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I worked on the rendering team at Mozilla during that time and contributed a lot to improving performance and reducing memory usage for B2G. I remember I was op

I worked on the rendering team at Mozilla during that time and contributed a lot to improving performance and reducing memory usage for B2G. I remember I was optimizing the experience for 256 MB devices, then one day we're told to start optimizing for a 128 MB reference phone. The very next day I open up HN to see Ars Technica reviewing a Firefox OS 64 MB phone. Predictably I knew that the experience would be terrible because I was still optimizing rendering for 256 MB two days priors. Us shipping devices that our software wasn't tuned for shot the very little remaining faith I had in the project. Coincidentally I was profiling and tuning the keyboard pop-open for 256 MB devices at the time. Profiling and tuning the trade-offs of when to render and animate the graphical layers. Knowing that these trade-offs would be very different and incorrect for a 64 MB device.

khuey 1y ago
I was also there for the memory usage side of things. B2G management was driven by a mix of "the web is the platform" ideology[0] and a willingness to promise whatever carriers and OEMs wanted to close a distribution deal regardless of whether it was feasible or made any sense. My own personal "this project is hopelessly doomed" moment was roughly 48 hours before the 1.4 code freeze when I was contacted by a colleague asking how feature X was coming along. Feature X was needed to fix Bug Y, and Bug Y was in the critical bug list for the code freeze. But it turned out the B2G project managers had decided to manually track their critical bug list outside of Bugzilla, and didn't make any effort to track the transitive dependencies of those bugs, or notify anyone that they should be working on these. "ngmi" hadn't been popularized yet but that was very much my feeling at that moment. Active development ceased by the end of the year. [0] which I think could have panned out at least technically, given sufficient resources, time, etc
- dcminter 1y ago
  > ... a willingness to promise whatever carriers and OEMs wanted to close a distribution deal... That always struck me as one of the more impressive things that Jobs achieved with the original iPhone - getting buy-in from Cingular to do things Apple's way and not Cingular's. Pre-iPod Apple probably couldn't have done it.
  - rickdeckard 1y ago
    ...and have Cingular pay a revenue-share of the monthly user-bill back to Apple in exchange for exclusivity. It cannot be overstated what a gamechanger it was to have a recurring revenue stream incrementing with each new user. Beside Blackberry, no cellphone company was able to finance maintenance based on its userbase AND hardware sales, they all only worked (and mostly still work) based on hardware-sale alone.
fabrice_d 1y ago
The Ars Technica review was for the 128MB phones (the Tarako project if you remember, shipping from the 1.3t branch). We never did a 64MB version, which was just a pipe dream from some BD folks to save a few cents of BOM costs.

khuey 1y ago

I was also there for the memory usage side of things. B2G management was driven by a mix of "the web is the platform" ideology[0] and a willingness to promise whatever carriers and OEMs wanted to close a distribution deal regardless of whether it was feasible or made any sense. My own personal "this project is hopelessly doomed" moment was roughly 48 hours before the 1.4 code freeze when I was contacted by a colleague asking how feature X was coming along. Feature X was needed to fix Bug Y, and Bug Y was in the critical bug list for the code freeze. But it turned out the B2G project managers had decided to manually track their critical bug list outside of Bugzilla, and didn't make any effort to track the transitive dependencies of those bugs, or notify anyone that they should be working on these. "ngmi" hadn't been popularized yet but that was very much my feeling at that moment. Active development ceased by the end of the year. [0] which I think could have panned out at least technically, given sufficient resources, time, etc

dcminter 1y ago
> ... a willingness to promise whatever carriers and OEMs wanted to close a distribution deal... That always struck me as one of the more impressive things that Jobs achieved with the original iPhone - getting buy-in from Cingular to do things Apple's way and not Cingular's. Pre-iPod Apple probably couldn't have done it.
- rickdeckard 1y ago
  ...and have Cingular pay a revenue-share of the monthly user-bill back to Apple in exchange for exclusivity. It cannot be overstated what a gamechanger it was to have a recurring revenue stream incrementing with each new user. Beside Blackberry, no cellphone company was able to finance maintenance based on its userbase AND hardware sales, they all only worked (and mostly still work) based on hardware-sale alone.

fabrice_d 1y ago

The Ars Technica review was for the 128MB phones (the Tarako project if you remember, shipping from the 1.3t branch). We never did a 64MB version, which was just a pipe dream from some BD folks to save a few cents of BOM costs.