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Firefox Mobile Threatens Mobile App Stores, Says Mozilla
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.'"
There's still the problem of having a good way to back up local storage....
I would suspect many apps using local storage would use it as a cache for server storage... but really, that's up to the browser. On my system, I can simply back up "~/.config/google-chrome/Default/Local Storage" and be done. Looking inside, it's a few easily-read sqlite databases, stored as protocol_domain_port, more or less.
On Linux, at least, backing this up is a trivial shell script.
the DOM is beyond half assed as a GUI environment. There's not even a drag and drop mechanism built in that works across all browsers.
There is, however, a standard for drag and drop, and several libraries which emulate it in all browsers.
There's no way to guarantee that your handlers won't get stripped out by some overzealous UI library that you load.
Sure there is, just don't use such an overzealous UI library! That's like complaining that X11 sucks because it's theoretically possible to make a widget toolkit that sucks.
Basic functionality like contentEditable (for WYSIWYG editing) is barely supported in any browser, replete with hundreds of serious bugs that make it very hard to deal with.
I haven't touched it, so maybe you're right. Then again, there are more than enough tools to build your own.
There's no way to set up an automatically recurring callback with a guaranteed period.
That's the nature of a single-threaded system. But setInterval works, and I really don't see why it's inadequate for a GUI system.
There's no way to spawn multiple threads of concurrent execution (except for a FireFox-specific mechanism).
Google "web workers" -- it's not Firefox-specific.
There's no standard way to talk to hardware.
That's by design. What hardware do you need to talk to?
Even simple things like specifying which UI elements should grow proportional to the window size is an utter pain.
Assign a fixed size to elements which shouldn't grow, assign a percentage to the ones which should. This has been known for years. I'm sure you've found something that's "an utter pain", but what is it?
Creating clickable buttons that don't get their text content selected can be rather entertaining.
Your ShellScriptGames link suggests you're not an utter moron, but you're losing credibility here...
<button> ...duh?
Convincing the browser to not deselect the selected text in a contentEditable region when you do so is doubly so.
I'll again grant that I don't know how this actually works.
Then, you have that fun box model that only a committee could love (all of us are dumber than any of us).
What is it about the box model you don't like? This is actually not a rhetorical question -- I'm sure it has flaws, I just don't really know about them.
Don't get me started on trying to do column layouts with CSS. I could go into specifics, but if you've ever tried to build any significant web application, you're already nodding in agreement....
I'm shaking my head... CSS3 supports columns natively, to take one example.
Yeah, it's going in the right direction. It's got a long way to go, unfortunately.
I will agree with this, absolutely. However, most of your complaints are addressed with current or future standards, much of it supported now -- for example, I'm using a Chrome beta, and I was able to see multicolumn layouts. (If you have to support IE, how are you getting local storage and CSS animation to work?)
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!