
Firefox OS Participation Hub - ariestiyansyah
https://firefoxos.mozilla.community
======
hardwaresofton
As a person who runs (as my main phone) a FirefoxOS (2.5) on a LG Nexus 5, I'd
like to note that those who would like to try out FFOS on a device (maybe an
old left over one, if you're not sure), are welcome to! The water's nice and
warm, just dive right in :). The build and flash documentation is nice and
relatively easy to follow, given the technical level of the goal that you're
trying to accomplish (building a mobile OS and flashing a phone).

I'd love it if the page that was linked noted more ways to contribute to the
community -- at present, it seems like there are two (but should be more):

\- Port FFOS (I'm actually doing this on one phone I had laying around, and
it's actually pretty difficult because I am new to porting mobile android-
based OSes)

\- Try FFOS on android

What about app reviews? last I checked, that was also a great way to
contribute to the platform (assuming they're still done by volunteers). Also,
contributing code, mashing bugs (a link to the bugtracker), i18n help all seem
like things people could do to help (when I last built from master, some
translations were still lacking)

------
striking
Tried the homescreen replacement for Android. It was not good, at all. The
jank was impressively terrible and the interface was fairly broken. Dunno why
anyone put the time into making an Android adaptation of something so totally
incomplete.

I guess this might work someday, but I honestly don't understand the point of
making an interface out of just HTML and CSS. The performance is truly awful,
and will never get better until the models that govern those technologies are
refined. It's impossible to optimize CSS, for example. (Although Javascript is
definitely getting better, it's still not "native" speed either.)

I hope some rethinking comes to this project.

~~~
pcwalton
> It's impossible to optimize CSS, for example.

That's a bold claim, and it does not square with my experience optimizing CSS
implementations. In fact, CSS at its core is well suited for parallel
implementations, saturating all CPUs on typical workloads, and its declarative
rendering structure maps more naturally to hardware-accelerated graphics APIs
than traditional vector graphics APIs do.

Why, specifically, do you think CSS is unoptimizable?

~~~
cwzwarich
As somebody who has optimized both CSS implementations and native rendering
engines / UI frameworks, the main reason why I am fundamentally skeptical
about the performance of CSS as an application platform is incremental layout.
No one has ever implemented CSS with incremental layout in a way that is even
close to being competitive with native UI code.

If you want to make a responsive UI, doing work incrementally and amortizing
the cost of actions across frame intervals is more important than raw
performance. This is especially true on mobile, where frequency / voltage
controllers for CPUs and GPUs are tuned to work best on consistent workloads
rather than bursty workloads.

~~~
pcwalton
> No one has ever implemented CSS with incremental layout in a way that is
> even close to being competitive with native UI code.

So this is a really broad statement and without further clarification it's
hard to pin down precisely what you mean. By incremental layout do you mean
partial layout, or relayout after dynamic changes? For the latter, I don't see
how flexbox (for example) is worse in this area than springs and struts, as it
essentially _is_ springs and struts. And for absolutely positioned UIs (the
old way mobile apps were laid out), layout time of CSS is essentially zero.
For the former, it's commonplace to use frameworks that will do the standard
"UITableView" sort of optimizations in script. Moreover, though, there's CSS
Containment [1] coming soon to allow for these sorts of optimizations without
having to use JS. I agree that CSS Containment is critical to allow CSS to
achieve the performance of native frameworks, but this is an area of active
work, and I don't see any roadblocks in the way of partial layout once CSS
Containment arrives.

[1]: [https://drafts.csswg.org/css-containment/](https://drafts.csswg.org/css-
containment/)

------
sohkamyung
I tried the Firefox OS Android app on my Nexus 7 (2012). I don't know if
tablet form-factors are a target but if it is, the icon sizes need some
rework.

My Nexus 7 has a 7" screen and on it, the home screen icons are incredibly
huge: at least 2-3 times the diameter of the standard Android App icons and
look really out of place on my screen.

