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.'"

Comments

web-app-web

[ghetto2ivy]

Not without better connectivity.

Re:web-app-web

[maxume]

Or perhaps the local storage features present in html5.

Re:web-app-web

[maxume]

My above post is flamebait in much the same way that marshmallows are meat.

Re:web-app-web

[Beardo the Bearded]

Marshmallows are made with gelatin, which is made from meat. (Technically, it's the ground cartilage of food-grade animals)

Vegetarians and vegans won't eat marshmallows because they are basically meat and sugar.

Re:web-app-web

[Greenisus]

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).

Re:web-app-web

[dgatwood]

Local storage is pretty cool, and the CSS animation and stuff doubly so. There's still the problem of having a good way to back up local storage.... *sigh*

That said, it's still not even slightly close to what you can do in a native app. Even if performance was identical, 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's no way to guarantee that your handlers won't get stripped out by some overzealous UI library that you load. 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. There's no way to set up an automatically recurring callback with a guaranteed period. There's no way to spawn multiple threads of concurrent execution (except for a FireFox-specific mechanism). There's no standard way to talk to hardware. And those are just the huge problems.

Even simple things like specifying which UI elements should grow proportional to the window size is an utter pain. Creating clickable buttons that don't get their text content selected can be rather entertaining. Convincing the browser to not deselect the selected text in a contentEditable region when you do so is doubly so. Then, you have that fun box model that only a committee could love (all of us are dumber than any of us). 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.... :-)

Yeah, it's going in the right direction. It's got a long way to go, unfortunately. Right now, it takes mounds of custom GUI libraries just to get usable UI, mainly working around the fact that the web browser just wasn't designed to do this stuff. When I can write a web app that's lightweight and doesn't require bringing in something as heavyweight as Prototype just to get anything done, we'll be at least in the right ballpark./p>

Nope.

[7Ghent]

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.

Seems Unlikely

[saisuman]

I saw my wife playing Assassin's Creed on the iPhone today. I can't imagine a game of that quality being remade in Javascript unless it comes with some funky O3D-like capabilities.

Um...how do you figure?

[danaris]

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

Re:Um...how do you figure?

[GooberToo]

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.

Deja Vu

[tverbeek]

This sounds like Steve Jobs before he announced that the iPhone would be supporting native apps and not just web apps. It already had a pretty fast, capable browser, and there were hardly any apps for it. Within a week of shipping an SDK, there were hundreds.

Re:Deja Vu

[jo42]

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.

Re:Ahem

[MichaelSmith]

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

Always...

[daVinci1980]

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.

Re:Ahem

[aztracker1]

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.

Re:Ahem

[contrapunctus]

step 1.5: Change SSH password.

Two things.

[Hurricane78]

Two things, my friend:

1. Java is THE dominant platform if you want to program anything that works on pretty much all mobile phones on the planet. Apart from the iPhone, and some Windows Mobile phones, I don’t think there is a phone that can’t do Java.
2. In the real world, not many people care about the App Store or the iPhone. It has only 3-4% percent of the global market share, and technologically already was surpassed when it came to the market in Japan, was a novelty for about a month in most of Europe, and only in the USA has gained more than 10% for obvious reasons. Which means, others are still hugely dominant. So much in fact, that I don’t even think it’s worth targeting the iPhone platform. (I’m sorry, but if you now think I’m trolling, that’s the reality distortion bubble, created by the hype. I’m in no way hating the iPhone or anything. It has great raw power and a good UI. I’m just stating the facts as I know them from actually being in the market, and keeping up to date, because I need that to make a living. Prejudice is just stupid, and am happy to be corrected. :)

So I really see no point in yet another layer of inner-platform failure, to use JavaScript, when you already have fast Java with accelerated OpenGL, EAX-like audio support, and tons of functions. (Be aware that as much of it is accelerated, Java on mobile phones is vastly faster per raw CPU power, than on desktop VMs.)

If they can offer me all those hardware-accelerated APIs, an ability to check if the phone supports them, a fast JavaScript compiler, and 96% of all phones of the world having it pre-installed, I might consider writing for their platform. ;)

Re:Two things.

[defjesta]

While you seem to have some industry experience, I think you perhaps write off the iPhone a little too easily. I can certainly see some parallels with Apple's Mac strategy in the 80's, but they have done a lot of things right (from a dev point of view), and are seeing success accordingly. 100k apps and rising speaks for itself really.

I agree that the iPhone has a small marketshare of total mobile phones, however the vast majority of mobile applications (where a web app won't do), are targeted towards smartphones. As you can see on this graph, the iPhone is currently in third place with around 13% marketshare. Not insignificant, and not bad at all for just over 2 years on the market.

As another poster mentioned, Apple has made it very easy to sell and buy Apps on this device, so most people that own an iPhone will spend money on Apps. Contrast this to Symbian where it takes a pretty dedicated and sometimes technical user to buy and install an application.

So, in the "real world" the iPhone is quite a dominant force already. It may yet prove to be a fad, and the mobile industry does move very fast, but I don't think so. I am personally seeing an increasing amount of consulting requests specifically iPhone related, and interest from corps is sky high.

With regards to your Java point; J2ME is nice (sometimes ;-), and it certainly has the largest install base of any mobile language, but the sad reality is that it is nowhere near "write once, run anywhere". For a cross platform J2ME mobile project, you will usually spend at least 50% of your project time porting and getting things running on devices that all implement it a little differently and have their own quirks. So supporting the majority of smartphones (Symbian, Blackberry, Win Mo and iPhone) will require a lot of specialised code anyway (unless you use a cross platform framework, but that has it's own drawbacks).

All iPod Touches and iPhones are essentially the same (barring some hardware differences like processor speed, bluetooth, etc), and an App written for one will almost always run on any other (I have had some obscure issues that crop up between different models, but nothing of significance). This is heaven from a dev's point of view!

Re:Is it just me?

[ceoyoyo]

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.

PastryKit

[fandingo]

Ars Technica had an article about a hidden framework that Apple was developing before Apps hit with 2.0. http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2009/12/pastrykit-best-iphone-web-app-library-you-never-heard-about.ars

Actually looks pretty cool and could allow more web-based apps.

I still think that local apps will be preferreable. The thing is that a lot of apps are only useful on the web, so the concerns about not being able to access them w/o a net connection are baseless. Not all apps, but there's lots of social networking apps and others that need networks.

Give me a break, you just made that up.

[WiiVault]

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

Re:Give me a break, you just made that up.

[Marcika]

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

Sorry, but the MorganStanley slide is talking about 'smartphone' share - and not even market share but _shipment_ share. I am very sure that my current phone along with hundreds of millions of other SonyEricsson or Nokia phones didn't count in their survey, although they've been dealing with GMail or Google Maps just fine years before the iPhone was a glimmer in Steve's eye.

In short: GP is very likely closer to the truth than you are.

If it was surpassed in Japan, why so popular?

[SuperKendall]

It has only 3-4% percent of the global market share, and technologically already was surpassed when it came to the market in Japan

True that it currently has 3-4% of global market share of all phones - but here you are talking about Java, which does not run on all phones either. So why not speak to the smartphone percentage, which is more like 20%.

As for Japan, if it was surpassed years ago then why is it so popular there? It's not number one (that's a list updated every week), but it's been in the top ten ever since it was pointed out that it reached number one.

In the real world, not many people care about the App Store or the iPhone.

Except for thirty or forty million users worldwide. By all means feel free to leave them to me.

I'm just stating the facts as I know them from actually being in the market, and keeping up to date, because I need that to make a living.

I think you need to do a better job keeping up. I'm in the market as a full time mobile developer, so my living depends on this too...

when you already have fast Java with accelerated OpenGL, EAX-like audio support, and tons of functions. (Be aware that as much of it is accelerated, Java on mobile phones is vastly faster per raw CPU power, than on desktop VMs.)

You won't find a much bigger Java fan than myself. But the reality is that even if you have some of that on every platform, you have almost no platforms that offer all of that - and the testing required across so many devices makes "reality" that you have to target a handful. Real-world apps are moving in droves to the iPhone/Android, and only the simplest apps or some games are still going to J2ME platforms.

Now if you are including Android in there it's a different matter, but it's really different than J2ME.

All that said... I agree with your conclusion that the mobile browser app market is just not compelling compared to the iPhone or Android - or even J2ME. They'd have to add a ton of stuff just to get close and the native platforms swill simply always be ahead of the game.

"More intense tasks"

[Animats]

Javascript "increasingly more appropriate for more intense tasks."

Yeah, right. I'm getting really tired of web sites that use 100% of the CPU while doing essentially nothing. It's bad enough on a desktop machine. On a phone, that eats the battery.