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Firefox Mobile Threatens Mobile App Stores, Says Mozilla

Posted by timothy on from the race-to-the-bottom-price dept.

Barence writes "Mozilla claims that its new Firefox Mobile browser could be the beginning of the end for the hugely popular app stores created by Apple and its ilk. Mozilla claims Firefox Mobile will have the fastest Javascript engine of any mobile browser, and that will allow developers to write apps once for the web, instead of multiple versions for the different mobile platforms. 'As developers get more frustrated with quality assurance, the amount of handsets they have to buy, whether their security updates will get past the iPhone approval process ... I think they'll move to the web,' Mozilla's mobile VP, Jay Sullivan, told PC Pro. 'In the interim period, apps will be very successful. Over time, the web will win because it always does.'"

23 of 278 comments (clear)

  1. web-app-web by ghetto2ivy · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Not without better connectivity.

    1. Re:web-app-web by maxume · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Or perhaps the local storage features present in html5.

      --
      Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
    2. Re:web-app-web by some_guy_88 · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Yeah, people suck.

    3. Re:web-app-web by Greenisus · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I've used the local storage features and they're great. Even made a simple hash store based on it. But you're still stuck in the browser, so the user experience isn't quite as good as a native app. Also, you have all of the overhead of the browser, so even the leanest and meanest Javascript will have a hard time keeping up with the speed of a native app. At least, that has been my experience with the iPhone and Mobile Safari.

      But it's definitely moving in the right direction, especially when you throw in CSS-driven animation (which is sadly slow on the iPhone).

  2. Ahem by Captain+Splendid · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Yeah, worked for java didn't it? Not sure Apple's any likelier to just roll over any more than Microsoft or Adobe did.

    --
    Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
    1. Re:Ahem by MichaelSmith · · Score: 4, Insightful

      But the only really successful app store is on the iphone, and apple won't allow firefox on that platform.

      --
      http://michaelsmith.id.au
    2. Re:Ahem by aztracker1 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I'm pretty sure I'm not the only android user that would disagree. I have a friend who's a die hard mac fan, who's getting a Droid. There are a lot of things the users don't like in the iPhone, Apple's App Store and AT&T.

      --
      Michael J. Ryan - tracker1.info
    3. Re:Ahem by Jugalator · · Score: 2, Insightful

      3. Reach merely a fraction of the iPhone market where people are geeky enough to bother...?

      --
      Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
    4. Re:Ahem by Yvan256 · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Different screen resolutions, different interfaces, etc, etc. You won't be able to write once, run anywhere. Or are they thinking they can force everybody to use Firefox on both phones AND computers? That's as bad as Microsoft, isn't it?

    5. Re:Ahem by ckaminski · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Only supporting 1, a SINGLE, ActiveSync account, for one. That I think is perhaps the biggest flaw in the iPhone email setup... this coming from the Pre, which could support multiple ActiveSync accounts, so I could sync GMail and my Corporate mail. With iPhone, it's one or the other.

    6. Re:Ahem by HarrySquatter · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Yeah cause Android has been such a smashing success. Oh wait...

  3. Nope. by 7Ghent · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Not until mobile OSes allow for direct hardware access from the browser. Palm's Web OS does, but I can't imagine Apple allowing Fennec to access the accelerometer or camera, say. Particularly if it begins to cannibalize their App Store profits.

  4. Um...how do you figure? by danaris · · Score: 5, Insightful

    First of all, you can be 100% certain that unless Mozilla's made some kind of specific arrangement with Apple, this will not be allowed on the App Store. It's plainly and obviously against the SDK terms.

    Second...how many times have people complained that web apps are totally inadequate substitutes for native apps, for many types of application? I mean, sure, you can make an RSS reader, or a Twitter client, but what about (for instance) Myst? That's now an iPhone app, weighing in at over 500MB, if I recall correctly. Do you really think that's going to be a viable app to distribute as a web app?

    Third, unless you're going to have some sort of subscription thingy worked out, how are you going to make money on web apps without intrusive ads? Again, consider Myst. No one is going to accept ads suddenly popping up when they try to link from Myst Island to Channelwood. And I doubt that people will want to pay a monthly fee to access a single-player game, either.

    Fourth, if you're writing a plain web app, however fancily mobile-enhanced, how are you going to make use of the cool features of different phones? The iPhone has a camera, accelerometers, GPS, and multitouch. I admit I'm not terribly well-versed in the features of other smartphones, but a) do they all have these? b) can you access them from web apps? and c) can you access them all in the same way from web apps?

    I'm betting the answers to these are all, to greater or lesser extent, "no."

    Mozilla can dream about "killing the App Store." But if it ever happens, it's not going to be Firefox Mobile that does it.

    Dan Aris

    --
    Fun. Free. Online. RPG. BattleMaster.
    1. Re:Um...how do you figure? by GooberToo · · Score: 3, Insightful

      You're missing the point. The point is that developers will move to browser independent webapps rather than writing an iPhone+blackberry app+htc touch app, etc.

      You're missing the point. If that were going to happen, Palm would have had a smash success on their hands. As is, they've had just enough success to keep the wolves at bay. Developers AND users don't want browser apps. And from what I've read, Apple will remove the app at the first sign of success. Simply put, article's rant is nothing but a wet dream. It simply isn't going to happen - at least not any time soon.

      Web browsers are not appropriate for everything, but they're becoming increasingly faster, and increasingly more appropriate for more intense tasks.

      Right - and that's only just barely started to happen on the desktop where enough power exists to allow for JIT of JS. Mobile devices are no where near powerful enough at this point to allow for those types of optimizations. Maybe sometime over the next decade... Until then, its not practical, and that's just from a CPU perspective. Broadband radios drain the holy crap out of the battery. Forcing basic functionality to the browser is simply going to make users even more unhappy in addition to the crappy interfaces.

      You're point four is certainly a good one but that also means additional layers on layers. That's not going to fly and simply make it unusable for vast too many applications, given the limited nature mobile platforms.

      Simply put, a wet dream is a wet dream, no matter now much you want to rationalize its real. In the end, your friends are still going to roll their eyes when you insist you nailed that super model last night. Even if everyone wanted to buy into your wet dream, the technology just isn't there yet.

  5. Misses the point pretty badly by ZombieRoboNinja · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I'd say this comment misses the point of phone apps pretty terribly. At least the ones I use tend to rely almost entirely on the phone's hardware features. Not just accelerated graphics and GPS and camera, but tie-ins to the address book and calendar, etc.

  6. Always... by daVinci1980 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It's a little shortsighted to use "always" to describe the web's winning streak for two reasons:

    1) The web has not always won. Despite Google's Office suite, Microsoft continues to dominate the office space and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. So at least in one market, thick clients have continued to win out over thin clients.

    2) The web is just not that old. Claiming that the web will win because it has always won is a weak appeal to tradition made especially weak by the fact that the web is realistically 13-15 years old.

    --
    I currently have no clever signature witicism to add here.
  7. ECMAScript is Lisp with C syntax by tepples · · Score: 1, Insightful

    ECMAScript has been described as Scheme with C syntax, or what Lisp might have been had the M-expressions ever been implemented. Are your complaints about the language itself or about the DOM?

  8. Re:Is it just me? by ceoyoyo · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Mozilla is suggesting that Firefox should essentially be the OS for smart phones. If that came to pass, all the apps on your phone could be, at best, as stable as Firefox. Which makes the stability of Firefox definitely on topic, in addition to the speed.

  9. Give me a break, you just made that up. by WiiVault · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Sorry but you are wrong. The iPhone has 17% of the mobile share globally, 50% of the global app usage, and an insane 65% of the mobile HTML request. Unlike you I did the research instead of making shit up. Want the source? Here

  10. Re:Deja Vu by jo42 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    What the PHB-tard from Mozilla forgot was the initial way of developing apps for the iPhone was in Safari via HTML, CSS and Javascript. Since day one Safari on the iPhone supported sending multi-touch info to Javascript code and many, many other Apple originated extensions to Webkit and proposed HTML and CSS standards (which Mozilla will have to add to Firefox if they haven't already). The iPhone app market exploded when a native SDK became available. Comparing developing apps in Javascript to native SDKs, on any platform, is like comparing skateboards to cars - yeah, both are transportation, with one being a toy and the other the real thing.

  11. Re:PLEASE not Javascript by BenoitRen · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Your post is yet more evidence of how misunderstood JavaScript as a language is. It's actually quite neat and versatile. No wonder the language's core (ECMAScript) has so many derivations.

  12. Re:APIs missing from common JS implementations by BZ · · Score: 2, Insightful

    > And restricting XHR using a list of exceptions to a client-side same origin policy isn't
    > even secure

    It actually is, for non-public resources (ones requiring a login).

  13. Re:Trusting the client by BZ · · Score: 2, Insightful

    The scenario CORS is supposed to help with is that of a user being logged into site A (call it The Bank) without site B being able to send certain requests with the user's credentials to site A and read the responses. If site B wants to make requests from their own server, they don't have the user's credentials and will get a 401 or equivalent. If site B wants to make the requests via the browser (which does send credentials with requests), then the request is only sent (in the preflight case) if the right CORS response is received, and the data is not made available to site B unless the right CORS response is received.

    Since the browser is the entity here which knows both which trust domain is making the request and which trust domain the request is going to, it needs to be the one which enforces the data not leaking from A to B unless A explicitly wants it to.