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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 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
Apple will sue
The homepage is a grid of icons with 4 icon dock in the bottom,
It's okay, the icons are round so they should be safe.
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
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?
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.
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.
Because they're the topic and focus of this story...
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
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.
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?
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?
No money, true. No benefit - well, I'm sure Apple considers "squash all competition" a benefit to them. They really have no need of money, anyway.
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?
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 don't get it. You are implying that Firefox is bloated? Firefox is the leanest browser there is atm.
-- no sig today
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.