3 ms·
Sigh. Part of this simply has to do with Android's fledgling early versions and their rapid development. There were a lot of things that required core updates
by drivebyacct2 14y ago
Sigh.
Part of this simply has to do with Android's fledgling early versions and their rapid development. There were a lot of things that required core updates and driver updates that OEMs drug their feet on. Now, that's pretty well smoothed out with 4.0 and 4.x and hasn't been an issue and should be much less of one going forward.
[not true:]
The great irony here of course is that Firefox OS uses SurfaceFlinger and relies on the Android stack. They can add new Gecko functionality, but if Android improves the graphics stack again -- guess what? If Firefox OS wants to leverage those (and they should) then they have to make the same core difficult-for-OEMS changes.
[/not true]
The analog of "add APIs through Gecko" is "Android Compatibility Library" that adds new functionality to older versions of Android to allow targeting of older devices.
- fabrice_d 14y agoFirefox OS doesn't use SurfaceFlinger at all. Our graphic susbsytem talks directly to the GL layer.
- drivebyacct2 14y agoYeah, I just realized that I confused Ubuntu with Firefox OS (ubuntu does use SurfaceFlinger). IIRC, as of several months ago, there were a few components that Firefox OS still piggy-backed on Android for. Either way, my point was quite invalid. Thanks for the correction.
- shawn-butler 14y agoThere is no irony other than you are misinformed. SurfaceFlinger is not really involved. They setup an OpenGLES context and then use a custom compositor. https://github.com/cgjones/mozilla-central/blob/master/widget/gonk/nsWindow.cpp#L79 https://github.com/cgjones/mozilla-central/blob/master/widge... [Edited for tone. Frustration got better of me]
- drivebyacct2 14y agoWow. Way off, my apologies. Post has been edited.