12 ms·

Mozilla to open first-world front in Firefox OS war

234 points by je_bailey 12y ago

SwellJoe 12y ago
I'm unreasonably excited about Firefox OS. Android really isn't open enough for my taste, and my trust of Google has diminished over the years, as they've encroached on more and more of the web and my data on that web. Apple has always been awful for the open web. And I'd rather write JavaScript and HTML than Java.
- abrowne 12y ago
  I like that they are targeting the low end, both in developing countries and now in the US. I need a phone for email/sms/phone, and I use the browser, calendar, calculator, and authenticator, but really that's about it. I don't want a 5-inch device in my pocket for this use case!
- TazeTSchnitzel 12y ago
  With Firefox OS you could also write C or C++ (possibly Rust eventually) thanks to emscripten and asm.js. But, crucially, asm.js makes them portable. No compiling for different architectures.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - Kankuro 12y ago
    My experience: I considered porting Ankidroid (a flashcard app) from Android to FirefoxOS (because it is a must-have for my phone). Its storage is based on SQLite, which is ported into Javascript via emscripten. Problem: it only support in-memory operations. Because my SQLite file is 70Mo+ large, it is not an option. In SQLite you can write a abstraction layer for the I/O, but the operations are synchronous, and all the I/O operations in Firefox OS are asynchronous (so it would require modifying heavily the library). So I gave up, and maybe I will start the day FirefoxOS provides supports natively SQLite. Sad thing: Firefox addons have native support for SQLite.
- vijayr 12y ago
  Is it possible to write good mobile apps in JS and HTML, compared to Android or iOS? I don't know much about mobile programming, but it seems much harder for JS to compete with native apps, no?
  - je_bailey 12y ago
    It all depends on the hooks that Mozilla provides to the JavaScript developers. These hooks are the way that the web page can interact with the phones built in hardware. If these API's are sufficient then there is no reason that these apps can't execute as well as an app on any other phone.
  - on_and_off 12y ago
    The startup I work for was approached some time ago by Firefox in order to ship our app on FFOS (our app has ~1 million daily users, so we regularly have this kind of proposals). I did not participate in this firsthand, but from what I gathered from my colleagues, the FFOS SDK is so atrocious that sadly the idea of porting our app to this OS is laughable. On the other hand, we are fully committed to our iOS and Android app (in objc & java) and are mostly satisfied by these two SDKs. It might be an unfair comparison though, Google and Apple have had way more time than Mozilla to improve their respective SDKs.
    - SwellJoe 12y ago
      I tinkered with Android development when the original Google Developer Phone came out (aka G1). And, after years of not paying it any attention, because my focus was on server development, I've started learning my way around it again. It's not even the same world. So much of the tedium of developing in Java has gone away, due to better libraries, much better tooling, and just all around a bigger/better ecosystem. Making apps for Android, even without starting with a third party framework or tool, is vastly less time-consuming than it used to be. I believe it's fair to say Firefox OS SDK will get better. I suspect we'll see interesting things happen just because it is primarily JavaScript+HTML5. There are a half dozen (or more) projects to make it possible to make Android and iOS apps in JavaScript, and they're popular, despite having dramatically less support and tooling available (as much as I hate Java, and I really do hate Java, Android Studio almost makes it tolerable). I haven't seen the Firefox OS SDK yet, though I plan to check it out, and pick up some kind of dev phone soonish, but I would bet that it's at least on par with some of the early JavaScript+native frameworks cropping up lately. Stuff like Ionic, React Native, etc. All of those are new and sloppy and don't have settled toolchains, etc. But, the desire to work in JavaScript instead of ObjC or Java is pretty strong for many people, as evidenced by the huge quantity of people doing it despite it probably being more effort than coding in the standard language of the platform. I think it's kinda like desire paths: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desire_path https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desire_path JavaScript is the path a lot of people want to walk for making mobile apps. Firefox OS is the first to make it the primary way to develop apps for the platform. I suspect the application developer uptake will be very rapid; probably more rapid than previous platforms, and more rapid than the actual user uptake. This is a platform that allows you to use your existing web development skills right out of the box...and there are a lot more web developers than Java or ObjC developers in the world.
- MichaelGG 12y ago
  Android's open enough for me, but what I find unhappy is that Google seems intent on tricking people into revealing more and more information. It often reminds me to turn on history tracking, despite having said no many times. Every time I use the Play store, it tries to get me to enter a phone number. The way it does this is by popping up a dialog, with no buttons except continue. It makes it look like you MUST do this (there's no indication you can back out), even though it's optional. That's deceptive. And of course, the idiotic permissions system. Want to check to see if a user's on the phone? Gotta also get access to who they call and their IMEI and other permanent identifiers. Basically, all the time I'm on my Android device, I feel like I've gotta be extra cautious, that Google's out to screw me over. Unfortunately, MS is just flubbing their system by pumping it full of crap. (They were paying devs in 3rd world countries $2000 to push out junk apps. They refuse to take down garbage/scams. They even published fake Windows Updates on the store, and other stuff that falsely claims to be by MS.) MS could fix it all immediately by offering Android app compatibility. I'd switch in a minute. I use Firefox as my browser, mainly because of this. I wish I could switch to another smartphone platform.
  - on_and_off 12y ago
    >MS could fix it all immediately by offering Android app compatibility Err, wouldn't these carry over Android's permission system ?
    - _delirium 12y ago
      They could fake it, the way Cyanogenmod does, e.g. return null data to apps if the user doesn't want the app to have a particular permission.
  - veeti 12y ago
    >MS could fix it all immediately by offering Android app compatibility. Did you also switch over to the Blackberry and Jolla?
    - jbigelow76 12y ago
      I'd like to see a critical mass of AOSP vendors emerge that would convince Android devs to look beyond the Play store. MS shipping their own flavor of Android, along with Amazon and then BB and Jolla offering Android app compatibility could begin to turn that tide. Especially with MS being able to offer some "foundational" type apps (Bing maps, email client, MS Office, Cortana) that could address some of the holes in not utilizing Google Play services. I don't see it happening though, MS would have to declare that their unified Windows 10 OS is a failure before it even launches.
- JimDabell 12y ago
  > Apple has always been awful for the open web. Apple played a massive part in the success of the mobile web and responsive design. The release of Mobile Safari and WebKit was a watershed moment. Before that point, the mobile web largely consisted of separate, pretty awful sites on WML. Afterwards, most mobile platforms had a default web browser based on WebKit, and the mobile web transformed as a result. I'm not saying Apple are perfect, but saying that they've "always been awful for the open web" is grossly overstating things.
  - SwellJoe 12y ago
    OK, I'll give them credit for strong-arming the web into giving up its addiction to Adobe Flash. That was a win for the open and standards-based web.
    - xorcist 12y ago
      That credit should probably go to Google, and to a lesser extent to Firefox (which at least tried). Google used the strong weight of Youtube to make sure all web browsers implemented a replacement, a long and tiresome process that took the better part of ten years. They bought companies and gave patents away along the way. I'm not sure exactly what Apple did. Please enlighten me.
      - SwellJoe 12y ago
        Apple kept Flash off the iPhone, at a time when nearly all web video was in Flash, and when iPhone was the phone to have. There was much gnashing of teeth, but Jobs and Apple stood firm, and demanded the world come to them (which is their way, but in this case what they were doing was for good and not evil). It definitely wasn't just Apple. Google and Mozilla certainly played a huge role, and I definitely consider them much better web citizens than Apple (Mozilla best of all, obviously), but a lot of sites switched to HTML5 video only because they wanted to be watchable on iOS devices.
        acdha 12y ago
- _jomo 12y ago
  I like Android (the AOSP) in itself, but I very much dislike how Google ships it with a lot of their own (proprietary) apps that can't be uninstalled (the usual way). Some of Google's features may be nice, but I don't want them to track me and get all my private data from my phone. I'm using CyanogenMod without all the Google apps. It's nice, but the experience just isn't as nice as you have it with Google-Android. Most of the features could be done without tracking users, however.
  - Brakenshire 12y ago
    I also use CyanogenMod without Google Apps, albeit using MultiROM so I can boot into vanilla Android if I need to.
austinhallock 12y ago
It has definitely been an up-hill battle for Firefox OS trying to gain market share, but I think everyone (including Mozilla) expected that. Having played with one of their earlier test units and the newer Firefox Flame with FFOS 2.0, it has come a long way. Even our Android-obsessed designer loves the Flame. It's a tough situation to be in where they need to improve the quality of the ecosystem, but need users to convince the big-wig devs to developer for the OS. The total user numbers we've seen from them is certainly better than we expected, but still too small to convince a major developer to build for Firefox OS on numbers alone. If their platform wasn't the web, I'm not sure they'd have much of a chance at success, but being able to convince a developer the values of building for the web is much easier than building for a fairly new mobile OS.
shmerl 12y ago
I really respect Firefox OS for being fully open, but I dislike the lack of native applications. I wish normal glibc Linux mobile distros (not Android) would gain more traction. Sailfish OS is great, but they don't seem to be interested in opening up the UI and most of the core applications.
- iso8859-1 12y ago
  What do you think about Tizen?
  - shmerl 12y ago
    Tizen is interesting, but it has the downside of the old Meego - too much control from Samsung. When Nokia and Intel pulled the plug, Meego disintegrated and only community fork (Mer) survived, on which Sailfish is actually built. Tizen has a similar risk. And it's not a major priority for Samsung it seems.
codewithcheese 12y ago
I hope Mozilla make a phone aimed at tech first movers (hacker news crowd etc), we seem to be the most likely to support attempts at openness. It would have to be high end though. A bit like Ubuntu tried to do with the Edge.
- fabrice_d 12y ago
  If you have a Sony z3 or z3c, you can build and flash firefox OS on it. These are really nice devices imho.
  - eropple 12y ago
    Doing this blows up your camera's low-light performance. Don't do this unless you don't like your phone (and I like mine, so I sure won't).
on_and_off 12y ago
I really wish to see a great third mobile OS with a marketshare in the two digits. I appreciate the spirit behind FFOS, so I would like to see it take that place. I am not sure of how they want to achieve that though. However, AFAIK, FFOS does not really bring anything new to the table, so I have trouble seeing how it could make an impact in the first-world.
- fabrice_d 12y ago
  Not being tied to an app silo is pretty unique. Unfortunately most people are either ok with that or haven't yet realized. Uphill battle for sure.
  - icebraining 12y ago
    Not really. Android lets you sideload apps pretty easily, and it even has third-party repositories like F-Droid.
    - fabrice_d 12y ago
      That does not make the transition from iOS to Android or vice versa easier. Once you have invested in one ecosystem, you lose your investment if you switch. That does not happen on the web, where you can switch from a browser to another with a very marginal cost.
      - icebraining 12y ago
        Actually, it does. For example, you can run them on the Samsung Z1 which runs Tizen (not Android), thanks to OpenMobile's compatibility layer: http://www.androidcentral.com/samsungs-tizen-powered-z1-rival-android-one-if-not-all-android http://www.androidcentral.com/samsungs-tizen-powered-z1-riva...
  - r00fus 12y ago
    One thing to note is that hardware and OSs exist to run apps. Some of these apps are built-in like Phone or Mail. However, most are not, and may never exist outside that OS - games are a good example. When will Skype and Webex (two very important work uses of my phone) come to FFOS? These problems go away if you are not courting heavy app users, but I would not call this an "App Silo" - these are investments people have made in time, knowledge and perhaps money, and even if they exist on another OS (see reviews for various Android apps that migrated from iOS like Audible) may not ever have the same feature set or usability.
listic 12y ago
What is the official way to learn about Firefox OS releases? I can't figure out which version of FxOS has which status, despite being subscribed to mailing lists. Flame update page [1] has images for 2.0, 2.1, 2.2 and 3.0. LG/KDDI Fx0 has apparently shipped in Japan with version 2.0 [2] on December 25, 2014. All this suggests that at least version 2.0 has been released. Yet Wikipedia page [3] doesn't have release date for version 2.0 onwards, and I don't know where else to look. [1] MDN: Updating your Flame https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Firefox_OS/Phone_guide/Flame/Updating_your_Flame https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Firefox_OS/Phone_guide/F... [2] Mozilla Press Center: Mozilla and KDDI Launch First Firefox OS Smartphone in Japan https://blog.mozilla.org/press/2014/12/mozilla-and-kddi-launch-first-firefox-os-smartphone-in-japan-4/ https://blog.mozilla.org/press/2014/12/mozilla-and-kddi-laun... [3] Wikipedia: Firefox OS | Release history http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox_OS#Release_history http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox_OS#Release_history
- asutherland 12y ago
  The release management page is https://wiki.mozilla.org/Release_Management/B2G_Landing https://wiki.mozilla.org/Release_Management/B2G_Landing. You can probably think of the code complete date as the lower bound on a production device shipping with that version of the software.
fit2rule 12y ago
Anyone know if I can easily port an OpenGL ES-1.1 based application, written in C++, to FirefoxOS? Or will I have to re-write it in HTML5/js?
- dangoor 12y ago
  You could probably do it with Emscripten. https://github.com/kripken/emscripten https://github.com/kripken/emscripten
- higherpurpose 12y ago
  You can probably compile it to asm.js and use WebGL (OpenGL ES 2.0).
- frik 12y ago
  You can compile your C++ with emscripten to asm.js target. HTML5 has WebGL which is based OpenGL ES 2.0. More than 95% of all FirefoxOS devices support WebGL and the number of FirefoxOS users is increasing rapidly: http://webglstats.com http://webglstats.com I suggest you this blog series, this guy ported his OpenGL game demos to WebGL and wrote long articles about it (Part 77 - 82): http://www.sea-of-memes.com/LetsCode77/LetsCode77.html http://www.sea-of-memes.com/LetsCode77/LetsCode77.html
- ndesaulniers 12y ago
  I wrote a book chapter in the upcoming book "WebGL Insights" to be published in August on just the subject. The answer is yes, if you port your OpenGL ES 1.0 code to OpenGL ES 2.0. The WebGL 1.0 spec is basically just a diff of the ES 2.0 spec. Then Emscripten can do most of the rest. I'm assuming your code is C++.
jrochkind1 12y ago
I would love to try a firefox OS phone. Verizon seems like an odd choice in the U.S., to me they seem like a 'premium' brand somewhat more expensive than their competitors, while Firefox OS, at least prior to know, seems to have been positioning itself as a budget option.
- abrowne 12y ago
  Verizon has the best coverage in rural areas, at least where people I know live: southeast Minnesota, western Wisconsin, and Iowa. Many of my (and my friends') relatives in these areas still use flip phones or have reluctantly upgraded to iPhones or Android. Verizon is wise to have an option that's not a smartphone and not total junk. I just upgraded my ZTE Open C to FxOS 3.0. This phone is similar, but worse, in specs to the original Moto E. It runs well, as long as you are using it for basic purposes.
  - jrochkind1 12y ago
    aha! That makes some sense, thanks.
  - sutro 12y ago
    Any tips or links you can share for getting your Open C to FxOS 3.0? Did you have to first upgrade the base image from JellyBean to KitKat? Were you able to shallow flash a nightly image or did you have to build everything yourself? I have an Open C and am on 2.1, but haven't yet tried to move past that. Thanks!
    - abrowne 12y ago
      I had played with using the Flame images a while back, but I had never gotten around to building anything myself. Just a couple days ago I read that the EU Ebay version (but not the FR version!) is the same as (or similar enough to) the US version, so the MozFR builds here work: http://builds.firefoxos.mozfr.org/doc/en/devices/zte-open-c-eu http://builds.firefoxos.mozfr.org/doc/en/devices/zte-open-c-... I haven't tried SIM/phone-related function yet, but everything else is working for me.
bla2 12y ago
I'd rather they'd push Firefox on Android more. Firefox OS seems stillborn, but Firefox/Android is a good product and mobile could need more browser competition.
- lambda 12y ago
  I feel like one thing they could do to promote Firefox OS would be to make it possible to run Firefox OS applications on Android; create an installer/app store that would allow you to install them as if they were native apps, but they would be using a shared runtime. That would really help to make it worthwhile to develop FxOS apps; actually having a large installed base of phones that they could be used on, in order to help bootstrap the ecosystem up.
  - mburns 12y ago
    >make it possible to run Firefox OS applications on Android https://hacks.mozilla.org/2014/06/firefox-os-apps-run-on-android/ https://hacks.mozilla.org/2014/06/firefox-os-apps-run-on-and...
  - Brakenshire 12y ago
    > I feel like one thing they could do to promote Firefox OS would be to make it possible to run Firefox OS applications on Android; create an installer/app store that would allow you to install them as if they were native apps, but they would be using a shared runtime. Good news! That already exists in Firefox for Android, it's called Firefox Marketplace, it works by packaging up the apps as apks, which means they can operate as native android apps with access to native device APIs.
  - jccalhoun 12y ago
    as someone else noted you can already run firefox os apps on android. you can go to the marketplace inside firefox and install apps. It seems like a lot of them are non-english which gives me hope that this is taking off at least a little outside the usa (but of course only being fluent in English I can't really tell if these non-english apps are any good or not.)
mythrowaway2 12y ago
They need to move quickly before everyone who knows anything about it has quit working at Mozilla.
tvararu 12y ago
Got to try a Firefox OS phone (or three) last week at a short hackathon in Telefonica Digital's offices in London. The first device I tried (and apparently the one with the beefiest hardware) was an Alcatel One Touch Fire. My enthusiasm took a sharp turn downward from the moment I unlocked the device; accomplished by sliding the screen left to right, the animation was jerky, did not track my finger accurately, and skipped to the end when I let go of the screen halfway through the width of the screen. One of the hosts was quick to point out that the lock screen interaction was actually custom programmed by Alcatel, and so is the rest of the user interface, at which point he pointed to try a different device running something closer to "stock Firefox OS." I'm enthralled by the promise of helping the web win by creating a device category where the web is a first-class citizen, but I'm doubtful it will happen if manufacturers outsource their tasteless UI customizations to web dev interns. Sunspider came out at roughly 1600ms, which places the mid-2013 Alcatel somewhere in the performance bracket of an iPhone 4 (mid-2010, flagship device). Despite the rough benchmarks, I ran some Famo.us demos and they were surprisingly usable, and I could easily get a physics-backed drag interaction to run smoothly inside the browser. I'm waiting to try out a Firefox OS phone with cutting edge hardware.
aubergene 12y ago
I was given a Firefox OS phone at Mozfest last year. I lost my other phone earlier this year and so used it exclusively for four weeks. I'm sorry to say it's pretty terrible at this stage. I was using v2 of Firefox OS. The problems are broadly that it was slow, unreliable and poorly designed. It would just become completely unresponsive a couple of times a week, requiring the battery to be removed to restart. There are very few well known apps. Twitter seems to be the only one, and it was so slow for scrolling that I gave up using it. The included apps were just placeholders to install apps, almost all of them only worked online. I wouldn't recommend getting one to anybody. I'm sure you could buy a cheap secondhand Android and have a better experience. It was worse than Android 1.6. There's such a huge mountain of work for the Mozilla developers to get this to be in anyway competitive to Android. I think Mozilla would be better to concentrate their resources elsewhere.
- jbigelow76 12y ago
  Maybe Mozilla just needs to launch their own Android AOSP implementation and provide developers with a way to build fully native Android apps with JavaScript. Or is AOSP not going to run on the kind of hardware FFOS is targeting?
  - dblohm7 12y ago
    Mozilla has already developed technology to make web apps appear as native on Android. Go and check out the Firefox Marketplace.
Brakenshire 12y ago
I help a lot of middle aged and elderly people who are not all that tech literate, and get asked a lot for recommendations, and I definitely think there is a niche for something between feature phones and smart phones. A lot of people are not interested in putting in the investment of time and money to get up to pace using Android or an iPhone. There's quite a big step to using those devices, for instance in managing data use, or in the way that phone functions recede amongst new smartphone features. With Android as a new user you can even for all intents and purposes lose your dialler, by pressing and holding the icon incorrectly. iOS isn't interested in meeting that market, because of low cost, and if they did attempt it both Android and iOS might well suffer in trying to alter and dilute their brands and the unity of their interfaces. It also works quite well as an target market, because a lot of the apps that would be expected are quite simple, and shouldn't be too difficult to create using web technologies - maybe news or magazine apps, cinema or TV listings, weather and so on. Combine the right interface with a price of £50-£100, a good battery life, and a credible promise over security and privacy, and it definitely seems like an option which could get into the retail stores, and a place in the market of perhaps 2-3%, which is a good place to start.
- mmahemoff 12y ago
  I agree there's a good opportunity for simpler phones that still get some of the benefits of smartphones rather than a 10 year old Nokia. That said, I don't see much in the article to suggest this is what Mozilla is going after. Yes, some of the devices will be cheap, but there are plenty of cheap Android and Windows phones too. Even if an OS did target just this market, the problem would still be a lack of apps. They might not be the kind of users who install 10 home screens full of apps, but many of them will be interested in a handful of apps in different categories, so the long-tail marketplace still matters. That's where there's an advantage to an Android phone customised for simple usage, but still with the ability for a user (or their tech-savvy friends/family) to install a wide range of apps if/when they want to.
  - Brakenshire 12y ago
    They do talk about that market to a certain extent in the article, which I was glad to see. I think on limited apps, it's worth saying that beyond a relatively small number of apps like Facebook or WhatsApp, someone moving from a feature phone won't necessarily have any interest in existing apps on other systems. In general they won't want Google Maps or Waze or Telenav Scout (and won't ask for those while buying the phone), they want to type 'directions' or 'weather' and have something useful come up. That lowers the barrier to entry, although of course there is still the basic requirement that enough useful apps are there, which imo doesn't yet currently apply on FxOS.
xiaq 12y ago
Firefox OS, being based on HTML/CSS/JavaScript, sounds a lot more hackable than Android to me. Well, you can hack Android pretty heavily - forking CyanogenMod, writing Xposed plugins, etc., but Java is just obscure and the compile/deploy/debug cycle is too cumbersome for casual hacking. Hence I look forward to Firefox OS as platform I can easily hack, but I am not sure whether it really is. Could someone with experience tell me: * How easy is it to deploy a FxOS app? How is the remote debugging experience? * How easy is it to hack the core apps (e.g. phone, SMS)? * How easy is it to hack the "framework" (e.g. window manager, status bar)? Is it even written in JavaScript?
- fabrice_d 12y ago
  * deploying apps is super easy - either host them on a web server or push them from firefox's webIDE, and remote debugging using the firefox devtools just works. * hacking core apps is totally doable. You need a rooted device to update them though. Currently the best ones would be nexus 5 or sony z3(c). * everything that is displayed is html/js/css. What you call "framework" here is part of the system app (https://github.com/mozilla-b2g/gaia/tree/master/apps/system https://github.com/mozilla-b2g/gaia/tree/master/apps/system). It's a fairly large app, but it's where a lot of the fun stuff is!
  - xiaq 12y ago
    Thanks. Now I am really looking forward to playing with FxOS!
  - darklajid 12y ago
    Hijacking this: Is is possible to replace system parts with 3rd party stuff? I'm mostly talking "change the keyboard" here? If it is, is this possible by modifying/replacing the current keyboard only or can this be something out of tree?
    - fabrice_d 12y ago
      We support 3rd party keyboards now, so you can provide one out of tree.
Lio 12y ago
OT: Hmm, something seems very wrong with that CNET page. It loads ok but it's unreadable on iOS. As soon as I try to scroll it goes haywire. Anyone else seeing that or have a link to a static version?
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
higherpurpose 12y ago
I hope Mozilla puts Servo into Firefox OS sooner rather than later. Same for rebuilding the whole thing in Rust, although that will probably last 3+ years.
- dbaupp 12y ago
  The Servo team have actually been experimenting with "boot to servo" recently. Their blog has some photos and a description: http://blog.servo.org/2015/02/10/twis-23/ http://blog.servo.org/2015/02/10/twis-23/
DigitalSea 12y ago
Firefox is going to have to fight to get any kind of market share. As Microsoft has shown, you can have great hardware, great interface and tonnes of money behind you, but it does not buy you market share. As long as Mozilla is prepared for the uphill battle they are about to fight, I think they might have a chance. They really need to carve out a niche like they've done in non first-world countries. Merely being the same as Android or iOS is not going to be enough. They need to get developers on board, but even so, will they have the games that most consumers like to play? It's a tricky situation, but one nonetheless I am excited to see what happens from.
contingencies 12y ago
A strong opportunity for FirefoxOS growth is supporting ad-hoc and mesh link layers and providing an intelligent APIs that support that access without compromising security. It's the anti-Google, anti-carrier, anti-corporate, anti-surveillance, anti-government, pro-efficiency, pro-security, pro-developing world feature everyone wants but nobody can have because none of the mobile OSs support it. Read bug+PDF @ https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=945047 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=945047
GigabyteCoin 12y ago
>programmers could write an app just once with Web technologies that span not just iOS, Android, and Firefox OS, but also Windows Phone, BlackBerry OS, Tizen, Ubuntu and any other mobile operating system that arrives tomorrow. This, to me, is the most powerful prospect of Firefox OS. I have been "writing apps" in HTML, Javascript and PHP ever since I can remember. They are just as responsive and useful as any app I have ever used on my Android. Which works fine, but had recently been creeping the heck out of me because it's distributed by Google. Every app is virtually a simple website imho. Look at google docs, for example. Angry birds could easily be written in javascript. As could flappy bird, and virtually every game I can think of. I see no reason to bother writing a piece of software that can only be used on Androir or iOS, except for sheer greed, so I haven't. It's worked out well for me so far. Here's to hoping Firefox OS comes to the first world sooner rather than later.
- randomchars 12y ago
  > I have been "writing apps" in HTML, Javascript and PHP ever since I can remember. > They are just as responsive and useful as any app I have ever used on my Android. I've yet to see any mobile web app that's as responsive and useful as a native one. They're slow, can't make use of platform features (e.g intents on android, native google login flow) and they always look out of place.
emeidi 12y ago
"front" ... "war"?! Mozilla is taking a knife to a gunfight with the 800 pound gorillas out there. This is going to be a really long and bloody war ... NOT.
SixSigma 12y ago
Slide out keyboard, woo, sign me up. The pop up keyboard is the thing I hate most about my slab.
Aissen 12y ago
Here's what Mozilla needs to "fix" in Firefox OS IMO: - have real browser. Seriously. Firefox on Android is a much better browser. - handle the software, and the updates, Microsoft-style. Maybe have OEMs pay for this service, maybe involve the community. Seriously, all Firefox OS devices sold have an ancient version of the OS. It means I'm safer when I'm using Firefox on Android than when I'm using a Firefox OS phone. I understand the tradeoffs that led them to this decision (their dependency on the Android stack for example), but they seriously need to rethink it. - allow for native code to run. I know it's hard. Even Google with it's uber-optimized (or so they thought at the time) Dalvik (for small phones) understood the need for the NDK. I'm not sure asm.js can cut it, as I've yet to see console-class games on Firefox OS like there are on Android and iOS. - Of course, they need to continue their groundwork on APIs. There shouldn't be a thing you can do on say, iOS or WP and not in Firefox OS (and I'm not saying Android because it gives a lot of power to developers). - They need a flagship phone, for everyone. Not a "developer phone" (although it can act as one), but a real flagship.
spiralpolitik 12y ago
Firefox OS is a great idea, and if it was 2010 it would probably stand a good chance at succeeding with the correct launch strategy. But its not 2010. This weekend I had a chance to play with a Jolla smartphone. Hardware wise it pretty good, and had some really good ideas, but the software was half baked. While in time both Jolla and Firefox OS could become great products, but time ran out a while back. You now have to come to market with all the pieces (and then some). You can't adopt the "build it and they will come mantra" because unless you can give users a compelling reason to switch without losing functionality they won't come. The hardware wars are long gone. The app wars ended a few years back. We are now in the ecosystem wars and Mozilla (and Jolla) appear to have no answers for this (or have answers "coming soon"). The sad fact is that from here on out it's iOS and Android in a tussle neither can win, and unless the phone market resets itself like it did in 2007 there is very little anybody else can do.
- onion2k 12y ago
  There are a lot more people who can write a web app than a mobile app, by a factor of 10 at least. Give them a platform where it's trivial to make an app (easier than, say, Cordova/PhoneGap), and make it free, and you could easily disrupt the mobile market to a small degree. If FirefoxOS is a success the next challenge will come from the fact that iOS and Android could easily have HTML5 apps too with a native WebviewUI 'player' app, and if FirefoxOS gets any traction their respective developers will add that functionality quickly. Hopefully, for consumers and developers alike, they'd all have compatible APIs so mobile apps would be truly cross-platform, but that's not very likely.
  - pjmlp 12y ago
    I would believe that if Web OS, Windows Phone HTML apps, Tizen, Blackberry, ChromeOS didn't already prove users and developers alike don't care.
  - spiralpolitik 12y ago
    At this point "a small degree" won't amount to anything. Look at how much money Microsoft have had to burn through to get the few percentage points they've managed to amass. And they still can't get developers onto their ecosystem despite the bribes they've thrown out. It's go big or go home time and Mozilla simply don't have the resources to do it.
realusername 12y ago
If you want to improve the quality of Firefox, there is a simple way to do it, just download Firefox Beta for Android and Firefox Beta for your computer, it's helping them to improve the quality of the stable releases. It's a really easy step to help Mozilla without changing anything to your habits.
blueskin_ 12y ago
I can't see how this would go well. Chrome OS has been a big flop, and pushing that onto phones is just going to pile more disadvantages on top of that. The everything-as-a-website concept is fatally flawed anyway, as while it is often possible to find a single-purpose site to do a specific thing such as converting file formats, you're completely at the mercy of an unknown third party and their privacy policy (as well as promise not to tamper with your file) if you do. It's a privacy disaster waiting to happen. That, and javascript is a horrible and inefficient language not fit for purpose even years ago, so certainly not on devices with weak CPUs and limited battery.
ralmidani 12y ago
I really want to support Firefox OS and abandon Android. But Mozilla keeps missing the mark as far as I'm concerned. I don't want a flip phone, or a low-spec phone, or one that's only available in Japan. I just want something with a decent quad-core and more than 1gb of ram that I can purchase in the US and that will come with a warranty.

234 points by je_bailey 12y ago

I'm unreasonably excited about Firefox OS. Android really isn't open enough for my taste, and my trust of Google has diminished over the years, as they've encroached on more and more of the web and my data on that web. Apple has always been awful for the open web. And I'd rather write JavaScript and HTML than Java.

abrowne 12y ago
I like that they are targeting the low end, both in developing countries and now in the US. I need a phone for email/sms/phone, and I use the browser, calendar, calculator, and authenticator, but really that's about it. I don't want a 5-inch device in my pocket for this use case!
TazeTSchnitzel 12y ago
With Firefox OS you could also write C or C++ (possibly Rust eventually) thanks to emscripten and asm.js. But, crucially, asm.js makes them portable. No compiling for different architectures.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- Kankuro 12y ago
  My experience: I considered porting Ankidroid (a flashcard app) from Android to FirefoxOS (because it is a must-have for my phone). Its storage is based on SQLite, which is ported into Javascript via emscripten. Problem: it only support in-memory operations. Because my SQLite file is 70Mo+ large, it is not an option. In SQLite you can write a abstraction layer for the I/O, but the operations are synchronous, and all the I/O operations in Firefox OS are asynchronous (so it would require modifying heavily the library). So I gave up, and maybe I will start the day FirefoxOS provides supports natively SQLite. Sad thing: Firefox addons have native support for SQLite.
vijayr 12y ago
Is it possible to write good mobile apps in JS and HTML, compared to Android or iOS? I don't know much about mobile programming, but it seems much harder for JS to compete with native apps, no?
- je_bailey 12y ago
  It all depends on the hooks that Mozilla provides to the JavaScript developers. These hooks are the way that the web page can interact with the phones built in hardware. If these API's are sufficient then there is no reason that these apps can't execute as well as an app on any other phone.
- on_and_off 12y ago
  The startup I work for was approached some time ago by Firefox in order to ship our app on FFOS (our app has ~1 million daily users, so we regularly have this kind of proposals). I did not participate in this firsthand, but from what I gathered from my colleagues, the FFOS SDK is so atrocious that sadly the idea of porting our app to this OS is laughable. On the other hand, we are fully committed to our iOS and Android app (in objc & java) and are mostly satisfied by these two SDKs. It might be an unfair comparison though, Google and Apple have had way more time than Mozilla to improve their respective SDKs.
  - SwellJoe 12y ago
    I tinkered with Android development when the original Google Developer Phone came out (aka G1). And, after years of not paying it any attention, because my focus was on server development, I've started learning my way around it again. It's not even the same world. So much of the tedium of developing in Java has gone away, due to better libraries, much better tooling, and just all around a bigger/better ecosystem. Making apps for Android, even without starting with a third party framework or tool, is vastly less time-consuming than it used to be. I believe it's fair to say Firefox OS SDK will get better. I suspect we'll see interesting things happen just because it is primarily JavaScript+HTML5. There are a half dozen (or more) projects to make it possible to make Android and iOS apps in JavaScript, and they're popular, despite having dramatically less support and tooling available (as much as I hate Java, and I really do hate Java, Android Studio almost makes it tolerable). I haven't seen the Firefox OS SDK yet, though I plan to check it out, and pick up some kind of dev phone soonish, but I would bet that it's at least on par with some of the early JavaScript+native frameworks cropping up lately. Stuff like Ionic, React Native, etc. All of those are new and sloppy and don't have settled toolchains, etc. But, the desire to work in JavaScript instead of ObjC or Java is pretty strong for many people, as evidenced by the huge quantity of people doing it despite it probably being more effort than coding in the standard language of the platform. I think it's kinda like desire paths: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desire_path https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desire_path JavaScript is the path a lot of people want to walk for making mobile apps. Firefox OS is the first to make it the primary way to develop apps for the platform. I suspect the application developer uptake will be very rapid; probably more rapid than previous platforms, and more rapid than the actual user uptake. This is a platform that allows you to use your existing web development skills right out of the box...and there are a lot more web developers than Java or ObjC developers in the world.
MichaelGG 12y ago
Android's open enough for me, but what I find unhappy is that Google seems intent on tricking people into revealing more and more information. It often reminds me to turn on history tracking, despite having said no many times. Every time I use the Play store, it tries to get me to enter a phone number. The way it does this is by popping up a dialog, with no buttons except continue. It makes it look like you MUST do this (there's no indication you can back out), even though it's optional. That's deceptive. And of course, the idiotic permissions system. Want to check to see if a user's on the phone? Gotta also get access to who they call and their IMEI and other permanent identifiers. Basically, all the time I'm on my Android device, I feel like I've gotta be extra cautious, that Google's out to screw me over. Unfortunately, MS is just flubbing their system by pumping it full of crap. (They were paying devs in 3rd world countries $2000 to push out junk apps. They refuse to take down garbage/scams. They even published fake Windows Updates on the store, and other stuff that falsely claims to be by MS.) MS could fix it all immediately by offering Android app compatibility. I'd switch in a minute. I use Firefox as my browser, mainly because of this. I wish I could switch to another smartphone platform.
- on_and_off 12y ago
  >MS could fix it all immediately by offering Android app compatibility Err, wouldn't these carry over Android's permission system ?
  - _delirium 12y ago
    They could fake it, the way Cyanogenmod does, e.g. return null data to apps if the user doesn't want the app to have a particular permission.
- veeti 12y ago
  >MS could fix it all immediately by offering Android app compatibility. Did you also switch over to the Blackberry and Jolla?
  - jbigelow76 12y ago
    I'd like to see a critical mass of AOSP vendors emerge that would convince Android devs to look beyond the Play store. MS shipping their own flavor of Android, along with Amazon and then BB and Jolla offering Android app compatibility could begin to turn that tide. Especially with MS being able to offer some "foundational" type apps (Bing maps, email client, MS Office, Cortana) that could address some of the holes in not utilizing Google Play services. I don't see it happening though, MS would have to declare that their unified Windows 10 OS is a failure before it even launches.
JimDabell 12y ago
> Apple has always been awful for the open web. Apple played a massive part in the success of the mobile web and responsive design. The release of Mobile Safari and WebKit was a watershed moment. Before that point, the mobile web largely consisted of separate, pretty awful sites on WML. Afterwards, most mobile platforms had a default web browser based on WebKit, and the mobile web transformed as a result. I'm not saying Apple are perfect, but saying that they've "always been awful for the open web" is grossly overstating things.
- SwellJoe 12y ago
  OK, I'll give them credit for strong-arming the web into giving up its addiction to Adobe Flash. That was a win for the open and standards-based web.
  - xorcist 12y ago
    That credit should probably go to Google, and to a lesser extent to Firefox (which at least tried). Google used the strong weight of Youtube to make sure all web browsers implemented a replacement, a long and tiresome process that took the better part of ten years. They bought companies and gave patents away along the way. I'm not sure exactly what Apple did. Please enlighten me.
    - SwellJoe 12y ago
      Apple kept Flash off the iPhone, at a time when nearly all web video was in Flash, and when iPhone was the phone to have. There was much gnashing of teeth, but Jobs and Apple stood firm, and demanded the world come to them (which is their way, but in this case what they were doing was for good and not evil). It definitely wasn't just Apple. Google and Mozilla certainly played a huge role, and I definitely consider them much better web citizens than Apple (Mozilla best of all, obviously), but a lot of sites switched to HTML5 video only because they wanted to be watchable on iOS devices.
      - acdha 12y ago
_jomo 12y ago
I like Android (the AOSP) in itself, but I very much dislike how Google ships it with a lot of their own (proprietary) apps that can't be uninstalled (the usual way). Some of Google's features may be nice, but I don't want them to track me and get all my private data from my phone. I'm using CyanogenMod without all the Google apps. It's nice, but the experience just isn't as nice as you have it with Google-Android. Most of the features could be done without tracking users, however.
- Brakenshire 12y ago
  I also use CyanogenMod without Google Apps, albeit using MultiROM so I can boot into vanilla Android if I need to.

austinhallock 12y ago

It has definitely been an up-hill battle for Firefox OS trying to gain market share, but I think everyone (including Mozilla) expected that. Having played with one of their earlier test units and the newer Firefox Flame with FFOS 2.0, it has come a long way. Even our Android-obsessed designer loves the Flame. It's a tough situation to be in where they need to improve the quality of the ecosystem, but need users to convince the big-wig devs to developer for the OS. The total user numbers we've seen from them is certainly better than we expected, but still too small to convince a major developer to build for Firefox OS on numbers alone. If their platform wasn't the web, I'm not sure they'd have much of a chance at success, but being able to convince a developer the values of building for the web is much easier than building for a fairly new mobile OS.

shmerl 12y ago

I really respect Firefox OS for being fully open, but I dislike the lack of native applications. I wish normal glibc Linux mobile distros (not Android) would gain more traction. Sailfish OS is great, but they don't seem to be interested in opening up the UI and most of the core applications.

iso8859-1 12y ago
What do you think about Tizen?
- shmerl 12y ago
  Tizen is interesting, but it has the downside of the old Meego - too much control from Samsung. When Nokia and Intel pulled the plug, Meego disintegrated and only community fork (Mer) survived, on which Sailfish is actually built. Tizen has a similar risk. And it's not a major priority for Samsung it seems.

codewithcheese 12y ago

I hope Mozilla make a phone aimed at tech first movers (hacker news crowd etc), we seem to be the most likely to support attempts at openness. It would have to be high end though. A bit like Ubuntu tried to do with the Edge.

fabrice_d 12y ago
If you have a Sony z3 or z3c, you can build and flash firefox OS on it. These are really nice devices imho.
- eropple 12y ago
  Doing this blows up your camera's low-light performance. Don't do this unless you don't like your phone (and I like mine, so I sure won't).

on_and_off 12y ago

I really wish to see a great third mobile OS with a marketshare in the two digits. I appreciate the spirit behind FFOS, so I would like to see it take that place. I am not sure of how they want to achieve that though. However, AFAIK, FFOS does not really bring anything new to the table, so I have trouble seeing how it could make an impact in the first-world.

fabrice_d 12y ago
Not being tied to an app silo is pretty unique. Unfortunately most people are either ok with that or haven't yet realized. Uphill battle for sure.
- icebraining 12y ago
  Not really. Android lets you sideload apps pretty easily, and it even has third-party repositories like F-Droid.
  - fabrice_d 12y ago
    That does not make the transition from iOS to Android or vice versa easier. Once you have invested in one ecosystem, you lose your investment if you switch. That does not happen on the web, where you can switch from a browser to another with a very marginal cost.
    - icebraining 12y ago
      Actually, it does. For example, you can run them on the Samsung Z1 which runs Tizen (not Android), thanks to OpenMobile's compatibility layer: http://www.androidcentral.com/samsungs-tizen-powered-z1-rival-android-one-if-not-all-android http://www.androidcentral.com/samsungs-tizen-powered-z1-riva...
- r00fus 12y ago
  One thing to note is that hardware and OSs exist to run apps. Some of these apps are built-in like Phone or Mail. However, most are not, and may never exist outside that OS - games are a good example. When will Skype and Webex (two very important work uses of my phone) come to FFOS? These problems go away if you are not courting heavy app users, but I would not call this an "App Silo" - these are investments people have made in time, knowledge and perhaps money, and even if they exist on another OS (see reviews for various Android apps that migrated from iOS like Audible) may not ever have the same feature set or usability.

listic 12y ago

What is the official way to learn about Firefox OS releases? I can't figure out which version of FxOS has which status, despite being subscribed to mailing lists. Flame update page [1] has images for 2.0, 2.1, 2.2 and 3.0. LG/KDDI Fx0 has apparently shipped in Japan with version 2.0 [2] on December 25, 2014. All this suggests that at least version 2.0 has been released. Yet Wikipedia page [3] doesn't have release date for version 2.0 onwards, and I don't know where else to look. [1] MDN: Updating your Flame https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Firefox_OS/Phone_guide/Flame/Updating_your_Flame https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Firefox_OS/Phone_guide/F... [2] Mozilla Press Center: Mozilla and KDDI Launch First Firefox OS Smartphone in Japan https://blog.mozilla.org/press/2014/12/mozilla-and-kddi-launch-first-firefox-os-smartphone-in-japan-4/ https://blog.mozilla.org/press/2014/12/mozilla-and-kddi-laun... [3] Wikipedia: Firefox OS | Release history http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox_OS#Release_history http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox_OS#Release_history

asutherland 12y ago
The release management page is https://wiki.mozilla.org/Release_Management/B2G_Landing https://wiki.mozilla.org/Release_Management/B2G_Landing. You can probably think of the code complete date as the lower bound on a production device shipping with that version of the software.

fit2rule 12y ago

Anyone know if I can easily port an OpenGL ES-1.1 based application, written in C++, to FirefoxOS? Or will I have to re-write it in HTML5/js?

dangoor 12y ago
You could probably do it with Emscripten. https://github.com/kripken/emscripten https://github.com/kripken/emscripten
higherpurpose 12y ago
You can probably compile it to asm.js and use WebGL (OpenGL ES 2.0).
frik 12y ago
You can compile your C++ with emscripten to asm.js target. HTML5 has WebGL which is based OpenGL ES 2.0. More than 95% of all FirefoxOS devices support WebGL and the number of FirefoxOS users is increasing rapidly: http://webglstats.com http://webglstats.com I suggest you this blog series, this guy ported his OpenGL game demos to WebGL and wrote long articles about it (Part 77 - 82): http://www.sea-of-memes.com/LetsCode77/LetsCode77.html http://www.sea-of-memes.com/LetsCode77/LetsCode77.html
ndesaulniers 12y ago
I wrote a book chapter in the upcoming book "WebGL Insights" to be published in August on just the subject. The answer is yes, if you port your OpenGL ES 1.0 code to OpenGL ES 2.0. The WebGL 1.0 spec is basically just a diff of the ES 2.0 spec. Then Emscripten can do most of the rest. I'm assuming your code is C++.

jrochkind1 12y ago

I would love to try a firefox OS phone. Verizon seems like an odd choice in the U.S., to me they seem like a 'premium' brand somewhat more expensive than their competitors, while Firefox OS, at least prior to know, seems to have been positioning itself as a budget option.

abrowne 12y ago
Verizon has the best coverage in rural areas, at least where people I know live: southeast Minnesota, western Wisconsin, and Iowa. Many of my (and my friends') relatives in these areas still use flip phones or have reluctantly upgraded to iPhones or Android. Verizon is wise to have an option that's not a smartphone and not total junk. I just upgraded my ZTE Open C to FxOS 3.0. This phone is similar, but worse, in specs to the original Moto E. It runs well, as long as you are using it for basic purposes.
- jrochkind1 12y ago
  aha! That makes some sense, thanks.
- sutro 12y ago
  Any tips or links you can share for getting your Open C to FxOS 3.0? Did you have to first upgrade the base image from JellyBean to KitKat? Were you able to shallow flash a nightly image or did you have to build everything yourself? I have an Open C and am on 2.1, but haven't yet tried to move past that. Thanks!
  - abrowne 12y ago
    I had played with using the Flame images a while back, but I had never gotten around to building anything myself. Just a couple days ago I read that the EU Ebay version (but not the FR version!) is the same as (or similar enough to) the US version, so the MozFR builds here work: http://builds.firefoxos.mozfr.org/doc/en/devices/zte-open-c-eu http://builds.firefoxos.mozfr.org/doc/en/devices/zte-open-c-... I haven't tried SIM/phone-related function yet, but everything else is working for me.

bla2 12y ago

I'd rather they'd push Firefox on Android more. Firefox OS seems stillborn, but Firefox/Android is a good product and mobile could need more browser competition.

lambda 12y ago
I feel like one thing they could do to promote Firefox OS would be to make it possible to run Firefox OS applications on Android; create an installer/app store that would allow you to install them as if they were native apps, but they would be using a shared runtime. That would really help to make it worthwhile to develop FxOS apps; actually having a large installed base of phones that they could be used on, in order to help bootstrap the ecosystem up.
- mburns 12y ago
  >make it possible to run Firefox OS applications on Android https://hacks.mozilla.org/2014/06/firefox-os-apps-run-on-android/ https://hacks.mozilla.org/2014/06/firefox-os-apps-run-on-and...
- Brakenshire 12y ago
  > I feel like one thing they could do to promote Firefox OS would be to make it possible to run Firefox OS applications on Android; create an installer/app store that would allow you to install them as if they were native apps, but they would be using a shared runtime. Good news! That already exists in Firefox for Android, it's called Firefox Marketplace, it works by packaging up the apps as apks, which means they can operate as native android apps with access to native device APIs.
- jccalhoun 12y ago
  as someone else noted you can already run firefox os apps on android. you can go to the marketplace inside firefox and install apps. It seems like a lot of them are non-english which gives me hope that this is taking off at least a little outside the usa (but of course only being fluent in English I can't really tell if these non-english apps are any good or not.)

mythrowaway2 12y ago

They need to move quickly before everyone who knows anything about it has quit working at Mozilla.

tvararu 12y ago

Got to try a Firefox OS phone (or three) last week at a short hackathon in Telefonica Digital's offices in London. The first device I tried (and apparently the one with the beefiest hardware) was an Alcatel One Touch Fire. My enthusiasm took a sharp turn downward from the moment I unlocked the device; accomplished by sliding the screen left to right, the animation was jerky, did not track my finger accurately, and skipped to the end when I let go of the screen halfway through the width of the screen. One of the hosts was quick to point out that the lock screen interaction was actually custom programmed by Alcatel, and so is the rest of the user interface, at which point he pointed to try a different device running something closer to "stock Firefox OS." I'm enthralled by the promise of helping the web win by creating a device category where the web is a first-class citizen, but I'm doubtful it will happen if manufacturers outsource their tasteless UI customizations to web dev interns. Sunspider came out at roughly 1600ms, which places the mid-2013 Alcatel somewhere in the performance bracket of an iPhone 4 (mid-2010, flagship device). Despite the rough benchmarks, I ran some Famo.us demos and they were surprisingly usable, and I could easily get a physics-backed drag interaction to run smoothly inside the browser. I'm waiting to try out a Firefox OS phone with cutting edge hardware.

aubergene 12y ago

I was given a Firefox OS phone at Mozfest last year. I lost my other phone earlier this year and so used it exclusively for four weeks. I'm sorry to say it's pretty terrible at this stage. I was using v2 of Firefox OS. The problems are broadly that it was slow, unreliable and poorly designed. It would just become completely unresponsive a couple of times a week, requiring the battery to be removed to restart. There are very few well known apps. Twitter seems to be the only one, and it was so slow for scrolling that I gave up using it. The included apps were just placeholders to install apps, almost all of them only worked online. I wouldn't recommend getting one to anybody. I'm sure you could buy a cheap secondhand Android and have a better experience. It was worse than Android 1.6. There's such a huge mountain of work for the Mozilla developers to get this to be in anyway competitive to Android. I think Mozilla would be better to concentrate their resources elsewhere.

jbigelow76 12y ago
Maybe Mozilla just needs to launch their own Android AOSP implementation and provide developers with a way to build fully native Android apps with JavaScript. Or is AOSP not going to run on the kind of hardware FFOS is targeting?
- dblohm7 12y ago
  Mozilla has already developed technology to make web apps appear as native on Android. Go and check out the Firefox Marketplace.

Brakenshire 12y ago

I help a lot of middle aged and elderly people who are not all that tech literate, and get asked a lot for recommendations, and I definitely think there is a niche for something between feature phones and smart phones. A lot of people are not interested in putting in the investment of time and money to get up to pace using Android or an iPhone. There's quite a big step to using those devices, for instance in managing data use, or in the way that phone functions recede amongst new smartphone features. With Android as a new user you can even for all intents and purposes lose your dialler, by pressing and holding the icon incorrectly. iOS isn't interested in meeting that market, because of low cost, and if they did attempt it both Android and iOS might well suffer in trying to alter and dilute their brands and the unity of their interfaces. It also works quite well as an target market, because a lot of the apps that would be expected are quite simple, and shouldn't be too difficult to create using web technologies - maybe news or magazine apps, cinema or TV listings, weather and so on. Combine the right interface with a price of £50-£100, a good battery life, and a credible promise over security and privacy, and it definitely seems like an option which could get into the retail stores, and a place in the market of perhaps 2-3%, which is a good place to start.

mmahemoff 12y ago
I agree there's a good opportunity for simpler phones that still get some of the benefits of smartphones rather than a 10 year old Nokia. That said, I don't see much in the article to suggest this is what Mozilla is going after. Yes, some of the devices will be cheap, but there are plenty of cheap Android and Windows phones too. Even if an OS did target just this market, the problem would still be a lack of apps. They might not be the kind of users who install 10 home screens full of apps, but many of them will be interested in a handful of apps in different categories, so the long-tail marketplace still matters. That's where there's an advantage to an Android phone customised for simple usage, but still with the ability for a user (or their tech-savvy friends/family) to install a wide range of apps if/when they want to.
- Brakenshire 12y ago
  They do talk about that market to a certain extent in the article, which I was glad to see. I think on limited apps, it's worth saying that beyond a relatively small number of apps like Facebook or WhatsApp, someone moving from a feature phone won't necessarily have any interest in existing apps on other systems. In general they won't want Google Maps or Waze or Telenav Scout (and won't ask for those while buying the phone), they want to type 'directions' or 'weather' and have something useful come up. That lowers the barrier to entry, although of course there is still the basic requirement that enough useful apps are there, which imo doesn't yet currently apply on FxOS.

xiaq 12y ago

Firefox OS, being based on HTML/CSS/JavaScript, sounds a lot more hackable than Android to me. Well, you can hack Android pretty heavily - forking CyanogenMod, writing Xposed plugins, etc., but Java is just obscure and the compile/deploy/debug cycle is too cumbersome for casual hacking. Hence I look forward to Firefox OS as platform I can easily hack, but I am not sure whether it really is. Could someone with experience tell me: * How easy is it to deploy a FxOS app? How is the remote debugging experience? * How easy is it to hack the core apps (e.g. phone, SMS)? * How easy is it to hack the "framework" (e.g. window manager, status bar)? Is it even written in JavaScript?

fabrice_d 12y ago
* deploying apps is super easy - either host them on a web server or push them from firefox's webIDE, and remote debugging using the firefox devtools just works. * hacking core apps is totally doable. You need a rooted device to update them though. Currently the best ones would be nexus 5 or sony z3(c). * everything that is displayed is html/js/css. What you call "framework" here is part of the system app (https://github.com/mozilla-b2g/gaia/tree/master/apps/system https://github.com/mozilla-b2g/gaia/tree/master/apps/system). It's a fairly large app, but it's where a lot of the fun stuff is!
- xiaq 12y ago
  Thanks. Now I am really looking forward to playing with FxOS!
- darklajid 12y ago
  Hijacking this: Is is possible to replace system parts with 3rd party stuff? I'm mostly talking "change the keyboard" here? If it is, is this possible by modifying/replacing the current keyboard only or can this be something out of tree?
  - fabrice_d 12y ago
    We support 3rd party keyboards now, so you can provide one out of tree.

Lio 12y ago

OT: Hmm, something seems very wrong with that CNET page. It loads ok but it's unreadable on iOS. As soon as I try to scroll it goes haywire. Anyone else seeing that or have a link to a static version?

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

higherpurpose 12y ago

I hope Mozilla puts Servo into Firefox OS sooner rather than later. Same for rebuilding the whole thing in Rust, although that will probably last 3+ years.

dbaupp 12y ago
The Servo team have actually been experimenting with "boot to servo" recently. Their blog has some photos and a description: http://blog.servo.org/2015/02/10/twis-23/ http://blog.servo.org/2015/02/10/twis-23/

DigitalSea 12y ago

Firefox is going to have to fight to get any kind of market share. As Microsoft has shown, you can have great hardware, great interface and tonnes of money behind you, but it does not buy you market share. As long as Mozilla is prepared for the uphill battle they are about to fight, I think they might have a chance. They really need to carve out a niche like they've done in non first-world countries. Merely being the same as Android or iOS is not going to be enough. They need to get developers on board, but even so, will they have the games that most consumers like to play? It's a tricky situation, but one nonetheless I am excited to see what happens from.

contingencies 12y ago

A strong opportunity for FirefoxOS growth is supporting ad-hoc and mesh link layers and providing an intelligent APIs that support that access without compromising security. It's the anti-Google, anti-carrier, anti-corporate, anti-surveillance, anti-government, pro-efficiency, pro-security, pro-developing world feature everyone wants but nobody can have because none of the mobile OSs support it. Read bug+PDF @ https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=945047 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=945047

GigabyteCoin 12y ago

>programmers could write an app just once with Web technologies that span not just iOS, Android, and Firefox OS, but also Windows Phone, BlackBerry OS, Tizen, Ubuntu and any other mobile operating system that arrives tomorrow. This, to me, is the most powerful prospect of Firefox OS. I have been "writing apps" in HTML, Javascript and PHP ever since I can remember. They are just as responsive and useful as any app I have ever used on my Android. Which works fine, but had recently been creeping the heck out of me because it's distributed by Google. Every app is virtually a simple website imho. Look at google docs, for example. Angry birds could easily be written in javascript. As could flappy bird, and virtually every game I can think of. I see no reason to bother writing a piece of software that can only be used on Androir or iOS, except for sheer greed, so I haven't. It's worked out well for me so far. Here's to hoping Firefox OS comes to the first world sooner rather than later.

randomchars 12y ago
> I have been "writing apps" in HTML, Javascript and PHP ever since I can remember. > They are just as responsive and useful as any app I have ever used on my Android. I've yet to see any mobile web app that's as responsive and useful as a native one. They're slow, can't make use of platform features (e.g intents on android, native google login flow) and they always look out of place.

emeidi 12y ago

"front" ... "war"?! Mozilla is taking a knife to a gunfight with the 800 pound gorillas out there. This is going to be a really long and bloody war ... NOT.

SixSigma 12y ago

Slide out keyboard, woo, sign me up. The pop up keyboard is the thing I hate most about my slab.

Aissen 12y ago

Here's what Mozilla needs to "fix" in Firefox OS IMO: - have real browser. Seriously. Firefox on Android is a much better browser. - handle the software, and the updates, Microsoft-style. Maybe have OEMs pay for this service, maybe involve the community. Seriously, all Firefox OS devices sold have an ancient version of the OS. It means I'm safer when I'm using Firefox on Android than when I'm using a Firefox OS phone. I understand the tradeoffs that led them to this decision (their dependency on the Android stack for example), but they seriously need to rethink it. - allow for native code to run. I know it's hard. Even Google with it's uber-optimized (or so they thought at the time) Dalvik (for small phones) understood the need for the NDK. I'm not sure asm.js can cut it, as I've yet to see console-class games on Firefox OS like there are on Android and iOS. - Of course, they need to continue their groundwork on APIs. There shouldn't be a thing you can do on say, iOS or WP and not in Firefox OS (and I'm not saying Android because it gives a lot of power to developers). - They need a flagship phone, for everyone. Not a "developer phone" (although it can act as one), but a real flagship.

spiralpolitik 12y ago

Firefox OS is a great idea, and if it was 2010 it would probably stand a good chance at succeeding with the correct launch strategy. But its not 2010. This weekend I had a chance to play with a Jolla smartphone. Hardware wise it pretty good, and had some really good ideas, but the software was half baked. While in time both Jolla and Firefox OS could become great products, but time ran out a while back. You now have to come to market with all the pieces (and then some). You can't adopt the "build it and they will come mantra" because unless you can give users a compelling reason to switch without losing functionality they won't come. The hardware wars are long gone. The app wars ended a few years back. We are now in the ecosystem wars and Mozilla (and Jolla) appear to have no answers for this (or have answers "coming soon"). The sad fact is that from here on out it's iOS and Android in a tussle neither can win, and unless the phone market resets itself like it did in 2007 there is very little anybody else can do.

onion2k 12y ago
There are a lot more people who can write a web app than a mobile app, by a factor of 10 at least. Give them a platform where it's trivial to make an app (easier than, say, Cordova/PhoneGap), and make it free, and you could easily disrupt the mobile market to a small degree. If FirefoxOS is a success the next challenge will come from the fact that iOS and Android could easily have HTML5 apps too with a native WebviewUI 'player' app, and if FirefoxOS gets any traction their respective developers will add that functionality quickly. Hopefully, for consumers and developers alike, they'd all have compatible APIs so mobile apps would be truly cross-platform, but that's not very likely.
- pjmlp 12y ago
  I would believe that if Web OS, Windows Phone HTML apps, Tizen, Blackberry, ChromeOS didn't already prove users and developers alike don't care.
- spiralpolitik 12y ago
  At this point "a small degree" won't amount to anything. Look at how much money Microsoft have had to burn through to get the few percentage points they've managed to amass. And they still can't get developers onto their ecosystem despite the bribes they've thrown out. It's go big or go home time and Mozilla simply don't have the resources to do it.

realusername 12y ago

If you want to improve the quality of Firefox, there is a simple way to do it, just download Firefox Beta for Android and Firefox Beta for your computer, it's helping them to improve the quality of the stable releases. It's a really easy step to help Mozilla without changing anything to your habits.

blueskin_ 12y ago

I can't see how this would go well. Chrome OS has been a big flop, and pushing that onto phones is just going to pile more disadvantages on top of that. The everything-as-a-website concept is fatally flawed anyway, as while it is often possible to find a single-purpose site to do a specific thing such as converting file formats, you're completely at the mercy of an unknown third party and their privacy policy (as well as promise not to tamper with your file) if you do. It's a privacy disaster waiting to happen. That, and javascript is a horrible and inefficient language not fit for purpose even years ago, so certainly not on devices with weak CPUs and limited battery.

ralmidani 12y ago

I really want to support Firefox OS and abandon Android. But Mozilla keeps missing the mark as far as I'm concerned. I don't want a flip phone, or a low-spec phone, or one that's only available in Japan. I just want something with a decent quad-core and more than 1gb of ram that I can purchase in the US and that will come with a warranty.