4 ms·

Using HTML5 enables the operating system to be very lean and it requires less memory consumption. This claim is deeply suspect.

• bryanlarsen 12y ago
  Look at it this way: the web browser is probably the most resource intensive application run on most smartphones, and it's not a smartphone without a browser. Therefore total required resources is the OS+WM+browser+background apps (phone etc). In Firefox OS, the OS+WM+browser heavily share resources, allowing significant resource saving.
  • johnchristopher 12y ago
    But that means every app requires the "maximum" (each are like a browser instance) of resources then. Moreover, correct me if I am wrong, but data structures such as xml/sgml/xhtml tend to require a lot of memory (or a lot of cpu throughput to convert to simpler data structures).
    • judk 12y ago
      ML is 0% of the cost of a web app. JS and images and CSS flights of fancy make it expensive.
  • dubcanada 12y ago
    Clearly you've never opened up Facebook application. Talk about a resource hog...
    • munificent 12y ago
      Ironically, that's because it uses a browser internally for large chunks of its UI.
    • fabrice_d 12y ago
      Actually the mobile version of Facebook website is not bad. Twitter on the other side...
• fabrice_d 12y ago
  There's no reason for a stack that is (linux kernel + android hal + web runtime) to require more resources than (linux kernel + android hal + dalvik and a java toolkit). Android is barely usable on these devices. Firefox OS run really well. But of course I'm biaised, I spent a bit too much time on this project ;)
  • zanny 12y ago
    I think the point is more kernel + libc + binaries is the maximally leanest. Putting any interpreter on top of that is always a huge overhead, be it Dalvik or Gecko / Spidermonkey. And worst of all (or best?) is that it seems we are moving towards this thing where Mono and Qt are also on phones, meaning you have two parallel stacks - one interpreter and one big ass shared library or another interpreter - running at once.
    • azakai 12y ago
      It is more complicated than that, though. Yes, while you can build a kernel+libc+binary code application that is pretty lean, that means that your kernel plus graphics stack need to handle both that type of application, as well as a web browser and related content. In some cases, having to handle just one of those opens up optimization opportunities, either in the kernel, libc, or the graphics stack. If you can run only native binaries using a single graphics method, that might be overall leanest, but every phone needs a browser these days. So the only other option to have a single thing to optimize for is to make the only stack the web stack. Then, whatever is optimal for the browser in terms of handling GPU textures, as one example, you can just do, because nothing else needs to run as well.
    • ibisum 12y ago
      kernel + libc + luajit == *ahem*
  • jlebar 12y ago
    > There's no reason for a stack that is (linux kernel + > android hal + web runtime) to require more resources than > (linux kernel + android hal + dalvik and a java toolkit). Correct, but likewise there's no good reason for (linux + android hal + web) to require /less/ ram than (linux + android hal + dalvik and java toolkit). Even if we accept the claim that most of the time on Android you have both dalvik and webkit loaded at once, whereas on B2G you only have gecko running, claiming that this necessarily means that B2G uses less memory is akin to claiming that x + y > z for arbitrary values of x, y, and z, which is obviously silly. But I don't need to tell you that this claim that B2G uses less memory by design was a major frustration to me back when I owned B2G memory usage. :) If FFOS is small, it's because you and I and others worked really hard to make it so.