Firefox OS Will Win Big With Developers - Mozilla

judgecorp writes "Mozilla's mobile operating system Firefox OS will win overwhelming support from developers because it dropped XUL in favour of HTML5, says the head of Mozilla Europe in an interview. Firefox OS is more open than iOS and Android, and 75 percent of apps are already written in HTML5."

Comments

Uh huh...

[Anonymous Coward]

This just in: Mozilla employee tells us that Mozilla product will be a huge hit!

Why don't we wait until it comes out before making such claims?

Hope they enjoy shitty performance

[Anonymous Coward]

HTML5, while faster than previous incarnations of HTML+JS, is still massively slower than native applications. I predict a very sluggish experience.

75 Percent

[Fallingcow]

75 percent of apps are already written in HTML5

OK, maybe. But what percentage of good apps are written in HTML5?

Re:75 Percent

[goruka]

Exactly my thoughts. To be more specific, writing non-retardedly simple games is a feat with html5 due to slow performance and huge memory consumption.
Even in Android Java is often bypassed in favor of NDK for complex projects and portability reasons, where you want to use C/C++ or your own, more fittin, scripting language such as Lua or Python.
Mozilla developers seem to have very strong ideals of a world where the only programming language is HTML5 and the only platform is the web, and I remember there was a lot of hype about that philosophy a few years ago, but app stores with native apps have clearly shown the future is somewhere else. Even Google has aknolwedged that in Chrome by allowing Native Client..

*facepalm*

[girlintraining]

Assuming your platform will "win big with programmers" is silly. Programmers will work with whatever you give them, and combine it with whatever they know. And no two programmers will have the same approach. Thinking you know what programmers want is like believing you know what women want. As if every woman (like every programmer) would be a cookie cutter copy of the other.

There are only a select few things I've found that programmers esteem and have in common, and it all has very little to do with programming per-se. They are patient. They often have the ability to hyper-focus for hours or (in extreme cases) days on a specific problem, going without food, water, sleep, social contact... in fact, interrupting them may get something chucked at your head. Prolonged and intense programming over a period of days or weeks can result in epic logic failures in their daily life -- "Hey hun, can you go to the store and if they have bread, pick up some eggs?" Programmer comes home with just eggs. They can and sometimes do become obsessed with details of a project (not just computer projects... ANY kind of project) and totally lose track of everything else; time, space, the fact that the house around them is on fire, that the girlfriend (cough, hi) is threatening to bean them if they don't come to bed and cuddle them, etc. Programmers are also endlessly fascinated with a difficult to define quality I call "Niftiness". If something is nifty, they will be drawn to it like a moth to fire. However, what is nifty to one is completely mundane to another... and "Niftiness" is a time-sensitive thing... it degrades rapidly with time.

You'll note that nowhere in there did I mention anything resembling a computer, or anything about programming itself. Programming attracts a particular kind of person; It is not the result of a particular way of doing something.

Re:And WebOS failed because?

[Patch86]

The fact that apps can be written in the exact same programming language for Win Phone 8 and Firefox OS is a point in Mozilla's favour, not against them.

They're banking on cross-compatibility between the other platforms to ensure that they get a decent ecosystem very quickly. That's presumably what both Mozilla and MS picked HTML5- maximum cross-platform capabilities.