10 ms·

An entire Mobile OS built using HTML, CSS and JS - by Mozilla

289 points by Mamady 15y ago

EastCoastLA 15y ago
Looks like with Enyo, the JavaScript app framework, and leveraging this new Boot2Gecko, smartphone hardware will become the focus rather the phone OS.
- alttab 15y ago
  Really as it should be. If the software was any good it would make using it feel like nothing at all. The only attraction left is the screen/battery/camera/wifi quality. I've been waiting to see something like this for a long time.
- joelhaasnoot 15y ago
  Yes, to be honest, Palm already demonstrated this could be done in 2009. Oh, and that was a released product.
- Osiris 15y ago
  As I was watching the video I was thinking the same thing that WebOS has been out for years. I'm sure the underlying technology and framework is quite different from Mozilla, but it's not a ground-breaking idea. Perhaps they should take the opportunity to work on the newly open sources WebOS which is likely to be able to grab more market share than an entirely new Gecko OS.
  - asadotzler 15y ago
    WebOS uses JS+HTML but it does not expose nor advance standards-based APIs for all the phone hardware capabilities like B2G. Also, WebOS requires you use their framework where B2G lets you use any frameworks or no frameworks -- it's really just like the real Web plus a bunch of DOM APIs for things like the phone's telephony stack and vibrator and accelerometer and all that.
mpg33 15y ago
Would this not dramatically increase data usage? ie data fees to carriers
- stasm 15y ago
  It's 'the Web', i.e. a set of HTML pages with some CSS and JS, with access to a few newly developed APIs, like the one for dialing the phone, but running locally on the device, not remotely.
  - jpravetz 15y ago
    Does anyone know how the sandboxing works to allow a camera, gallery and dropbox app to access the same locally stored image files? Or for local contacts to be shared?
    - Trezoid 15y ago
      A media API is being developed (in co-operation with the W3C) to allow exactly that. Further, apps will be able to request "trusted app" status to run with less cross domain restrictions.
andyzaharia 15y ago
As a prototype this is cool, as a daily use phone, it kind of sucks. Scroll/swipe latency, anyone ? P.s iOS user here...
mhd 15y ago
Boy, the video's constant use of "the web" really annoyed me. I know that you have to cut down the jargon to make it presentable, and "HTML, CSS and JS" gets a bit confusing. What about "web technologies" or even just "a browser"? Also: "You can run on less expensive hardware, because you've got less technology going on under the covers." You can't really call a full HTML5 stack light-weight. Sure, you save some libraries, but that's mostly a space issue. I sincerely doubt that a JS-based "Angry Birds" would use fewer resources than a native app. Having said that, I'm really looking forward to this. Hope there's a way to get it on older Android phones soon, my Nexus One is waiting for new life…
- TazeTSchnitzel 15y ago
  HTML5, or perhaps better termed "emerging web technologies" are an incredibly heavy stack. You have 3 different means of markup being parsed from the get-go: HTML/SGML, XML and JSON. HTML is a quite lightweight component, OK. But then you get CSS. CSS used to be simple, but it's getting incredibly complex with tons of new standardised features and vendor prefixes. Initially it just drew lines and boxes in colour with text, positioned correctly on the page according to a few simple positioning systems. Now it draws coloured boxes and lines with 3d transformations, animated, with alpha transparency, a drop shadow and rounded corners, at the same time as rendering text, and positioning them correctly on the page using several different layout systems. Then, there's the image formats commonly supported. PNG, JPEG, GIF, and ICO (Windows, favicons). SVG, a fully-featured vector graphics format which also uses CSS, as well as having its own, different animation system, and its own scripting system! Then we have common audio and video formats. MP3, WAV, OGG, MP4/H264 and WEBM. As well as the subtitle formats. Oh yeah, MathML parsing is in there somewhere too. And then we have Javascript, a simple, not terribly complex language. OK. But we also have tons of APIs for it. The Document Object Model API. The XMLHttpRequest API. The Canvas API - a complete 2d rendering context AND full OpenGL ES 2.0. WebSockets. Local storage and session storage. IndexedDB. Game controller API. Page visibility API. Audio composition API (forgot proper name). Touch events. BlobBuilder. Geolocation. History API. Just to name a bit of it.
  - indubitably 15y ago
yaix 15y ago
That would be awesome if it actually became a mainstream mobile OS. Otoh, what about security here? Having JS from a web site dial the phone or taking pics? How will they make sure that lazy I-don't-read-popups-but-just-click-okay users will not get pwned?
- chime 15y ago
  Dialing the phone and taking a picture work no differently than they currently do on iOS/Android - your app simply calls the device's native functions and then the OS takes over the operation. And once the operation is complete/cancelled, focus can return to your app if you set the proper callbacks. Potential security concerns would be akin to the Chrome-extension snoop and inject issue where a random app or web-page could potentially try to read/write the data of other apps if the security model isn't setup right. But these are problems fixable in the short-term. On the plus side, as the phone owner, I might be able to redesign the OS dialer by changing some CSS and finally have a phone pad that goes 7-8-9/4-5-6/1-2-3 like a num-pad instead of 1-2-3/4-5-6/7-8-9.
Radzell 15y ago
Didn't they try this with HP web OS. That failed I wouldn't put money on this.
- MitziMoto 15y ago
  I had the original Palm Pre with WebOS. The OS itself was actually top notch. I absolutely loved it. I believe it failed because Palm just didn't have enough weight behind it (like Google or Apple have) to make it reach critical mass. That said, this isn't the same as WebOS. WebOS ran javascript apps, but they ran on the device itself. From what I can gather, B2G is running everything on the actual web. It's very different. -- Edit: I may have been wrong there. Apparently it is running locally. This quote from the web page through me off: "You don't have to pay the penalty of a big smart phone operating system if you're running directly on the web" That's a bit misleading.
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
  - asadotzler 15y ago
    B2G runs apps from the web and locally cached for offline use. B2G apps are not required to use some non-standard library to get at the phone hardware like WebOS did. APIs for camera and telephony and vibrator and accelerometer and all that in B2G are proper DOM APIs that will be web standards.
- sp332 15y ago
  I'm not sure why WebOS failed. Probably just because they couldn't attract as many developers, so there was a lot less software available. I really liked my TouchPad. Ironically the biggest weakness for me was the web browser - it was buggy and had almost no features.
nextparadigms 15y ago
"You can run on less expensive hardware, because you've got less technology going on under the covers. You don't have to pay the penalty of a big smart phone operating system if you're running directly on the web." That's misleading. Sure, you might need fewer resources to pull something like a simple web page. But try using web apps that are the equivalent of native apps on Android or iOS, and you'll need a lot better hardware to run those just as well.
- sp332 15y ago
  I think they mean that the minimum hardware requirements just got a lot smaller.
  - mbel 15y ago
    Could you explain why? I might be looking at it a bit too naively, but how system build for running interpreted JavaScript apps can perform better than one designed for compiled ones?
    - sp332 15y ago
      It doesn't perform better. But at the low end, you don't need to bootstrap a java VM (like Android) just to check your email and browse the web etc. You can do the little things on less hardware.
      - mhd 15y ago
        Dalvik being a bigger overhead than JägerMonkey?
        nupark2 15y ago
        Your comment should be sitting higher. Dalvik is unlikely to be more expensive than a similarly complex JS VM.
      - tjoff 15y ago
geoffroy 15y ago
looks promising!
knowtheory 15y ago
So, I noticed there was no mention of multi-touch events in the video, and none of the apps demonstrated used multi-touch. I did some digging to see whether this was a gap or whether mozilla had been working on multi-touch in browser (since the consequences of such a change for JS APIs are interesting to consider). Mozilla has apparently been working on multi-touch in browser as one can see in these two links: http://hacks.mozilla.org/2009/08/multi-touch-firefox/ http://hacks.mozilla.org/2009/08/multi-touch-firefox/ http://hacks.mozilla.org/2009/10/multi-touch/ http://hacks.mozilla.org/2009/10/multi-touch/
- hammersend 15y ago
  It is possible they see their OS as being suited for one-handed devices. One of the things I do not like about Ice Cream Sandwich on my Galaxy Nexus is Google has removed the "+"/"-" buttons in most of their native apps so now I have to either use some really unwieldy one-handed finger contortions or use two hands to zoom in and out. I think an argument can be made that in many instances at least on a smart phone as opposed to a tablet multi-touch while being fun to use is actually a step backwards in usability.
  - Raphael 15y ago
    Did you try double tap to zoom?
    - hammersend 15y ago
      Yes. You can't zoom out that way though.
suprgeek 15y ago
This is a really promising direction to take for Mobile Apps. If I can write amazing HTML5+JavaScript apps for the Mobile then the logical extension to this is to write the Uber-app "Phone OS" using these technologies as well. Lets get this working on at least the Dual & Quad core beasts first and worry about the lesser-hardware ones as B2G evolves Good work Mozilla and keep Pushing the "Open Web". A walled garden despite its many advantages, is still a Gilded Prison for some.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
  - indubitably 15y ago
    Is it really fair to assume that there's a "we" here?
veeti 15y ago
The user interface doesn't look very smooth. It doesn't matter how good the UI looks (and it does look good) if it doesn't feel right.
- Trezoid 15y ago
  It's improved significantly since that video.
  - damncabbage 15y ago
    Interesting. Do you have a video or link?
    - Trezoid 15y ago
      No, unfortunately. Most of the videos going around (read: all of them) are from MWC where B2G was demoed. The development group is VERY active on IRC and there was some chatter at the time about that. Some of the slight lags in the demo were actually parts of the CSS transition they use (originally intended to avoid accidental swipes when they wanted taps) and was tweeked to be much better not long afterwards. More recently there have been significant improvements in the actual CSS animation on the gecko side (improvements which will hit firefox in the future) which means everything feels even faster and more natural. At this point B2G is making significant progress _every day_ so about the only real way to get an up to date idea of how it runs is to either read the github commit log frequently or put it on a device (and currently that means a GSII)
mmaunder 15y ago
This runs a Linux kernel with some components in common with Android like libusb, so really linux is the operating system and there is a browser running on top of it. Lots more info: https://wiki.mozilla.org/B2G https://wiki.mozilla.org/B2G
- ChuckMcM 15y ago
  Yes, the title is misleading. It should have read "an entire phone user interface implemented in a browser" which would have been more descriptive. I love that the mozilla guys have done the legwork of figuring out what APIs were missing in order to do that. That is a nice piece of work.
  - asadotzler 15y ago
    It's more than a user interface though. It's a platform for Web applications that let those apps reach all the way down to the full capabilities of the hardware.
    - ChuckMcM 15y ago
      Perhaps we share a definition disconnect. Is X11 a platform for a user interface or is it a OS? I lean to the former definition but I'll be the first to agree that I come from an earlier time. When 'windows' came out it really was a user interface on top of MS/PC-DOS (and it still is IMO) however now several generations of folks have been brought up saying that Windows was the OS.
      - grannyg00se 15y ago
        I don't think recent versions of windows can realistically be thought of as a UI on top of MS/PC-DOS anymore.
        serge2k 15y ago
        Can any version that was built on NT?
nooop 15y ago
"This is now just running the web directly." This makes absolutely no sense. This is borderline an insult to system developers -- because system software is what the device is running directly. I'm all for people to state a bit of sensationalist statements so they can sell there shit and be understood by the general public and so over, but this is going way too far. Being proud of an intrinsically limited product (this is a linux that runs only one program by design, so this is less capable than an android or whatever) for the improvements it can brings as side effects is one thing, but a statement like "this is running the web directly" is misleading because it will be understood as the real stuff by less knowledgeable people who will believe in some kind of incredibly innovative magic, like a magical processor "running the web" or i don't know what idiotic fantasm, instead of taking the thing for what it is: a system that can do less, with maybe some advantages as a side effects, but of course some inconveniences too.
- eli_gottlieb 15y ago
  >This makes absolutely no sense. This is borderline an insult to system developers -- because system software is what the device is running directly. It's ok. We're used to it. From the desktop to the laptop to the netbook to the phone, Mozilla and Google have been trying to exterminate us for years.
  - wickedchicken 15y ago
    > Mozilla and Google have been trying to exterminate us for years. I highly recommend you take a look at PNaCl: portable LLVM binaries run in the NaCl sandbox. Since LLVM bitcode can be JITed (or even offline compiled before execution), you would be looking at optimized code for whichever target you're running on. Very exciting stuff. http://www.chromium.org/nativeclient/pnacl/building-and-testing-portable-native-client http://www.chromium.org/nativeclient/pnacl/building-and-test...
    - eli_gottlieb 15y ago
      Which requires that people use Chrome, running a web-browser to run native code that gets JITed from bitcode... at that point, why not just pull the blocks from the Jenga tower and run native code on your processor through an executable file loaded by an operating system?
ma2rten 15y ago
I feel like I have just seen the future and it is very bright. This would make mobile development so much easier and open up a completely new range of possibilities. Just imagine .... - writing just one app that runs on every desktop and mobile phone out there. - apps which update entirely automatically, without any extra line of code, because they are basically just cached versions of a website. - a designer, who just knows CSS & HTML, can make an entirely new GUI for your phone. - an eco-system where the development of the interface (HTML) is completely separate from the kernel/browser and you can choose which kernels/rendering engine to run on your phone, independent of the user interface and vice versa. - etc. etc. Kudos to Mozilla for their vision and for not just developing the technology, but making a good looking prototype to demonstrate it. However, I am a little bit skeptical that a web-based OS will perform the same as a native OS, especially in terms of battery consumption. But smartphones only get more powerful and html rendering engines only faster, so it can only be a matter of time. Also a little nitpick with respect to the title: the OS not entirely build using HTML, CSS and JS, it's just the user interface, which is just small part of the OS (compared to the kernel, etc.). EDIT: I know most of this is already possible in principle, but the user / developer experience would be completely different.
- tjoff 15y ago
  I thought that the general consensus was that you never wanted multiplatform anyway. Not because it can't be done but an app that looks and acts the same on both iOS and android (for instance) will suck horrible on at least one platform (but probably both). Apps which will update automatically? That's just as possible with native apps but you have the option to turn that off - because it's a bad idea for a lot of applications. In general if you don't respect that as a developer I don't want to use your apps. You can make an entirely new GUI for android right now if you wanted to. But for the same reason as in my first paragraph, you really don't wan't to fragment your userbase. The GUI guidelines are very important for apps to integrate well, as an app developer you would now have to support all those third party interfaces that will change every five minutes... I wouldn't call that a bright future. Designing a good GUI is hard and if you have managed to make it easy it is going to be really bad.
  - 15y ago
awolf 15y ago
There are a lot of "looks promising" comments here. Am I the only one who thinks this does NOT look promising? Aside from games, rendering a markup language is one the most taxing things we do on our mobile devices. When I get handed a new phone to play with, the first thing I do is load a non-mobile optimized website and see how it scrolls. This worst-case scenario is a good indicator for how laggy and jittery a mobile OS will be at sporadic times throughout the day. Now a mobile OS built entirely on the worst-case of rendering HTML, CSS, and JS for every interaction? Sure, devices will keep getting faster as time goes on. But keep in mind that as device performance over the years increases, so do our expectations. I am skeptical that this will ever deliver a sufficient user experience when compared side by side to other mobile OSes.
- Zirro 15y ago
  If B2G wasn't performing well at this stage, I doubt they would push forward with it as hard as they are. The transitions and scrolling between "home-screens" shown in the video look quite smooth to me.
- rooshdi 15y ago
  I am skeptical that this will ever deliver a sufficient user experience when compared side by side to other mobile OSes. Wasn't the same sort of thing said about the desktop vs the web? Sufficient is the key word here. If the experience is good enough, where users are willing to overlook design quality for the sake of not having to worry about constantly installing and updating apps, then this should do the job. Convenience is king.
- edderly 15y ago
  I agree, people under-estimate the resources required to render typical web content, and also tend to forget how even on the high end devices that the web experience isn't particularly good. Similarly there's also been an underestimation about the cost and nature of systems software, any one remember Oracle's 'Raw Iron' (http://www.infoworld.com/t/platforms/techs-all-time-top-25-flops-558?page=0,2 http://www.infoworld.com/t/platforms/techs-all-time-top-25-f...). At the same time, isn't it striking how users embrace mobile apps as opposed to paywalls on the web? I wonder how this OS would address this problem?
israelpasos 15y ago
This definitely blurs the line between calling an app native or web based, at least from a business-marketing standpoint. However, far more interesting is to see the waves of innovation that APIs have created. APIs are becoming the personality of computer systems in the sense that they allow interaction and shielding from the outside world. As long as developers know how to interact with a system's personality they can now build just about anything. Furthermore, experience is becoming the new IP so I believe that such technologies will bring more and more experience innovation by providing easier and faster paths for high-level programmers to contribute to the ecosystem.
johnrob 15y ago
I love the mentality behind this effort. More stuff can and should be done in the browser on mobile devices. For this to succeed, the most important problem is not exposing mobile hardware (camera, gps, etc) - it's user input. The cornerstone of the web is typing a url into the address bar, and typing is still a miserable experience on phones. Clicking links on touchscreens isn't exactly stellar either (hence the new verb 'fat-fingering'). If someone can solve these problems, the browser stack is already powerful enough to do to phones what it already did to the desktop.
- projct 15y ago
  FYI, 'fat-fingering' or 'fat-fingered' isn't really that new and I've more often heard it used in regard to keyboards on computers. http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=fat%20finger http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=fat%20finger has a definition from 2005 but I think I had heard it as early as 1997.
Random_Person 15y ago
Is everything cached to the device? What are my limitations in "airplane mode"? I don't mind the concept of making cross-platform apps. My limited knowledge of HTML/CSS has shown me that while it is extemely difficult to make robust content look good across multiple browsers/platforms, it IS possible... but will developers really have the access to multiple platforms to test their UI on?
darklajid 15y ago
Just looking at that demo makes me want to install it. I wouldn't mind running a unstable version if _basic_ stuff would work (i.e. - calling). Unfortunately I own this Tegra2 based POS thing and I'm quite positive that I'll never see even a glimpse of the B2G experience on this device. Still, this is remarkably close to the WebOS approach and - I like the idea very much.
wavephorm 15y ago
This is actually a battle cry for Mozilla. The desktop GUI paradigm is done for, it's at the end of the line. Once desktops die off in popularity there will be no growth for web browsers like Firefox unless they own the whole stack like Apple and Google have successfully done, and Microsoft and RIM are attempting to do. Mozilla is developing Boot2Gecko because without expanding into a full mobile platform Mozilla is in a really tough spot in the smartphone/tablet markets. Predictions for the future put Apple/Safari at 45% marketshare, Google/Android at 54% marketshare, and the 1% scraps left over for RIM, Microsoft and now Mozilla. Mozilla will to have sell an awful lot of these phones for their organization to be viable in the future.
- eli_gottlieb 15y ago
  I'm sorry, desktop GUI applications are done for. Someone please notify my entire computer setup of its impending death. Also, my wife, my mother, my brother, my stepfather, my father, and everyone else I know. Hey, everyone, your computers are dead! It's time to convert to WebSmartiPhonePadTablets running nothing but web-browsers! Sure, you don't want to because they run like crap compared to actually writing native programs, but they're a growth market for corporate behemoths!
  - wavephorm 15y ago
    Ah yeah I should have expected such pedantry on HackerNews. You know very well I didn't mean you were going to stop using Windows immediately. I said nothing of the sort. You didn't even have the respect to read anything else I said or even acknowledge that I said anything else. Instead you pointlessly nitpicked at a generalization and added nothing to this thread.
dannyr 15y ago
Google is laying the groundwork for this as well. Chrome is slowly making its way into Android & my guess is that Chrome Apps are going to be next.
jay_kyburz 15y ago
The reason I'm excited about this that I won't need to wait for the carriers to update my UI. I imagine there will be a whole rage of interesting 3rd party interfaces I'll be able to browse and download. Want and interface that's just command line. Somebody will make it. What about an interface for Grandma that just has really big fonts in just a dialer, contacts and photo album. I feel like I got burnt when I bought my 7" Samsung Tablet because Samsung is not supporting it anymore and it has some really clunky interfaces. I would love to see and ecosystem where I have full and easy control to install and remove apps from my phone easily. Fingers crossed.
melvinng 15y ago
Mozilla should skip working with the carrier just go to the phone manufacturers and develop their own phone. Once they have their own phone it's only an matter of time before carrier jump on board with them. Imagine the $50 smartphone!!
lukejacksonn 15y ago
This is awesome.. and it is the way forward if every device can just run a browser then what is the need for an OS, you can port anything straight to the browser. With the likes of HTML5, jQuery, WebGL, AWS everyone could be making their own OS on the web. It is really not that hard or revolutionary it's just using existing services effectively.. Let's carry on this way. +rep for mozilla (gone up in my estimates)
dfc 15y ago
Who decided to market this as an operating system?
NHQ 15y ago
He is right about one thing: every device should be able to download and run html apps natively.
Qweef 15y ago
Pretty cool. This is like a spiritual successor to WebOS, which was awesome btw. Though, WebOS didn't take the API idea nearly this far.
JVIDEL 15y ago
Regardless of how it is, it's too late: Android is the new Windows, iOS the new System7, and everything else is the equivalent of AmigaOS, OS/2, BeOS, etc... About ease of development being a gateway to shovelware, yeah right as if the artificially high and expensive barrier to iOS is keeping all the fart apps away. The fact is if there's money to be made then everyone will try to get in, even the wantrepreneurs hiring cheap coders to copy some old game and repackage it as something new (for more information check Harvest Moon). If Android has more freemium shovelware is simply because it became the dominant OS in that industry, so wantrepreneurs are targeting that market instead, same as it happened with Windows and MacOS.
hughw 15y ago
We already have a lot of miles on ChromeOS. Why isn't it more popular? Is there anything fundamentally inferior about a device that is all web browser? Will B2G have the same barriers?
haydenchambers 15y ago
how do you secure this?
j45 15y ago
So, this is WebOS, over again? What is different about this other than Mozilla making it? Appreciate any insights.
kellenfujimoto 15y ago
I like how that video in the "HTML5 zone" was using a flash player...the irony was amusing.
rsanchez1 15y ago
"This browser-based OS will revolutionize how users interact with their apps and how developers write their apps, allowing everyone to take their apps everywhere." -Jon Rubinstein, January 2009, commenting on webOS (not a direct quotation)
aritraghosh007 15y ago
Its just like what ChromeOS did to the Desktop/Laptop world.

289 points by Mamady 15y ago

Looks like with Enyo, the JavaScript app framework, and leveraging this new Boot2Gecko, smartphone hardware will become the focus rather the phone OS.

alttab 15y ago
Really as it should be. If the software was any good it would make using it feel like nothing at all. The only attraction left is the screen/battery/camera/wifi quality. I've been waiting to see something like this for a long time.
joelhaasnoot 15y ago
Yes, to be honest, Palm already demonstrated this could be done in 2009. Oh, and that was a released product.
Osiris 15y ago
As I was watching the video I was thinking the same thing that WebOS has been out for years. I'm sure the underlying technology and framework is quite different from Mozilla, but it's not a ground-breaking idea. Perhaps they should take the opportunity to work on the newly open sources WebOS which is likely to be able to grab more market share than an entirely new Gecko OS.
- asadotzler 15y ago
  WebOS uses JS+HTML but it does not expose nor advance standards-based APIs for all the phone hardware capabilities like B2G. Also, WebOS requires you use their framework where B2G lets you use any frameworks or no frameworks -- it's really just like the real Web plus a bunch of DOM APIs for things like the phone's telephony stack and vibrator and accelerometer and all that.

mpg33 15y ago

Would this not dramatically increase data usage? ie data fees to carriers

stasm 15y ago
It's 'the Web', i.e. a set of HTML pages with some CSS and JS, with access to a few newly developed APIs, like the one for dialing the phone, but running locally on the device, not remotely.
- jpravetz 15y ago
  Does anyone know how the sandboxing works to allow a camera, gallery and dropbox app to access the same locally stored image files? Or for local contacts to be shared?
  - Trezoid 15y ago
    A media API is being developed (in co-operation with the W3C) to allow exactly that. Further, apps will be able to request "trusted app" status to run with less cross domain restrictions.

andyzaharia 15y ago

As a prototype this is cool, as a daily use phone, it kind of sucks. Scroll/swipe latency, anyone ? P.s iOS user here...

mhd 15y ago

Boy, the video's constant use of "the web" really annoyed me. I know that you have to cut down the jargon to make it presentable, and "HTML, CSS and JS" gets a bit confusing. What about "web technologies" or even just "a browser"? Also: "You can run on less expensive hardware, because you've got less technology going on under the covers." You can't really call a full HTML5 stack light-weight. Sure, you save some libraries, but that's mostly a space issue. I sincerely doubt that a JS-based "Angry Birds" would use fewer resources than a native app. Having said that, I'm really looking forward to this. Hope there's a way to get it on older Android phones soon, my Nexus One is waiting for new life…

TazeTSchnitzel 15y ago
HTML5, or perhaps better termed "emerging web technologies" are an incredibly heavy stack. You have 3 different means of markup being parsed from the get-go: HTML/SGML, XML and JSON. HTML is a quite lightweight component, OK. But then you get CSS. CSS used to be simple, but it's getting incredibly complex with tons of new standardised features and vendor prefixes. Initially it just drew lines and boxes in colour with text, positioned correctly on the page according to a few simple positioning systems. Now it draws coloured boxes and lines with 3d transformations, animated, with alpha transparency, a drop shadow and rounded corners, at the same time as rendering text, and positioning them correctly on the page using several different layout systems. Then, there's the image formats commonly supported. PNG, JPEG, GIF, and ICO (Windows, favicons). SVG, a fully-featured vector graphics format which also uses CSS, as well as having its own, different animation system, and its own scripting system! Then we have common audio and video formats. MP3, WAV, OGG, MP4/H264 and WEBM. As well as the subtitle formats. Oh yeah, MathML parsing is in there somewhere too. And then we have Javascript, a simple, not terribly complex language. OK. But we also have tons of APIs for it. The Document Object Model API. The XMLHttpRequest API. The Canvas API - a complete 2d rendering context AND full OpenGL ES 2.0. WebSockets. Local storage and session storage. IndexedDB. Game controller API. Page visibility API. Audio composition API (forgot proper name). Touch events. BlobBuilder. Geolocation. History API. Just to name a bit of it.
- indubitably 15y ago

yaix 15y ago

That would be awesome if it actually became a mainstream mobile OS. Otoh, what about security here? Having JS from a web site dial the phone or taking pics? How will they make sure that lazy I-don't-read-popups-but-just-click-okay users will not get pwned?

chime 15y ago
Dialing the phone and taking a picture work no differently than they currently do on iOS/Android - your app simply calls the device's native functions and then the OS takes over the operation. And once the operation is complete/cancelled, focus can return to your app if you set the proper callbacks. Potential security concerns would be akin to the Chrome-extension snoop and inject issue where a random app or web-page could potentially try to read/write the data of other apps if the security model isn't setup right. But these are problems fixable in the short-term. On the plus side, as the phone owner, I might be able to redesign the OS dialer by changing some CSS and finally have a phone pad that goes 7-8-9/4-5-6/1-2-3 like a num-pad instead of 1-2-3/4-5-6/7-8-9.

Radzell 15y ago

Didn't they try this with HP web OS. That failed I wouldn't put money on this.

MitziMoto 15y ago
I had the original Palm Pre with WebOS. The OS itself was actually top notch. I absolutely loved it. I believe it failed because Palm just didn't have enough weight behind it (like Google or Apple have) to make it reach critical mass. That said, this isn't the same as WebOS. WebOS ran javascript apps, but they ran on the device itself. From what I can gather, B2G is running everything on the actual web. It's very different. -- Edit: I may have been wrong there. Apparently it is running locally. This quote from the web page through me off: "You don't have to pay the penalty of a big smart phone operating system if you're running directly on the web" That's a bit misleading.
- deleted 15y ago
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- asadotzler 15y ago
  B2G runs apps from the web and locally cached for offline use. B2G apps are not required to use some non-standard library to get at the phone hardware like WebOS did. APIs for camera and telephony and vibrator and accelerometer and all that in B2G are proper DOM APIs that will be web standards.
sp332 15y ago
I'm not sure why WebOS failed. Probably just because they couldn't attract as many developers, so there was a lot less software available. I really liked my TouchPad. Ironically the biggest weakness for me was the web browser - it was buggy and had almost no features.

nextparadigms 15y ago

"You can run on less expensive hardware, because you've got less technology going on under the covers. You don't have to pay the penalty of a big smart phone operating system if you're running directly on the web." That's misleading. Sure, you might need fewer resources to pull something like a simple web page. But try using web apps that are the equivalent of native apps on Android or iOS, and you'll need a lot better hardware to run those just as well.

sp332 15y ago
I think they mean that the minimum hardware requirements just got a lot smaller.
- mbel 15y ago
  Could you explain why? I might be looking at it a bit too naively, but how system build for running interpreted JavaScript apps can perform better than one designed for compiled ones?
  - sp332 15y ago
    It doesn't perform better. But at the low end, you don't need to bootstrap a java VM (like Android) just to check your email and browse the web etc. You can do the little things on less hardware.
    - mhd 15y ago
      Dalvik being a bigger overhead than JägerMonkey?
      - nupark2 15y ago
        Your comment should be sitting higher. Dalvik is unlikely to be more expensive than a similarly complex JS VM.
    - tjoff 15y ago

geoffroy 15y ago

looks promising!

knowtheory 15y ago

So, I noticed there was no mention of multi-touch events in the video, and none of the apps demonstrated used multi-touch. I did some digging to see whether this was a gap or whether mozilla had been working on multi-touch in browser (since the consequences of such a change for JS APIs are interesting to consider). Mozilla has apparently been working on multi-touch in browser as one can see in these two links: http://hacks.mozilla.org/2009/08/multi-touch-firefox/ http://hacks.mozilla.org/2009/08/multi-touch-firefox/ http://hacks.mozilla.org/2009/10/multi-touch/ http://hacks.mozilla.org/2009/10/multi-touch/

hammersend 15y ago
It is possible they see their OS as being suited for one-handed devices. One of the things I do not like about Ice Cream Sandwich on my Galaxy Nexus is Google has removed the "+"/"-" buttons in most of their native apps so now I have to either use some really unwieldy one-handed finger contortions or use two hands to zoom in and out. I think an argument can be made that in many instances at least on a smart phone as opposed to a tablet multi-touch while being fun to use is actually a step backwards in usability.
- Raphael 15y ago
  Did you try double tap to zoom?
  - hammersend 15y ago
    Yes. You can't zoom out that way though.

suprgeek 15y ago

This is a really promising direction to take for Mobile Apps. If I can write amazing HTML5+JavaScript apps for the Mobile then the logical extension to this is to write the Uber-app "Phone OS" using these technologies as well. Lets get this working on at least the Dual & Quad core beasts first and worry about the lesser-hardware ones as B2G evolves Good work Mozilla and keep Pushing the "Open Web". A walled garden despite its many advantages, is still a Gilded Prison for some.

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- indubitably 15y ago
  Is it really fair to assume that there's a "we" here?

veeti 15y ago

The user interface doesn't look very smooth. It doesn't matter how good the UI looks (and it does look good) if it doesn't feel right.

Trezoid 15y ago
It's improved significantly since that video.
- damncabbage 15y ago
  Interesting. Do you have a video or link?
  - Trezoid 15y ago
    No, unfortunately. Most of the videos going around (read: all of them) are from MWC where B2G was demoed. The development group is VERY active on IRC and there was some chatter at the time about that. Some of the slight lags in the demo were actually parts of the CSS transition they use (originally intended to avoid accidental swipes when they wanted taps) and was tweeked to be much better not long afterwards. More recently there have been significant improvements in the actual CSS animation on the gecko side (improvements which will hit firefox in the future) which means everything feels even faster and more natural. At this point B2G is making significant progress _every day_ so about the only real way to get an up to date idea of how it runs is to either read the github commit log frequently or put it on a device (and currently that means a GSII)

mmaunder 15y ago

This runs a Linux kernel with some components in common with Android like libusb, so really linux is the operating system and there is a browser running on top of it. Lots more info: https://wiki.mozilla.org/B2G https://wiki.mozilla.org/B2G

ChuckMcM 15y ago
Yes, the title is misleading. It should have read "an entire phone user interface implemented in a browser" which would have been more descriptive. I love that the mozilla guys have done the legwork of figuring out what APIs were missing in order to do that. That is a nice piece of work.
- asadotzler 15y ago
  It's more than a user interface though. It's a platform for Web applications that let those apps reach all the way down to the full capabilities of the hardware.
  - ChuckMcM 15y ago
    Perhaps we share a definition disconnect. Is X11 a platform for a user interface or is it a OS? I lean to the former definition but I'll be the first to agree that I come from an earlier time. When 'windows' came out it really was a user interface on top of MS/PC-DOS (and it still is IMO) however now several generations of folks have been brought up saying that Windows was the OS.
    - grannyg00se 15y ago
      I don't think recent versions of windows can realistically be thought of as a UI on top of MS/PC-DOS anymore.
      - serge2k 15y ago
        Can any version that was built on NT?

nooop 15y ago

"This is now just running the web directly." This makes absolutely no sense. This is borderline an insult to system developers -- because system software is what the device is running directly. I'm all for people to state a bit of sensationalist statements so they can sell there shit and be understood by the general public and so over, but this is going way too far. Being proud of an intrinsically limited product (this is a linux that runs only one program by design, so this is less capable than an android or whatever) for the improvements it can brings as side effects is one thing, but a statement like "this is running the web directly" is misleading because it will be understood as the real stuff by less knowledgeable people who will believe in some kind of incredibly innovative magic, like a magical processor "running the web" or i don't know what idiotic fantasm, instead of taking the thing for what it is: a system that can do less, with maybe some advantages as a side effects, but of course some inconveniences too.

eli_gottlieb 15y ago
>This makes absolutely no sense. This is borderline an insult to system developers -- because system software is what the device is running directly. It's ok. We're used to it. From the desktop to the laptop to the netbook to the phone, Mozilla and Google have been trying to exterminate us for years.
- wickedchicken 15y ago
  > Mozilla and Google have been trying to exterminate us for years. I highly recommend you take a look at PNaCl: portable LLVM binaries run in the NaCl sandbox. Since LLVM bitcode can be JITed (or even offline compiled before execution), you would be looking at optimized code for whichever target you're running on. Very exciting stuff. http://www.chromium.org/nativeclient/pnacl/building-and-testing-portable-native-client http://www.chromium.org/nativeclient/pnacl/building-and-test...
  - eli_gottlieb 15y ago
    Which requires that people use Chrome, running a web-browser to run native code that gets JITed from bitcode... at that point, why not just pull the blocks from the Jenga tower and run native code on your processor through an executable file loaded by an operating system?

ma2rten 15y ago

I feel like I have just seen the future and it is very bright. This would make mobile development so much easier and open up a completely new range of possibilities. Just imagine .... - writing just one app that runs on every desktop and mobile phone out there. - apps which update entirely automatically, without any extra line of code, because they are basically just cached versions of a website. - a designer, who just knows CSS & HTML, can make an entirely new GUI for your phone. - an eco-system where the development of the interface (HTML) is completely separate from the kernel/browser and you can choose which kernels/rendering engine to run on your phone, independent of the user interface and vice versa. - etc. etc. Kudos to Mozilla for their vision and for not just developing the technology, but making a good looking prototype to demonstrate it. However, I am a little bit skeptical that a web-based OS will perform the same as a native OS, especially in terms of battery consumption. But smartphones only get more powerful and html rendering engines only faster, so it can only be a matter of time. Also a little nitpick with respect to the title: the OS not entirely build using HTML, CSS and JS, it's just the user interface, which is just small part of the OS (compared to the kernel, etc.). EDIT: I know most of this is already possible in principle, but the user / developer experience would be completely different.

tjoff 15y ago
I thought that the general consensus was that you never wanted multiplatform anyway. Not because it can't be done but an app that looks and acts the same on both iOS and android (for instance) will suck horrible on at least one platform (but probably both). Apps which will update automatically? That's just as possible with native apps but you have the option to turn that off - because it's a bad idea for a lot of applications. In general if you don't respect that as a developer I don't want to use your apps. You can make an entirely new GUI for android right now if you wanted to. But for the same reason as in my first paragraph, you really don't wan't to fragment your userbase. The GUI guidelines are very important for apps to integrate well, as an app developer you would now have to support all those third party interfaces that will change every five minutes... I wouldn't call that a bright future. Designing a good GUI is hard and if you have managed to make it easy it is going to be really bad.
- 15y ago

awolf 15y ago

There are a lot of "looks promising" comments here. Am I the only one who thinks this does NOT look promising? Aside from games, rendering a markup language is one the most taxing things we do on our mobile devices. When I get handed a new phone to play with, the first thing I do is load a non-mobile optimized website and see how it scrolls. This worst-case scenario is a good indicator for how laggy and jittery a mobile OS will be at sporadic times throughout the day. Now a mobile OS built entirely on the worst-case of rendering HTML, CSS, and JS for every interaction? Sure, devices will keep getting faster as time goes on. But keep in mind that as device performance over the years increases, so do our expectations. I am skeptical that this will ever deliver a sufficient user experience when compared side by side to other mobile OSes.

Zirro 15y ago
If B2G wasn't performing well at this stage, I doubt they would push forward with it as hard as they are. The transitions and scrolling between "home-screens" shown in the video look quite smooth to me.
rooshdi 15y ago
I am skeptical that this will ever deliver a sufficient user experience when compared side by side to other mobile OSes. Wasn't the same sort of thing said about the desktop vs the web? Sufficient is the key word here. If the experience is good enough, where users are willing to overlook design quality for the sake of not having to worry about constantly installing and updating apps, then this should do the job. Convenience is king.
edderly 15y ago
I agree, people under-estimate the resources required to render typical web content, and also tend to forget how even on the high end devices that the web experience isn't particularly good. Similarly there's also been an underestimation about the cost and nature of systems software, any one remember Oracle's 'Raw Iron' (http://www.infoworld.com/t/platforms/techs-all-time-top-25-flops-558?page=0,2 http://www.infoworld.com/t/platforms/techs-all-time-top-25-f...). At the same time, isn't it striking how users embrace mobile apps as opposed to paywalls on the web? I wonder how this OS would address this problem?

israelpasos 15y ago

This definitely blurs the line between calling an app native or web based, at least from a business-marketing standpoint. However, far more interesting is to see the waves of innovation that APIs have created. APIs are becoming the personality of computer systems in the sense that they allow interaction and shielding from the outside world. As long as developers know how to interact with a system's personality they can now build just about anything. Furthermore, experience is becoming the new IP so I believe that such technologies will bring more and more experience innovation by providing easier and faster paths for high-level programmers to contribute to the ecosystem.

johnrob 15y ago

I love the mentality behind this effort. More stuff can and should be done in the browser on mobile devices. For this to succeed, the most important problem is not exposing mobile hardware (camera, gps, etc) - it's user input. The cornerstone of the web is typing a url into the address bar, and typing is still a miserable experience on phones. Clicking links on touchscreens isn't exactly stellar either (hence the new verb 'fat-fingering'). If someone can solve these problems, the browser stack is already powerful enough to do to phones what it already did to the desktop.

projct 15y ago
FYI, 'fat-fingering' or 'fat-fingered' isn't really that new and I've more often heard it used in regard to keyboards on computers. http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=fat%20finger http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=fat%20finger has a definition from 2005 but I think I had heard it as early as 1997.

Random_Person 15y ago

Is everything cached to the device? What are my limitations in "airplane mode"? I don't mind the concept of making cross-platform apps. My limited knowledge of HTML/CSS has shown me that while it is extemely difficult to make robust content look good across multiple browsers/platforms, it IS possible... but will developers really have the access to multiple platforms to test their UI on?

darklajid 15y ago

Just looking at that demo makes me want to install it. I wouldn't mind running a unstable version if _basic_ stuff would work (i.e. - calling). Unfortunately I own this Tegra2 based POS thing and I'm quite positive that I'll never see even a glimpse of the B2G experience on this device. Still, this is remarkably close to the WebOS approach and - I like the idea very much.

wavephorm 15y ago

This is actually a battle cry for Mozilla. The desktop GUI paradigm is done for, it's at the end of the line. Once desktops die off in popularity there will be no growth for web browsers like Firefox unless they own the whole stack like Apple and Google have successfully done, and Microsoft and RIM are attempting to do. Mozilla is developing Boot2Gecko because without expanding into a full mobile platform Mozilla is in a really tough spot in the smartphone/tablet markets. Predictions for the future put Apple/Safari at 45% marketshare, Google/Android at 54% marketshare, and the 1% scraps left over for RIM, Microsoft and now Mozilla. Mozilla will to have sell an awful lot of these phones for their organization to be viable in the future.

eli_gottlieb 15y ago
I'm sorry, desktop GUI applications are done for. Someone please notify my entire computer setup of its impending death. Also, my wife, my mother, my brother, my stepfather, my father, and everyone else I know. Hey, everyone, your computers are dead! It's time to convert to WebSmartiPhonePadTablets running nothing but web-browsers! Sure, you don't want to because they run like crap compared to actually writing native programs, but they're a growth market for corporate behemoths!
- wavephorm 15y ago
  Ah yeah I should have expected such pedantry on HackerNews. You know very well I didn't mean you were going to stop using Windows immediately. I said nothing of the sort. You didn't even have the respect to read anything else I said or even acknowledge that I said anything else. Instead you pointlessly nitpicked at a generalization and added nothing to this thread.

dannyr 15y ago

Google is laying the groundwork for this as well. Chrome is slowly making its way into Android & my guess is that Chrome Apps are going to be next.

jay_kyburz 15y ago

The reason I'm excited about this that I won't need to wait for the carriers to update my UI. I imagine there will be a whole rage of interesting 3rd party interfaces I'll be able to browse and download. Want and interface that's just command line. Somebody will make it. What about an interface for Grandma that just has really big fonts in just a dialer, contacts and photo album. I feel like I got burnt when I bought my 7" Samsung Tablet because Samsung is not supporting it anymore and it has some really clunky interfaces. I would love to see and ecosystem where I have full and easy control to install and remove apps from my phone easily. Fingers crossed.

melvinng 15y ago

Mozilla should skip working with the carrier just go to the phone manufacturers and develop their own phone. Once they have their own phone it's only an matter of time before carrier jump on board with them. Imagine the $50 smartphone!!

lukejacksonn 15y ago

This is awesome.. and it is the way forward if every device can just run a browser then what is the need for an OS, you can port anything straight to the browser. With the likes of HTML5, jQuery, WebGL, AWS everyone could be making their own OS on the web. It is really not that hard or revolutionary it's just using existing services effectively.. Let's carry on this way. +rep for mozilla (gone up in my estimates)

dfc 15y ago

Who decided to market this as an operating system?

NHQ 15y ago

He is right about one thing: every device should be able to download and run html apps natively.

Qweef 15y ago

Pretty cool. This is like a spiritual successor to WebOS, which was awesome btw. Though, WebOS didn't take the API idea nearly this far.

JVIDEL 15y ago

Regardless of how it is, it's too late: Android is the new Windows, iOS the new System7, and everything else is the equivalent of AmigaOS, OS/2, BeOS, etc... About ease of development being a gateway to shovelware, yeah right as if the artificially high and expensive barrier to iOS is keeping all the fart apps away. The fact is if there's money to be made then everyone will try to get in, even the wantrepreneurs hiring cheap coders to copy some old game and repackage it as something new (for more information check Harvest Moon). If Android has more freemium shovelware is simply because it became the dominant OS in that industry, so wantrepreneurs are targeting that market instead, same as it happened with Windows and MacOS.

hughw 15y ago

We already have a lot of miles on ChromeOS. Why isn't it more popular? Is there anything fundamentally inferior about a device that is all web browser? Will B2G have the same barriers?

haydenchambers 15y ago

how do you secure this?

j45 15y ago

So, this is WebOS, over again? What is different about this other than Mozilla making it? Appreciate any insights.

kellenfujimoto 15y ago

I like how that video in the "HTML5 zone" was using a flash player...the irony was amusing.

rsanchez1 15y ago

"This browser-based OS will revolutionize how users interact with their apps and how developers write their apps, allowing everyone to take their apps everywhere." -Jon Rubinstein, January 2009, commenting on webOS (not a direct quotation)

aritraghosh007 15y ago

Its just like what ChromeOS did to the Desktop/Laptop world.