Slashdot Mirror
Firefox OS: Disruptive By Aiming Low
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.
My favourite is the people on /. who still, consistently, claim the RPi is a giant waste of money and that people should just buy old used x86 machines from a dump. It's even more amusing when these people claim such a plan is suitable for stocking a /computer lab/.
I gave up a long time ago reading the comments here to try and get any sort of useful insight, as most of them are people ranting over and over again about how the glory days of the 90s should live on forever, and how anything else is just not worth bothering with.
Possibly a more contextual example to this story is the comparisons to WebOS and the original iPhone's software stack, and how HTML5 apps were a giant disaster on those platforms, as well as the people who claim that HTML isn't a platform and never will be. Well, aside from the fact that people, you know, learn from history's mistakes, turns out there have been major improvements in the last 5 years in computing:
- Huge optimisations in graphics in general, which is really what 99% of consumers care about in terms of their phone experience
- Huge optimisations in layout engines and rendering engines for HTML
- Optimisations in JavaScript runtimes that are now orders of magnitude faster than they were back then, even on the same hardware
- Huge optimisations in memory management
- Several new revisions of the OpenGL API for embedded systems
- SIMD instruction sets for ARM are now widespread
Whether people here like it or not, turns out the web is already a platform. Is it ideal? No. But it's an accessible platform for any reasonably intelligent person to be able to make something half decent, and it seems that far outweighs any sort of technical superiority for a content delivery platform (which is effectively what the web is). To claim the web is not a platform is just outright denial. Zuckerberg has about 900 million reasons why those people are wrong.