4 ms·

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

by 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?
neilk 15y ago
Depends. "Worse is Better" used to be one of the most reliable phenomena in the software industry. That would suggest a more open, network-centric, HTML-based interface should win, despite annoyances or bugginess. But that rule doesn't seem to be holding true for the mobile market. I don't really understand it. Maybe simplicity, affordance, and marketing are now the important factors, given the kinds of users we are now reaching. Or, maybe it's Apple's ability to deliver key hardware innovations, years ahead of the competition. (http://www.quora.com/Apple-Inc-2/What-would-be-a-good-use-of-Apples-97-8+-billion-in-cash http://www.quora.com/Apple-Inc-2/What-would-be-a-good-use-of...). One would think this trend couldn't last, but they do it over and over again.
asadotzler 15y ago
And that's why we all still use Outlook instead of Gmail and Encarta Atlas instead of Google Maps, right?
- corford 15y ago
  I use and prefer Thunderbird over Gmail. Same for Google Earth versus maps.google.com ...
- eli_gottlieb 15y ago
  Lots of us do use actual applications on our actual computers. If I didn't receive a GMail app with my Android phone by default, I would go download a Thunderbird-equivalent app. Web applications are bloated sacks of and perform similarly on anything smaller than my desktop-replacement laptop.
azakai 15y ago
> 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. The point here though is that you have less overhead by focusing just on the web. Running a web browser on a normal mobile OS, as you mentioned, runs a browser stack on top of the normal OS. There is additional work there, for example, on Android to run the browser you also run the Dalvik VM, etc. And the underlying OS and userspace is optimized for native apps for that platform, not just for the browser. B2G purposefully has just one VM - JavaScript - and just one native app - a web browser, and the underlying OS is optimized for running exactly that, not native Android apps or native iOS apps in addition to a web browser. It's too early to say how the final result will be. But the approach makes sense and is worth trying.

by awolf 15y ago

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?

neilk 15y ago

Depends. "Worse is Better" used to be one of the most reliable phenomena in the software industry. That would suggest a more open, network-centric, HTML-based interface should win, despite annoyances or bugginess. But that rule doesn't seem to be holding true for the mobile market. I don't really understand it. Maybe simplicity, affordance, and marketing are now the important factors, given the kinds of users we are now reaching. Or, maybe it's Apple's ability to deliver key hardware innovations, years ahead of the competition. (http://www.quora.com/Apple-Inc-2/What-would-be-a-good-use-of-Apples-97-8+-billion-in-cash http://www.quora.com/Apple-Inc-2/What-would-be-a-good-use-of...). One would think this trend couldn't last, but they do it over and over again.

asadotzler 15y ago

And that's why we all still use Outlook instead of Gmail and Encarta Atlas instead of Google Maps, right?

corford 15y ago
I use and prefer Thunderbird over Gmail. Same for Google Earth versus maps.google.com ...
eli_gottlieb 15y ago
Lots of us do use actual applications on our actual computers. If I didn't receive a GMail app with my Android phone by default, I would go download a Thunderbird-equivalent app. Web applications are bloated sacks of and perform similarly on anything smaller than my desktop-replacement laptop.

azakai 15y ago

> 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. The point here though is that you have less overhead by focusing just on the web. Running a web browser on a normal mobile OS, as you mentioned, runs a browser stack on top of the normal OS. There is additional work there, for example, on Android to run the browser you also run the Dalvik VM, etc. And the underlying OS and userspace is optimized for native apps for that platform, not just for the browser. B2G purposefully has just one VM - JavaScript - and just one native app - a web browser, and the underlying OS is optimized for running exactly that, not native Android apps or native iOS apps in addition to a web browser. It's too early to say how the final result will be. But the approach makes sense and is worth trying.