
Firefox: The Next Mobile Platform - ekjeacheblog
https://ekjeacheblog.com/firefox-the-next-mobile-platform/
======
gedrap
I use Firefox OS as main phone (ZTE Open C) since October, came with version
1.3.

The biggest disappointment is lack of applications. So you can't get
notifications for Facebook messages, etc. But that's ok, given that the phone
is in a very early stage and Facebook haven't built a proper app for it yet.

There are some bugs which might be slightly annoying at first, but it's ok
once you get used to it. The most frustrating one is the text prediction when
using the keyboard, because it doesn't learn automatically and I am messaging
in 2 languages... But I guess that can be counted as an edge case. The
navigation (GPS) works surprisingly well though! Overall, it's worth giving a
try especially given it's price.

I am quite excited about it's future. The code is easy to read and should be
relatively easy to add new features / modifications yourself. So even if it
won't become popular in mainstream (and it's really hard to win user share in
the current market), it can be an interesting platform for hacking.

I wrote a bit more about it at [http://blog.gedrap.me/blog/2014/10/19/a-month-
of-using-firef...](http://blog.gedrap.me/blog/2014/10/19/a-month-of-using-
firefox-os-as-the-main-phone/)

~~~
lucb1e
> it doesn't learn automatically and I am messaging in 2 languages

I have the same on Cyanogenmod with the AOSP keyboard (Android's default). It
doesn't do next word prediction nor does it seem to learn when I pick a
suggestion (it doesn't prioritize it next time), and I'm constantly switching
between Dutch and English.

There are plenty of keyboard apps that do this better (even the stock Samsung
one was great at this) but the keyboard is a core component that I want to be
able to trust. I'm putting up with the annoyances and going for open source
here. Not saying that this is the way to go for everyone, but it's not just
Firefox OS which has this.

> The navigation (GPS) works surprisingly well though!

Navigation is not synonymous with GPS. Which works well, determining your
location or routing to places? If the latter, I'm curious: which map source
does it use, Google Maps?

~~~
gedrap
> nor does it seem to learn when I pick a suggestion

The most frustrating part about FirefoxOS is that if I choose not to
autocorrect the word, it doesn't remember that and tries to do the same the
next time I am typing it. Yes, I could add all the words manually... But that
would take a long long time.

> Navigation is not synonymous with GPS.

Valid point :) both, it's fast to determine the current location when data is
enabled, and routing is good too. It's using Here Maps
[https://www.here.com/](https://www.here.com/) I live in Vilnius (Lithuania)
so there are not many (almost none) tall buildings, that probably helps.

------
random_passerby
"Unlike major mobile operating systems, which were designed based on Linux
codes, Mozilla created their Firefox Os (project name: Boot to Gecko) on an
HTML platform, more precisely HTML 5."

afaik Firefox OS is also built upon a Linux kernel, so it's a bit misleading
...

~~~
creshal
It is. And in my (limited) experience, version fragmentation is already a bad
problem… There's little to no apps, and half of those few need a newer OS
version than is available for my half-year old Fire E.

~~~
on_and_off
Yikes. How do they plan to get users ? For all the talk about Android's
fragmentation, it has been conceived so that the sdk is as back-compatible as
possible (and Play Services and the compatibility libraries only improve
that).

~~~
creshal
> How do they plan to get users ?

Cheap phones for users who don't particularly care, I assume.

> and Play Services and the compatibility libraries only improve that

I haven't yet looked at the developer side of FFOS, but guessing from the
store entries of all the apps I cannot install, it doesn't have an equivalent
to those.

------
troponin
I can't read this article without turning on Javascript.

>Oops! It appears that you have disabled your Javascript. In order for you to
see this page as it is meant to appear, we ask that you please re-enable your
Javascript!

~~~
normloman
It's text. Why do you need javascript to show text? Why do people do this?

~~~
mariusmg
Because they're stupid and progressive enhancement is a pipe dream.

------
mauricesvay
This article is so badly written.

------
mg1982
It's a real shame, but I don't think Mozilla is going to be able to make this
work - they just don't have the leverage with hardware that the big three -
MS, Apple, Google - have. While the technical avenue they're going down is
interesting and has merit, I don't think that'll resonate with people in the
market for a phone. They have a lot of work to do - starting from cold - just
to get something that kinda sorta works as well as what's already out there -
I just don't think they'll get enough people to switch. Worse if you look at
their flagship product - desktop is a metoo! that's haemorraging users and the
mobile version is a non-entity. I use and love both, it's a desperate shame -
I just cannot for the life of me see Mozilla making headway with this OS.

------
proveanegative
I am looking forward to commercially successful apps on Firefox OS.

Three months ago I asked HN if anyone had one but got not answers
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8798922](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8798922)).

~~~
lukifer
I think the smart move for Mozilla would be a unified build process that
exported FFos apps to iPhone and Android. If it were positioned as the best
"write-once" hybrid web framework, FFos would gain a much larger app ecosystem
as a by-product.

~~~
hotsy_botsy
This happened a while ago, but hasn't seemed to catch on:
[https://github.com/mozilla/apk-factory-
service](https://github.com/mozilla/apk-factory-service)

~~~
aries1980
The issue is you need to have a pre-installed Firefox on the device. Too bad,
such dependency can't be set in the manifests so it won't pull automatically
from App Store or Google Play.

------
hueving
I can't help but feel Firefox OS is going to be like Linux desktop. Too late
to market and without a giant bankroll require to pay their way in.

"this is the year of Firefox OS" will be the new "the is the year if the Linux
desktop"

~~~
joshuapants
I think there's a key difference: there is a niche of Linux desktop users.
They'll probably never be very big (not in the foreseeable future, at least),
but they're there and since they tend to be power users they're sort of self-
supporting.

In contrast, I don't see Firefox OS carving out a similar niche, though I'd
really like it to. It doesn't really do anything the others don't do (and it's
missing a lot of what they can do), the devices are uniformly pretty terrible,
and the strategy seems simply to be to compete for the low end. Unfortunately,
the low end is being targeted by pretty much everyone but Apple, so they've
got plenty of competition and no real value proposition.

------
jadavis
Does anyone really think Android phones won't be competitive at the FirefoxOS
price point? The Moto E is already under $100 unsubsidized, and that's a well-
known brand name. Generic imports are even cheaper, and prices will continue
to fall.

~~~
azakai
It's not impossible, but Android phones need to do more - they run not just a
web stack but also the Android Java stack - and they have not optimized for
the low end, as much so far.

~~~
Zigurd
While Android runs on a lot of high-end hardware, it was originally targeted
at devices that are under-powered compared to the cheapest smartphone chipsets
now available.

Android also uses implementation approaches like a component lifecycle, the
Zygote, and limited per-process heap size that reduce runtime memory use at
the Java runtime layer.

The people who designed the Android runtime had also designed the Danger
system, which used Java and ran in as little as 32MB of RAM.

While it is possible for an app developer to make an inefficient Android app,
it is very likely that core phone functionality, like dialers, messaging apps,
PIM apps, etc. are a lot more efficient implemented as Android apps than as
Web apps.

~~~
azakai
Well, first of all Android has changed a lot since those early days. The
competition has focused on higher-end devices to challenge the iPhone, not the
low-end.

Second, it might be true that a single app could be more efficient as a native
Android app than a web app. But regardless of whether it is (and I'm not sure
it is - we would need to measure), the issue I mentioned is that Android
phones have to support both native apps and their entire graphics stack etc.,
and the web platform and its entire graphics stack etc. Both because users can
run both Android apps and a web browser, and because Android apps can embed a
web view, so the combination happens even in a single app.

That fundamentally adds overhead. Of course, in theory massive amounts of work
could remove it (you could unify both stacks on a single graphics codebase,
and to some extent that is true on Android), but that might introduce
compromises as well, and no one wants to compromise the high end which
competes against Apple.

The bottom line is that Android doesn't ship super-low-end phones. That might
not only be due to technical issues like these, of course.

~~~
Zigurd
[http://www.android.com/one/india/](http://www.android.com/one/india/)

~~~
azakai
Those are still much more expensive than the lowest-end. I think they cost
around $100 last I heard, and a currency conversion on the amazon link there
gives $104, which seems to confirm they haven't gotten cheaper.

~~~
Zigurd
If you sort this site by price [http://www.snapdeal.com/products/mobiles-
mobile-phones/filte...](http://www.snapdeal.com/products/mobiles-mobile-
phones/filters/Form_s~Touch#phtl|) you find the cheapest smartphones are about
1500rs. That's about $25 (according to Google). Most of them run Android.
Though, once Windows Phone 10 comes out, I'd be interested to see if that's a
better UX at the ultra-cheap end of the spectrum. Nevertheless, Android is
currently the OS of choice at the low end, wherever you draw the line on
acceptable UX. And the latest and greatest Android is available for about
4800rs, or about $77, running on a quad-core SoC.

As for how that's done, it's because Android can aggressively "swap" (really
serialize and reconstitute)background components out of memory, and it can do
the same to whole processes. You can actually watch your Android app instance
switch PIDs, as it comes back from having had all the components, and the
underlying runtime instance, killed. Now, there are some fat slovenly apps out
there that might not be happy with life in a very limited machine, but I bet
those 1500rs phones push the minimum specs pretty damn hard.

------
jetm9
off-topic: flame phone are reasonably specced and priced. we just dont know
anything about when we could "just" order an unlocked flame or a similar
phone.

mid-range specced and priced phone would sell, i think, as second phone, phone
for relatives and like.

------
fijal
For the sake of my future self I hope the answer is __no __. However bad the
current platforms are (and I 'm certainly not a huge fan of apples policy
w.r.t. implementing own languages), you _can_ think about writing your own
application without writing in Javascript and using e.g. kivy. I don't mind
Javascript capturing mindshare, since it's choice to use it, I don't like the
situation where it's not a choice, it's ENFORCED upon me, like on the web.
With all the talk about open platforms and freedom, mozilla is sticking to
it's guns with "everyone should use javascript, all the time". For one I would
like to keep my freedom to use other things, thanks mozilla :-)

~~~
oska
List of languages that compile to JavaScript [1]

[1] [https://github.com/jashkenas/coffeescript/wiki/List-of-
langu...](https://github.com/jashkenas/coffeescript/wiki/List-of-languages-
that-compile-to-JS)

~~~
fijal
This is ridiculous. I want a _real_ language, like Python or Ruby, not
something that is ESSENTIALLY JavaScript with an altered syntax and few
goodies.

~~~
dragonwriter
> I want a real language, like Python or Ruby

First, by what criteria is JavaScript not "a _real_ language" whereas Ruby and
Python are " _real_ " languages?

Second, in any case, among the languages on that list that compile to
JavaScript are both Ruby and Python, which I think meets any reasonable
definition of a "a _real_ language, like Python or Ruby".

~~~
fijal
JavaScript is a real language. I should make it more explicit - I want a real
language that's sufficiently different than JS. Any of the list is not. If you
look closely, none of the languages is __actually __python or ruby (or
anything else that 's sufficiently different), just JS with altered syntax.
Getting all the semantic differences is REALLY hard and once you do it it's
slow (e.g. untranslated pypy slow, ~60x slowdown), so you can't use it. My
problem is not with JS per se it's with the absolute lack of choice.

~~~
mercer
What about ClojureScript? From what I gather it's quite fast and it couldn't
be more different from javascript.

Or even C via asm.js?

