Mozilla Partners With Panasonic To Bring Firefox OS To the TV

An anonymous reader writes "At CES 2014 in Las Vegas today, Mozilla announced its plans for Firefox OS this year. Having launched Firefox OS for smartphones in 2013, the company has now partnered with Panasonic to bring its operating system to TVs, and also detailed the progress that has been made around the tablet and desktop versions."

Comments

Anything will be an improvement

[amorsen]

The current generation of "smart" TV's with every brand having their own interface is getting a bit tedious. Give me Android, give me Firefox OS, even give me iOS if you have to.

Re:Anything will be an improvement

[bob_super]

My smart TV is running windows.
It runs every browser and most of my favorite apps, flash, video, and it even runs productivity software, games, and non-latin websites.

Just don't mind the little box behind the flat screen.

Re:Anything will be an improvement

[dgatwood]

The current generation of "smart" TV's with every brand having their own interface is getting a bit tedious. Give me Android, give me Firefox OS, even give me iOS if you have to.

The problem is, even if they are based on Android, they still will probably each have their own interface. For some reason, every company seems to think they understand UI design better than whoever designs the standard Android interface, and unfortunately, more often than not, they're wrong. :-)

And if you're really unlucky, you end up with a smart TV that won't play Netflix reliably and a smart Blu-Ray player that won't play video from Amazon reliably....

Re:Anything will be an improvement

[CODiNE]

Historically hardware manufacturers make terrible software. It's just a throw away to get you to buy the plastic in the box.

Digital Camera software.
Scanner Software.
Printer Drivers with Photo Editing software.
Harddrive "drivers" and software.
Wifi cards.

Once you buy it you're on your own.

When these functions get absorbed by the OS it's usually a pretty good basic experience for everyone with the rare actually useful optional download from the maker for more knobs to turn.

So iOS, Windows, Linux or Android... usually the built-in stuff is better than the crap you would have gotten, but there still needs to be a way to use the occasional gem from hardware makers that actually care.

Re:Anything will be an improvement

[TrollstonButterbeans]

"The current generation of "smart" TV's with every brand having their own interface is getting a bit tedious. Give me Android, give me Firefox OS, even give me iOS if you have to."

I'm not disagreeing with this.

But there is little difference between a TV and flat panel monitor these days, I can hook an XBox up to either of them as an example.

All they need to do is standardize plugging a smart phone into a TV or monitor and make a wireless keyboard or game controller work and all of these issues about "some OS running on some anarchronism of device" --- and face it, in ten years the idea of a "monitor" that can only function as a TV (which is what we have today) --- is going to sound mighty stupid.

If you get my drift ...

Chaos for the Masses

[Tablizer]

So now everyday TV watchers can experience the frequent random silly UI "upgrades" just like the rest of us. If you think losing the remote inside the couch is frustrating, imagine the buttons scrambling themselves randomly at 3am, and with "explanations" such as, "we are just gradually preparing for the future Flux Capacitor interface kit by mixing the old and new styles, whether they gel or not."

Re:Android not sufficiently open?

[exomondo]

That is interesting, because I thought a bunch of handset makers are using Android while giving nothing at all back to google.

They are, but they are restricted. They can't create any incompatibilities and the key element to being part of the Android ecosystem is the proprietary Google Play Services and all the proprietary Google apps. Sure they could take the stock AOSP project and maintain, upgrade and develop it themselves but they aren't really in the business of doing that.

You need the 'cool channel'

[oneiros27]

Butthead: Hey Beavis.
Beavis: What?
Butthead: I was just like...thinking and stuff. It was pretty cool.
Beavis: Yeah, I'm gonna try that.
Butthead: TV is cool.
Beavis: Yeah, yeah, TV rules. It rules! Yeah...
Butthead: Hey beavis...I heard that pretty soon, they're gonna have, like, 500 channels. That's gonna be cool.
Beavis: Really? That would be cool.
Butthead: You know what would be really cool, though? If like, one of the channels didn't suck.
Beavis: Yeah, but, like, if one of them didn't suck, why would you need the other...um... three hundred and twenty-seven?
Butthead: Because, you know all those tv shows that suck? It's like, you gotta put them somewhere! You can't put 'em on the cool channel!
Beavis: Yeah, yeah! They should call it the cool channel!

Re:Android not sufficiently open?

[ChunderDownunder]

It's more a move to counter LG - who are building TVs around the entrails of Palm's webOS. Both platforms are built around HTML5, so any 'apps' running on LG TVs might easily be ported to Panasonic's.

Re:time to stop buying Panasonic TV's I guess.

[NonFerrousBueller]

No kidding - as if my Panasonic "Smart" TV didn't suck enough already. Twice now we've sat down as a family to Skype with my mother on the other side of the world only to have the telly decide it needed to do an update NOW. Twenty minutes later, the 3 year old is in no mood to sit and talk to grandma, who is already tech-challenged and doesn't understand the hold-up. The inbuilt "OS" is slow and buggy and the UI is atrocious. The YouTube browser tries to do a full search for each letter you enter, so by the time I've laboriously typed "Winnie The Pooh" it's tried to do 15 searches. The matching DVD player is even worse. There are right ways and wrong ways to implement this, I hope Firefox does more right than wrong.

Yeah, this is Slashdot so I should be whipping up some sort of MythTV thingie but I've seen the agony my friend has gone through doing that and seriously, I've got better things to do with my time (see three year old).