Firefox OS Phone on Display at LinuxFest NorthWest (Video)

Jakob Perry organized the first LinuxFest Northwest when he was still a student. He got off to a good start: now LFNW has been running for 14 years, and has retained its flavor as a low-key, friendly conference. Exhibitors from Linux distributions from tiny (CrunchBang) to huge (Red Hat) were on hand for 2013, and enough speakers and topics to fill about 80 different sessions over the two days of the conference. Not all of it's about Linux per se, either: the EFF and FSF were represented, along with a BSD table, and a local astronomy group with a great name. At this year's event I ran into the first Firefox OS phone that I've had a chance to play with in person. Firefox OS integrates Linux by way of the Android kernel, but is otherwise its own beast. Ubuntu and Mozilla contributor Benjamin Kerensa was on hand to talk about what makes it tick, and to give a demo of the all-HTML5 interface.

Comments

Re:Actually ran pretty slick

[Lennie]

That is the whole point of FirefoxOS, get rid of all the extra layers and pretty much only run a rendering engine on top of a Linux kernel (exceptions are things like: wpasupplicant).

It has been shown that FirefoxOS can use less resources than Android that way.

Which is good because their target market is not the first world countries, but countries like Brazil, Mexico, Poland, Spain. Where smartphones are not as widespread (in Spain and Poland it might be certain parts of the country or markets), mostly because of the price of the phone itself. Prices may drop, but especially parts like touchscreens are very expensive and will probably remain that way.

Because this is a new market for smartphones, FirefoxOS actually has a chance of getting a proper share of the market in those countries.

FirefoxOS might be a little less flashy than the first-world competitors, but they pretty much have no marketshare in those countries anyway. And will probably not have much of a marketshare any time soon.