

Mozilla is building an operating system - vilya
https://wiki.mozilla.org/B2G

======
joakin
Impressive how the most voted comments are rants about the browser.

If that's insightful or useful comments hit me...

I really don't understand this hate towards Mozilla that has been going around
lately.

Edit: Why am I being downvoted? It's a sincere opinion of a person who doesn't
see a relation in critizising a project of an organisation in an article that
talks about other projects.

If you dont like Firefox its fine, but it's a wonderful project with millions
of users and that cannot be denied.

Sending my opinion to oblivion because of pointing how unrelated the firefox
rant comments are to the article makes no sense.

~~~
mindcrime
I think it's more like "tough love" than hate. If I bitch about Firefox, it's
because I _want_ to love Firefox, but I can't. That pisses me off. If I didn't
care about it, like the way I don't care about Safari or Konqueror, or Opera,
I wouldn't talk about it, like I never talk about Safari or Konqueror, or
Opera.

~~~
DEinspanjer
I checked your comments and you certainly aren't a regular Mozilla flamer, so
I'll take what you say here at face value.

The thing that frustrates me is how many other people come out of the woodwork
on any Mozilla or Firefox related post to give the story, "I used to love
Firefox but it uses too much memory so I switched to Chrome and now I'm so
happy". My opinion is Google has some amazing marketing and social skills to
power that kind of sentiment shift. The big thing that rarely comes up in
those threads is that Mozilla is a community. There are memory bugs that have
been open in bugzilla for years, but there have been various people in the
community working on them, sometimes in their spare time, for years as well.
You look at the scope of the project, and it isn't small. It certainly isn't a
hack project someone can commit a quick patch to in a day.. There are
certainly paid Mozilla employees working on the code base every day, but the
number doesn't compare with any of the other major browser vendors. The
FirefoxFlippers™ rarely ever follow up with something like, "I tried to look
at the problem and realized what a difficult thing memory management is so I
took the easy path and decided to let some profit based vendor do it for me
and hope that they treat me well."

My personal and probably bias experience is that I have _never_ felt a memory
issue. I tend to run a lot of add-ons and I only rarely keep a lot of tabs
open because I prefer to follow a pattern of opening up a bunch of things then
working my way back down to zero. I feel that most memory issues are related
to bad add-ons, bad plug-ins, or bad websites, and I am very happy with the
new about:memory stats that show up in Aurora. I just hope that some of the
FirefoxFlippers™ who aren't just trolling for Google might take a moment to
try out their easily repeatable excessive memory use-cases and drop us a line
so we can work together with the community to get rid of them.

I'll now take my downmodding for ranting on a post with a comment that is only
tangentially related to the topic. :/

~~~
eropple
You seem to be under the impression that the difficulty of putting out a
working product is something the consumer cares about. They don't.

Results are what matters, and for all too long Mozilla's results have been
poor compared to Google's.

~~~
DEinspanjer
There are a lot of things that "the consumer" doesn't care about. Some of
those are things that Mozilla feels are very important and we spend time
trying to show people why.

Mozilla doesn't make a browser to maximize their profits by taking as much
from "the consumer" as they can get away with. If we try to compete with the
other vendors on those terms, I agree we will fail.

I hope that there continue to be enough people whose goals align with Mozilla,
and that together we can work on improving not only Firefox but the web. As we
do that, then we will be able to help more of those uncaring consumers.

~~~
eropple
This sits among the more passive-aggressive posts I've seen in a while.

 _Mozilla makes a browser._ It is evaluated in comparison with _other
browsers_. It does not matter who makes those other browsers or why--and it's
not like the primary contenders are "maximizing their profits" off of it
anyway! The WebKit guys aren't "maximizing their profits" by writing WebKit.
Google isn't "maximizing their profits" by using WebKit in Chrome. There may
be some knock-on benefits for Google, but it's certainly not directly making
them cartloads of money. But what they have done is written a very, very fine
browser.

I was a Mozilla user well before Firefox--heck, when Mozilla Suite was EOLed I
was a SeaMonkey user for a while. And then I left. Why? _Because Mozilla's
browser stopped being worth my time._ The competition blew past XULRunner
(lol) and Gecko (ouch) and Mozilla simply has not caught up. Maybe the memory
issues have been fixed in recent years; I wouldn't know because the reason I
won't go back _now_ is performance and compatibility. Lofty goals that we poor
benighted consumers don't "get" are nice to have, but bringing them up because
your browser can't hack what WebKit can doesn't excuse it from not being able
to do so.

It is notable and both sad and funny that the only time you get the "people
don't understand what we're doing!" spiel is when you don't have people
singing hosannahs to your greatness. If you want them, _compete successfully_.
Don't come around whining that people switched away because the things that
matter to them were inadequately addressed by your development team. Because
that's solely and singularly on you guys. I want you guys to do well. I truly,
honestly do. Right now? You don't compete, so I avoid Firefox. Sorry.

~~~
ootachi
You admit to not having used Firefox in recent years, so how do you know that
Firefox "doesn't compete"?

~~~
eropple
Because I have to target it. It's installed; it is not my first or second
browser of choice except to make sure CSS3 and JS don't hork.

------
hollerith
I wish they'd concentrate on making a browser that does not need to be
restarted after every hour or 2 of browsing lest it become more and more
unresponsive.

I wish they'd concentrate on making a browser that can start scrolling before
all the Javascript on the page has finished running.

(I'm using FF 7 on Snow Leopard with 1 gig of RAM. Would I have to restart FF
less often if I had more RAM?)

~~~
owenmarshall
Firefox has made memory overhead a _serious_ priority in the Fx7 & Fx8
development cycles, with some impressive results:

<https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=666058#c31>

~~~
hollerith
FF 7.0a2 (got Jul 24 from the Aurora channel) is less responsive than FF 3.6
was on my machine -- although I cannot be sure that the unresponsiveness is
due to memory pressure rather than, e.g., insufficient parallelism of the UI
relative to the part that executes Javascript.

~~~
experimental
Possibly disable hardware acceleration.

Disable: Google Updater Google Toolbar FlashBlock if you have NoScript

~~~
hollerith
Disabling hardware acceleration (it's in the General tab of the Advanced pref
pane) seems to have solved the horrible problems I was having with Firefox 7.
Thanks!

------
runjake
My first question is why? Do they have a real vision other than "me too"?

Does anyone else remember when Phoenix was first released to fight bloated
browsers? Now it is that bloated browser and running an OS developed around
its technologies isn't too appealing to me.

Find your roots before you start off on some other project if you hope to have
any significant success.

~~~
dman
What is your definition of bloat - size of download, application startup
times, number of features, speed while being used, memory usage?

Firefox 5 without addons does not seem to be bloated to me by any of the above
definitions. In terms of featuresets just for reference - Netscape
communicator used to ship with a mail client, browser, news client, html
editor and a calendar.

~~~
runjake
not so much the size of the download, but all of the rest, yes.

I feel that Firefox is nearly at the point Netscape was at the point Phoenix
(the original name of Firefox) came into being.

5.0 does seem a little faster.

For what it's worth, I still run Firefox (5.0) on a regular basis, including
as I post this comment.

~~~
sabret00the
How can "Firefox be nearly at the phone of Netscape" when it doesn't ship with
a mail client, irc client or any of the other related stuff that no one
needed? People hear words like bloat and jump on the bandwagon. That's
disappointing for a site such at this. I personally see more memory usage for
the same workload (number of tabs) on Chrome over Firefox. However Chrome's
memory is distributed across more processes so it's easier to hide in plain
sight.

That said, I'm starting to come round to the train of thought about a user
being able to control what they install. Not all users require the developer
tools, in the same way that not all users require the ability to read news
feeds and in the very same way that some users want enhanced share options in
their browsers.

------
Zumzoa
Already being discussed here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2805708>

------
andhow
Boot To Gecko is not a project to build an operation system.

IIUC, Mozilla is planning to reuse Linux and core components of Android. If
anything, I would think Boot To Gecko would be better thought of as a shell
around the OS. Using process separation (underway for a while now in the
Electrolysis project) bugs/leaks/crashes in Gecko should be isolated and not
significantly more disruptive than in normal Firefox.

I think the major value provided by (and work required for) Boot To Gecko will
be on creating open standards (in the open) for access to the device so that
web platform can be a first class citizen of the device.

------
ck2
I realize they can do more than one thing at once but how about getting
threaded tabs into a current build of Firefox first. Coders talented enough to
make an O/S certainly should be able to make threaded tabs happen.

~~~
starwed
They just hit a pretty important milestone for that.

[http://felipe.wordpress.com/2011/07/20/initial-
electrolysis-...](http://felipe.wordpress.com/2011/07/20/initial-electrolysis-
patches-for-desktop-firefox-now-in-mozilla-central/)

------
dstein
How well is it going to be received compared with the level of effort
required? ChromeOS is pretty bad and Google has been working on it for a long
time.

------
cosgroveb
It seems strange to me that they announce this without even mentioning
ChromeOS as if B2G was conceived in a cave.

~~~
bzbarsky
The point here is not to build an OS. The point is to improve web APIs so that
web apps can compete with native ones, and do it in an open fashion so that
all web browsers can implement the new APIs. ChromeOS has done some of this,
but neither far enough nor openly enough (what ChromeOS extensions are working
on becoming cross-browser standards?).

~~~
sabret00the
In that case, wouldn't it be more effective to throw Mozilla's weight behind
an open source mobile Operating System that actually has a chance of going
mainstream ala MeeGo?

~~~
bzbarsky
It depends on the goal. If the goal is to have an open source mobile operating
system, then maybe. If the goal is to have it not matter which exact mobile
operating system you use, so new mobile operating systems have an easier time
entering the market.... then no.

In case it's not clear, Mozilla is not building a kernel or anything here.
They're just building capabilities for web apps to be able to do whatever
mobile apps can do now.

------
vilya
I wonder if they're planning to write it in Rust? It would be interesting to
see how an OS written in a more modern language than C would turn out -
especially since other attempts like Microsoft's Singularity seem to have gone
quiet.

------
yid
Wouldn't it make more sense to replace gnome/kde with gecko? Isn't that
essentially what the win8 demo was all about? So many questions, so little
cloud...

~~~
MatthewPhillips
The wiki page doesn't do a good job explaining it, but what they're aiming at
is mobile devices. Essentially they want a phone that replaces every native
functionality with html/javascript. So a web application would be your phone
dialer, a web application could access your NFC chip. All of the capabilities
they're going for is stuff that's in the pipeline in W3C, they want to create
an OS to accelerate the process (and create new standards as well).

~~~
stcredzero
_Essentially they want a phone that replaces every native functionality with
html/javascript._

I would love to hear more about the security model.

~~~
bzbarsky
The security model is one of the hard parts that needs working out, yes. This
is just an announcement that there is a plan to work one out in case people
want to participate instead of just having stuff dumped on them from on high
when it's done the way Google and Apple do it.

------
nextparadigms
I'd like to see what Mozilla comes up with. Bring it on Mozilla!

------
suyash
Telephony Apps and api natively in the browser- yay!!!

------
MatthewPhillips
Does Mozilla have any mobile patents?

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matmann2001
I can't wait until Safari starts building its own operating system...

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bluelu
Will it also run Internet Explorer?

------
jerhewet
tl;dr -- Mozilla thinks it's a good idea to write an operating system in
Javascript.

