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> - It's really unfortunate that Rust wasn't a bit further along during the Firefox OS era. A lot of the Rust UI pieces that are now being developed would make
by Yoric 1y ago
> - It's really unfortunate that Rust wasn't a bit further along during the Firefox OS era. A lot of the Rust UI pieces that are now being developed would make a really strong foundation for something like Firefox OS. And could perhaps also have enabled a better story for "breaking out" of the confines of the web platform.
What do you mean, "Rust UI"? In FirefoxOS, the idea was that all applications were developed solely with web technologies.
More Rust would have been nice, but would only have made sense with the support for compiling towards wasm (or asm.js, at the time).
- nicoburns 1y ago> More Rust would have been nice, but would only have made sense with the support for compiling towards wasm (or asm.js, at the time). Rust would have been used for implementing the web technologies, not by end users. I would note that many of the "web" technologies did not exist before Firefox OS (and Chrome OS) started adding them in a flurry, so really almost anything was on the table. The key thing was that they were open and specified.
- owebmaster 1y ago> The key thing was that they were open and specified. And nowadays Firefox is the only of the "major" browsers that doesn't even support PWA anymore. FireFoxOS could have won the battle by just existing. 5% of the smartphone market would be worth much more than only 5% of the browser market.
- jcranmer 1y ago> FireFoxOS could have won the battle by just existing. 5% of the smartphone market would be worth much more than only 5% of the browser market. "Just existing" isn't enough to get you to 5% of the market. At the time Mozilla started investing in B2G, it wasn't clear if the also-rans of the mobile OS marketplace were chasing, between them, 1% share or 10% share (now, it's clear that you're chasing 1% share). As this postmortem points out (and the linked graphics developer's testimony discusses as well), Mozilla was heavily focused on the smartphone OS development, to the point of letting its existing browser competency atrophy. And despite all of that effort, the result can barely even be qualified as an also-ran. In the counterfactual world where Mozilla didn't focus on trying to build a smartphone OS but instead pushed more for quality in its desktop and mobile browsers, or even invested in ecosystems like Node.js or Electron built on SpiderMonkey and Gecko respectively (which dovetails nicely with their everything-in-JS vision), their relevance would have been far greater, I think.
- owebmaster 1y agoI think an alternative to iOS/Android duopoly is much more needed than another nodejs or electron. Those two actually work quite well.
- Yoric 1y agoFor what it's worth, Mozilla has done Electron-on-Gecko at least twice (several years before Electron), and Electron-on-Servo at least once. There was brief interest by the community, and a few applications were written to take advantage of it, but it didn't last.
- ksec 1y ago>Rust would have been used for implementing the web technologies, not by end users. It wouldn't. Another reason for Firefox OS's failure was their insistence of doing everything in Javascript. Do not bet against Javascript mentality. They quite literally wants to write most part of OS in JS. A few developer actually blogged about this once Mozilla announced they will discontinue the development of Firefox OS.
- Yoric 1y agoMany layers were in C++. Most of the JS code was the applications (including the homescreen).