

Hands-on with Mozilla’s Web-based “Firefox OS” - w0ts0n
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/03/firefox-os-hands-on-mozillas-plan-to-build-on-top-of-the-web/2/

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goldfeld
"Still, Firefox OS could have a big impact on the Web even if it never gains
significant market share. By pushing the Web forward, Mozilla is helping to
ensure that mobile websites will continue to be relevant even as developers
create hundreds of thousands of proprietary apps. Firefox could lose the
battle for the smartphone OS market but still win the war for open standards."

I think this is the big point. Mozilla doesn't have _to win_. We're all
winning from it's push. It's like when you compare a startup to an open source
project. If the startup fails, it's a complete failure. If an open source
project doesn't succeed in becoming popular, we still have it's legacy bare
open on which to build on. The majority of startups failing don't contribute
anything to humanity. The majority of open code does, in their small,
incremental ways.

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daleharvey
> You can import contacts from Facebook or your SIM card, but not from Gmail

Thankfully gmail contact import landed recently

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MatthewPhillips
It's unfortunate that they are handing these out to the press at a time when
developers still cannot get a device.

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fabrice_d
We only have a limited number of devices, and won't sell any ourselves. For
sure we would be happier if geeksphones were available for all to use...

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MatthewPhillips
I know fabrice, this isn't your fault, but I consider it a PR mistake to give
these to the press when developers cannot pay for them. Sends the message that
press is more important than developers (which may be true, but not the
message you want).

If this had been a blog post from Twitter about how they integrated Web
Activities into their mobile web app, that would have been really awesome.

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bsimpson
Having Firefox OS hardware isn't that important at this stage - it's just an
Android fork that runs on a handful of commercially-available Android devices.
It would be great if Mozilla had a buildbot like Cyanogen's that posted images
on a publicly-accessible FTP server for the 8 or so devices they support.

I'd be willing to try Firefox OS on my Galaxy Nexus, and probably even write
apps for it. But, I don't really want to download GBs of toolchain and Gonk
source to compile my own image to be able to do these things.

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fabrice_d
We can't distribute builds for most of these devices for legal reasons.

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anoncow
If you can, can you point out the legal reasons?

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fabrice_d
We can't redistribute binary blobs (gpu drivers for instance) that you need
when building the images to flash phones. They are exceptions though, like the
nexus S.

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anoncow
So can we expect images for nexus 4?

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thehigherlife
it seems like their biggest problem is that when they run into problems with
the way that something functions their fix is "we're working with company X to
change code so that it works better with our OS"

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mtct
Well, it can't be helped, Mozilla is not a big corporation, they don't have
enough resource to reinvent every popular web service.

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thehigherlife
Yes, but if you're going to make a twitter app that just points to twitter's
web app and then it doesn't behave in a sane way, you can't expect twitter to
write code fixing those issues.

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rhelmer
Perhaps it is not clear from the article, but the twitter app is a third-party
application in the marketplace written by Twitter not Mozilla:
<http://blog.twitter.com/2013/02/twitter-for-firefox-os.html>

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kijin
> _You can log into a Google, Yahoo, or CalDav account to sync with an online
> calendar. I had no trouble logging into my Google account for this purpose,
> and I could create and edit events as well as viewing them._

I wonder if Mozilla plans to launch their own contacts & calendar sync service
based on their Firefox Sync infrastructure. Letting Google know everything
might be too much for the privacy-sensitive Mozilla folks. On the other hand,
I would be very wary of any sync service that is modeled on Firefox Sync. It
syncs when it wants to. It takes hours, if not days, for my PC bookmarks and
history to show up on my phone (Firefox for Android).

> _things got awkward if we wanted to read a website linked from a tweet.
> Clicking on a link causes Twitter to load the tweet in a separate browser
> window. After reading an article, there was no obvious way to navigate back
> to Twitter. The browser's back button was grayed out because as far as the
> browser was concerned we had merely opened the page in a new window._

I don't see any reason why, in 2013, a web page should open in a new window.
The desktop version of Firefox opens "new windows" in new tabs instead, and
has done so for as long as I can remember. Every modern browser except IE does
this by default. Even the mobile version of Firefox supports tabs, albeit in a
slightly unusual manner. If everything is going to be a web page anyway, why
not open things in new tabs by default? Everyone already knows how tabs works.
Pressing Back would return to the tab that opened it.

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fabrice_d
If you use the twitter site from Firefox OS browser, links will just open in a
new tab as you expect. What they where using is the twitter app. In this
situation, external links are openened as _target=blank and we redirect these
page loads to the browser app.

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kijin
I understand that you can't control all the third-party apps. Still, I am a
little disappointed that there remains such a strong distinction between the
"browser app" and other apps when the entire OS is essentially a very powerful
browser.

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fabrice_d
Hm.. I see what you mean. The nice thing is that anyone can experiment and
build a different system app that would be more like a browser with apps in
tabs if you want. Getting all the UX right and please everybody is hard ;)

