

Mozilla’s Firefox OS Gets First Update, Heads for Second Phase of Launches - keviv
http://techcrunch.com/2013/10/09/ffos-2/

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andreastt
I think the most important thing Firefox OS can do, even if it's not a
financial success, is to bring Mozilla – and in extension everyone who cares
about openness – to the discussion table. This can, if played right, become a
very effective tactic at standardizing things on the phone/device platform.

It's a fact that the web is playing a more important part on phones, and no-
one has quite yet been able to figure out how to integrate it well in a native
environment. Rethinking the phone environment with the browser sandbox as a
toolkit is a very interesting, but also bold approach.

So whether Firefox OS takes off or not is really of secondary interest to me.
I'm just happy that people who care about curating and caring for the web are
making their voices heard.

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reidrac
I'd love to get FFOS updates in my ZTE Open because 1.0.1 feels more like a
dev preview than an end user product, to the point that it is almost useless
as a smartphone.

I can see the potential, but I'm not buying a new device just for that.

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BrianEatWorld
I have been using it as my main phone every other week since release. TBH, I
haven't run into bugs so much as curious features (or lack of features). Are
there particular bugs you keep hitting? If anything, it seems a bit more
stable than my Cyanogen-running Nexus.

The worst "feature" offender I have found is that when talking on the phone,
if a call comes in, the screen activates. If the phone is close touching my
ear, it has a habit of picking up the incoming call without any notification.

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conception
The Keyboard is pretty terrible. Several of my apps just don't launch, (Here,
Notes off the top of my head), apps crash pretty regularly (reddit pretty
often). Reception isn't the best and it drops calls pretty regularly on me.

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zobzu
its a lot better in 1.3 nightly, if you feel adventurous. no swype but it
feels about as good as on my iphone.

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programminggeek
I have no idea if Firefox OS is going to take off or not, but I am looking
forward for it to do well. I am not saying that as someone who thinks HTML5 is
the best way to build apps, because it really isn't. I just like seeing
Android having a great competitor that is open source and not driven by a huge
company like Samsung. Also, this will keep Mozilla alive and relevant for at
least another decade. That's a good thing and a very big deal IMO.

Also, I love the look of the devices so far.

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rhelmer
Are you asserting that HTML/CSS/JS is not at all viable/desirable for making
apps, or just not your personal preference? I'd like to know what you feel is
best if the latter (and what you feel stops the former - having a standardized
high-level platform has advantages!)

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programminggeek
I've built HTML/CSS/JS mobile apps with phonegap and while it's fun as a
developer, the user experience is just not as good as building a proper native
app.

If you care about user experience, build using what is native to the platform.

This is why most web devs don't build web apps using Flash or Java applets
anymore. Those aren't native to the platform and don't provide the best
possible user experience.

HTML/JS as "native" apps to a platform can absolutely work and be awesome, but
it really comes down to what "native" on a given platform means. On Android
it's Java, on iOS it's Obj-C, on Windows it's C#, on a web browser or Firefox
OS it's HTML/JS.

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rhelmer
Thanks, I appreciate the details. There definitely is a "happy path" for each
platform, where tools/docs/developer support and getting into the marketplaces
and so forth is much simpler and well-understood - things can get dicey when
you stray from that.

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amenod
I was really looking forward to checking FFOS out. But this article puts so
much emphasis on carriers that I am a bit alarmed - I hope Mozilla manages to
keep the FFOS open.

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yeukhon
You can't have a smartphone without the support from carrier. Mozilla has to
deal with carriers issue and this is why they really can't make FFOS available
in North America yet (beside the fact that FFOS is still in early stage...)

You have to compromise with carriers and manufacturers without compromising
user's privacy (FFOS tries its best to protect user's privacy, but certainly
you can't do everything right?) Sometimes you have to choose certain hardware
and certain price.

Mozilla is a giant but it doesn't ahve the resource Google does. So when it
comes to negation, it depends on how much users Mozilla FFOs has.

The source code itself is open. Well the master copy. In the future there will
be forks and I think Mozilla will keep its best effort to make sure phones
running forks meet the standard (they are making such process, validation
process to ensure Mozilla's standard is met before the build is released).

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MildlySerious
The biggest deal about FFOS so far is that I don't own a phone with this yet.

This propably doesn't matter for most end users, but I think the big delay
between countries where it gets available is pretty bad in terms of marketing.

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rhelmer
Think of FirefoxOS as a MVP - it created partnerships and an actual device,
and proved there was a market in several countries underserved by current
smartphones.

The article is about the very first iteration on top of this. I disagree that
this is bad in terms of marketing - it would be the equivalent of trying to
sell a MVP to a huge enterprise company before getting any
users/traction/market validation - except in this case it'd be putting a phone
in the hands of consumers who are used to more advanced features and a more
mature ecosystem.

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RRRA
It really needs a VoIP, SSH and jabber client!

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telephonetemp
Is it possible to make an SSH client in HTML5?

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ndesaulniers
Yes! There's a basic implementation for Raw Sockets that I used to port node-
irc to FxOS: [https://github.com/nickdesaulniers/fxos-
irc](https://github.com/nickdesaulniers/fxos-irc)

