10 ms·

I used Firefox OS for 30 days and it made me want to quit phones

95 points by msh 13y ago

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
fidotron 13y ago
Firefox OS remains highly unlikely to go anywhere with the current direction. They need a rethink, fairly fast, as Android has got the "we're not iOS" market sewn up at this point. (MS are about the only group left with any hope whatsoever, and that's fairly slim). As has been repeatedly demonstrated web technology based operating systems simply don't run well on mobile, especially if (like FFOS) you haven't got completely GPU accelerated graphics, which is a slight problem on lower res screens like the Open, but is completely essential for anything in the 720p or greater territory. Chasing Chrome OS in netbook land would be enormously more entertaining, and far more likely to actually get some traction, especially with the recent negative noise about any cloud services.
xkarga00 13y ago
How about the Alcatel OneTouch Fire? Has anyone got his/her hands on it?
- jbeja 13y ago
  It has the same spec so is pretty much the same, but with a different look and slightly bigger screen
cleverjake 13y ago
I reallllllly think this author misses the point of firefox os. it is not meant to "take on android" it is meant to take on feature/dumb phones. People who store their contacts on their sim card, and pay for things using SMS.
- gagege 13y ago
  What's wrong with storing contacts on a SIM card? Seems like a good idea, just move it to a new phone and boom, all your contacts are there.
  - wcummings 13y ago
    All the cool kids sync their data in "THE CLOUD"
  - hmottestad 13y ago
    You are fairly limited w/regards to space.
  - gbl08ma 13y ago
    My main problem with it is the lack of enough fields to store all contact information. If you have, for example, a person's home phone number and mobile phone number, you end up using two entries instead of one, because last time I checked (and at least on the SIM cards I own) the storage format is a simple two-column list: Name-Phone. Furthermore, there are strict limits on the amount of characters one can insert (and the character set is very limited, too). Additionally, one can only store 250 entries or so (varies from card to card). To sum it up in one word, for me it's very unpractical. I remember having to use Bluetooth to transfer contacts from a old feature-phone to a new feature-phone because, obviously, the SIM card would not hold all the contact information I had in the old phone. We certainly have the technology to make better cards with more storage (BTW, the space for SMS text storage on the cards I own is ridiculously small, too). But as people moved on to store information on "rich" contact systems and, more recently, in the cloud, I think there isn't much motivation to innovate in that area.
    - gagege 13y ago
      Interesting. I didn't know they had those limitations. Better off with regular SD card backups then.
  - SifJar 13y ago
    Not as good as syncing to some online service e.g. Google. I recently bought a new Android phone, before that I used a Windows Phone 8 phone and before that another Android. On both the WP8 and second Android, I simply logged into my Google account and all my contacts synced in mere minutes. (On the Android, it also reinstalled all my apps, reconnected to all my WiFi hotspots etc.). I believe a SIM card can hold 100 numbers. Many people will have more numbers than that, so that's not really a viable alternative. Manually exporting to an SD card and then importing (which I believe can be done on Firefox OS, although exporting requires a third party app) is another option, but it's not as convenient as syncing to an online service.
- kevining 13y ago
  Exactly. When the author mentions, "I like playing around with smartphones", he is immediately ruled out from the target audience of FirefoxOS today. Perhaps in the future it may compete evenly with android/iOS, but that's not an immediate goal.
- wanderr 13y ago
  I think that's the short-term strategy, but the long-term strategy probably is to take on Android. As it stands now it seems like Firefox OS is a good proof of concept but is lacking in polish and is a bit unreliable. I had a chance to play with a Firefox OS phone a few months ago, and I would probably opt for a feature phone over that, right now. In a year or less though, I think it could be a viable replacement. For competing with Android, they have a lot of catching up to do, but I think it's within reach and not requiring devs to learn another api/platform to create apps for it should help them get past the biggest hurdle any new players in the smartphone OS have to contend with, which is a lack of apps.
  - Touche 13y ago
    Remember that the apps being written for Firefox OS are the first of their kind. They had to write IMAP libraries from bits and pieces of Node libraries because no one had ever tried to write an IMAP library for the browser before (of course you couldn't in the past) whereas Java has many mature libraries to choose from. A lot of the complaints surrounding Firefox OS are stuff like this, the Mozilla guys are doing a lot of from-scratch implementations of complicated protocols
- alexqgb 13y ago
  What I understand from a friend who works for Mozilla, their interest is in "the next two billion people to come online." That is to say, people who are outside the smartphone saturated bubble of the first world and who are unlikely to jump to iPhones on LTE in the foreseeable future. This really is about a designing a system that works in the incredibly constrained and frequently unstable conditions of the developing world. If you've ever been there, you know it's a really different universe - politically, socially, culturally, economically, and technologically. And yes, all these factors influence the definition of solution correctly optimized for its environment. Without an understanding of that environment, it's hard to judge whether or not Mozilla is hitting its marks.
  - tsuyoshi 13y ago
    I lived in Cambodia for a couple years, and my wife and daughter were born there. It is, as you say, a different universe. I agree that most people in developing countries are not jumping to iPhones anytime soon (although they all want one, Apple simply doesn't care about people who can't drop hundreds of dollars on a phone), but LTE is definitely coming. I don't at all see why they won't all be buying smartphones in the near future. At the low end, there are already Android phones selling for less than $100. What would prevent them from eventually getting down the price to where feature phones are now?
- Dewie 13y ago
  The author addresses that: > If this was the first ‘smart’phone I ever used, I’d wonder what the hell the fuss was all about, and return to my trusty Nokia 3310 in confusion.
  - cleverjake 13y ago
    That is not addressing it, it is projecting his own bias into a situation he doesn't know. You are assuming because it types slowly, it isn't worthwhile to have all of wikipedia, google, and every other website out there available. For someone who has never had a smartphone, having the internet on your phone could be a TREMENDOUS deal.
    - Dewie 13y ago
      > That is not addressing it, it is projecting his own bias into a situation he doesn't know. It is addressing it, although perhaps with a particular bias. Don't try to twist words like that. And unlike people who have never had smartphones, he obviously has the experience of both having a dumb phone and a smart phone, so he knows how it is to not have things like a browser on a phone, though you might argue that that was probably in a time where you didn't gain a lot from having convenient access to the Web... but then you're starting to really draw in many assumptions about the author just because you refuse to concede any point when it comes to what you wrote. ;)
programminggeek 13y ago
I haven't used Firefox OS, but I've wrote PhoneGap apps for iOS and Android, and the biggest problem is just that it puts the developer experience before the end user experience and that seems backwards to what makes a great product. Yes, using the same code everywhere is cool, but if it takes longer to load, is less responsive, and has a worse experience, you have saved yourself time, but made something worse. I imagine it like a 3D printed plastic hammer. If I want a cheap toy for my kids maybe it's great, but if I'm putting a new roof on my house I want a real hammer, forged in steel, etc. You know, so that I can have the best tool for driving nails into wood. I don't care that it would be cheaper/faster to make a plastic hammer, I care about a tool that is great. I know that properly executed and with enough processing power, maybe performance is a mostly non-issue, but in my experience mobile JS dev isn't there yet and it's not remarkably better this year than last. I hope this Firefox OS thing works out for Mozilla, but until the perf issues are solved, it's not going to be too exciting.
- Touche 13y ago
  > I haven't used Firefox OS, but I've wrote PhoneGap apps for iOS and Android, and the biggest problem is just that it puts the developer experience before the end user experience and that seems backwards to what makes a great product. I strongly disagree with your definition of "user experience". I believe that changing phones and having to install different apps, with different UIs, or possibly doing without one because the new phone doesn't have an equivalent, is a bad user experience. This is my opinion as a user, not as a developer.
  - Tloewald 13y ago
    So, as a user, you don't change phones to one that forces you to do without your favorite apps, learn a new UI, and so on.
    - Touche 13y ago
      The fact that I need to worry about this at all is a bad user experience.
wcummings 13y ago
I picked one of these up because it was $80 unlocked, well w/in impulse buy range, and anyone w/ some webdev chops can churn out an app w/o learning [STUPID DEV STACK THAT DOESNT WORK ANYWHERE ELSE]. I wish there was some slicker FFOS hardware, but I like where the platform is going
- candl 13y ago
  And how is HTML any better? This is a good example : http://fb.html5isready.com/ http://fb.html5isready.com/ a fairly sophisticated facebook application in HTML. It's barely usable on my Lumia 920 (IE10), barely usable on my BlackBerry Z10 (webkit based browser) and doesn't even render properly on a Nexus 7 2012 (Firefox). All these are pretty powerful devices. Doesn't look like HTML is working everywhere as people claim.
  - gagege 13y ago
    Moto G with Firefox. Header renders but has graphical errors. Main body of page doesn't render at all. html5isready? Funny.
  - zobzu 13y ago
    I just go to facebook.com with firefox on the nexus 7 and it just works waaaaaaaaay better than this website you refer. So.. I don't think it's an HTML problem. Turns out, facebook.com also works great on my desktop browser.
  - Touche 13y ago
    That was built in a couple of days as a demonstration, it's not a production-quality app.
- malkia 13y ago
  It's also great if you want to go to a foreign country, or if (like me) have to visit back your native one. It has good battery usage, and it works pretty good for it's purpose (phone first). for $50 the best I could find was very old design phones (back in Buglaria) that looked a lot worse than the $80 deal from FFOS (and they were locked at that, while ZTE is open). So I think the PRICE should be taken very seriously here. I love my Nexus, and I love my wife's iPhone, and my friends' fancy Samsung, etc. - but each one of them is multiple times more expensive than the ZTE Open. And it might finally make me start develop more for the web (did too much C/C++ over the years).
bluekitten 13y ago
The author seems miss the point in the comparison to the Moto G's price, since ZTE does not have a ~$50B search business to subsidize its phone business(Motorola's been losing money at a fast clip) and needs to make money on every phone it sells, it's not really a valid comparison. Android phones in the < $150 price range are quite slow too. That said, it seems to be underperforming other OSes. I remember WebOS on my HP Touchpad had issues with scroll and lagging even on a dual core 1.5GHz processor. Anyone know how the CPU in the ZTE Open(single core Cortex A5 at 1GHz) compares to the Qualcomm MSM7227A Snapdragon CPU Cortex-A5 in the Lumia 510(A WP7 phone)? Both have the same GPU(Adreno 200) and 256MB RAM, but the 510 doesn't seem to have that many issues with lag despite the ZTE Open being clocked 25% higher. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDZQuEn2mMM http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDZQuEn2mMM
- sirkneeland 13y ago
  The Lumia 510 was indeed a WP7 phone, and one the (few?) things WP got right was smooth performance on low end hardware.
- eropple 13y ago
  > The author seems miss the point in the comparison to the Moto G's price, since ZTE does not have a ~$50B search business to subsidize its phone business(Motorola's been losing money at a fast clip) and needs to make money on every phone it sells, it's not really a valid comparison. It's an eminently valid comparison because the Moto G exists and is sold for $179. Sure, they have advantages that let them do that. No consumer cares. (Few developers care.)
shmerl 13y ago
Try Sailfish.
rimantas 13y ago
I just saw instructions how to upgrade to 1.1 and it became clear how far away from prime-time Firefox OS is.
- soapdog 13y ago
  FirefoxOS consumer phones upgrade over the air just like Android and iOS devices. The developer preview phones are unlocked so the developer can opt to update by hand from his own copy of Firefox OS.
- mattl 13y ago
  Updating is OTA. Updating the developer phone? Harder.
dubcanada 13y ago
Dude, it's not even a "released" phone yet, what you have is a dev version at best.
- randomchars 13y ago
  If it's sold in stores and featured in advertisements, it is released.
canadev 13y ago
While FF OS does sound pretty bad from the descriptions in article, I'm willing to cut it some slack. Sounds like it should not have been released at this point, to me, but the biggest benefit (IMO) of open-source software is that things can get patched. And if you look at the activity on the FF browser, it can happen very fast. This article encouraged me to clone the source code and play with it -- but after nearly 20 years of software development I'm starting to learn that my eyes are bigger than my stomach. Still, for anyone interested: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Firefox_OS/Building_and_installing_Firefox_OS https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Firefox_OS/Building_and_... Now, I would like to start hacking on the browser at some point... http://codefirefox.com/ http://codefirefox.com/ In conclusion, I feel that their release process (like don't release until it works properly) is broken, but hopefully will be fixed, and I am almost glad that the product sucks, because it shows such room for improvement. I think the mobile industry, and the software industry more generally, is still young.
zobzu 13y ago
tldr: user expected 3y old phone hardware and from-scratch OS to beat Android/iOS on quad core devices, got disappointed.
dserban 13y ago
Firefox OS isn't aimed at Android, as the article implies. I don't think it's even meant to be aimed at something, not even at dumbphones. The intent is to provide a fallback digital-freedom option, should any of the mobile players ever start to exhibit monopolistic tendencies. Firefox OS is a hedge that Mozilla is building for us.
jfoster 13y ago
People wrote this type of article about Android when the first Android phone had come out. Mozilla can definitely salvage this and it's natural that it would take more iteration before they arrive at a really good user experience. I think the big problem Mozilla face is that they haven't been left much of an opening by Android. Even if they offer a wonderful user experience, why would anyone prefer a Firefox phone over an Android phone?
- andrewflnr 13y ago
  Because it's a third or less of the cost of an Android.
  - msh 13y ago
    You can get a Chinese android phone for 80usd
soapdog 13y ago
Disclaimer: I am a Mozilla Rep volunteering with Firefox OS stuff. Let me address some misconceptions in this article and why I think it is misguided but first lets be sure that we're all on the same page and that people are entitled to their own opinion, even if we disagree. Firefox OS is not made to fight mid-range and high-end Android devices. Firefox OS was created with the following main objectives: - Create a Free and Open mobile source operating that is developed in the open. Android does not fit this bill because Google only release Android source code once the job is done and is not keen on accepting contributions from third-party. Firefox OS is on github from day one and everyone is encouraged to contribute. - Create a system based on web technologies where using nothing but HTML/CSS/JS you can access all phone features. The mobile ecosystem was becoming a closed market where each vendor had their own proprietary system and walled garden. Firefox OS is open and use open standards for development. Apps made for Firefox OS can be used in other systems with minimal fiddling. - Create devices that were cheaper than the usual low-end Android device. The market is not the U.S. the market is Latin America, East Europe, Asia where people don't have the same budgets as U.S. In Brazil an iPhone costs USD 1000 at least where Firefox OS costs about USD 80 without contract. The Moto G device quoted on the article costs about USD 350 here. Now with this objective in mind, lets review some parts of this article. The phone does not have two marketplaces. There is the adaptative search that displays web apps based on a search query. You can use those apps once (open the page) or save them (add a link to them) to the launcher. The Firefox Marketplace will provide you with apps. Saying that the adaptative search is a marketplace is saying that because Google Now can search the web it rivals Google Play. On the current version of Firefox OS being shipped you can add contacts from SIM Card, Facebook and GMail. There are apps on the marketplace to import vCards and other contact sources. You can add email accounts from many popular providers and from scratch using IMAP or POP. There is an issue with self signed certificates meaning that on some special cases, people hosting their own email can't add the server because the certificate is not recognized. This is being addressed in the open. Apps are made by their developers, not by Mozilla. If the Twitter or Facebook app does not work as well as it should is because those developers are not doing the necessary effort. When I say necessary effort is because its so damn simple to pick a mobile web site and just add it as an app that some developers forget to optmize the experience to be more app like with things such as appcache. The Twitter app when first launched was pretty bad, these days after some updates it became quite decent. The Facebook app still basically their mobile web version and has a lot of room for improvement. Anyway, this is responsability of the developers. The fact that there are apps that the author considers embarrassing is a good thing, it proves how easy it is to develop for the system. Do an exercise, imagine if the world wide web instead of using HTML/CSS/JS used 6502 Assembly language and that to code for it you would need to do it in that language. How many web developers we would have? How open and accessible the web would be? One of the cool things about the web is that it is really easy to cook something that is usable. To build great experiences in the web requires a lot of knowledge but to build something that works it is quite easy. Because of this Firefox OS is approachable by hackers and new developers alike and this is reflected in the current marketplace. Another thing is that Mozilla doesn't charge you anything to be able to place apps in the marketplace and there is no SDK or special computer/OS (Apple I am looking at you) required to build apps for Firefox OS. Anyone can do it. This is good, democratic and pays well in the long run, just look how popular the web is today. Nokia Here maps has navigation. Also, criticism about Here maps should not be directed at Firefox OS. Its like blaming Mac OS X for the lack of triple A games. There is no fragmentation in Firefox OS. Just like you can browse the web in Firefox 25 or Chrome or Firefox 18. You can use the apps in different versions of the OS. The companies that build Firefox OS are required by contract not to wait more than six months before updating the phones. This means that in the worst case scenario, it updates at double speed than the usual competitors that have yearly updates. The vendors are updating it more quickly though. It took just some months from Firefox OS 1.0 to 1.1. Also Firefox OS is divided in three components (gonk, gecko, gaia) and updating Gaia is pretty easy. Anyway. The article missed the point which is an open system for a cheap device aimed at emerging markets. This is not a competitor to iPhone 5 or Galaxy S4. The main competition is dumb phones and very low end Android devices that have crap performance.
elktea 13y ago
> Surprisingly, given the ZTE Open’s wheezing 1GHz single-core processor and the feeble 256MB of RAM, [Cut the rope] didn’t choke and was perfectly playable. In what world would a modern 1GHz processor have any issues with a simple 2D game running at a low resolution?
sergiotapia 13y ago
At this point I don't care! I'm rooting for Mozilla as they are most definitely the company I trust more than any other in the world. They are really transparent and it has the community support Google wishes it had. I really hope it catches on with the years. I'm still bitter that I can only use Objective-C to make iPhone apps. I mean, objective-c!?
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
null_ptr 13y ago
Reading this made me realize what a thick skin you need to put your work out there and not be phased by such negativity. It's also a reminder about the high degree of entitlement software development outsiders have.
dpcan 13y ago
I had a similar experience, only I really enjoyed the OS, but the hardware was completely unusable for me and how I use my phone, which is more like a computer than a phone. I was so frustrated with how slow everything was that I just had to go back to my old phone (which at the time was a Windows Phone 7 - go figure). I really think that FFOS on really fast hardware would be awesome. The phone & experience actually reminded me of my old G1, but at that time, there wasn't much to go back to until I got the iPhone 3GS :)
ksec 13y ago
As Far as i am concern, Mozilla has never been great ( or even good ) with User Experience. So it is no surprise all those time they wasted on Firefox OS didn't bring any major ground breaking achievement. However I do admire them to continue working on "Open Web". Open Codec etc. Sometimes I just wish they could be more realistic.
IlPeach 13y ago
I've bought the ZTE Open through a friend of mine from Spain. As other have said the article is a bit biased and it doesn't stand the comparison with Android or anything really. It's a very young OS (remember the first few versions of Android?). But, this said, my biggest gripe is the touch screen of the device in question. I really thought there would have been better touch screens available for that price. Bummer.
tluyben2 13y ago
Flashbacks from when I got a Lumia because I thought I needed to try it. After trying to like it, I tried to avoid using the thing at all for anything and I reverted back to my S2 after a few weeks. My wife had the same reaction and got an iPhone. I use the Lumia to build apps solely now; outside that it's switched off.

95 points by msh 13y ago

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

Firefox OS remains highly unlikely to go anywhere with the current direction. They need a rethink, fairly fast, as Android has got the "we're not iOS" market sewn up at this point. (MS are about the only group left with any hope whatsoever, and that's fairly slim). As has been repeatedly demonstrated web technology based operating systems simply don't run well on mobile, especially if (like FFOS) you haven't got completely GPU accelerated graphics, which is a slight problem on lower res screens like the Open, but is completely essential for anything in the 720p or greater territory. Chasing Chrome OS in netbook land would be enormously more entertaining, and far more likely to actually get some traction, especially with the recent negative noise about any cloud services.

xkarga00 13y ago

How about the Alcatel OneTouch Fire? Has anyone got his/her hands on it?

jbeja 13y ago
It has the same spec so is pretty much the same, but with a different look and slightly bigger screen

cleverjake 13y ago

I reallllllly think this author misses the point of firefox os. it is not meant to "take on android" it is meant to take on feature/dumb phones. People who store their contacts on their sim card, and pay for things using SMS.

gagege 13y ago
What's wrong with storing contacts on a SIM card? Seems like a good idea, just move it to a new phone and boom, all your contacts are there.
- wcummings 13y ago
  All the cool kids sync their data in "THE CLOUD"
- hmottestad 13y ago
  You are fairly limited w/regards to space.
- gbl08ma 13y ago
  My main problem with it is the lack of enough fields to store all contact information. If you have, for example, a person's home phone number and mobile phone number, you end up using two entries instead of one, because last time I checked (and at least on the SIM cards I own) the storage format is a simple two-column list: Name-Phone. Furthermore, there are strict limits on the amount of characters one can insert (and the character set is very limited, too). Additionally, one can only store 250 entries or so (varies from card to card). To sum it up in one word, for me it's very unpractical. I remember having to use Bluetooth to transfer contacts from a old feature-phone to a new feature-phone because, obviously, the SIM card would not hold all the contact information I had in the old phone. We certainly have the technology to make better cards with more storage (BTW, the space for SMS text storage on the cards I own is ridiculously small, too). But as people moved on to store information on "rich" contact systems and, more recently, in the cloud, I think there isn't much motivation to innovate in that area.
  - gagege 13y ago
    Interesting. I didn't know they had those limitations. Better off with regular SD card backups then.
- SifJar 13y ago
  Not as good as syncing to some online service e.g. Google. I recently bought a new Android phone, before that I used a Windows Phone 8 phone and before that another Android. On both the WP8 and second Android, I simply logged into my Google account and all my contacts synced in mere minutes. (On the Android, it also reinstalled all my apps, reconnected to all my WiFi hotspots etc.). I believe a SIM card can hold 100 numbers. Many people will have more numbers than that, so that's not really a viable alternative. Manually exporting to an SD card and then importing (which I believe can be done on Firefox OS, although exporting requires a third party app) is another option, but it's not as convenient as syncing to an online service.
kevining 13y ago
Exactly. When the author mentions, "I like playing around with smartphones", he is immediately ruled out from the target audience of FirefoxOS today. Perhaps in the future it may compete evenly with android/iOS, but that's not an immediate goal.
wanderr 13y ago
I think that's the short-term strategy, but the long-term strategy probably is to take on Android. As it stands now it seems like Firefox OS is a good proof of concept but is lacking in polish and is a bit unreliable. I had a chance to play with a Firefox OS phone a few months ago, and I would probably opt for a feature phone over that, right now. In a year or less though, I think it could be a viable replacement. For competing with Android, they have a lot of catching up to do, but I think it's within reach and not requiring devs to learn another api/platform to create apps for it should help them get past the biggest hurdle any new players in the smartphone OS have to contend with, which is a lack of apps.
- Touche 13y ago
  Remember that the apps being written for Firefox OS are the first of their kind. They had to write IMAP libraries from bits and pieces of Node libraries because no one had ever tried to write an IMAP library for the browser before (of course you couldn't in the past) whereas Java has many mature libraries to choose from. A lot of the complaints surrounding Firefox OS are stuff like this, the Mozilla guys are doing a lot of from-scratch implementations of complicated protocols
alexqgb 13y ago
What I understand from a friend who works for Mozilla, their interest is in "the next two billion people to come online." That is to say, people who are outside the smartphone saturated bubble of the first world and who are unlikely to jump to iPhones on LTE in the foreseeable future. This really is about a designing a system that works in the incredibly constrained and frequently unstable conditions of the developing world. If you've ever been there, you know it's a really different universe - politically, socially, culturally, economically, and technologically. And yes, all these factors influence the definition of solution correctly optimized for its environment. Without an understanding of that environment, it's hard to judge whether or not Mozilla is hitting its marks.
- tsuyoshi 13y ago
  I lived in Cambodia for a couple years, and my wife and daughter were born there. It is, as you say, a different universe. I agree that most people in developing countries are not jumping to iPhones anytime soon (although they all want one, Apple simply doesn't care about people who can't drop hundreds of dollars on a phone), but LTE is definitely coming. I don't at all see why they won't all be buying smartphones in the near future. At the low end, there are already Android phones selling for less than $100. What would prevent them from eventually getting down the price to where feature phones are now?
Dewie 13y ago
The author addresses that: > If this was the first ‘smart’phone I ever used, I’d wonder what the hell the fuss was all about, and return to my trusty Nokia 3310 in confusion.
- cleverjake 13y ago
  That is not addressing it, it is projecting his own bias into a situation he doesn't know. You are assuming because it types slowly, it isn't worthwhile to have all of wikipedia, google, and every other website out there available. For someone who has never had a smartphone, having the internet on your phone could be a TREMENDOUS deal.
  - Dewie 13y ago
    > That is not addressing it, it is projecting his own bias into a situation he doesn't know. It is addressing it, although perhaps with a particular bias. Don't try to twist words like that. And unlike people who have never had smartphones, he obviously has the experience of both having a dumb phone and a smart phone, so he knows how it is to not have things like a browser on a phone, though you might argue that that was probably in a time where you didn't gain a lot from having convenient access to the Web... but then you're starting to really draw in many assumptions about the author just because you refuse to concede any point when it comes to what you wrote. ;)

programminggeek 13y ago

I haven't used Firefox OS, but I've wrote PhoneGap apps for iOS and Android, and the biggest problem is just that it puts the developer experience before the end user experience and that seems backwards to what makes a great product. Yes, using the same code everywhere is cool, but if it takes longer to load, is less responsive, and has a worse experience, you have saved yourself time, but made something worse. I imagine it like a 3D printed plastic hammer. If I want a cheap toy for my kids maybe it's great, but if I'm putting a new roof on my house I want a real hammer, forged in steel, etc. You know, so that I can have the best tool for driving nails into wood. I don't care that it would be cheaper/faster to make a plastic hammer, I care about a tool that is great. I know that properly executed and with enough processing power, maybe performance is a mostly non-issue, but in my experience mobile JS dev isn't there yet and it's not remarkably better this year than last. I hope this Firefox OS thing works out for Mozilla, but until the perf issues are solved, it's not going to be too exciting.

Touche 13y ago
> I haven't used Firefox OS, but I've wrote PhoneGap apps for iOS and Android, and the biggest problem is just that it puts the developer experience before the end user experience and that seems backwards to what makes a great product. I strongly disagree with your definition of "user experience". I believe that changing phones and having to install different apps, with different UIs, or possibly doing without one because the new phone doesn't have an equivalent, is a bad user experience. This is my opinion as a user, not as a developer.
- Tloewald 13y ago
  So, as a user, you don't change phones to one that forces you to do without your favorite apps, learn a new UI, and so on.
  - Touche 13y ago
    The fact that I need to worry about this at all is a bad user experience.

wcummings 13y ago

I picked one of these up because it was $80 unlocked, well w/in impulse buy range, and anyone w/ some webdev chops can churn out an app w/o learning [STUPID DEV STACK THAT DOESNT WORK ANYWHERE ELSE]. I wish there was some slicker FFOS hardware, but I like where the platform is going

candl 13y ago
And how is HTML any better? This is a good example : http://fb.html5isready.com/ http://fb.html5isready.com/ a fairly sophisticated facebook application in HTML. It's barely usable on my Lumia 920 (IE10), barely usable on my BlackBerry Z10 (webkit based browser) and doesn't even render properly on a Nexus 7 2012 (Firefox). All these are pretty powerful devices. Doesn't look like HTML is working everywhere as people claim.
- gagege 13y ago
  Moto G with Firefox. Header renders but has graphical errors. Main body of page doesn't render at all. html5isready? Funny.
- zobzu 13y ago
  I just go to facebook.com with firefox on the nexus 7 and it just works waaaaaaaaay better than this website you refer. So.. I don't think it's an HTML problem. Turns out, facebook.com also works great on my desktop browser.
- Touche 13y ago
  That was built in a couple of days as a demonstration, it's not a production-quality app.
malkia 13y ago
It's also great if you want to go to a foreign country, or if (like me) have to visit back your native one. It has good battery usage, and it works pretty good for it's purpose (phone first). for $50 the best I could find was very old design phones (back in Buglaria) that looked a lot worse than the $80 deal from FFOS (and they were locked at that, while ZTE is open). So I think the PRICE should be taken very seriously here. I love my Nexus, and I love my wife's iPhone, and my friends' fancy Samsung, etc. - but each one of them is multiple times more expensive than the ZTE Open. And it might finally make me start develop more for the web (did too much C/C++ over the years).

bluekitten 13y ago

The author seems miss the point in the comparison to the Moto G's price, since ZTE does not have a ~$50B search business to subsidize its phone business(Motorola's been losing money at a fast clip) and needs to make money on every phone it sells, it's not really a valid comparison. Android phones in the < $150 price range are quite slow too. That said, it seems to be underperforming other OSes. I remember WebOS on my HP Touchpad had issues with scroll and lagging even on a dual core 1.5GHz processor. Anyone know how the CPU in the ZTE Open(single core Cortex A5 at 1GHz) compares to the Qualcomm MSM7227A Snapdragon CPU Cortex-A5 in the Lumia 510(A WP7 phone)? Both have the same GPU(Adreno 200) and 256MB RAM, but the 510 doesn't seem to have that many issues with lag despite the ZTE Open being clocked 25% higher. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDZQuEn2mMM http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDZQuEn2mMM

sirkneeland 13y ago
The Lumia 510 was indeed a WP7 phone, and one the (few?) things WP got right was smooth performance on low end hardware.
eropple 13y ago
> The author seems miss the point in the comparison to the Moto G's price, since ZTE does not have a ~$50B search business to subsidize its phone business(Motorola's been losing money at a fast clip) and needs to make money on every phone it sells, it's not really a valid comparison. It's an eminently valid comparison because the Moto G exists and is sold for $179. Sure, they have advantages that let them do that. No consumer cares. (Few developers care.)

shmerl 13y ago

Try Sailfish.

rimantas 13y ago

I just saw instructions how to upgrade to 1.1 and it became clear how far away from prime-time Firefox OS is.

soapdog 13y ago
FirefoxOS consumer phones upgrade over the air just like Android and iOS devices. The developer preview phones are unlocked so the developer can opt to update by hand from his own copy of Firefox OS.
mattl 13y ago
Updating is OTA. Updating the developer phone? Harder.

dubcanada 13y ago

Dude, it's not even a "released" phone yet, what you have is a dev version at best.

randomchars 13y ago
If it's sold in stores and featured in advertisements, it is released.

canadev 13y ago

While FF OS does sound pretty bad from the descriptions in article, I'm willing to cut it some slack. Sounds like it should not have been released at this point, to me, but the biggest benefit (IMO) of open-source software is that things can get patched. And if you look at the activity on the FF browser, it can happen very fast. This article encouraged me to clone the source code and play with it -- but after nearly 20 years of software development I'm starting to learn that my eyes are bigger than my stomach. Still, for anyone interested: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Firefox_OS/Building_and_installing_Firefox_OS https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Firefox_OS/Building_and_... Now, I would like to start hacking on the browser at some point... http://codefirefox.com/ http://codefirefox.com/ In conclusion, I feel that their release process (like don't release until it works properly) is broken, but hopefully will be fixed, and I am almost glad that the product sucks, because it shows such room for improvement. I think the mobile industry, and the software industry more generally, is still young.

zobzu 13y ago

tldr: user expected 3y old phone hardware and from-scratch OS to beat Android/iOS on quad core devices, got disappointed.

dserban 13y ago

Firefox OS isn't aimed at Android, as the article implies. I don't think it's even meant to be aimed at something, not even at dumbphones. The intent is to provide a fallback digital-freedom option, should any of the mobile players ever start to exhibit monopolistic tendencies. Firefox OS is a hedge that Mozilla is building for us.

jfoster 13y ago

People wrote this type of article about Android when the first Android phone had come out. Mozilla can definitely salvage this and it's natural that it would take more iteration before they arrive at a really good user experience. I think the big problem Mozilla face is that they haven't been left much of an opening by Android. Even if they offer a wonderful user experience, why would anyone prefer a Firefox phone over an Android phone?

andrewflnr 13y ago
Because it's a third or less of the cost of an Android.
- msh 13y ago
  You can get a Chinese android phone for 80usd

soapdog 13y ago

Disclaimer: I am a Mozilla Rep volunteering with Firefox OS stuff. Let me address some misconceptions in this article and why I think it is misguided but first lets be sure that we're all on the same page and that people are entitled to their own opinion, even if we disagree. Firefox OS is not made to fight mid-range and high-end Android devices. Firefox OS was created with the following main objectives: - Create a Free and Open mobile source operating that is developed in the open. Android does not fit this bill because Google only release Android source code once the job is done and is not keen on accepting contributions from third-party. Firefox OS is on github from day one and everyone is encouraged to contribute. - Create a system based on web technologies where using nothing but HTML/CSS/JS you can access all phone features. The mobile ecosystem was becoming a closed market where each vendor had their own proprietary system and walled garden. Firefox OS is open and use open standards for development. Apps made for Firefox OS can be used in other systems with minimal fiddling. - Create devices that were cheaper than the usual low-end Android device. The market is not the U.S. the market is Latin America, East Europe, Asia where people don't have the same budgets as U.S. In Brazil an iPhone costs USD 1000 at least where Firefox OS costs about USD 80 without contract. The Moto G device quoted on the article costs about USD 350 here. Now with this objective in mind, lets review some parts of this article. The phone does not have two marketplaces. There is the adaptative search that displays web apps based on a search query. You can use those apps once (open the page) or save them (add a link to them) to the launcher. The Firefox Marketplace will provide you with apps. Saying that the adaptative search is a marketplace is saying that because Google Now can search the web it rivals Google Play. On the current version of Firefox OS being shipped you can add contacts from SIM Card, Facebook and GMail. There are apps on the marketplace to import vCards and other contact sources. You can add email accounts from many popular providers and from scratch using IMAP or POP. There is an issue with self signed certificates meaning that on some special cases, people hosting their own email can't add the server because the certificate is not recognized. This is being addressed in the open. Apps are made by their developers, not by Mozilla. If the Twitter or Facebook app does not work as well as it should is because those developers are not doing the necessary effort. When I say necessary effort is because its so damn simple to pick a mobile web site and just add it as an app that some developers forget to optmize the experience to be more app like with things such as appcache. The Twitter app when first launched was pretty bad, these days after some updates it became quite decent. The Facebook app still basically their mobile web version and has a lot of room for improvement. Anyway, this is responsability of the developers. The fact that there are apps that the author considers embarrassing is a good thing, it proves how easy it is to develop for the system. Do an exercise, imagine if the world wide web instead of using HTML/CSS/JS used 6502 Assembly language and that to code for it you would need to do it in that language. How many web developers we would have? How open and accessible the web would be? One of the cool things about the web is that it is really easy to cook something that is usable. To build great experiences in the web requires a lot of knowledge but to build something that works it is quite easy. Because of this Firefox OS is approachable by hackers and new developers alike and this is reflected in the current marketplace. Another thing is that Mozilla doesn't charge you anything to be able to place apps in the marketplace and there is no SDK or special computer/OS (Apple I am looking at you) required to build apps for Firefox OS. Anyone can do it. This is good, democratic and pays well in the long run, just look how popular the web is today. Nokia Here maps has navigation. Also, criticism about Here maps should not be directed at Firefox OS. Its like blaming Mac OS X for the lack of triple A games. There is no fragmentation in Firefox OS. Just like you can browse the web in Firefox 25 or Chrome or Firefox 18. You can use the apps in different versions of the OS. The companies that build Firefox OS are required by contract not to wait more than six months before updating the phones. This means that in the worst case scenario, it updates at double speed than the usual competitors that have yearly updates. The vendors are updating it more quickly though. It took just some months from Firefox OS 1.0 to 1.1. Also Firefox OS is divided in three components (gonk, gecko, gaia) and updating Gaia is pretty easy. Anyway. The article missed the point which is an open system for a cheap device aimed at emerging markets. This is not a competitor to iPhone 5 or Galaxy S4. The main competition is dumb phones and very low end Android devices that have crap performance.

elktea 13y ago

> Surprisingly, given the ZTE Open’s wheezing 1GHz single-core processor and the feeble 256MB of RAM, [Cut the rope] didn’t choke and was perfectly playable. In what world would a modern 1GHz processor have any issues with a simple 2D game running at a low resolution?

sergiotapia 13y ago

At this point I don't care! I'm rooting for Mozilla as they are most definitely the company I trust more than any other in the world. They are really transparent and it has the community support Google wishes it had. I really hope it catches on with the years. I'm still bitter that I can only use Objective-C to make iPhone apps. I mean, objective-c!?

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

null_ptr 13y ago

Reading this made me realize what a thick skin you need to put your work out there and not be phased by such negativity. It's also a reminder about the high degree of entitlement software development outsiders have.

dpcan 13y ago

I had a similar experience, only I really enjoyed the OS, but the hardware was completely unusable for me and how I use my phone, which is more like a computer than a phone. I was so frustrated with how slow everything was that I just had to go back to my old phone (which at the time was a Windows Phone 7 - go figure). I really think that FFOS on really fast hardware would be awesome. The phone & experience actually reminded me of my old G1, but at that time, there wasn't much to go back to until I got the iPhone 3GS :)

ksec 13y ago

As Far as i am concern, Mozilla has never been great ( or even good ) with User Experience. So it is no surprise all those time they wasted on Firefox OS didn't bring any major ground breaking achievement. However I do admire them to continue working on "Open Web". Open Codec etc. Sometimes I just wish they could be more realistic.

IlPeach 13y ago

I've bought the ZTE Open through a friend of mine from Spain. As other have said the article is a bit biased and it doesn't stand the comparison with Android or anything really. It's a very young OS (remember the first few versions of Android?). But, this said, my biggest gripe is the touch screen of the device in question. I really thought there would have been better touch screens available for that price. Bummer.

tluyben2 13y ago

Flashbacks from when I got a Lumia because I thought I needed to try it. After trying to like it, I tried to avoid using the thing at all for anything and I reverted back to my S2 after a few weeks. My wife had the same reaction and got an iPhone. I use the Lumia to build apps solely now; outside that it's switched off.