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Boot To Gecko – Mozilla's Web-Based OS
kai_hiwatari writes "Mozilla has launched a new project called 'Boot to Gecko.' The aim of this project is to develop a complete operating system for the open web. Unlike Google's version of a web-based OS — the Chrome OS — Mozilla's version is not aimed at netbooks. With Boot to Gecko, Mozilla is aiming for smartphones – and Android forms a part of their plan."
I recently switched back to the default google mobile browser because firefox mobile kept crashing, and was slower.
The quote at the bottom of the slashdot page is "Jenkinson's Law: It won't work.".
I think it's fitting.
Online Starcraft RPG? At
Dietary fiber is like asynchronous IO-- Non-blocking!
Reminds me of this: http://www.xpud.org/
Maybe Mozilla should focus on making a useable Android browser, before trying to re-invent the OS.... Firefox for Android is abhorrent compared to the built-in Webkit browser.
How about just going back to making a good desktop browser? I don't want a Mozilla operating system, some sort of "open web experience", a smartphone browser, or anything else that Mozilla is peddling these days. I want a browser that's dedicated to desktop computers, with a UI designed for a big, desktop monitor (not a netbook or a tablet), and I want the browser to render HTML. I don't need a database in my URL bar; a radical, new UI; an integrated PDF viewer, implemented in Javascript; Harry Potter themes for my browser; or anything else that Mozilla has been advertising (except for the faster Javascript performance, which is pretty nice).
All I want is a web browser. I feel like a throw-back, someone who doesn't belong in today's world, full of ideologically-driven features, heavy-handed developers who tell me how to get my work done (rather than giving me a product that allows me to get the work done the way I want), constant buzz words, and marketing. People keep telling me how fast the web is moving, how fast IT is moving, and all I see are people chasing trends, fads, and buzzwords. That's fine for corporate culture, but when you just want to open your web browser and render some HTML, the last thing you want is to be assaulted with this crap. It's time for someone to make a browser that does nothing but render HTML. And don't suggest Opera, because I certainly don't need a bittorrent client in my browser.
And why the hell is Mozilla experimenting with all these ridiculous things, like low power servers? For fuck's sake, all I want from them is a browser, not a R&D department that makes the world a better place.
Thank you and get off my lawn.
Definitely a better direction than Chrome OS. I think the usefulness of a web-only operating system is far higher on a handheld mobile device than a netbook/PC.
I thought that Mozilla would have realized the same thing that successful corporate leaders and turn around teams have been saying for years. If you are really good at one thing it doesn't mean you should start trying to do other things to make even more money. This type of thinking has crashed many companies over the years. The best example of this is Boston Market. They went from being a very profitable roasted chicken place to trying to offer all kinds of food and it pretty much ran the company in to the ground. It is a shadow of what it used to be. Most of the time doing one thing and doing it really really well is exactly what a company should continue to focus on rather than trying to chase even more profits and end up cratering.
So they use Android as a base but you can't run Android Apps? That alone kills the possibility of a massive user base and f* if developers want to start porting to yet another platform. I like Mozilla, probably more than Google, but lately Mozilla has just made a lot of really bad decisions. Prism? That was a good idea! I still use it to run things like GrooveShark - works great! But apparently the project is dead - they made it work then killed it. Way to go guys! HTML5 games? Yeah, that was a disaster wasn't it! Why didn't you put together a better llvm engine in JS and have a porting challenger or something? Now this? You think this will work?
Seriously.
Its annoying that these companies and groups keep claiming they're somehow running the browser as the operating system.
All of them, Google's included, run on an operating system. Chrome (like Gecko) doesn't have SATA drivers for all the chipsets, none of them have virtual memory systems, thread schedulers, video drivers or any other other things the real OS they're pretending isn't there has. They're running a normal OSS kernel, normal set of supporting OS services. The fact that you don't give a user a useful desktop outside the browser window doesn't make it a browser-based OS.
After the last three generations of Firefox web browsers, which I only run for my extensions... why on earth would I choose to run Mozilla anything as on os, anywhere?
Not when there's a slew of already established mobile os's like regular Android, WebOS, iOs, and numerous others to choose from. Maybe I'm old and cynical. But I just don't see this one taking off.
Mozilla should stick to what they do well, which isn't a lot these days.
This signature has Super Cow Powers
Anything Google can do, we can('t) do better.
Maybe they could call it WebOS instead.. Oh wait that has already been done before..
with the Smartphones outselling computers
That won't last forever. Computers sold briskly while they became faster each iteration until they finally became fast enough for most home and office uses. Since then, sales of computers have slowed down. Likewise, smartphones are in an explosion of capability which too will end. Then the only reason to replace a working phone will be A. when switching network protocols (e.g. AMPS to TDMA to GSM to UMTS to LTE) or B. when a non-user-replaceable battery dies.
And you'll always have cheapskates who run multiple devices on one connection to the Internet. Currently, that's a lot easier to do with computers than with smartphones.
Gecko as on OS? Be serious. Use a real operating system like emacs.
It doesn't do anything well. Rather it has many plugins that try to do everything else.
Chrome is like Vi which it does text editing very simply, elegantly, and very light and fast. However, this drives people absolutely mad if they need anything more than what is there.
I guess this makes IE like Visual Studio.
http://saveie6.com/
I google Gecko OS and get a disc launching tool for the Wii game console.
We looked at doing this at Sun about 15 years ago. We called it "Netscape on a stick". Never really panned out but we had SunOS-on-a-stick that booted rather quickly off a 80MB PCMCIA drive in a tablet prototype we had developed. Yes, Sun had a working tablet in 1995.
To hell with smart phones.
a caveman could do it
Does it also save you 15% on car insurance?
APIs to make functions like SMS, Telephone, NFC etc. available to a web app. One that is developed, a proper privilege models will be developed. The privilege model is very much essential to make that the capabilities of the phone are safely exposed to the web apps.
Makes me cringe. No thank you, I do not want to expose functions like SMS and phone to web apps, no matter what privilege model they are choosing
If my comment didn't sound as good in your head as it did in mine, then I guess we all know who's to blame
the listened far to literary to the Google suggestion of doing dumb thing
Jehovah be praised, Oracle was not selected
The market is still too large to ignore. Even if it stalls out at a level similar to the number of desktops, that's still way too many to ignore. Plus some of the things that they're needing to work on for handsets are liable to work their way into the desktop release.
Fork this, Firefox 3.x was great before the Google Chrome and iOS Safari imitations. So someone Fork the classic Firefox 3 we all know and love before this web OS crap takes over.
Network computers, JavaOS, MIPS and OS/2 didn't work out either did they? Just make the best web browser you can and have a cache mod system to load and unload modules and plugins when needed to save on memory. Why follow ChromeOS now? Focus on what you do best, the web browser is the OS and does not need to be turned into an independent OS just run on top of someone else's OS and process HTML 5 and under code.
And right now all but one of the brand name phone firmwares use Webkit as their go to HTML rendering library (Windows Phone 7 being the "odd" one out).
This then becomes a kind of mobile web monoculture, and i have already seen one site that focuses on mobile Safari. Shades of "Requires IE6" anyone?
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
Gecko as a mobile OS? How exactly do they manage the phone apps, since they're just a search engine? And does this mean that from now on, phones will have to have OS upgrades every 5 months?
Rather than that, why don't they come out w/ a completely new solution package, like Android? Take an ARM or MIPS platform, put a JVM/Java OS on top of it, and then their own browser, plus some of the best free Java apps out there. Define this reference platform, and then let the HTCs and other CEMs of the world make such phones, maybe adding their own top level customizations. Also, when they 'retire' a version, they can simply pass it over to the makers of phones that use that previous platform, and put the onus of such support on to them. That way, Mozilla just supports the latest software versions, like they want, while letting previous versions be supported by phone manufacturers.
Oh, one more thing - please not another version of Linux!!!
That won't last forever. Computers sold briskly while they became faster each iteration until they finally became fast enough for most home and office uses. Since then, sales of computers have slowed down. Likewise, smartphones are in an explosion of capability which too will end.
I'm not going to argue with your logic, but you need to bear in mind that the power requirements of desktop systems makes them unusable for the majority of the world's population. I just came back from a very isolated village in Vanuatu, where people still cook over open fires, where the houses still have mud floors... and where every household has at least one mobile phone. You can bet your bottom dollar that as Internet and smart phones prices reach commodity levels, there are billions of people who will use them as their primary - and probably sole - means of interacting with the outside world.
So, yes, smart phone sales will flatten eventually, but not before their numbers are at least an order of magnitude larger than those for desktop (and laptop) PCs,
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
Windows 98 tried the browser integrated in the OS back when Mozilla was still a netscape code name. It caused the demise of Netscape navigator and got Microsoft into anti trust trouble. Looks like the current generation of Firefox developers havent learnt from hisypry.
The whole App is OS was tried by many different software. Emacs, the operating system without a decent text editor is a well known joke, Staroffice had a built in "start" menu, which was canned by OpenOffice.org years ago. Arachne the browser for MS DOS included many things such as a fie manager and image viewer in additon to web browsing.
Mozilla gets 50 million a year in Google jad revenue, imagine what 50 million a yeat to a foundation working on a minimalist, memory conservative browser would provide?
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/07/07/22/1247210/New-Linux-Desktop-Environment-Built-on-Firefox
for their mental disorders which cause these crazy ideas. It was a simple job for them, a web browser that could browse the web and that was open source. A browser was supposed to be a simple, memory conscious tool that parsed HTML which was glorified text files with the occasional tag put in. How could anyone mess up such a simple task? Mozilla did, and I hope when they are in hospital they realize that a web browser is that, a BROWSER and not an OS, a cure for cancer, a religion or a drug or any other weird idea they get.
Mozilla, because Crucial, Hynix, Corsair and other RAM manufacturers need more sales.
Why is everyone trying to change the landscape in ways that set us back twenty five years?
Because PCs are not profitable anymore. A piece of hardware with a price of $400 that allows you to do everything? No, no, no. It's far better to sell you 4 devices with a price of $200. Hey, and if they can reduce your freedom in the same package, even better.
Then the only reason to replace a working phone will be A. when switching network protocols (e.g. AMPS to TDMA to GSM to UMTS to LTE) or B. when a non-user-replaceable battery dies.
c. the carrier or the vendor will stop updating the os, those unable to install an aftermarket os are screwed.
A lesson has been learned with the PC desktop.
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
I'm not going to argue with your logic, but you need to bear in mind that the power requirements of desktop systems makes them unusable for the majority of the world's population. I just came back from a very isolated village in Vanuatu, where people still cook over open fires, where the houses still have mud floors... and where every household has at least one mobile phone.
And I won't argue with yours. I just want to know one thing: How do they charge those mobile phones?
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Most villages have the resources to put together - for example - a generator made from a scrounged truck parts, if only they had the know-how. Enough to power a phone charger couple of hours a day. Try powering a netbook, let alone a desktop, on tens of watts a day.
The bigger barrier would be access to a mobile network, and the means to pay for bandwidth.
Not only is it extra work, but it means you won't get any user-testing until you are nearing feature parity (which given how many features a modern smart phone has is FAR too late).
It would be easier and more logical to develop your new API as a standard Android App.
These are generally very power-efficient "Dumbphones", normally Nokia makes low end stuff with awesome battery life. In places without power, quite a few villages will have a shop or charging station for the phones (not from Vanuatu, but a nearby country). Customers buy pre-pay credit and charge their phones at the same time. Phone accounts are being tied into billpayment systems and money sending (Western Union-ish) all over the pacific. But quite a lot of places have power, satellite TV and 3G internet, all enjoyed in a house with a mud floor.
A typical truck alt provides ~95A (these days, anyway; in the 60s and 70s it was more like 65A) at about 14V with a 60% duty cycle. If you have enough wind then a VAWT driving an alternator actually produces a fair amount of power.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The bigger barrier would be access to a mobile network
Which comes back to my point. In my country, carriers want to sell customers a $40/mo mobile voice plan before they'll even think of selling them a mobile data plan. Having to buy a separate plan per device is hard for people in countries with undervalued currencies to afford. (See Penn effect for why developing countries' currencies are undervalued.) So people will stick with netbooks or with Wi-Fi-only tablets and PDAs and connect them to the Internet through an AP that multiple devices share.
A lesson has been learned with the PC desktop.
HTC has likewise learned a lesson from the market of CM fans. Given the choice between two identical Android-powered devices, one compatible with CyanogenMod and one not, a savvy customer looking for a long-term investment will buy the one compatible with CM. So HTC has decided to ship its newer products with unlockable bootloaders.
It's actually less of a monoculture than you think.
Sure, Chrome, Android, iOS, Nokia, RIM, OS X, Steam all use WebKit as their rendering engine, but they all customize in wierd and wonderful ways. All the Google ones replace the standard WebKit JavaScript engine with the Google one, and Apple makes their own tweaks to WebKit, as does everyone else.
It's about as monoculture as Linux or Android is a monoculture - the underlying engine is the same, but damn does everyone make their own customizations.
Also one of the more unusual Apple projects to have suddenly taken off so dramatically or scale so widely. As for mobile browsers, there's also IE (Windows Phone 7) and Opera as contenders. Perhaps I should try mobile Firefox - last time I tried it, it ran as well as I expected (barely usable).
We should not forget that Apple did bootstrap it from Khtml, the HTML engine made for the KDE desktop. Hell, if people had not noticed and petitioned Apple for the changes (the engine was under GPL or LGPL) it may not be a webkit as we know it today.
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
When do these people going to stop contradicting them selves? Open Device man Open Device. I don't want to own expensive bricks that i can't control.
Eventually smartphones and other mobile devices WILL take over. It doesn't matter if they become like the asus transformer or not (its a tablet that becomes a laptop). What matters is that Firefox runs on it, and runs well (which is not the case yet).
Another Linux with another name.
Recipes for USA bankrupt - http://tinypaste.com/0d66f dd = dollar deluge (printed in the infinity)