

The State of Mozilla: 2011 Annual Report - pragmatictester
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2011/

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programminggeek
"With Firefox OS, we can break open the world of native operating systems and
closed platforms once again."

I'm not so sure they are solving the same problem they were solving before.
"The web" doesn't have to be a browser anymore. It can be any app. For
example, the Facebook app is a native app that makes a bunch of http api calls
to provide the FB experience. Previously it was basically a web app with a
native wrapper. In both cases you don't need Firefox to use Facebook.

I think native apps calling http services is a step fowrard in a lot of ways
because if Firefox screws up or doesn't implement a feature the right way or
whatever, your app isn't beholden to Firefox to fix their stuff in a future
release.

Also, when there was basically just IE on Windows Firefox was definitely a
reason for Firefox to exist. We have good browsers that seem to put a lot of
effort into supporting mobile and HTML5. They're not perfect, but it's not
even the same as IE6 back in the Win XP era.

Choice is good, but I don't think FirefoxOS is fixing anything.

~~~
eldondev
>"The web" doesn't have to be a browser anymore. It can be any app.

I think HTTP and "the web" are pretty distinct. The reason that "any app" is
mostly not "the web" is that it doesn't really let you go to just _any_ web
page. The web is what it is because I can follow a link to anywhere. If the
app does support this, then it is a branded browser on top of being a native
app, and it competes with firefox.

>if Firefox screws up or doesn't implement a feature the right way or
whatever, your app isn't beholden to Firefox to fix their stuff in a future
release.

But if the native ecosystem (IOS, android) screws something up, you are
beholden to them, and this happens plenty. I think firefox os is going to try
to solve this problems with OS fragmentation more than anything. Since android
has some closed core components, and IOS is mostly closed, this is what they
are trying to free similarly to what they did with IE. I am optimistic about
it.

