

Mozilla building mobile OS to battle Chrome - fizz972
http://download.cnet.com/8301-2007_4-20083238-12/mozilla-building-mobile-os-to-battle-chrome/

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rkwz
Sensationalist title. The Ars article[1] was much better.

 _A foundational goal of the B2G project is to explore and remedy areas where
current Web standards are insufficient for building modern mobile
applications. Instead of haphazardly grafting vendor-specific markup or
extensions into the application runtime, Mozilla will seek to propose new
standards to address the challenges that emerge during development._

Nicely aligns with their main aim of promoting openness, innovation and
opportunity on the web.[2]

[1] [http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2011/07/mozilla-
eyes...](http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2011/07/mozilla-eyes-mobile-
os-landscape-with-new-boot-to-gecko-project.ars)

[2] <http://www.mozilla.org/about/mission.html>

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asciilifeform
I wish people would stop calling the act of scraping together a new linux
distro "writing an OS."

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jorangreef
This may seem obvious but operating systems tend not to be replaced by other
operating systems, but rather subsumed by the very applications built on top
of them.

For example, DOS was not replaced by another OS but was subsumed by a DOS
application, Windows 3.1, which eventually grew down and became a standalone
OS in Windows 95.

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Flenser
DOS << Windows << Browser << Facebook

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cousin_it
Great thread! So the next thing to expect after the Chrome laptop would be a
Facebook laptop?

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Flenser
Or mobile phone

[http://m.ft.com/cms/s/2/8ead4e1a-b86b-11e0-b62b-00144feabdc0...](http://m.ft.com/cms/s/2/8ead4e1a-b86b-11e0-b62b-00144feabdc0.html)

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MatthewPhillips
My biggest problem with this is that the biggest problem with Mobile web
browsers right now is that they pale in comparison (both feature and
performance) to their desktop counterparts. Last time I checked the iPad
browser (probably the best tablet browser) was something like 15x slower than
Chrome desktop in javascript benchmarks.

This is the #1 blocker to mobile web app adoption. Try viewing a SVG on a
mobile browser and see what happens. You're flipping a coin. Why doesn't
Mozilla focus on bringing mobile/desktop feature parity before adding device
level APIs?

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rpearl
With regards to performance, keep in mind that there is simply a difference in
processor performance. A mobile architecture browser is just not going to be
as fast as a desktop based browser.

There are additional optimizations that can be done, of course--the ARM
assembly generated by current JITs is not of quite the same quality as the x86
assembly, because the architectures are structured differently and ARM was
shoe-horned in afterwards. Different ways of performing operations do better
on ARM than on x86--the architectures have different performance
characteristics. In point of fact, some of the JS team at Mozilla has shifted
focus to improving ARM code generation.

Second, you are assuming that everyone at Mozilla works on the same single
project. This is simply not so. There will still be a significant team of
people working on improving the current mobile Firefox. This new project is
distinct.

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MatthewPhillips
Please educate me, I honestly don't know, but I've tested html5 games on an
iPad2 and a 5 year old single core PC and seem the PC consistently outperform
the iPad2. What is it about ARMs that are so slow compared to the equivalent
or worse x86 chip?

I'm completely supportive of this project, and would probably use it on my
personal phone, I just wonder if Mozilla isn't already stretched too thin.

~~~
rpearl
There's a few aspects to discuss here.

Firstly, in 2006 (5 years ago), x64 chips were Core2Duos clocked at about
2.2Ghz. This is top of the line, but even a mid-level processor would be
something like 1.6Ghz. A PC would probably have about 2GB of RAM.

An iPad2 is a 1GHz, dual core device. Further, it is built for a mobile
device, and thus will sacrifice performance for the sake of battery life, at
the very least in subtle ways. It has 512MB of RAM. That's not quite
equivalent, not yet. Certainly the next round of mobile hardware will be above
and beyond the level of said desktops by a good margin.

Second, there is the performance profile characteristics I mentioned before. I
don't know much of the details of ARM, but for example: you can only load a
12-bit immediate. Larger constants must be loaded into a constant pool. The
iPad's L1 cache is significantly smaller than that of a desktop processor.
Both have 16 general purpose registers, but spilling to the stack will take
more of a hit on ARM.

Then there is code quality. Current codegen for ARM is not as good as x64--
checking the tag and performing a conditional jump in Jaegermonkey currently
produces 3 instructions where it could be done in 1 instruction. When an
constant is loaded into the constant pool there is no check to see whether it
was necessary to load it (was it already loaded in?) There was a lot of focus
on code generation quality in x86-land which has only recently been shifting
to ARM--I expect those pieces of the puzzle to be solved very quickly.

To address your other point, what information is indicative of Mozilla being
"stretched too thin"?

(For my credentials when talking about Firefox's Javacsript JIT--I am an
intern currently working on the next generation JS JIT, Ionmonkey. Code is
here: <http://hg.mozilla.org/projects/ionmonkey/>)

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PedroCandeias
"Mozilla will seek to propose new standards to address the challenges that
emerge during development"

I'd love to be able to get excited about this, but sadly I can't. Here's why:
<http://xkcd.com/927/>

Plus, like someone already said, Mozilla is maybe stretching itself a bit too
thin.

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Yhippa
I dream of a future of sophisticated mobile web apps and no vendor lock-in to
a particular mobile OS.

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quattrofan
Ok somewhat confused the article implies its to battle Android not Chrome..?

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shareme
Mozilla's biggest problem is not aligning with wants of mobile OEMs..

Right now a significant part of mobile OEMs wants mobile widget engine
technology..such as BONDi..Mozilla could be ahead of the game by putting BONDi
inside their engine for mobile..

My bias; exactly 18 months ago was interviewed by Mozilla for an xml dev job
and suggested that very path.

