Mozilla Opens the Firefox App Store To Early Testers

SternisheFan sends this quote from ZDNet: "Mozilla has opened its Firefox Marketplace, with Android device owners and developers getting the first access to the browser's app store. The access arrived on Thursday, in the release of the latest 'Aurora' build of Firefox for Android. Aurora is meant for developers and early adopters, as it is the test stream of Mozilla's browser. The storefront lets people find and install web applications delivered via the browser, and gives developers a place to publicize their apps. 'We're hoping that Aurora users, our awesome early adopters, will go experience the Firefox Marketplace on their Android phones and let us know what they think,' Mozilla Labs engineering manager Bill Walker said in a blog post. 'Our goal is to collect as much real-life feedback as possible about the Marketplace's design, usability, performance, reliability, and content.' ... Mozilla said it expects to follow with a Marketplace for the Firefox browser beta and Firefox OS launches next year."

Comments

The "App"ification of Everything Continues

[GerbilSoft]

Now that any generic webpage can be considered an "app", how long will it take before everything's an "app"? Photos? Apps. Videos? Apps. USB cables? They're no longer USB cables, they're "app cables". Heck, drop the cables - they're just "apps" too.

Besides that point, most of these so-called "apps" are worthless. I remember a time when Apple fans used to proudly proclaim that even though there was less software on the Mac platform, they were higher quality than Windows programs. Now that the iPhone has hundreds of thousands of apps, quality doesn't matter anymore.

At least Firefox hasn't gone full Windows 8 and reduced everything to 16 colors (yet)...

Hey Mozilla

[AuMatar]

You're doing a halfassed job of writing your flagship browser at the moment. There's no way in hell I'm using your app store or your OS. This type of wasted effort, useless featuritis, and loss of focus is why you're losing ground.

Re:Hey Mozilla

[sl4shd0rk]

You're doing a halfassed job of writing your flagship browser at the moment.

Well, considering the alternatives, I'd say they're doing OK:
IE) is and always has been an application supporting only bastardized version of the HTML standard and focused on adoption of M$ proprietary extensions/standards.

Opera) Closed source and Ad-ridden.

Chrome) All your Web belong to Google. Dubious "Sandboxed" native code execution.

Konqueror/Rekonq) Seems to work sometimes.

Given the alternatives, I don't see Firefox doing anything egregious. In fact, their efforts are laudable. They make an effort to maintain an open-source product that you can download for free. The Mozilla offerings are probably the least suspect when it comes to privacy issues. Mozilla has their fair share of bugs, but honestly a lot of the complaining I read about Firefox is due to misbehaving plugins as well as users not understanding their system resources.

Maybe I live under a rock but the Mozilla products work great for me. Can you point out some factual information behind your rant? If One of the other offerings are far superior I'd really be interested.

Makes kinda sense

[Floyd-ATC]

This must be what they've been doing instead of fixing the crazy startup time, shutdown time and memory consumption. Kinda logical really, if you can't fix the underlying problem just make sure users make an investment in some apps that only work with Firefox. That way the users are less likely to give up and just use a competing browser. Some of you may have seen this trick before.