Slashdot Mirror
Where Is Firefox OS?
adeelarshad82 writes "Microsoft's very simple yet graceful concept raises a very big question. The way Microsoft is planning out Windows 8, developers will be able to write one HTML 5 app which will run across every Windows 8 form factor, from desktops to laptops, to ARM netbooks and tablets. Given the concept, if you remove the operating system — or at least make it transparent enough that the browser becomes the platform — then suddenly every piece of software works across every piece of hardware which raises the question that why Mozilla hasn't considered a Firefox OS?"
A: Because it's a dumb idea.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
It's fine with me Mozilla isn't doing a "Firefox OS". They can focus more of their efforts on the core Firefox product. Besides, Google is doing a good enough job already with a browser-based OS if you ask me.
The 'browser as an OS' concept is still stupid.
I could draw it out and make it sound pretty, but its stupid nonetheless. Once you've made the browser so big that it encompasses all possible generic operating system needs, it is too bloated and someone else makes a smaller faster better browser.
Operating systems and browsers are two different things.
Now as a work environment, say a desktop interface, browsers have potential, and that's what most people mean, but even there, the security problems of dividing up what is local data and what is remote, what should be executable and what shouldn't becomes a nightmare that is easier to handle when avoided completely.
HTML5 isn't the best way to write any application; that's why almost everyone else who's made an HTML based platform has moved to a native one after the fact. Does HTML need the features necessary to write generic applications? Certainly not. The overloading of protocols (everything as HTTP) and formats (everything as HTML/CSS) is just short sighted laziness.
Please make it stop.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
Does a Linux kiosk OS count? How about Webconverger? It is a Debian derivative kiosk that uses Firefox.
Just install a very lightweight linux distro. Install firefox on it. Set it to full screen mode.
Done. No need to reinvent the wheel.
Great idea. Then they can make an OS web app that runs on the browser, basically a windows add-on for firefox. That way you can upload your OS in the cloud and just stream it over 3G to all your devices whenever you need it. A side benefit would be that Microsoft would finally get paid for all the pirated software people have stolen from them over the years.
Because then they'd have to deal with all the hardware support and driver incompatibility bullshit that Microsoft and Apple and the Linux crew have to deal with. Not everybody wants to code at the metal level.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Name one other open-source browser developed by an open community process not funded by a corporation that doesn't have some sort of lag on fixing some bugs.
I'm not a FOSS evangelist, but for the resources they have it's not out of the bounds of expectations in my book.
Man who leaps off cliff jumps to conclusion.
Am I the only one who just wants a browser?
Sure, I like stuff like javascript games (I am a game dev so the topic inherently catches my attention) and some webapps, but I am certainly not willing to give my browser that much importance.
For me the centerpiece of the OS is the file manager and the tools to do my tasks. I don't want to have to depend on just a browser or webapps that don't have local code to run from your physical computer. We know the cloud is not 100% reliable (sure, it's not 100% unreliable either, but until there's no choice but to use it, I want to use that choice).
And you couldn't do the exact same thing with native code because...?
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
MS is really talking about using HTML as the best way to port code between the different versions of Windows 8? That is at least 4 different kinds of fail.
To the haters: You can't win. If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine
just two weeks ago. Webian Shell on top of Linux sounds a lot like Chrome OS to me...
MS needs a browser based OS to maintain market share in the world of sub-$500 internet devices. We have seen these fail, and everyone is saying lack of mobile broadband is going to kill them, but these are going to be targeted at home user with WiFi that want inexpensive machines that can move around the house. The benefit is going to be reliability, and MS want to take users away from Apple in this lucrative market and return them to MS.
Likewise Google has to have a mobile OS to continue to collect information. The mobile OS is prefect for Google because everything a user does is recorded, track, mined, and sold. Google already has significant market share, so, as we see, the internet devices are being sold at a healthy profit, and the benefit to the user are free applications after the fact. This gives MS hope as it can often intimidate manufacturers to sell at a less healthy profit in return for marketing support that will create the volume that MS wants.
So we have one company that wants a WebOS to keep it office franchise alive, another that wants to keep the advertising money flowing. Where would mozzila be? They have no market share concerns, they have no free apps, and there is no open hardware platform for a table or internet computer. So one can buy an expensive laptop, pay the internet tax, and then install this great Mozilla OS. We have seen how well this works for Linux. Or one can buy the allegedly open Android or Chrome tablet and install Mozilla. What is the point? Chrome is not a bad OS.
As we have seen on the iPhone, software developers don't want to develop for the web browser. They want native Apps. The machine needs to do both, unless one is in the business of locking in users like MS or Google.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
"which raises the question that why Mozilla hasn't considered a Firefox OS?"
Mozilla has considered a Firefox OS and decided against it.
Can someone summarize this article for me? I can't open the link because firefox has been constantly locking up on me since the last release.
slow pieces of shit.
Well, that's no excuse. That didn't stop Windows Vista from being considered and released.
Let q be a radix > 1. I am in ur base-q, killing 10 d00ds.
MS's beatdown of little-guy Netscape doesn't really say anything about behemoth Google's chances of success, and there's room for Mozilla (and anyone else) to survive with some coat-tail surfing.
Except Google isn't gunning for market share, and I believe they're still one of the larger sources of direct funding for the Mozilla Foundation. Google just wants advancement. Before Chrome came along, every browser's javascript engine was absolute shit. Slow and crappy and slow and slow. V8 kickstarted everybody's interest in Javascript (as Javascript is what really makes Google run) and now everybody is much faster than the first release of Chrome, which gives Google plenty of room to make bigger, better browser applications. They didn't want to beat everybody, they just wanted to scare everybody and say "Look, speed is important to people. Do you see how fast our market share is growing? You had better pick up the pace or you will become irrelevant as quickly as our new browser renders Google Maps Satellite View."
It worked.
And today Microsoft still holds the majority of the browser market share, but most of that comes from enterprise and people who either prefer IE (those people DO exist, believe it or not) or people who just don't care to deviate from the default (which is also just fine).
January in Canada is fairly different depending which side of the country you're on.
Seasons are opposite across the equator, sir. When it's Winter on one side of Canada, it's Winter on the other. The only difference is that Southern Canada might be i-cant-feel-my-face cold while Northern Canada is holy-shit-i-think-my-balls-just-froze-off cold.
What would a "Firefox OS" do that running FIrefox fullscreen won't? If you want to make your web browser your only application, DON'T RUN ANY OTHER PROGRAMS. Jesus Christ people, there's nothing innovative or novel about a system that will only run a web browser. It is a crippled system and a stupid idea.
I remember back in the day, when I actually wanted to major in CS, Java came out. Yes, that long ago. And the big thing about Java was that you would be able to write code that was platform-independent, and just rely on a Java interpreter that would be released on any necessary platforms. Which is why everything is written in Java now...
I'm just saying, using a browser as a conveyance for some sort of universal HTML-based software market just seems like a new version of an old idea that didn't pan out in the first place.
Also, not to nitpick (well, yes to nitpick), but I think that part that says "suddenly every piece of software works..." needs a bit of filling out. Especially at the "suddenly" part.
Also also, Mozilla would be better off not trying to be the Gobot to Google's Transformer, if you see what I mean. That niche is already being filled by Google. Mozilla should focus on making a niche for Firefox, not making it an also-ran to Chrome OS. Full disclosure, I'm not a fan of Firefox since Chrome came out, and since I put Opera on my Droid. But, there must be some area where Firefox excels, because it has a solid base of users. They should exploit and enhance that area.
This unbiased moderation brought to you by the Porcine Aviation Group!
Not enough people, anyway, for it to be really successful. I think part of the problem is that it took them ages to actually create a separate "XULrunner" package, so that you could install XUL once and then install Firefox, Thunderbird, Sunbird, Songbird, etc. When it was just the Mozilla Suite (Seamonkey, now), it might have made sense to bundle XUL with that, but if I ship a XUL app, it shouldn't be tied to Firefox itself.
But people did write apps using XUL -- Songbird wasn't even affiliated with Mozilla, if I recall. And people wrote tons of Firefox extensions that are almost standalone apps in their own right -- Zotero, for instance. (I think Zotero would make more sense as a standalone XUL app and a "send to Zotero" Firefox extension, but whatever.)
There's another reason XUL never caught on, though: It seemed pointlessly different than HTML. That is, they created their own separate markup language, rather than extend HTML. At the same time, you couldn't really write websites in XUL -- if I recall, it would at least ask for some sort of permissions -- that, and it wouldn't run on any other browser. So, despite the fact that so much of the Firefox UI (or, I'd guess, most of Firefox that isn't Gecko) is written in XML+JavaScript, it was still very different than the Web itself.
Compare this to their new invention, Jetpack, which is really taking the main idea behind the Chrome extension API and applying it to Firefox -- Chrome extensions almost entirely use HTML+JavaScript. They add some custom JavaScript APIs, but other than that, if there's a way to do what you want to do in HTML+JavaScript, they won't duplicate it for Chrome -- for example, if you absolutely need to run native code with full OS access, you use NPAPI and write a plugin, and restrict it to your extension.
I think this might be why HTML5 is taking off as an actual generic application platform -- people need web apps anyway, so it's already a cool idea to take your web app offline and integrate it into the desktop. Or, if you're writing a new app, you already have a bunch of web developers that you needed for your web app, so you don't need to hire or train experts in Win32 or .NET -- you just write another web app.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!