7 ms·
Firefox OS – video presentations and slides on the OS, WebAPIs
- johnmmurray 14y agoOh yay... another OS.
- javis 14y agoWhat's wrong with a variety of OSs?
- darkstalker 14y agoNothing wrong. It's just not hype-worthy because it doesn't contain the words Apple/Chrome/iOS. So most people will just ignore this.
- shardling 14y agoThey're not trying to sell a brand, though -- I believe the starting goal is to get this on low end commodity phones in South America. (Notice how everything in the original link is also available in Portuguese?) To that end they already have deals with carriers there. Since Mozilla actually has the health of the web as their main mission, they have a role catering to markets that others will neglect.
- sp332 14y agoHint... it's Linux.
- bvdbijl 14y agoThat's the kernel, not the OS.
- sp332 14y agoOK, you got me. It's GNU/Linux.
- zobzu 14y agoActually its Android/Linux A lot of parts are non-GNU. Specially the proprietary drivers.
- sp332 14y agoOh! Actually I had no idea it was based on Android, which actually makes a lot more sense for phones than the regular GNU userland. Thanks!
- cpeterso 14y agoUsing an Android kernel also allows Mozilla to leverage Google's Linux work and get hardware support "for free" from hardware vendors who won't bother writing drivers for non-Android Linux.
- shardling 14y agoThere's a brief description on wikipedia; it's called "Gonk". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox_OS#Gonk http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox_OS#Gonk
- cpeterso 14y agoI suspect "Gonk" is a pun on "Gecko" and "Android" based on Star Wars' GNK power droid: http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/GNK_power_droid http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/GNK_power_droid
- lbenes 14y agoSo basically, you're getting an Android phone, minus the 700,000 Apps? Thanks, but no thanks. The whole idea of using HTML, CCS, and JavaScript as the back end technology for a low-end smartphone is nuts. Even the best HTML rendering engines are CPU and memory hogs. CSS was never designed for and is nearly impossible to hardware accelerate, and JavaScript is notoriously difficult to optimize and even the best VMs like V8 run orders of magnitude slower then Native code, while the VM itself takes up a massive amount of memory. Mozilla should focus on building a competitive browser. At the end of the day, I want a responsive fast phone, like the iPhone or Galaxy S3, not some dog slow HTML5 monstrosity.
- y0ghur7_xxx 14y agoSorry for the OT, but I always get a certificate error when visiting that domain. Am I the only one? http://www.sslshopper.com/ssl-checker.html#hostname=hacks.mozilla.org http://www.sslshopper.com/ssl-checker.html#hostname=hacks.mo... Says the cert is ok, but my firefox complains: hacks.mozilla.org uses an invalid security certificate. The certificate is only valid for tbpl.mozilla.org (Error code: ssl_error_bad_cert_domain) Maybe there is something wrong with my network.
- dbaupp 14y agoIt's fine for me.
- JimmaDaRustla 14y agoUpdate your browser - happens to me in IE8, but not Chrome 22. Certification verification is done by the browser, and I believe they store acceptable CA signers somehow, which is probably out dated. Edit: Don't quote me, been a while since studying site certificates.
- y0ghur7_xxx 14y agoI have the latest ff: 16.0.2. I even tried $ openssl s_client -connect hacks.mozilla.org:443 from a linode vm: CONNECTED(00000003) --- Certificate chain 0 s:/serialNumber=I1oZ-yurbFWiPu/xP8HIzW3f9mApQvMv/C=US/ST=California/L=Mountain View/O=Mozilla Corporation/OU=IT/CN=tbpl.mozilla.org i:/C=US/O=GeoTrust, Inc./CN=GeoTrust SSL CA 1 s:/C=US/O=GeoTrust, Inc./CN=GeoTrust SSL CA i:/C=US/O=GeoTrust Inc./CN=GeoTrust Global CA 2 s:/C=US/O=GeoTrust Inc./CN=GeoTrust Global CA i:/C=US/O=Equifax/OU=Equifax Secure Certificate Authority --- Server certificate [...] subject=/serialNumber=I1oZ-yurbFWiPu/xP8HIzW3f9mApQvMv/C=US/ST=California/L=Mountain View/O=Mozilla Corporation/OU=IT/CN=tbpl.mozilla.org issuer=/C=US/O=GeoTrust, Inc./CN=GeoTrust SSL CA Any idea?
- superawesome 14y agos_client doesn't support SNI, so this is expected behavior. The client (s_client) doesn't know how to tell the server what hostname it's requesting during the handshake... so the server returns the default one. After the handshake completes, normal HTTP semantics kick in and the client/server have no problems... but by then it's too late, and the client has already negotiated based on the wrong cert.
- jobu 14y agoThere's no mention of gaming in those slides. Will they be supporting WebGL?
- leeoniya 14y agoi haven't been this excited about something in a long time. what i wouldn't give to hack my own phone without learning proprietary platforms.
- slacka 14y agoThen get yourself a Nexus Android phone today. The OS is completely open source, with a whole community built around hacking phones, XDA. You can get much better performance out of Java than you could ever dream to with JavaScript. Many of FF OS's hardware APIs are Mozilla specific, no different than Android's.
- leeoniya 14y agoi run CM7 nightly on my original Evo 4G (WiMax). i have done a fair bit of customizing it, but without learning Java in addition to the huge android framework, it's a pretty gnarly task to make significant changes. i think that firefox OS will do to the smartphone ecosystem what github did to open source contribution revival. not having to touch the OS guts, and just scripting against some additional APIs is a huge win for simplification to the whole hacking process. the mozilla-specific stuff will start proprietary like android, but all of their work is submitted for standards adoption and is almost certainly needed in one form or another.
- slacka 14y agoCM7? Why aren't you running ICS? Even the official Sprint firmware has been upgraded. Yes, JavaScript has come a long way with the latest engines. However, it's still a long ways away from being competitive with iOS or Android NDK Apps. Even Mozilla's poster child for the potential of HTML5 in 3D gaming, Banana Bread, is 4-10x slower than its native counterpart Cube 2.
- leeoniya 14y agoi occasionally flash CM9 and CM10 nightlies to see if performance has improved. unfortunately both are significantly slower even with third party kernels than CM7. also, there are no 4G/WiMax drivers for anything above GB, so i really have no better options. it sux i cannot run latest native browser or chrome, but i run FF mobile nightly and Opera if i need the latest goodies.
- pajju 14y agoMozilla nurtured the web with Firefox. This is yet another great project for the Mobile ecosystem. I always wished for myself and for the larger web community a 'Rock solid web based Open' Mobile Platform. And it is happening fast. All such advancements are only possible today, as we have faster Javascript engines, can leverage Cloud services, access to cheaper hardware and much faster Internet Penetration and adoption than ever before. The web can function as a strong platform by itself and not a hybrid model. Also let's not forget the big failure of the over hyped Palm WebOS. Many said - it was too early; not ready for the market. I too agreed then. :) Lets hope Firefox has good design patterns and moves agile. Couple of things I wish everyone knows - 1. Are all the System level API's ready? Telephone API, Sensor API's et al. It looks to me, its under prototype and design, what's the current stage? 2. Can this leverage WebGL and all HTML5 features? 3. AFAIK, all the front end is around Javascript or some Javascript MVC. Are there any other programming API's?
- zobzu 14y ago2. WebGL works fine, HTML5 works fine. This is Firefox's Gecko. Everything that works on Desktop works on Firefox OS. For 1. and 3., here's the Web API: https://wiki.mozilla.org/WebAPI https://wiki.mozilla.org/WebAPI Should answer all your questions, I hope
- litmus 14y agoSeriously, I don't know why exactly but this stuff makes me feel like a dirty utopian hippie despite all the steely-eyed "realist" devil's advocate posturing people can summon. I only wish FirefoxOS devices were around to have been considered for our retarded "give every child a tablet" program that's underway in Turkey, especially given the rumors that Mozilla is shooting for the cheap end of the market. As expected, the tablets for the program are being marketed as a toy.
- litmus 14y agodownvote explanation? alluding to the notion that a open standards based mobile OS may be an ideal candidate for a state-funded tablet education push is bad because...why exactly? ed: the above post is not meant to be sarcastic. dirty utopian hippie = optimistic in a good way
- thelukester 14y agoMozilla has lost their way with Firefox, and are becoming like MS. They have a slow, bloated browser that runs terribly on Android. Instead of trying to make the best browser for the platform, they created FF OS, locking the user into their platform and API standards, just like MS tried to do when it bundled IE in Windows. I had a WebOS phone and despite loving the beautiful UI and it being ahead of iOS in many ways like notifications and task switching, I dumped it. HTML5 killed the user experience. I need fast, responsive apps that only Android and iOS can deliver. There's no way I'd ever go back to generic, laggy, HTML5 Apps.
- sawrubh 14y agoRegarding your comment on HTML5 being "laggy", I think you should take a look at https://hacks.mozilla.org/2012/11/html5-mythbusting/ https://hacks.mozilla.org/2012/11/html5-mythbusting/ Besides, Mozilla is not trying to tie down anyone to it's platform, because the platform is basically the Web, which is open to everyone. There are many things which distinguish it from other platforms like you can host your "apps", which are nothing more than simple websites, on your own site and not necessarily Mozilla's MarketPlace. Mozilla is working hard to reduce the memory footprint and make the apps responsive[1] and by the time it comes out, I think it's going to have a really good performance. [1] - https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=797189 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=797189