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Firefox OS: Disruptive By Aiming Low

Posted by timothy on from the picture-worth-1k-words dept.

judgecorp writes "As Apple launches a new slightly-improved iPhone 5, Mozilla CTO Brendan Eich says if you want a really disruptive phone you should look to Firefox OS. It's a low-cost low-end device — and that's the point. It uses standards so should be resistant to patent infringement suits, it will fit on featurephone-grade hardware, and it will run HTML5 apps without the restriction of native apps in an app store. In other words, it's aiming for the next 2 billion smartphone users, people who can't afford the iPhone/Android model." Reader rawkes has some (very warm) thoughts about Firefox OS, too, which helpfully includes both screenshots and a video demo.

2 of 286 comments (clear)

  1. Web as an OS by girlintraining · · Score: 4, Informative

    The model of the web as an OS has been passed around since the turn of the century. The dot com bubble tried it. Oracle has tried it, repeatedly. Microsoft tried it. Every attempt so far has failed, and it was by people with far more resources than the Firefox team. I could type out a long list of reasons why this is, but what's the point? History tells us that no matter how promising it looks, and how pretty it is, it's destined for the scrap heap.

    --
    #fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
    1. Re:Web as an OS by jlebar · · Score: 5, Informative

      there's this little company called Google that has this thing called ChromeOS. it is EXACTLY [Firefox OS] ... an OS that boots into a browser. it's not lighting the world on fire either.

      (Firefox OS developer here) This is a common misconception, but Chrome OS is a lot different from Firefox OS, at least from an architectural perspective.

      Chrome OS is, as you say, an OS that boots into a browser. You're running a full desktop Linux client, including a window manager.

      In Firefox OS, the window manager is an HTML page. Gecko (that is, Firefox) shows the window manager. All your apps, are iframes (with special attributes on them). The browser is an app (a special iframe). The browser's tabs are more special iframes inside the browser iframe. There are a lot of iframes in Firefox OS.

      Also note that Chrome OS is not targeting smartphones (afaik). It's really quite different.