having friends/family there) and MFA. (Banking app from the bank I use would be great but that's too much to ask for). I guess the sweet spot is gonna be in a middle range smartphone compatible with Graphene or Lineage and install a minimalistic launcher in it.

0x38B 4y ago
I enjoyed my Nokia 2720 flip phone for half a year. It’s got a Google Maps web app that supports voice search, enough for looking up hours or a phone number. The camera is bad, but enough for photos of products or things to remember. If you know what you’re getting into, it’s not a bad (smart) dumb phone, especially if you are looking to get away from a smartphone. I rooted mine to install a QR code reader and app for ePubs.

ho_schi 4y ago

CSS and HTML are both from the web but different things. It makes sense to use CSS to control the style (therefore it is named Style-Sheets) in toolkits like Gtk and Qt! While JavaScript is an interpreted language for the web but not for applications. Yes. JavaScript can be used on the desktop, we name it usually Electron. It actually replaced Flash! It allows companies to copy their web-code to the desktop and relabeling it as application. This is cheap. The users suffer from slow applications, which require a network connection, which consume high amounts of resources (memory) and provide bad integration. This is expensive. Microsoft Teams tries currently to switch from Electron (which includes Chrome) to Chrome itself. I'm rather happy with the GNOME-Shell. It comes with its own implementation of GJS which changes the situation. The GNOME-Shell itself suffered from memory leaks which are fixed for some years: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/-/issues/64#note_296648 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/-/issues/64#note_... I'm thankful for the authors description. Replacing language A by B or B by C doesn't improve the implementation. Every implementation requires a lot work and constant care. And the comment describes how they control memory usage rather well in C/C++ with ASAN (GCC or CLANG) and Valgrind, suffered from incompatibilities between GObject and JavaScript and memory leaks within JavaScript. The implementation with JS allows for immediate manipulations of GNOME-Shell through developers but I wonder if the would prefer a native language when doing it again. At least that would reduce complexity and remove the dependency on the interpreter.

jonsger 4y ago

I would be pretty happy if Mozilla would make the desktop Firefox (the one for Windows/Mac/Linux) responsive. So it becomes usable on Linux on mobile phones :)

Kukumber 4y ago

No way this OS could have worked, html+js based OS on a resource constrained device is the stupidest idea ever, reminds me of the java based blackberry OS, a shit show What's the most popular mobile OS? and what they created to power their interface and to gradually replace their old toolkit? yeah, it's not a html+js based OS ;) If they ever want to revive Firefox OS, they'll need a better frontend story