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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.
This sounds a lot like my current WebOS phone.
And thought: "What a load of crap." then I read TFA and the other thing and I was like: "Oh wow, this is not a bad idea at all." and then I thought: "Could have done with this earlier, though."
The homepage is a grid of icons with 4 icon dock in the bottom,
GENERATION 25: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
How did we get on the subject of Internet Explorer?
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
Agreed. Cell phones are cheap as fuck. It's the service that beats you down. I have never owned a smart phone, because while I'm fine paying a couple hundred bucks every two or three yeras for a phone, I'm *not* fine paying a couple hundred bucks a *month* for a plan.
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
Looks like someone has never been to the developing world.
When I want my phone to be 'disruptive', I usually just turn up the volume and then set my ringtone to some pop song...
Support the EFF and Creative Commons. The war is coming, and they're supporting you...
The last time I checked, Chrome required an Android 4.x device that comes with the Google Play Store, while Firefox could run on any Android 2.2/2.3 device with an ARMv7 CPU and enough RAM. Not all devices are officially upgradable to Android 4, and not all devices come with Google Play Store.
From TFA:
This is nuts. They're not targeting feature-phones at all... I was expecting something really low-end, with a fast HTML5 interpreter, instead of mobile java. Instead, they're targeting the low-end of current 1st world smart phones.
Those specs are better than the Samsung Replenish, going for $80 on Boost Mobile or the Alcatel Venture, going for $30 on Virgin Mobile. Those are unsubsidized prices, too, meaning you can go out any buy as many of those as you want, without ever signing-up for service.
So think of it this way... Do you want some phone specificaly designed for poor people, which doesn't have any apps, or a generation-old Android phone, which is much cheaper because they recouped their R&D selling it in the USA/Europe for years, and because the specs are slightly lower? A device which can run most of the millions of regular Android applications out there...
It's pretty clear which way to go. Of course cell phone makers are nuts, and will try anything once, because the successes are so damn profitable.
I think the FirefoxOS guys just know they don't have a product, so they're saying it's for poor people, so they can pretend they don't have to compete with Android, because nobody believes they have a snowball's chance in hell of competing with Android, here or in the 3rd world.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Chrome works better than Firefox everywhere.
Except on devices that can't run Chrome but can run Firefox, as I mentioned in another comment.
Most people IN THE USA do that. Everywhere else in the world, they do not, and have to pay for their own damn hardware.
When you're just swapping pre-paid SIM cards to go from one provider to another, there's nobody to subsidize your phones for you.
We're not talking about the USA/Europe here. Head to Africa, and you'll find that cell service is cheap... With terrible exchange rates, and dirt-cheap labor, locally provided services are reasonably priced, while any imported items are very expensive. When people survive on an income of less than $100, you can buy a (locally produced) Coke for $0.12, but an imported iPhone is still $600+, you start to see the problem.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
It uses standards so should be resistant to patent infringement suits,
You'll be surprised what's patentable lately. And whether something is a standard or not has little to do with it.
it will fit on featurephone-grade hardware,
Running and running well are two different things. I'm skeptical until handsets are actually in the wild.
and it will run HTML5 apps without the restriction of native apps in an app store.
This is how "apps" were done on the original iPhone. There were Apple's apps, and there were 3rd party AJAX applets that generally ran from within Safari. And people complained because the quality of the user experience was hobbled by them not being native apps. The restrictions have nothing to do with whether they're native apps or HTML5 doohickeys. You can make native apps and not have an app store at all. Just let people load them to their phone direct from web downloads anywhere on the web or uploaded from flash memory card or USB sticks, kinda like how actual PCs work (for now).
In other words, it's aiming for the next 2 billion smartphone users, people who can't afford the iPhone/Android model.
Considering the iPhone 4 can be had for free now plus the iPhone has been available on prepaid for years, you could buy an older does-not-support the latest iOS iPhone pretty cheap now unlocked on Craigslist and avoid even the required Data Plan stupidity. If you can't afford one now you probably have things you should be focusing your money on instead (like food).
Luddite with no data plan here... any kind of data plan that I would consider worth having runs $70+/month - $840/year, I don't really care if the phone is free, I don't want to sign up for a multi-thousand dollar future debt.
If they'd sell me an iPhone with voice only service and let me access WiFi only for my data, I'd be on-board, even at $600 up front, but between now and retirement, a data plan looks like it might add up to the equivalent of a nice cabin cruiser, or a condo on the beach - is checking Google while you're waiting for the check in a restaurant really that valuable to you?
No this isn't one of those asinine Apple did it first posts, but do try to remember back to the days of the original iPhone. The SDK wasn't available and people had to make do with Web based apps. There were screams for Apple to hurry up and release a native SDK.
I wish them luck, and I do think cheap web based phones are a underserved market. However I think Brendan Eich isn't doing Mozilla OS any favors by trying to compare it to the likes of iOS or Android. They may find themselves in the same grave as WebOS as people wonder when or if a native SDK will come out.
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
Family of 5, adds up to $200/month on my calculator - for a service that doesn't work when we travel on weekends? No thanks.
I think you're missing the low-end concept here.
you can get one for free
You can be forgiven for thinking that $30-60 dollars a month is no big deal. For some people it's completely untenable. They are actual, literate human beings with rights and stuff. They don't have 'plans.'
buy last years model
Last years model isn't all that cheap, especially if it's unlocked. An unlocked Nexus S from 2010 is $340+, for example.
Today you can get a new, unlocked low power Android phone from LG for about $100. A year from now a new phone with the same power will probably be $75. An unlocked smart phone for the price two month's 'plan' cost. You can get GSM for $0.10 and Skype minutes for $0.019. A full function unlocked smart phone for cheap. Real cheap.
That's what we're talking about. So cheap it's almost disposable. And no 'plan.'
Android does run on those low end phones. The runtime overhead doesn't help, however. There is a place for a really efficient smart phone OS and Firefox OS is aiming right for it.
smart phone data charge
Lack of data does not preclude smart phones. For some people the smart phone is the only web capable device they own. Those people will know exactly where to find several reliable wifi hotspots within a walk or short drive.
People who spend time with seasonal workers get all this. Please try to allow for your own ignorance; there are a lot of other people on this planet.
My thought is that this type of project has a lot in common with OLPC, since a Smartphone is essentially a PC in a small footprint. Cheap, open source, nice interface, low-end hardware, for the 3rd world. Mix Firefox OS with mesh networking, and things just might get interesting...
Whatever happened to OLPC? They are still around but I hardly hear of them anymore...
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
To be disruptive, a device has to attract developers and users. This one hasn't even got a hardware vendor. In any case, the constant screwups with Firefox and Thunderbird make me very skeptical that Mozilla can disrupt a church picnic, never mind find a place in an extremely competitive mobile device market.
Obviously with Verizon and AT&T...
Browsing Verizon's website, a smartphone with a 10GB data plan is advertised as $140/mo, and that's BEFORE Verizon factors in their fees and taxes.
In fact I'd say MetroPCS is the worst of the worst... If you want to go for cheap, prepaid service, you could go T-Mobile, but Sprint (Boost, Virgin, etc) usually has the best deals with decent nationwide coverage.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Because they're the topic and focus of this story...
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
... THIS TO SUCCEED!
As a developer of web-based apps, we're often asked for "an app" for our product. Yes, our app is web-based, and we do make a custom CSS for mobile that eases some of the pain, but being purely web-based has problems too, in that even with cellular you can't truly bank on 100% online 24x7, resulting in application errors, lost data, etc. There are "local install" options but it's very tough to get much done with only a few MB of local storage available without having to endlessly bombard the end user with requests for more space.
Simply put, there's just not a good way to build a standard, packageable js-only app and I really, REALLY want the Mozilla/Firefox team to come up with a compelling enough solution that Android/IOS has to follow suit for compatibility and let me FINALLY build an app usable by everyone.
Apple will fight this tooth and nail. I may have to do the same thing I did with IE years ago: simply refuse to support it. (sigh)
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Let the reader be warned that the two articles linked to from the summary are a gushing review by a Mozilla employee and an interview with the Mozilla CTO.
Even so, how many operating systems announced lately are saying that their API is basically HTML, CSS, or JavaScript? Google Chrome OS, Tizen, node.js, Blackberry 10 (sort of at least?), Windows 8 Metro, and now Firefox OS.
DISCLAIMER: I am a web programmer. (And right now, I'm happy to be one.)
Standard response to the myriad complaints about having to use JavaScript: JavaScript, as a language, is nice. Its history is tainted by incomplete browser implementations, namely Microsoft's. Also, its low level of entry flooded the web with really bad examples. If you really want to learn JavaScript, read JavaScript: The Definitive Guide or JavaScript: The Good Parts.
It sounds like they agree with Jason Fried, who cowrote the book Getting Real, which you can read free online. To wit, this chapter: Build Less.
Somebody with usable mod points in this discussion should mod this smart shopper up. Data plans are an INSANE luxury unless you're able to use it to make more money than you're paying every month for it. Same reason you're an idiot if you take out a loan to buy anything personal other than a house.
That is NOT how it works. Standards are not a defense against patent claims, especially on the web, where some of the basic technologies like video display codecs are patented up the wazoo.
The evil of patents is that even if you mind your own business and do everything right, some American Troll who paid money to Uncle Sam's Patent Emporium can attack you and 1) stop you doing business, 2) demand money for past "infringements".
It just means that they disregard Linux completely and make all their design choices for Windows, even if those choices cripple the Linux version.
The funny thing is that Chrome, which was originally Windows-only, runs better on Linux than Firefox, which was multi-platform from its inception.
You must be using a crappy version of Linux, or you haven't optimized FF properly. Try openSUSE - it's kept pace with the Windows version of FF very well for years. They've got their own Build Service and software optimization - they don't just slap together a bunch of pieces from various Debian repositories and call it a "distribution".
After a quick look here's a $69 android phone from Wal-Mart. And while I wouldn't expect much from it, I have to mention this $49 tablet that also came up in the search for cheap androids. I mean for $49 you certainly won't be worried about damaging it. You could get one just for the bathroom.
This is just like the whining about the Raspberry Pi. It was pronounced an utter failure on Slashdot before it shipped, and they have now sold 200,000 units. Demand is still high enough that there are complaints about delivery times.
Did it take over the educational market for tiny computers? It's too soon to tell. It has to get into the hands of early adopting teachers first. Then it has to get wider acceptance in the educational domain, which can take time. Even if it doesn't have the impact they were hoping for in education, it can be a success in other areas. Success is success.
Consider Firefox OS. When it gets going it will be considerably less encumbered then Android. Look at what Google did to Acer when then tried to bring out a smart phone: http://mobile.slashdot.org/story/12/09/13/1916211/alibaba-says-google-threatened-acer-with-banishment-from-android. It will also be intrinsically much less vulnerable to the ridiculous patent wars.
Mozilla has already shown that it can run on the Raspberry PI, which is a very cheep device. I can see an opportunity for a Chinese manufacturer to bring out a dirt cheep smart phone/tablet for their domestic market and not worry about Apple/Google/Motorola or other patent parasites. Since they practice Real Capitalism in China (unlike the monopolistic pseudo-capitalism here in the US) I expect to see someone try this.
Maybe Firefox OS will be a dud. I honestly don't know. I am very interested to see how the effort turns out.
I do know that this kind of bashing is a form of public masturbation that is extremely popular on Slashdot. It's boring and stupid. Can't you go somewhere else when you decide to wank off in public?
Why is Snark Required?
India. Africa. South America. Places where people have already "innovated" their own money exchanges, payment transfer, & order fulfillment systems based on nothing more than plain ol' text messaging.
You want to see what they can come up with in the way of improved ad-hoc decentralised systems like that, & the software to support it? Wait until they get their hands on a cheap phone with smartphone-like features.
(That said, the article is bullshit; nothing more than the usual 'Mozilla is a dynamic organisation identifying horizontally-integrated market opportunities!" fluff that comes up everytime anything with a different browser in is launched...)
What part of "a well regulated militia" do you not understand?
Because there's at least 2 1/2 billion of them, and only 300 million Americans?
One day soon, your country is going to get its economic arse kicked by poor brown people...
What part of "a well regulated militia" do you not understand?
> Those of us who don't live in your California suburb and who have multiple devices ...
Yep. Or those of us who really, REALLY need our phones. I travel all over Alabama looking after 5 radio stations, some of which have towers in the middle of nowhere. I pay a premium for Verizon because to date, they've been best where I need to go. (Although I'll say this, coverage hasn't been same here -- with any carrier -- since the tornadoes came through on April 27th, 2011. Lot of damage from those things.)
I don't need fancy apps, but I do need text, email and a Web browser. I get that with the LG Ally that Verizon basically threw in when I signed up for another 2 years of indentured service-itude. :)
To be fair, I don't know how typical we are. Maybe most folks can get by with a barebones plan and spotty coverage. But to stay on topic, even in that case, I just don't see the appeal of this Mozilla OS, not now. Maybe 5 years ago, but not now.
But hey, I've been wrong before.
Cogito, igitur comedam pizza.
There's not much I enjoy more than watching their expressions as they go through the various stages of emotion while playing with the devices
1. It starts with mild confusion — a sort of 'Why have you just given me an Android device?' look
2. Following confusion is sudden realisation that this isn't Android, it's built using JavaScript
3. After a short while the excitement starts in a sort of "Holy shit!" mind-blowing moment
So people get a "'Holy shit!' mind blowing moment" because they realise it was programmed in JavaScript instead of Java? That's only because they're programmers, and they know that HTML/JavaScript has historically had shit performance and a crappy UX. Try this with non-programmers, and they will have no reason to be impressed.
Users don't give a fuck whether apps are written in JavaScript or Objective C or Java or C#.
Let's do a car analogy here. Suppose you're at a dealer's lot, checking out a car. You're looking at a car that is totally average. Nothing special, and it even felt a bit sluggish during the test drive. So you're wondering why all your automotive engineer friends are so impressed with it. Then you ask them, and their response is "Did you check out the wiring harness? It's routed really cleanly! And all the drivetrain components are totally modular and extensible!"
This is what it feels like talking to programmers sometimes. It's astonishing how so many programmers just don't get it.
Apple got it. When the iPhone was first announced, Steve Jobs didn't get up on stage and talk for two hours about what language they developed the apps in. The iPhone wasn't awesome because it used Objective C. It was awesome because you could hold a web page in your hand and directly manipulate it with your fingers! It was awesome because pinch and swipe gestures made an app like Google Maps possible on a phone.
What does Firefox OS give users that Android doesn't? All these guys have done is recreate the Android experience using JavaScript. If the users don't know what JavaScript is, why should they care?
I have the impression that Firefox is amongst the least memory hungry browsers. They are very aggressive with releasing memory.
I don't care about memory usage though, with 4GB. I use Chrome which is very hungry indeed.
Or he lives in a place with really poor coverage. These places do still exist throughout the U.S.. I was in Alabama once when the best option out there was Alltel. I don't think Verizon was available yet. For myself, I have to have coverage when I go deep into desert or into the mountains. Whilst my use is professional, the people I run into daily need that coverage for their daily personal usage. That's always been Verizon's selling point aside from Moto phones.
Hey don't knock it if you haven't tried it, one of my friends got tired of being assraped on his contract so went and got this $79 Android prepaid and after he let me play with it for a half an hour?
Its...really not a bad phone actually. It plays music nicely, surfs just fine, videos looked decent, as decent as one can expect on a screen that small, overall I had to say i would have NO problem using that as my day to day smartphone. Hell he even slapped a 32gb Micro-SD into it and he uses it now as his PMP as well as a smartphone, its really not a bad little unit.
Which is why I just don't see what market Firefox is going for, I mean what are they gonna put it on? $10 Tracphones? I've used those things as throwaway phones for vacation so I don't have to give a crap about something happening to it and they REALLY suck when it comes to the CPU, we are talking seriously weak and laggy. Any FF put on something THAT weak is gonna be painful and make FF look bad, and as you and I have both seen anything more expensive Android has covered and already has 200,000+ apps for the 2.x line which is what most of these cheapies run.
Thanks for the tablet link though, I'm gonna have to take a spin over to Wally World and see if they have one in stock. I mean at $50 who cares if you kill it? This looks like a perfect new playtoy.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
I develop games in HTML5, and even some of the better Android phones out there are still garbage in running them.
Maybe you should start by searching for problems on your side ... html5 is not flash, you should not need the latest hardware for cool results.
I don't get it. You are implying that Firefox is bloated? Firefox is the leanest browser there is atm.
-- no sig today
And I pay $9.70 for 1000 minutes, 1000 sms and 1GB full speed data with data being throttled but unlimited after.
Did I win?
I'll be happy to elaborate.
Firefox is a piggie, not so much in memory as that HAS gotten better but in CPU spiking it royally sucks ass. I have an AMD E350 netbook and I can gain an hour of surfing time by NOT using Firefox, that ought to tell you something. I have a 1.8GHz Sempron in the shop I use as a nettop because it uses less than 40w under load. With Dragon or Chrome? Great web surfing, can even play 720p videos no problem, Firefox? Just launching will slam the CPU to 100% and make the entire machine unresponsive for 40 seconds to a minute and every action you do in Firefox will suck CPU cycles like a drunk at a free bar. Simply going through my bookmarks can hit 80% CPU...really? Just to look at the bookmarks? And Firefox suffers from what I call "senior moments" where the entire system will just hang, sometimes for up to a minute. The chrome variants? Just don't do that.
Don't take my word for it, take ANY software that lets you have a CPU gauge in the taskbar AnVir Task Manager is a good one but there are a ton to choose from, and then watch the gauge as you do various tasks in both FF and any Chrome variant. You'll find that FF pimp slaps the living hell out of the CPU, I don't care which extensions you have, while Chrome simply don't. In my own little tests I've found anything short of a 3.2GHz P4 with HT is simply unusable on FF 15, its senior moments (which is it slamming the CPU to 100%) simply make the entire experience painful.
Its a fricking browser, you shouldn't need a high powered multicore just to run the damned thing. If anyone doubts I'll be more than happy to post screencaps, it'll just take a bit as I'll have to blank out my bookmarks, or reinstall without my bookmarks installed.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Try the Comodo spinoffs, Comodo Dragon (for Chrome) and IceDragon (for Firefox) as they are really nice. There really isn't too much they can do with FF as its the Gecko engine that is really the root of the problem but their Chrome version has no phone home and I've gone from V5-V21 and NO UI changes,other than they moved the little Dragon eye from the right to the left side to give more room for the bar, big deal.
So give it a spin, like you I was getting irritated at the way browsers were going so I just spent a week trying every damned thing under the sun, even the more offbeat like SWIron and QTWeb (which is great if you need cross platform support, as it works on everything) and after trying a good dozen different browsers i finally settled on the Dragon and couldn't be happier.
Oh and if you ever have a problem? just pop on to their forums, their devs actually lurk there and are happy to fix any problems VERY quickly. I ran into a weird little bug with the last release where it didn't want to load my startup page, they spent about 10 minutes talking to me and then posted a workaround while saying they would be sure to have that weird little bug fixed for the next version. Really nice guys and 10 minutes from listing problem to workaround? Can't beat that.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.