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Mozilla Launches Firefox OS Devices In Stores, Opens Up App Payments
An anonymous reader writes "After almost two years of development, Mozilla today officially launched Firefox OS devices in stores. At the same time, the company has opened up payments for developers interested in charging for their apps or charging for content inside their apps. Last week, the first commercial Firefox OS devices arrived in Spain ready to be sold by Telefónica, starting on July 9 with the ZTE Open for €69 ($88.80) including VAT. Mozilla says Poland, Colombia, and Venezuela also have upcoming launches soon, and more countries will be joining the list as well, but today today marks the day official Firefox OS devices are available in store."
Great, pick a country that's in a depression to launch a product.
I want to see phones ship with Cyanogenmod by default. But while we're wishing, I want a free app that turns my smartphone into a portable unlimited beer tap. And also, a bag of holding would be nice.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
and closed wallet/. Show me WAREZ/. *Ding*
oh look another account/middleman/appstore
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mobile_software_distribution_platforms
sad
Why is there a picture of a red panda with the article? Did some journalist actually think it was a fox?
> Before submitting your app, you need the following: Web hosting for the app (the Firefox OS Marketplace does not host apps).
I would like to buy such a phone, but "no hosting"? Really?
Why is kbg wasting our time with this drivel when he should focus on not spouting the same old nonexistent problems.
You forgot to throw in: I'll wait a few months for Firefox OS v216!
Because it doesn't leak and crash all the time. Check your add-ons.
I couldn't find the price of the ZTE Open yet, I mean unlocked, without SIM and without dealing with an operator at all. The Alcatel One Touch Fire is the other Firefox OS phone for now but I don't know how much it costs.
I guess if it's cheap enough it could be used as a PDA and media player only, or as a phone with no data plan and use wifi, SD, USB only.
But I'm fine with my small clamshell Samsung phone too (with no secondary display, no camera, no anything), long battery life and perfect form factor. It would be a pain to carry a rectangle everyday in one of my pants pocket (I carry enough crap already : tobacco, cigarette paper, keys, lighter, smartcards, corkscrew, a small purse with cash coins and USB drive)
Because mobile is the next big platform, and must have presence there to keep being relevant? Because none of the 2/3 main mobile platforms are truly open? Because their vision is open web everywhere? You don't need specifically Firefox OS to access that marketplace.
If/When those leaks are found they probably will be fixed (those devels "wasting their time" are users too), but there is a lot of people working in a lot of areas.
They did, it doesn't leak memory anymore. The browser still pegs CPU and still crashes, but crashes orders of magnitude less often than Netscape 4.x. That's because the web is horrible, it's a platform for automatic execution of perfectly portable interpreted code of varying and terrible quality and I don't bother filtering it (barring Flashblock).
You obviously don't run Firefox constantly open for months at a time. But that is my point if the browser can't handle addons without crashing and consuming all memory then that is something that should be addressed by at least having some tools in the browser to detect and/or fix the situation. One of the addons that I know that has some problems is the Flash Player plugin, but this plugin is basically required for browsing the web, so the Mozilla devs should work with Adobe to fix this situation or write their own integrated flash player. Just fix the damn browser please.
A browser should never crash, period. If it crashes then it is because the Mozilla devs wasted their time on some pet projects instead of using that time for QA and testing of the core browser.
No, I let it update periodically which necessitates closing it. Sometimes I even reboot so my system can install patches.
So the browser is supposed to be capable of solving the halting problem?
That's not an addon. That's a plugin. Mozilla has isolated it via the plugin host but it is still its own, closed source executable. How the hell can you possibly hold Mozilla to task for problems in flash?
Here, let me fix this for you:
It is able to crash. Sometimes it will crash once a day or more, sometimes it never crashes. That's with few and benign add-ons (though the most "heavy" of them is Session Manager) including Flashblock with tends to improve stability and resource usage by not auto-loading flash all the time.
Given the asshattery displayed by the browser team as of late with regards to... well, everything since say, 2005, I suspect they'll probably pick up at least 40% of the Windows Phone 8 users.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
A browser should never crash, period. If it crashes then it is because the Mozilla devs wasted their time on some pet projects instead of using that time for QA and testing of the core browser.
Agreed.
Also, software should never have security vulnerabilities, should never lag and should never have unexpected behaviours of any kind.
The fact that Firefox is the only web browsing software which is less than absolutely perfect is very damning.
Deploying Firefox as a pseudo OS on millions (maybe) of computer phones will give them an incentive to fix/improve their javascript host, at least. Which they have been doing for years already.
I don't have too many troubles with flash plugin, in fact if my browser is slow and my computer is swapping I can always do a killall -9 plugin-container, which I find myself doing in hard situations but not often at all. If you're auto-loading every flash object (which is the default) while browsing on over 100 tabs you're asking for trouble. Flashblock fixes any flash plugin problem I might have and you can whitelist that one site (e.g. I whitelist soundcloud.com, on another computer I whitelisted deezer as well)
How do we know that browser developers developed the OS, rather than newly-hired/volunteered OS developers?
What disappoints me is that the Firesomething add-on, which once gave each copy of the browser its own <element><animal> name, has gone unmaintained.
It isn't like software engineering is a new thing, there are known methods and ways to test for memory leaks and software crashes, there are also known methods for QA and regression tests for software. I understand there will always be some bugs in any software but as soon as a single crash occurs you should have enough information to identify the bug and fix it with an update.
Doesn't matter as long as there are bugs in the browser you fix that as first priority before you focus on something else.
I see you either a) haven't used it in over five years or b) work for Opera or Microsoft.
So does that mean when the servers are down, I'm supposed to pull the secretary into the meeting where we try to fix it?
How about the janitors?
You let the folks you hired for that task, work on that task. You don't reassign everyone to focus on one thing, that is overkill and a waste.
No but you prioritize the tasks based on how serious they are. Bugs are number one, new features are second, eye candy is third.
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The issue is javascript is broken as a language. Both android and firefox OS have a significant disadvantage in efficiency due to garbage collection and other poor architectural choices. iOS is slightly better settling on reference counting, avoiding major issues due to developer neglegence but allowing good developers to optimize their applications for efficient memory utiliization. Javascript is even worse off than java with no explcit memory allocation primitives. Oh, and no delete doesn't do what you think it does...