

Open Web Device - bergie
http://www.openwebdevice.com/

======
daeken
Wow, what a thing to wake up to! At the heart of the Open Web Device is
Mozilla's Boot2Gecko project. I just joined up with Mozilla on B2G a couple
weeks ago and it's been an honor to work alongside so many amazing people,
with a great goal: building a truly open mobile ecosystem. If you guys have
any questions about B2G itself, feel free to ask and I'll do my best to
answer.

~~~
AndrewDucker
I had a couple of questions on how you'd implement things like Spotify or
Dropbox (i.e. apps that download a bunch of files, or upload existing ones).

And also about how apps would interact with each other (so that I can change
out one SMS app for another, but have everything else continue to work).

Oh, and will it support things like different keyboards? I love that on
Android I'm not using the home screen, keyboard, email, SMS, or calendar apps,
and it all just works fine.

~~~
MatthewPhillips
note: I don't work for Mozilla but follow B2G closely. All of this stuff is
possible. Everything in B2G is a web app, including the keyboard IME (and the
browser, and the window manager itself). You can definitely swap that out. The
only thing that's not swappable, to my knowledge, is the phone app.

~~~
daeken
It's super easy to swap out any piece (or replace the whole UI) if you're
willing to mess around on the device, but there's no way to do this from the
UI as it stands, like you can with Android. I'm excited to see the solution to
that problem.

------
benihana
Until I use this, I'm going to hold off on the excitement everyone seems to
have for it.

The tagline is "The Device the developer community is waiting for." That's
great for the developer community. Unfortunately, the developer community is a
small minority of people and honestly, people don't really care if their
device is easy to develop for. People care how good their device is. If a
device is easy to develop for, but it's slow, or clunky or crashes all the
time or doesn't have features that people expect out of a mobile device,
what's the point?

~~~
fragsworth
> That's great for the developer community. Unfortunately, the developer
> community is a small minority of people

I think you underestimate the amount of influence developers have on the rest
of the population. If you get developers to love you by making their jobs that
much easier, they will go out of their way to promote your product and get
other people to start using it. It's in their _profit-minded interests_ to see
to it that your product succeeds, because if it doesn't, then they have to
bear the costs of doing things the old way.

The quality of the product matters, too, and we'll have to see if this will be
a high-quality product. But there's something to be said about getting
developers on your side.

~~~
amirmc
I understand your point but I don't think it's as influential as you make out.

First, you're assuming that developers have (sufficient) influence over
swathes of non-developers. I'm not sure that's true, especially in the case of
_hardware_.

Second, it's in developers' "profit-minded interest" to get their stuff on
every relevant platform. It's where the customers are that matters.

Finally, no matter how good the product is, I doubt any technically capable
folks (not just devs) want to end up as the de-facto 'tech-support guy' for
all the people they convinced to sign-up.

------
bergie
I'm amazed how quickly they seem to be moving this. It wasn't that long ago
that I first heard about Boot2Gecko (the wiki page is from last July), and now
they already have some hardware partners and operators lined up. Quite a
difference to the momentum behind MeeGo and Tizen...

I guess a big difference is that the driver here is Mozilla, a foundation that
most players in the field don't see as a direct competitor, and which already
has a very good name in the web space.

------
mikehuffman
This is actually a big deal. It is a step in the right direction to take care
of the missing pieces of mobile app development. I really believe that in 5
years time, "application development" will be just assumed to be web app
development and not desktop application development.

~~~
miloco
I disagree. The thought of maintaining an app with a large code base written
in JavaScript doesn't seem like a "step forward" to me. I'd much rather stick
with my Android apps object oriented code base and associated tools.

~~~
unoti
I've been rewriting my latest released Android game in Html5 and Coffeescript
for PhoneGap, which lets me deploy on iOS and Android, plus Blackberry and
other platforms, but I'm focusing on iOS and Android for now. I'm doing that
because I need to make an iOS version, and would rather spend my dev time
adding more features or developing more products rather than redeveloping the
same product on multiple platforms. This approach also opens me up to the
possibility of having a web version, perhaps a Facebook and/or Google+ module.
I'm astounded on how much smaller my code is in Coffeescript than Java. It's
about 1/2 the size of its Java counterpart.

Many people will of course not move on to HTML5 app development. Every time
technology changes, lots of people don't migrate. But it really is an amazing
way to go. Coffeescript solves a lot of problems and makes the code very
small. Jasmine unit testing helps with the scary feeling of not having type
safety. PhoneGap lets you deploy it as a native app. Chrome has a surprisingly
awesome stepping debugger built right in. Vim + the cofeescript plugin
automatically compile the Coffeescript every time you save. The difficulties
of debugging in Coffeescript are mostly overstated in my experience, and
countered by the feeling that I'm developing code faster than I ever have
before in any other language.

It's not all cake and ponies, and I've had to figure out a number of things.
But it's a really fantastic way to develop apps. Try it.

------
goatslacker
I for one am very excited to see B2G finally ship. I'm anxious to see how well
this OS performs and how well thought out is user experience is. I trust
Mozilla, they build quality products. The competition is fierce though and the
carriers ultimately have too much power here in the US. I really hope B2G is
committed to competing in the mobile arena.

------
eaurouge
"Qualcomm currently delivers the chipset for a large volume of Android based
smartphones, which is the DNA of the device. By tightly integrating the Open
Web Device with the chipset we will guarantee that any OEM will be able to
manufacture a device with very little effort: it will be almost a plug & play
procedure."

I think this is a bad idea. Why would you want to lock down the hardware at
such an early stage?

------
icebraining
Maybe it's prejudice, but I feel uneasy with their connection with Telefonica,
after seeing so many Spanish users (including some family members) complain
about them

~~~
freehunter
Same can be said about AT&T, Verizon, O2, DTAG/T-Mobile, Rogers, etc. There's
no universally good telecom, and someone is always going to be complaining
about them.

------
xlevus
How does this differ to WebOS? Isn't it pretty much the same concept?

~~~
eterps
WebOS also has its own framework. As far as I understand this is about
standard web applications (i.e. framework agnostic). F.e. you could build your
app in jquery-mobile and make your app communicate with the device through a
JavaScript API.

------
Thomaschaaf
This seems a lot like a webOS with Gecko instead of webkit. This seems
interessting as I hope the projects open webOS are building are going to be on
which both plattforms can build on.

------
josegonzalez
Doesn't support + signs in email addresses. Awesome. Does not inspire
confidence in a platform that is based on internet standards, where email is
an important part of communication.

~~~
fabrice_d
Feel free to file a github issue at <https://github.com/andreasgal/gaia> And
since we work in the open, we also gladly accept pull requests ;)

------
malandrew
I hope that some sort of support for inter-app linking is supported.

One of the biggest problems with native apps on iOS and Android is support for
moving from one app to another, but still allowing the user to easily return
to the originating app.

At the moment, the only native support for this kind of feature that I can
think of is maps support. For example, if you click on a Google Maps
directions link on OS X, the Google Maps application is opened automatically
instead of maps.google.com in the web browser.

Dunno if this would require a dedicated link button that remembers the app you
came from to take you back there or not. Perhaps there is a more elegant
solution. It's possible that Hypermedia JSON APIs could play a role in helping
people move between apps.

Whatever solution is adopted, making it easy for the user to return to the
originating app with ease is of utmost important, because this will create an
environment where app developers will fill comfortable partnering with other
app developers by including inter-app links.

~~~
drivebyacct2
Not really a problem for Android, it's what Intents are for and it powers all
inter-app interaction. It's actually extremely slick.

Which is why Web Intents were modeled after it. They're surely coming to
Gecko, if they're not already in place.

~~~
kiloaper
T think this is the Mozilla demo for intents:
[https://mozillalabs.com/blog/2011/07/web-apps-update-
experim...](https://mozillalabs.com/blog/2011/07/web-apps-update-experiments-
in-web-activities-app-discovery/)

~~~
drivebyacct2
Yup, that page links to <http://paul.kinlan.me/web-intents-a-fresh-look>

------
bradt
I've always seen mobile web apps winning over native mobile apps in the long
term. Jacob Nielsen described as much last week as well but was careful not to
put a timeline on it.[1] Hopefully this project helps make it happen sooner
than later.

[1] <http://www.useit.com/alertbox/mobile-sites-apps.html>

------
tucson
Can someone explain what this is all about and why this is interesting, for
non-savvy?

~~~
bzbarsky
This is about creating an open standard for APIs a phone OS would need to
implement so that pretty much any app people have on phones right now can be
implemented with web technologies (HTML, CSS, JavaScript). Essentially, any
web page can be an app; apps that need access to some sort of hardware
capabilities that web pages don't normally have access to would need to have a
permissions system of some sort, of course.

It's also about then shipping actual phones with an OS implementing these APIs
installed, creating an "app store" to aid in app discovery and whatnot and
whatever other pieces of infrastructure are needed to actually get this open
standard used.

One long-term goal, of course, is being able to switch phones (or carriers, or
phone OSes; whatever choice the consumer wants to make) without losing all
your apps; hence the need for an open standard.

------
Corrado
Isn't this exactly the same as Google Chromium[1]? Boot a minimal OS and load
a web browser to do all the heavy lifting. Don't get me wrong, I think doing
it in the open is much better than behind closed doors, I just want to make
sure that I'm not missing something.

1: <http://www.chromium.org/chromium-os>

------
AndrewDucker
It looks like all "apps" are web pages. I'm looking forward to seeing how well
they can make it run things like Angry Birds.

And how well they deal with background tasks. On Android I can upload my
photos in the background, or play music through Spotify (or my MP3 app) while
I'm doing other things. Will I be able to do similar things here?

~~~
toyg
And how well they deal with security. I look forward to the day when a
malware-distributing webpage can pwn millions of phones without being
detected...

EDIT: uh, downvotes?

~~~
flpmor
MY first reaction was about security as well. This change of paradigm is a
recipe for disaster if security is not considered from the beginning because
most of the assumptions change. If it's not done carefully (things like
segregation between apps, access control to privileged JavaScript, etc)... it
is going to pretty painful.

~~~
icebraining
Firefox already has all that. A good part of the browser is written in JS
which runs with high privileges (full filesystem access, full network access,
etc) while the code on websites doesn't. It already has systems for
unprivileged JS to request access to certain privileged APIs (location,
localStorage, etc). "Apps" - websites - are already segregated and run in
their own sandbox.

~~~
flpmor
I know, and we have constantly lived along the edge of the cliff because of
that. From a perspective of security it was a very poor design decision. By
making those decisions you create a big security burden, the attack surface is
very large, the impact of bugs is very large. These are the types of security
consideration that have to happen at design time. In this case I would like to
know more about, maybe it's being considered but not being discussed.

~~~
zobzu
So you're saying sandboxing webapps are a bad design decision. What is your
proposal then?

------
notatoad
How is this going to handle updates? Obviously the UI/html5 portion will be
trivial to update, but Firefox gets updated every six weeks. Is the system
core going to lag behind the rest of the Firefox ecosystem, or ami I going to
have to rely on my carrier or manufacturer to push out system updates every
six weeks?

~~~
azakai
I'm curious about this too. The FAQ mentions they will update the core browser
like Firefox normally does, but I wonder if that means they also need to
update the web browser frontend (written in HTML/JS) at those times as well.

~~~
drivebyacct2
The entire "OS" that is visible to the user is effectively a XUL style iframe.
You get an updated gonk/gecko core, and you're "updated".

~~~
azakai
Is gaia updated at those times?

------
samarudge
Not sure why, but it amuses me that the "For more info, read our FAQ." link
points to an element with the ID myModal

------
akoumjian
Last time I checked, Gecko and all the other browsers still had a long way to
go before being fully HTML5 compliant. Chunks of the File API, postMessage,
and a variety of other specs are incomplete and underdocumented.

Sites like caniuse.com vastly overestimate what has been sufficiently
implemented.

~~~
drivebyacct2
More details would be great. I've had no problem using the APIs you've listed,
nor have I found discrepancies in caniuse.com.

------
dannyr
Now that Chrome has made its way to Android, my guess is that Chrome Apps on
Android are not far behind.

I hope an app built for Chrome will work for OpenWebDevice & vice-versa.

~~~
azakai
Chrome Apps can use non-standard technologies (WebSQL, for example; and soon
Dart), so they won't work in other browsers. In fact, some of those
nonstandard technologies won't even work on Chrome when running on another
type of device (NaCl apps will not run on ARM).

~~~
mbrubeck
Though, to be clear, it should be easy to write a single app that works as
both a Chrome app and a B2G/Firefox app, as long as you use APIs that work
across both environments. (Chrome apps _can_ access non-web-accessible APIs,
but they don't have to.)

------
mrsebastian
Me gusta!

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
Spanish facebook Like button, heh

------
drivebyacct2
Wow. Judging by the number of nay-say commenters, it's obvious they should
have included a hands on video. Sadly each one I've found seems to be a fairly
different build. The one The Verge has is decent.

[http://www.theverge.com/2012/2/27/2827682/mozillas-boot-
to-g...](http://www.theverge.com/2012/2/27/2827682/mozillas-boot-to-gecko-
hands-on-demo)

------
rb2k_
While I think the idea is interesting, I will say what I always say in these
situations:

Talk is cheap.

I wish people would announce projects when there is actually something to look
at rather than just having a vague list of goals. It's like the "I have a
great idea for an app and just need somebody to do the software development".
I always like to think of products consisting of 15% Idea and 85%
implementation.

~~~
cryptoz
Well, they've written a bunch of the code and they have hardware partners.
What more are you looking for, aside from holding one in your hand?

Check out more of the project's details:
<https://wiki.mozilla.org/B2G#Contributing>

~~~
bergie
Yep, you can build the code on your own computer right now:
<https://wiki.mozilla.org/Gaia/Hacking>

Of course the bigger question is how soon some actual hardware will ship.

------
jasonabelli
Facebook aims to whip the mobile Web into shape

Read more: [http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-13970_7-57385707-78/facebook-
ai...](http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-13970_7-57385707-78/facebook-aims-to-whip-
the-mobile-web-into-shape/#ixzz1nakq5ig4)

