Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
Or perhaps the local storage features present in html5.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
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.
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.
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.
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.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
But the only really successful app store is on the iphone, and apple won't allow firefox on that platform.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
My above post is flamebait in much the same way that marshmallows are meat.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
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.
step 1.5: Change SSH password.
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.
---
ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
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.
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.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
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>
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.