Telefonica Shows Prototype Firefox OS Phone

judgecorp writes "Telefonica has added some detail to the Firefox OS picture, following the announcement of phones by two manufacturers earlier this week. The Qualcomm-built handset shown by Telefonica in London ran the HTML5 OS and showed multitasking as well as a range of HTML5 applications. Firefox-maker Mozilla receives a lot of funding from Google, but Telefonica sees Firefox OS as a way to achieve independence from Google. It will be more open than Android, and will run on lower-specification hardware, according to the company's director of products." A common reaction to Firefox OS over the past few days has been to say that it's doomed from the start. But Mozilla's stated goals are to 'promote openness, innovation, and opportunity on the Web for users and developers,' rather than to compete with Android and iOS. What do you think they need to do in order to achieve that in a meaningful way?

Comments

Need a niche

[Infiniti2000]

I'm not sure it's all so doom and gloom like TFA suggests. Telefonica needs a niche, or a gimmick, and this might be the right choice. At the very least, it might be enough to make a respectable ROI before the curtain closes. And, yes, it's fledgling, and being the first on the bandwagon would work out really well if the bandwagon (metaphorically) becomes a limousine.

Re:Need a niche

[gmuslera]

More than a niche, an ecosystem. The good thing about being browser based is that the very web should give one. Of course, in some way that was the reasoning behind WebOS, or Tizen. Maybe the right factors joins at a good time and it is enough to impose that kind of solutions.

Re:Need a niche

[jeffmeden]

I'm not sure it's all so doom and gloom like TFA suggests. Telefonica needs a niche, or a gimmick, and this might be the right choice. At the very least, it might be enough to make a respectable ROI before the curtain closes. And, yes, it's fledgling, and being the first on the bandwagon would work out really well if the bandwagon (metaphorically) becomes a limousine.

It's doom and gloom since product complexity in the mobile space creeps in SO fast you won't even know what hit you. A phone running nothing more than a lightweight browser which supports HTML5 seems great, it would be fast at browsing and it would basically "do" anything the web site was coded to do... until you ask "where are the contacts stored?" or "why won't my bluetooth headset stay paired?" and then it all goes to shit because all of the developers time is spent dealing with corner cases that each affect 500,000 users (after all, money isnt made in the mobile space until you have a few hundred million phones out there).

So basically you need to put your cards on the table: Do you go the route of Apple and publish a very polished OS that lacks some very basic features for the first few years until you get your legs under you? Or, do you do things the Google way, and kitchen sink the hell out of your OS with so much whizbang crap that it all crumbles apart between versions?

Re:Need a niche

[Skuto]

Security -> The browser already contains a fully sandboxed JS runtime environment since, what, 1995 or something?. They have to do almost nothing there, and it'll probably be actually a lot safer than the comparatively entirely untested Android security model.

Extensibility -> Pretty sure the idea is to just make as much as possible the "original" webpages more usable on a mobile device, instead of requiring the user to install half-assed "apps". There's already API's for pretty much everything in JS.

Re:Need a niche

[Skuto]

That was originally what the iPhone was supposed to do

News to me, to be honest. But in any case: we're quite some years later now. Maybe the Firefox phone won't be too late, but the iPhone was too early instead :P

ou won't until you get high-bandwidth non-capped connections

What? Bandwidth is irrelevant there. If it's bad, both the HTML/JS based app and the native App will suffer. If it's offline, neither of them cares.

Re:Need a niche

[Skuto]

accuracy of rendering pages

It's the same engine as desktop Firefox. What you're seeing is that a lot of websites send "Webkit-only" markup to Android devices. (Dolphin uses Android's rendering engine) This is something Firefox can never fix. There's an add-on that makes it pretend it's desktop Firefox, that generally stops misbehaving sites from sending broken markup. I suspect most sites will get their act together eventually.

I don't see the "slanted font" problem you talk about on my Galaxy S2, so that's rather strange. The "small font" problem can be solved by setting text size to "tiny" (yes, it's pretty retarded that you have to do the exact opposite of what you would expect, from what I understand it's because that option is completely misnamed).

Re:Need a niche

[chrb]

That was originally what the iPhone was supposed to do. Didn't work too well for them in the long run.

But the iPhone was running pure webapps that targeted only the iPhone, so there were some things that just weren't possible, like hardware access, and iOS won't JIT compile Javascript unless it is run in the web browser, so Javascript app performance is poor. Mozilla is developing APIs for doing everything that you could do natively, like accessing hardware etc., and submitting all of the APIs it develops to the W3C for standardisation, which means it's likely that these APIs will be implemented on Android, iOS etc., and then these apps will be cross-platform which gives them an edge over native apps. Boot to Gecko also uses a fast JIT.

Re:Cheap is good!

[amicusNYCL]

NOBODY expects the Firefox OS! Our chief weapon is usability...usability and a lower cost...a lower cost and usability... Our two weapons are a lower cost and usability...and Angry Birds. Our *three* weapons are a lower cost, usability, and Angry Birds...and Netflix. Our *four*...no...*Amongst* our weapons...amongst our weaponry... are such elements as a lower cost, usability.... I'll come in again.

Betanews article misses the mark everywhere

[Skuto]

The Betanews article is wrong in almost every paragraph, so let's just point out the biggest hole in the authors understanding:

Mozilla should stick to where they’re good at, which is the browser market.

Mobile devices are the fastest growing web clients market. There *is no browser market* on iOS, on Windows 8 RT or on Bada. It's not even fully clear yet if there's really a "browser market" on Windows 8.

The only way to get a browser market now is to have an OS out, too. The alternative is to die a slow and certain death. Google search money isn't going to keep coming if there's no devices on which Firefox can even be installed.

There are loads more fundamental misunderstandings in the article, such as the idea that Mozilla will make money on those phones. How can they do that, it's free software... They'll likely just make a deal about who the default search providers are and make money off that. They don't have to care about the margins on the phones at all...

Re:too little to late........

[Korin43]

I was a proud supporter of FireFox on the desktop, promoted it all the time....untill it got so bloated that pc's hard a hard time running it, so i switched to Chrome.

Firefox and Chrome have pretty much identical performance on the desktop. Recent updates have made Firefox's memory usage much better, and despite loud opinions, it was never actually bad. My guess is that most of the people complaining about Firefox's performance are the idiots who refuse to update after Firefox 3 ("Web browsing takes more memory now, it must be Firefox's fault, not the fact that the web is more complicated now!").

Americans don't get it

[acid06]

Brazil has a 200+ million headset market, roughly split equally between 4 major carriers (Vivo, Oi, TIM and Claro). This phone doesn't need to be the iPhone or Android killer - it just needs to be cheap and useful. I

f they're able to get 10% of Vivo's market share, it's a success - I mean, 5 million phones in Brazil alone meanss a lot of phones. I suppose other emerging markets would also have such similar characteristics, so a successful launch here in Brazil would pave the way for rolling this out to other South American countries and then, later, to other Asian emerging markets.

An current-gen iPhone here costs US$1000. If they're able to bring something that has good usability at a local US$200 price-point, they'll sell a lot of headsets, since the Android phones you can get here in Brazil in the US$200 are only fake Chinese crap (lower-end from Samsung start at US$250-300).

Re:Could it be true?

[TheSkepticalOptimist]

Considering none of those describe FireFox, no, its not true.