7 ms·

Trying to shoehorn a performance hungry HTML5 OS on low-end phones was a complete waste of time. Just read this review of the $35 Firefox phone [1]: it's comple

by veeti 11y ago

Trying to shoehorn a performance hungry HTML5 OS on low-end phones was a complete waste of time. Just read this review of the $35 Firefox phone [1]: it's completely unusable to the point that even typing is difficult. What an embarrassment. I bought the mid-spec Flame developer device out of curiosity, and it's not much better. Everything feels slow, sluggish and unresponsive. Even Android 2.x was better. My quad-core i7 desktop still occasionally struggles to render the latest and greatest HTML5 stuff at 60 fps. How on earth do they expect a phone to do the same? [1] http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/10/testing-a-35-firefox-os-phone-how-bad-could-it-be/ http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/10/testing-a-35-firefox-...

wwweston 11y ago
My experience is out of date, but I'm a little surprised to hear this. I have a Geeksphone Keon that I played with for a lot of 2013, and it wasn't half bad. Ironically my biggest complaint was that web browsing would bog down on pages with a lot of content... and I think that might have been a memory thing. Most of the phone/app stuff seemed fine (except the maps application, which was nigh unusable for me, not sure if that was CPU bound, memory bound, bandwidth bound, or just the wrong mapping service).
- digi_owl 11y ago
  Lots of "content" more like it. Best i can tell, JS can be a serious memory hog. And high "content" sites invariably come with trackers tracking trackers tracking trackers.
Lx1oG-AWb6h_ZG0 11y ago
I'm halfway through the article, and I have to say, I've never read a more brutal review. > The other really weird thing missing is any kind of battery backup for the time. If the phone loses power, the time and date gets reset, leaving it looking like an old VCR blinking "12:00." This seems insane for a device released just a few months ago... when you can get a lumia, which is very reasonable, for just 5$ more, why would anyone bother with this?
- pjc50 11y ago
  Provided it reacquires time as soon as it has a data connection, that's not unreasonable. The point of the Firefox phone was always to have an OS that was open in ways that Android isn't. That was never going to come in cheapest.
  - seba_dos1 11y ago
    Sadly, they aren't really living up to that point. Firefox OS works basically like AOSP - it's up to vendor to provide you unlocked environment (or not). It's not even on a requirement list when you want to market your device using Firefox OS brand. Phones like ZTE Open often came with blocked bootloader you had to "jailbreak" to upgrade FxOS by yourself - seems familiar, doesn't it? Some time ago I tried to compile Firefox OS to GTA04 - a hardware upgrade for Openmoko Neo Freerunner. It's pretty much the most open mobile phone out there these days, allowing you to run basically any GNU/Linux distro you'd want on it. I failed - available documentation is lacking; or actually, it focuses on something completely different. It assumes that you either have a Android phone and goes to great extent describing how to extract non-free binary blobs from your current system and apply them to FxOS, or you have a great knowledge of Android build system and you can handle everything by yourself. GTA04 isn't Android based - while there is Replicant build working on it, it's still closer to standard PC way than Android phones when it comes to stuff like booting etc. Not having much experience with Android from developer side, I simply got lost in all those clearly Android-based instructions. You'd at least think that Gonk, the hardware abstraction layer of Firefox OS implemented on top of Android base system, would be just a compatibility measure for dealing with vendors that only provide Android support. It's not the case - even though Honk (a Gonk reimplementation based on standard GNU/Unix way of how systems work) exists, it was contributed as a part of experimental Raspberry Pi port and is not really maintained ever since. It makes me sad, cause Firefox OS had the potential to actually move smartphones in general towards being a little more open platforms, which is always close to my heart as a long-time Openmoko and OpenPhoenux supporter and contributor, but sadly this aspect got basically ignored by Mozilla itself and they went with pragmatic "let's just make it work, even if it means having non-free low-level androidware under our free OS layer" :(
bryanlarsen 11y ago
A web browser is basic table stakes for a smart phone. In many people's minds that's the basic difference between a dumb phone and a smart phone: a dumb phone has a limited web browser. So Firefox OS has an advantage over it's competitors at the low end: it's competitors have to run their windowing system and a browser simultaneously; Firefox OS only has to run the browser.
- baghira 11y ago
  This may very well be true, but completely ignores the context: 1. As far as the effect of the window manager: this isn't emacs+X11 in 1995: the drag on CPU/ram/battery of gecko/blink will dwarf the "weight" of the windowing system. 2. FirefoxOS maybe be leaner in principle, but the competition has vastly better hardware, both in the Windows Phone field and in the Android one, via what I can guess is a combination of subsidies (is mobile MS still burning piles of cash or has the division posted some profits?) and sheer mass scale production. So, for little more money you get a get a better device that actually runs all the apps that your friends have, and a web browser. 3. The appeal of FirefoxOS even in those low end markets was negligible (this has been discussed to death). Besides they released phones in places such as Italy and Spain, two markets were people will en masse shell out the cash for an Iphone. I found that simply baffling.
  - soapdog 11y ago
    1. As far as the effect of the window manager: this isn't emacs+X11 in 1995: the drag on CPU/ram/battery of gecko/blink will dwarf the "weight" of the windowing system. Firefox OS can actually run on a 1 ARM CPU with as low as 128mb. It may not be the best experience but Android and WP can't even boot given those constraints. Firefox OS can be really nimble, the main issue when people complain about performance is usually a poorly implemented app and not the OS. 2. FirefoxOS maybe be leaner in principle, but the competition has vastly better hardware, both in the Windows Phone field and in the Android one, via what I can guess is a combination of subsidies (is mobile MS still burning piles of cash or has the division posted some profits?) and sheer mass scale production. So, for little more money you get a get a better device that actually runs all the apps that your friends have, and a web browser. That is true for some places but not everywhere. There are places where all the devices are imported and heavily taxed. In these cases Firefox OS tends to be a lot cheaper than a comparable Android. Some people can't afford an Android device, they may be stuck with dumb phones, in these cases, Firefox OS is an appealing solution. Thats the original case, migrating people to their first smartphone and give them web access. 3. The appeal of FirefoxOS even in those low end markets was negligible (this has been discussed to death). Besides they released phones in places such as Italy and Spain, two markets were people will en masse shell out the cash for an Iphone. I found that simply baffling. I will not comment on the negligible part of your comment because I know people from those locations, real people not data points in a graph, who were delighted to have their first device. Also remember that Firefox OS is a partnership with hardware makers and carriers. The carriers decide where it will launch and both TIM and Telefonica wanted to launch on their home country. It was their decision, we may not agree, but its their call to launch on their home base.
omouse 11y ago
It's not a complete waste of time because you can see where the performance is impacted. I'm sure they gathered valuable performance metrics. Obviously to gather more customers and to get people to believe in the product you need a higher-end phone. They wanted to avoid competing directly with iPhone or Android.
felipeerias 11y ago
Mozilla was sending a Web browser to do S40's job...
agumonkey 11y ago
Happened to Windows RT, IIRC Office suffered heavy input lag. Man seriously, a Duron with 64MB could do a lot of useful things like.. accepting keyboard input in real-time, it's hard to believe the software stack is that demanding today. I'm gonna release a phone with win2k on it and be rich.
soapdog 11y ago
Android 2.x was not better than Firefox OS 2.x IMHO. I have them all here and I really enjoy the Flame running 2.x, it was my primary smartphone until February. One don't need HTML5 at 60fps. One need HTML5 apps that work. Movies are not 60fps. The only place where you need 60fps is games and that type of game is not the objective of the devices you've seen running Firefox OS. What is needed is quality HTML5 apps. The old Pre2 and Pre3 webOS devices had some pretty amazing HTML5 apps. The usability was great even if the phone slowed sometimes. UX is better than FPS. Usability trumps benchmarks. The problem is when you code for the high-end place of the spectrum with evergreen browsers and stuff and try to shoehorn that into a phone. thats when misery happens. Instead of reading a review from written by someone used to high-end devices and ubiquitous networking. Look for those people in India and South America who are buying Firefox OS devices as their first smartphone because they couldn't afford a higher-end device. Look for their feedback. Many are accessing the web on a personal device for the first time. Its a life transforming opportunity once the doors to the vast knowledge repository of the web is open. I can go on for hours on where Firefox OS shines but I will not bore you. Just don't try to compare it against Android and iOS devices, that was never the objective.
- veeti 11y ago
  > One don't need HTML5 at 60fps. The only place where you need 60fps is games and that type of game is not the objective of the devices you've seen running Firefox OS. Smooth response is absolutely essential for touch usability. Without it, you can not have any sort of precision on an already imprecise input method. To achieve this, you really do need to near 60 frames per second. When the simplest list (let alone a complex web page) constantly trails behind your finger and has to catch up with rendering, it becomes very difficult to find what you're looking for. It's crucial that what happens on screen is connected to what you're doing, or you have to constantly try and consciously correct for the software that just can't keep up. A budget phone doesn't need to match the latest and greatest iPhone 6 in smoothness, but there is a baseline performance that has to be met for usability. > Many are accessing the web on a personal device for the first time... just don't try to compare it against Android and iOS devices, that was never the objective. If you actually read the review I linked, it turns out the $35 phone is practically worthless for any web browsing or just about anything. And once you go past that price point, FxOS has competition. Android One and low-end OEM's like Micromax already provide devices that are years ahead in performance, usability and functionality.
bitwize 11y ago
A developer had a problem and thought "I know! I'll base my entire platform on HTML5/JS!" Now he had two problems.
frik 11y ago
Give Mozilla a little more time. A HTML5 stack can be as efficient as a Java language based stack (Android, older Backberry, etc). It's all about the Javascript JIT VM, the web render engine and how efficient the JS code is. So with the upcoming multi process Servo web render engine coded in Rust, FirefoxOS will have an competitive advantage in future. HTML5 based shells/"OS" have certainly a bright future (ChromeOS is already popular and there is WebOS running in newer LG SmartTVs). A HTML5 based windows manager for Linux/Windows are probably the next thing - that allow offline web apps and native GUI applications to run next to each other and with the windows being actually HTML iframes.
- digi_owl 11y ago
  Also, didn't Mozilla develop a C to JS compiler that creates some impressively performing JS?
  - frik 11y ago
    Yes, you probably mean Asm.js and the Emscripten compiler
    - digi_owl 11y ago
      Yep, that would be the one.
darklajid 11y ago
To be fair: My current Android phone has eight cores (the previous one had four) and three GB of memory (previous: same). Those devices aren't really phones anymore... As a flame owner I do understand where you're coming from, but the 'phone' part in there struck me as misleading. This S6E is basically a powerful! machine from a couple years back and probably better Graphic hardware to boot, unless that machine came with a gaming card or something. (obviously the cheap phones don't compare to the S6 or the OnePlus One - but given that the announcement is moving away from the low-end sector I think this is worth considering)

by veeti 11y ago

wwweston 11y ago

My experience is out of date, but I'm a little surprised to hear this. I have a Geeksphone Keon that I played with for a lot of 2013, and it wasn't half bad. Ironically my biggest complaint was that web browsing would bog down on pages with a lot of content... and I think that might have been a memory thing. Most of the phone/app stuff seemed fine (except the maps application, which was nigh unusable for me, not sure if that was CPU bound, memory bound, bandwidth bound, or just the wrong mapping service).

digi_owl 11y ago
Lots of "content" more like it. Best i can tell, JS can be a serious memory hog. And high "content" sites invariably come with trackers tracking trackers tracking trackers.

Lx1oG-AWb6h_ZG0 11y ago

I'm halfway through the article, and I have to say, I've never read a more brutal review. > The other really weird thing missing is any kind of battery backup for the time. If the phone loses power, the time and date gets reset, leaving it looking like an old VCR blinking "12:00." This seems insane for a device released just a few months ago... when you can get a lumia, which is very reasonable, for just 5$ more, why would anyone bother with this?

pjc50 11y ago
Provided it reacquires time as soon as it has a data connection, that's not unreasonable. The point of the Firefox phone was always to have an OS that was open in ways that Android isn't. That was never going to come in cheapest.
- seba_dos1 11y ago
  Sadly, they aren't really living up to that point. Firefox OS works basically like AOSP - it's up to vendor to provide you unlocked environment (or not). It's not even on a requirement list when you want to market your device using Firefox OS brand. Phones like ZTE Open often came with blocked bootloader you had to "jailbreak" to upgrade FxOS by yourself - seems familiar, doesn't it? Some time ago I tried to compile Firefox OS to GTA04 - a hardware upgrade for Openmoko Neo Freerunner. It's pretty much the most open mobile phone out there these days, allowing you to run basically any GNU/Linux distro you'd want on it. I failed - available documentation is lacking; or actually, it focuses on something completely different. It assumes that you either have a Android phone and goes to great extent describing how to extract non-free binary blobs from your current system and apply them to FxOS, or you have a great knowledge of Android build system and you can handle everything by yourself. GTA04 isn't Android based - while there is Replicant build working on it, it's still closer to standard PC way than Android phones when it comes to stuff like booting etc. Not having much experience with Android from developer side, I simply got lost in all those clearly Android-based instructions. You'd at least think that Gonk, the hardware abstraction layer of Firefox OS implemented on top of Android base system, would be just a compatibility measure for dealing with vendors that only provide Android support. It's not the case - even though Honk (a Gonk reimplementation based on standard GNU/Unix way of how systems work) exists, it was contributed as a part of experimental Raspberry Pi port and is not really maintained ever since. It makes me sad, cause Firefox OS had the potential to actually move smartphones in general towards being a little more open platforms, which is always close to my heart as a long-time Openmoko and OpenPhoenux supporter and contributor, but sadly this aspect got basically ignored by Mozilla itself and they went with pragmatic "let's just make it work, even if it means having non-free low-level androidware under our free OS layer" :(

bryanlarsen 11y ago

A web browser is basic table stakes for a smart phone. In many people's minds that's the basic difference between a dumb phone and a smart phone: a dumb phone has a limited web browser. So Firefox OS has an advantage over it's competitors at the low end: it's competitors have to run their windowing system and a browser simultaneously; Firefox OS only has to run the browser.

baghira 11y ago
This may very well be true, but completely ignores the context: 1. As far as the effect of the window manager: this isn't emacs+X11 in 1995: the drag on CPU/ram/battery of gecko/blink will dwarf the "weight" of the windowing system. 2. FirefoxOS maybe be leaner in principle, but the competition has vastly better hardware, both in the Windows Phone field and in the Android one, via what I can guess is a combination of subsidies (is mobile MS still burning piles of cash or has the division posted some profits?) and sheer mass scale production. So, for little more money you get a get a better device that actually runs all the apps that your friends have, and a web browser. 3. The appeal of FirefoxOS even in those low end markets was negligible (this has been discussed to death). Besides they released phones in places such as Italy and Spain, two markets were people will en masse shell out the cash for an Iphone. I found that simply baffling.
- soapdog 11y ago
  1. As far as the effect of the window manager: this isn't emacs+X11 in 1995: the drag on CPU/ram/battery of gecko/blink will dwarf the "weight" of the windowing system. Firefox OS can actually run on a 1 ARM CPU with as low as 128mb. It may not be the best experience but Android and WP can't even boot given those constraints. Firefox OS can be really nimble, the main issue when people complain about performance is usually a poorly implemented app and not the OS. 2. FirefoxOS maybe be leaner in principle, but the competition has vastly better hardware, both in the Windows Phone field and in the Android one, via what I can guess is a combination of subsidies (is mobile MS still burning piles of cash or has the division posted some profits?) and sheer mass scale production. So, for little more money you get a get a better device that actually runs all the apps that your friends have, and a web browser. That is true for some places but not everywhere. There are places where all the devices are imported and heavily taxed. In these cases Firefox OS tends to be a lot cheaper than a comparable Android. Some people can't afford an Android device, they may be stuck with dumb phones, in these cases, Firefox OS is an appealing solution. Thats the original case, migrating people to their first smartphone and give them web access. 3. The appeal of FirefoxOS even in those low end markets was negligible (this has been discussed to death). Besides they released phones in places such as Italy and Spain, two markets were people will en masse shell out the cash for an Iphone. I found that simply baffling. I will not comment on the negligible part of your comment because I know people from those locations, real people not data points in a graph, who were delighted to have their first device. Also remember that Firefox OS is a partnership with hardware makers and carriers. The carriers decide where it will launch and both TIM and Telefonica wanted to launch on their home country. It was their decision, we may not agree, but its their call to launch on their home base.

omouse 11y ago

It's not a complete waste of time because you can see where the performance is impacted. I'm sure they gathered valuable performance metrics. Obviously to gather more customers and to get people to believe in the product you need a higher-end phone. They wanted to avoid competing directly with iPhone or Android.

felipeerias 11y ago

Mozilla was sending a Web browser to do S40's job...

agumonkey 11y ago

Happened to Windows RT, IIRC Office suffered heavy input lag. Man seriously, a Duron with 64MB could do a lot of useful things like.. accepting keyboard input in real-time, it's hard to believe the software stack is that demanding today. I'm gonna release a phone with win2k on it and be rich.

soapdog 11y ago

Android 2.x was not better than Firefox OS 2.x IMHO. I have them all here and I really enjoy the Flame running 2.x, it was my primary smartphone until February. One don't need HTML5 at 60fps. One need HTML5 apps that work. Movies are not 60fps. The only place where you need 60fps is games and that type of game is not the objective of the devices you've seen running Firefox OS. What is needed is quality HTML5 apps. The old Pre2 and Pre3 webOS devices had some pretty amazing HTML5 apps. The usability was great even if the phone slowed sometimes. UX is better than FPS. Usability trumps benchmarks. The problem is when you code for the high-end place of the spectrum with evergreen browsers and stuff and try to shoehorn that into a phone. thats when misery happens. Instead of reading a review from written by someone used to high-end devices and ubiquitous networking. Look for those people in India and South America who are buying Firefox OS devices as their first smartphone because they couldn't afford a higher-end device. Look for their feedback. Many are accessing the web on a personal device for the first time. Its a life transforming opportunity once the doors to the vast knowledge repository of the web is open. I can go on for hours on where Firefox OS shines but I will not bore you. Just don't try to compare it against Android and iOS devices, that was never the objective.

veeti 11y ago
> One don't need HTML5 at 60fps. The only place where you need 60fps is games and that type of game is not the objective of the devices you've seen running Firefox OS. Smooth response is absolutely essential for touch usability. Without it, you can not have any sort of precision on an already imprecise input method. To achieve this, you really do need to near 60 frames per second. When the simplest list (let alone a complex web page) constantly trails behind your finger and has to catch up with rendering, it becomes very difficult to find what you're looking for. It's crucial that what happens on screen is connected to what you're doing, or you have to constantly try and consciously correct for the software that just can't keep up. A budget phone doesn't need to match the latest and greatest iPhone 6 in smoothness, but there is a baseline performance that has to be met for usability. > Many are accessing the web on a personal device for the first time... just don't try to compare it against Android and iOS devices, that was never the objective. If you actually read the review I linked, it turns out the $35 phone is practically worthless for any web browsing or just about anything. And once you go past that price point, FxOS has competition. Android One and low-end OEM's like Micromax already provide devices that are years ahead in performance, usability and functionality.

bitwize 11y ago

A developer had a problem and thought "I know! I'll base my entire platform on HTML5/JS!" Now he had two problems.

frik 11y ago

Give Mozilla a little more time. A HTML5 stack can be as efficient as a Java language based stack (Android, older Backberry, etc). It's all about the Javascript JIT VM, the web render engine and how efficient the JS code is. So with the upcoming multi process Servo web render engine coded in Rust, FirefoxOS will have an competitive advantage in future. HTML5 based shells/"OS" have certainly a bright future (ChromeOS is already popular and there is WebOS running in newer LG SmartTVs). A HTML5 based windows manager for Linux/Windows are probably the next thing - that allow offline web apps and native GUI applications to run next to each other and with the windows being actually HTML iframes.

digi_owl 11y ago
Also, didn't Mozilla develop a C to JS compiler that creates some impressively performing JS?
- frik 11y ago
  Yes, you probably mean Asm.js and the Emscripten compiler
  - digi_owl 11y ago
    Yep, that would be the one.

darklajid 11y ago

To be fair: My current Android phone has eight cores (the previous one had four) and three GB of memory (previous: same). Those devices aren't really phones anymore... As a flame owner I do understand where you're coming from, but the 'phone' part in there struck me as misleading. This S6E is basically a powerful! machine from a couple years back and probably better Graphic hardware to boot, unless that machine came with a gaming card or something. (obviously the cheap phones don't compare to the S6 or the OnePlus One - but given that the announcement is moving away from the low-end sector I think this is worth considering)