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Mozilla Makes Prototype of Firefox OS Available
Thinkcloud writes "Even though the operating system hasn't arrived in a version for smartphones and tablets just yet, Firefox OS is available as a prototype module that you can run on Windows, Mac or Linux computers (download page). The initial Firefox OS phones are expected to arrive in 2013, and it's been reported that Alcatel and ZTE are the first manufacturers on board."
The smartphone market already has a ton of operating systems, each with their own ecosystem of applications. What is to be gained by introducing another this late in the game? I would much rather Mozilla focus all of their development efforts on making Firefox better. I just switched from Chrome back to Firefox and the memory management of Firefox still leaves a LOT to be desired.
... does it better. And chromeos is already moving along pretty quickly and will have a lot of apps from the gate.
The smartphone market already has a ton of operating systems, each with their own ecosystem of applications. What is to be gained by introducing another this late in the game? I would much rather Mozilla focus all of their development efforts on making Firefox better. I just switched from Chrome back to Firefox and the memory management of Firefox still leaves a LOT to be desired.
Well, one thing that I would like to see is more free open source mobile operating systems. Right now Android is dominating and I'm afraid that this will lead to a stagnant ecosystem in the mobile operating system world.
iOS is a good operating system but it can't compete with how cheap Android is and how pervasive it's becoming. You may think it's best for everyone to keep their heads down and concentrate on their bread and butter but I'd like to see someone challenge Android to be better. A natural monopoly could arise that causes Android development to stagnate and I don't think that'd be good for anyone.
As a consumer, you should be excited that another genuine contender is attempting to enter the ring against this unstoppable behemoth.
I love Android and I've used it as my mobile OS for the past three or four years but I wouldn't turn down another operating system that is open source and somehow better, would you?
I just switched from Chrome back to Firefox and the memory management of Firefox still leaves a LOT to be desired.
Firefox OS is part of their labs development. While you may have genuine concerns about their browser, I don't think they should shut down all their experimentation in the name of memory management (speaking of which my own personal experiences have been that their memory management is getting slowly better). Could you elaborate on what "a LOT to be desired" specifically is?
My work here is dung.
They're waiting for manufacturers to ship smartphones with 16GB of RAM before release.
In the world of marketing, the best way to get your product to be successful is to be first. If you can't do that, make everyone forget about who was actually first. If you still can't do that, be second while being the complete opposite of who was first. I believe these roles have already been filled by iOS and Android, with Windows playing catch-up. Also, is it just me or does their interface look a lot like Ice Cream Sandwich; I hope they get their own look-and-feel before releasing this into the wild.
Opera OS. That shit is going to be off the hook.
Wait. They just released v.200.1
The smartphone market already has a ton of operating systems.
...The smartphone market does have a "ton"[sic] of operating systems, but other than Android, and iOS[tied to one phone manufacturer], the others have either failed to make a market presence, failed to reinvent themselves against the competition, or simply been retired.
I'm not sure I believe in the third-ecosystem, or all arguments for it...but I see no reason, why a product that can successfully differentiate itself from lets be honest Android, with a unique selling point [killer apps; social integration; free Justin Bieber t-shirts!?]. I'm not sure if Firefox OS is going to be the next big thing, but I see no reason for questioning another entry into the market. Personally I loved Maemo and could easily imagine one of its successors with real backing taking off.
As for your comment on Firefox and its Memory Management its simply out of date, if anything Firefox is too frugal with memory, please do not lie.
I had a professor - an Emacs fan - who had a saying, "all software will eventually expand until it can send and receive email." It seems that needs to be amended to "all software will expand until it becomes an operating system."
rooooar
They even made an untested new language called "Prototype English" for it. ;-)
A few weeks after my switch to Firefox
When was this? Was it several years ago? Recent versions of Firefox are reportedly much better at not letting JavaScript make the browser leak memory.
Another pointless thing that nobody will want.
Its suggested that Samsung tablets are designed by Lawyers to get around Apples stupid design patents [I think ironically by Apples Lawyers]. I know round is the shape of the Firefox Logo, but its an incredibly wasteful shape. I cannot believe that Apple have succeeded in effectively corned the market of square boxes with round corners...its an icon theme at best. I'd rather have no standard shape than a stupid one, even with lasy App develops keeping one [often fuzzy]icon from iOS [A personal hatred of mine]
I can't wait for the random freeze ups!
Chrome runs a separate process for each window. I'm pretty sure Firefox is 1 process. With 1 process normally freeing memory does not return it to the OS. So closing a Firefox tab would not really shrink the Firefox process, while closing a Chrome tab would end a process and return its memory to the OS for re-use. It makes sense that Chrome might be better memory usage after extended use.
The article is a little out of date, but you get the point.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/windows-7-chrome-20-firefox-13-opera-12,3228-12.html
"IE9 uses half as much memory as most of the competition with only one tab open. Firefox has always had the lowest 40-tab memory usage total, but version 13 takes its single-tab total down to just 61 MB, which is right in line with Safari and Opera. What the composite score does not show is the speed at which the different browsers return memory back to the operating system. Chrome is the only contender to do this instantaneously. While Firefox and IE9 drop usage totals a great deal, they can take a minute to do so."
As you see what you said does not refute my point, just adds to it.
No, no thank you. I've only got 32 gig of memory.
And that's not enough for a firefox anything. Let alone an OS.
Plus i really don't like ~60% of the stuff mozilla has done to firefox over the last decade.
The world doesn't need another way to arrange apps in a grid. I think that Mozilla has put zero innovation into this, only doing so because they can.
I would like to see people spending some time trying to come up with new paradigms for mobile operating systems other then to simply arrange icons (rounded or otherwise) in a grid.
When every OS is basically regurgitating the same ideas, concepts, and essentially provide access to exactly the same content, the idea of multiple vendors is irrelevant. Firefox OS doesn't bring anything new to the table and so it is also irrelevant. If Mozilla can carve out a niche market for cheap handsets vendors then that is all about they can hope for.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
They release this one day before Jolla will unveil their continuation of Meego: Sailfish OS, which likely will be a highly open platform as well. http://jollatides.com/2012/11/20/24-hours-to-go-great-expectations/
this is great news.
I hope the operators DONT fragment it too much and that Mozilla have a plan for handling this aspect within their architecture.
Fragmentation is the one thing that could kill this effort
i hope they get the web intents stuff right. That will be vital.
I use Firefox. I like it more than Chrome. Chrome just makes tracking my life too easy for Google.
Performance is fine for me.
I just tried this new OS simulator. It was a totally easy install - installed inside Firefox.
The Android simulator too a full day to install and required Eclipse and Java which pretty temperamental and heavy weight.
The simulator work well for me. I was able to run Firefox inside it and see some websites.
There's an "Internet Sharing" option which I haven't see on any other phone.
Can I develop for it using a conventional programming language and API, without having to care about appalling things like "browsers" or "server- vs. client-side"?
If not, forget it. If yes, great news and I hope to see it soon on a phone nearby.
In this arena, Microsoft is the wannabee. Karma's a bitch aint it? That is, if you're MS.
Why do we need a firefox OS? The idea seems to be absurd. A web browser is a web browser, not a window system, not an OS. Whatever happened to the good Unix philosophy? Why can't firefox just run on the Linux kernel and use X for the windows? No need to reinvent the wheel here.
they're using unity on the atom and lxde on the chromebook.... this already throws off the balance between the two... normally i like the bench comparaisons but hrer i have to say : moronix!
Let's take a development process that tolerates severe memory leaks, and make their product the OS.
Having GNU emacs as a shell, or OS, makes more sense.
From this page: "Apple stopped supporting Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) in 2009". Have you tried upgrading to at least Snow Leopard, or failing that, replacing your over six-year-old PowerPC Mac with an Intel Mac?
You can even use websockets in javascript to communicate directly with other Firefox OS phones.
ha ha that is so funny!
Why is the UI IDENTICAL to Android?
Using the simulator felt like using a slightly more responsive Android, but the UX still sucks, and is completely unintuitive.
Didn't we learn anything from WebOS, Maemo, and Meego?
However, just because Apple abandons their users at a certain OS version doesn't mean app developers are required to follow suit.
An operating system past its announced end of life may be vulnerable to remote exploits that the operating system's publisher will never fix. For applications that do not rely on an Internet connection, such as a word processor or a DRM-free single-player or single-screen multiplayer video game, I agree with you, as the application is still useful even on a machine whose only link to the outside world is a USB flash drive. But for applications that do rely on an Internet connection, such as Firefox, I disagree. Continued updates to Internet applications for a vulnerable operating system just encourage people to continue using that vulnerable operating system.
There's one more component that differs from back then: Content is king.
Users adore their apps, but at the end of the day it's all their media and what they have stored "in the cloud" that matters. All your media will run on pretty much any platform effortlessly now, and web content is generally universal, whereas in the '80s getting content from one platform to open on another was extremely difficult. (Simply *moving it* from one platform to another was equally difficult.)
So, platform lock-in isn't quite as rigid as it was. Dominant platforms can change in the blink of an eye. (BlackBerry, anyone?)
Does it make you happy you're so strange?
Another mobile OS is a stupid idea. However, I no longer understand why things succeed or fail. Android looks like windows mobile with touch. For some reason people hated windows mobile but love android. Go figure. I tried to use iPhone and got lost. It is supposedly "just works" device but it was damn frustrating. What do I know. I think that windows phone is easy to use, fast and nice but nobody is buying them. So what do I know... Mozila OS could be runaway success although it looks to me like a total f#$@ waste of developer time.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
So now they're branding a whole OS with the Firefox label. Basic marketing theory suggests that they want us to associate the Firefox OS with the Firefox browser, right?
So, according to their marketing team, we should expect the whole OS to be slow, bloated, and lousy at managing tabs and windows. And we should expect it to crash on one out of every four attempts to watch Flash video. Right?
Someone at Mozilla needs a lesson in brand management, quickly.
You are such a whiny bunch, sometimes I wonder I am still on slashdot...
I mean, if we can be happy with a zillion Linux OS alone, then we can be happy with many mobile OS, I mean, it's the same thing. Choice to fit all, right? Not mention all the other alternatives (Haiku, React OS etc...)
I *like* it, and promote it, just like I like and promote Jolla's Sailfish OS, and Tizen and whatever else is out there... because more competition means a happy *me* (consumer).
I have a couple of smaller Android phones (~700 MHz processors...) that I would love to outfit with this OS. I downloaded the xpi and tested it on my nightly, and I can't wait to test on my phone. It is promising. I am not a app-crazy guy, and a few basic apps will suffice, as long as this brings a new life to old phones.
I am an ACCA student. Got a query on Accountancy/Finance? Maybe I can help!
Even one process freeing memory does return it to the OS. If it didn't, what would be the point of freeing memory in the first place? Some things may want to wait to free memory to try to prevent memory fragmentation, but as soon as a program calls free, the memory goes back to the OS. (If you use a custom allocator, this may or may not be true for your allocator's free function, but the C standard library free function absolutely returns the memory to the OS.) In fact, a memory leak is when a program fails to return memory it's allocated but will never use again to the OS.
It might be a good idea to research how memory management works; you seem to have a completely incorrect understanding of it. Surely a process's memory usage can go down as well as up, otherwise you'd have to restart your computer, or at least the majority of the programs running, constantly.
Just to clarify, you do generally need to free a whole page of memory for it to be returned, so technically not every free would return the memory to the OS, but depending on the page size, allocations of a certain size almost always should. I don't know if you're specifically talking about Firefox, and if it uses lots of small allocations (haven't really dug around the source, so I'm not sure) that are unlikely to be freed in way that causes pages to be returned, then I apologize.
There are 2 mechanisms which the C library uses to return memory to the OS. First if a certain amount of memory at the end of the data segment is free, it can reduce the size of the data segment. Second (known to work under Linux) if a process allocates large amounts (like 128KB) the memory allocator can use a different form of memory allocation (mmap for Linux). When this large block is freed it can be immediately returned to the OS. I was suggesting a way that memory could remain allocated. The original intent behind malloc retaining freed memory within a process was to allow the process to re-use the memory for subsequent allocations. This concept can be abused by processes which allocate different sized blocks leaving internal fragmentation with many chunks of memory too small to use. I would expect programmers for long running programs to guard against this problem. If I were writing Firefox I would try to compartmentalize the memory used for a tab so that all memory for a tab would be released to the OS when the tab was closed. I have read that Firefox has adopted a different allocator which may have solved the problem. I too have not studied Firefox code, but I expect that they do pretty well.
Ray Seyfarth, ray.seyfarth@gmail.com, http://rayseyfarth.blogspot.com
Yes, it depends on how it was allocated. glibc uses sbrk for small allocations (as you said, under 128 KB) and mmap for larger ones. It's actually interesting to read the mallopt man page. It seems to be glibc-only, but it lets you tune all the settings we're talking about, and then some. In any case, small allocations are the big problem, because they're put in the data segment and the data segment can't be shrunk past any data still allocated, so fragmentation means glibc can't use sbrk to shrink it again (at least past the point it's fragmented at). If all a program does is small allocations, and it fragments a lot, then the memory usage of the program wouldn't really go down. Of course, it's worth noting that M_TRIM_THRESHOLD is, by default, 128 KB, so freed memory won't always be returned immediately. You can also change M_MMAP_THRESHOLD to control what size allocation will be done on the data segment and with mmap.
For large amounts, yes, glibc will mmap them and munmap them when freed. I had forgotten, though, that Firefox switched to jemalloc. It seems like jemalloc never uses sbrk, and it considers "large" allocations (large enough to allocate a dedicated block) 4 KB instead of 128 KB. It also uses multiple arenas, which seems like it would complicate things even more. I don't know if using jemalloc helps guard against memory fragmentation or not, but its allocation strategy seems sane. At the very least, some pages should be able to be returned, even if they're one of the older pages, which should help a bit. With sbrk in glibc and Windows using the heap, only the most recently allocated memory (and the freed memory before it, until it hits a still-in-use point) can be freed, but that doesn't seem to apply to jemalloc, as long as the freed memory makes up a whole page.
Of course, with Windows, they don't reveal everything about it as it's proprietary, but it does seem like memory is always allocated on the heap, and the memory will always get returned (perhaps except in cases of extreme fragmentation) eventually, but by no means immediately (in case the program wants to use it again). A program can choose to use a Windows-specific function to return it right away (_heapmin). _heapmin won't return things that are below blocks on the heap that are still allocated, though, so fragmentation is still a big issue.
I can understand why a process might want to free memory but keep it around for later allocations (and Firefox may very well tweak jemalloc to do it) but with virtual memory, there's no guarantee the first allocation was contiguous anyway. I think it would be better for the process to return memory so other things can use it, and maybe keep a small amount handy, but not everything that's been freed so far.
Also, I apologize if my post came off as rude. I re-read it later and it seemed rude to me, which was absolutely not my intention. As a programmer, I don't strictly need to know how the memory allocator works (as long as it works), but I find it extremely interesting, and knowing how things happen makes it easier to prevent memory fragmentation, so I think people should know, even if for no other reason than it's quite interesting.