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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.
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...
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?
Because they're the topic and focus of this story...
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Better tardy to the party than huddled at home with a bag of Cheetos.
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.
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?
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.
This really makes no sense to me. Rendering HTML is not easy nor is it efficient (memory or cpu wise). There are millions upon millions of iPhones and Android devices running with lower specs than 256 MB memory and a 700 MHz CPU, and they are very usable and responsive - EXCEPT for web browsing!!! So in essence, they're taking the one thing that low-end phones do worst, which is rendering HTML, and only allowing them to do that. The alternative is allowing NATIVE applications (and although Android is Java, the NDK allows binaries compiled directly for the CPU, which is what all non-trivial games use), which provides the best performance even on low end hardware.
Really, in my mind, they have this completely backwards.
Better known as 318230.
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'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.