Thanks you! You just made my point! My laptop gets 8-15FPS while running this HTML5 web demo in H/W accel. Firefox. When I run the Native version of Cube I get over 100FPS.
Do you see the problem now? My laptop is much more powerful than that hardware they are targeting, but all of the built in and downloaded apps will be gimped by this HTML "technology".
From what I've read of B2G/Mozilla OS is that it will be lightweight and be able to run on cheap low-end phones.
LIGHTWEIGHT?!?, just like their browser Firefox, right? I switched to Chrome for a reason, and that was because Firefox was a bloated CPU, memory sucking pig. The idea of Firefox being the ideal technology for low-end smartphones is laughable.
The whole idea of using HTML, CCS, and JavaScript as the back end technology for a low-end smartphone is nuts. Even the best HTML rendering engines (Mozilla's Geko is not one of them) are CPU and memory hogs. CSS was never designed for and is nearly impossible to hardware accelerate, and JavaScript is notoriously difficult to optimize and even the best VMs like V8 run orders of magnitude slower then Native code, while the VM itself takes up a massive amount of memory.
I get that Mozilla wants to put Firefox on a phone. Fine, but first, focus one building a competitive rendering engine. Then you can use this Firefox OS to prototype a easy to use touch UI. But in the end, I want a responsive fast phone, like the iPhone or Galaxy S3, not some dog slow HTML monstrosity.
Sorry buddy, but Reality is not Negativity. There are millions upon millions of iPhones and Android devices running with lower specs than 256 MB memory and a 700 MHz CPU, and they are very usable and responsive, EXCEPT for web browsing! So if Mozilla wants to fix the problem with low end smartphones, they need to fix their browser first.
Then they can focus on creating a streamlined smartphone OS based on Native apps, not CPU hogging HTML5/CSS. Mozilla is living in a dream world, where they don't grok the real problem with low-end smartphones are battery life and performance. CSS was never intended for GPU acceleration and Javascript requires a heavy VM that sucks away CPU cycles and drains battery life, not to mention 10-100x slower than native.
Here's an idea, take WebOS or Android,make the GUI fully hardware accelerated, rewrite all the basic apps to run Native code, remove any HTML 5 / VM kruff . Now add your new state of the art Firefox XXXXX for web browsing, and you'd have something that I'd want to run on a low-end smartphone.
HTML5 and JavaScript are not meant for this purpose. You continue down this path and you will end up with a kunkly slow phone OS that is bested by native iOS and Android. If you want to make low under phone run well, you're going at the problem backwards. Take a platform like WebOS or Android and strip it down, ripping out all the resource hoggy VMs like JavaScript and Dalvik, and now you'd have fast OS than can run Firefox when it needs too, even on a low end phone.
When you take real world Javascript apps that have been ported from native C, like emulators, and they'll run 100x slower then their native counterparts. No offence, but Mozilla doesn't exactly have the best track record when it comes to performance. I left Firefox for Chrome because of this and now you are trying make firefox the default OS on low end smart phones? This is crazy. One of the biggest complaints of WebOS was its performance. And it was based off on the more streamlined WebKit engine.
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Thanks you! You just made my point! My laptop gets 8-15FPS while running this HTML5 web demo in H/W accel. Firefox. When I run the Native version of Cube I get over 100FPS.
Do you see the problem now? My laptop is much more powerful than that hardware they are targeting, but all of the built in and downloaded apps will be gimped by this HTML "technology".
For those of you interested, try it out yourself:
Cube 2: Sauerbraten:
http://cubeengine.com/files.php4
Firefox HTML5 Cube 2 port:
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/demos/detail/bananabread
From what I've read of B2G/Mozilla OS is that it will be lightweight and be able to run on cheap low-end phones.
LIGHTWEIGHT?!?, just like their browser Firefox, right? I switched to Chrome for a reason, and that was because Firefox was a bloated CPU, memory sucking pig. The idea of Firefox being the ideal technology for low-end smartphones is laughable.
The whole idea of using HTML, CCS, and JavaScript as the back end technology for a low-end smartphone is nuts. Even the best HTML rendering engines (Mozilla's Geko is not one of them) are CPU and memory hogs. CSS was never designed for and is nearly impossible to hardware accelerate, and JavaScript is notoriously difficult to optimize and even the best VMs like V8 run orders of magnitude slower then Native code, while the VM itself takes up a massive amount of memory.
I get that Mozilla wants to put Firefox on a phone. Fine, but first, focus one building a competitive rendering engine. Then you can use this Firefox OS to prototype a easy to use touch UI. But in the end, I want a responsive fast phone, like the iPhone or Galaxy S3, not some dog slow HTML monstrosity.
Sorry buddy, but Reality is not Negativity. There are millions upon millions of iPhones and Android devices running with lower specs than 256 MB memory and a 700 MHz CPU, and they are very usable and responsive, EXCEPT for web browsing! So if Mozilla wants to fix the problem with low end smartphones, they need to fix their browser first.
Then they can focus on creating a streamlined smartphone OS based on Native apps, not CPU hogging HTML5/CSS. Mozilla is living in a dream world, where they don't grok the real problem with low-end smartphones are battery life and performance. CSS was never intended for GPU acceleration and Javascript requires a heavy VM that sucks away CPU cycles and drains battery life, not to mention 10-100x slower than native.
Here's an idea, take WebOS or Android,make the GUI fully hardware accelerated, rewrite all the basic apps to run Native code, remove any HTML 5 / VM kruff . Now add your new state of the art Firefox XXXXX for web browsing, and you'd have something that I'd want to run on a low-end smartphone.
NO, not in the low power segment. Here are some hard numbers from another /. article today.
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTE4NjU
CPU Model Performance TDP Efficiency .79
AMD FireStream9370 - 52 / 225 / 2.35
Intel Atom N570 - 6.7 / 8.5 /
ARM Cortel-A9 - 2 / 0.5 / 4
As you can see in the low power domain, ARM is still more that 4x as efficient and uses 17x less much power than Intel.
HTML5 and JavaScript are not meant for this purpose. You continue down this path and you will end up with a kunkly slow phone OS that is bested by native iOS and Android. If you want to make low under phone run well, you're going at the problem backwards. Take a platform like WebOS or Android and strip it down, ripping out all the resource hoggy VMs like JavaScript and Dalvik, and now you'd have fast OS than can run Firefox when it needs too, even on a low end phone.
When you take real world Javascript apps that have been ported from native C, like emulators, and they'll run 100x slower then their native counterparts. No offence, but Mozilla doesn't exactly have the best track record when it comes to performance. I left Firefox for Chrome because of this and now you are trying make firefox the default OS on low end smart phones? This is crazy. One of the biggest complaints of WebOS was its performance. And it was based off on the more streamlined WebKit engine.