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| 'There is something magical about Firefox OS' |
| By Thom Holwerda, submitted by MOS6510 on 2012-09-13 20:00:06 |
| "Over the past year and a half I've been spending more and more of my time working with Mozilla's latest project, Firefox OS. During that time I've fallen in love with the project and what it stands for, in ways that I've never experienced with a technology platform before." I'm not convinced just yet. I hope it succeeds, but I just doubt it actually will. |
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| RE[6]: HTML as a toolkit for a mobile OS? |
| By Alfman on 2012-09-14 06:39:32 |
|
I think you two are getting overly hyped up over what is, at the end of the day, a matter of preference about which technologies you like better. galvanash, Yes, javascript promises to lower the barrier to entry for app development. But you've said alot of things I disagree with. Like static typing...it does have a use (though whether you benefit from it is a different matter), it explicitly limits the number of states a variable may hold and helps catch errors at compile time. In some languages, string concatenation and arithmetic addition are separate operators to help resolve the ambiguity, but javascript depends on inferred typing. var a = x.foo() + 'x'; // what is a? For this reason, I'd argue javascript is a poor choice for mission critical applications like those at NASA. There are more problems, like the inability to define proper "classes", which make javascript both slower and less error proof. Again, maybe you prefer not to use classes and find the prototype substitute good enough for you. But whether it's an enhancement or restriction of the language depends on your point of view - it's a matter of opinion. Also, we've build other languages on top of javascript because browsers don't give us much choice, not because it particularly makes sense to do so otherwise. Nelson, You are right that no single language is good for everything. But you must accept that portability is very important and useful to many developers and users, they should be able to write once, run anywhere without needing to rewrite it again... You can dismiss portability for yourself, but it really doesn't make sense to dismiss the utility for others. Edited 2012-09-14 06:41 UTC |
 - Score: 4 |
| RE: HTML as a toolkit for a mobile OS? |
| By moondevil on 2012-09-14 07:46:27 |
|
+1 As I cannot vote Even though I get paid to develop mostly web applications, for me HTML is for documents. It is insane what people try to bend the browsers to do, spending sometimes days fighting with HTML+CSS+JavaScript, for what would be a few function calls in a native application. And in the end they complain that it still does not look integrated. Of course it does not, HTML is for documents! But at the end of the day it is all about the money, so the customer gets what s/he asks for. |
| - Score: 3 |
| RE[2]: Another fallen mobile OS. |
| By swift11 on 2012-09-14 07:50:09 |
|
> So far what's really lacking are devices compatible with conventional (non Android) Linux stack. Samsung's devices for Tizen didn't come out yet to address this. Tizen is much broader than Samsung: http://www.tizenassociation.org/... |
| - Score: 1 |
| RE[2]: HTML as a toolkit for a mobile OS? |
| By swift11 on 2012-09-14 07:54:19 |
|
> But at the end of the day it is all about the money, so the customer gets what s/he asks for. HTML5 is also about freedom: http://mashable.com/2012/09/05/g... |
| - Score: 2 |
| Comment by clasqm |
| By clasqm on 2012-09-14 08:28:04 |
|
May I ask a very silly, naive question? Is there any real, organized marketing push behind this, or is it just a bunch of geeks hobbying around on the basis of "If we build it, they will come"? If you don't have a handset maker committed to building a phone around this OS and bringing it to market at least a year before you expect to hit 1.0, then just admit that you are hobbyists. Nothing wrong with that, everyone needs a hobby. Look at Linux's stagnant market share in desktops/laptops (as opposed to its leading position in other sectors). If regular, non-geek people are not prepared to strip Windows off their PCs and put Linux on, they are certainly not going to strip off iOS/Android/Win8 and install FirefoxOS. Not.Gonna.Happen. So don't tell us how you're doing this technically. Technical problems are there to be solved. Tell us how you are going to get millions of Chinese-made FFOS phones into peoples' hands. Why would manufacturers choose this over Android? Because it's free? Android is also free. Because it gives better performance on cheaper hardware? If manufacturers cared about better performance, someone would have purchased WebOS by now, making HP an offer they couldn't refuse. Better performance on cheaper hardware is NOT in the manufacturers' interest. It makes the customers hang on to their existing phone a little bit longer instead of performing their civic duty of constant upgrading. I'm afraid this won't be the first technically elegant solution that died and withered because its creators remained aloof of the commercial realities of the world they lived in [sigh ... BeOS]. Nor the last. |
| - Score: 2 |
| RE: Comment by clasqm |
| By swift11 on 2012-09-14 08:40:01 |
|
Most companies don't want a Google monopoly on mobile: Firefox OS (Gecko): https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/201... Tizen (Webkit): http://www.tizenassociation.org/... HTML5 without a browser is probably the best option to avoid a new monopoly. Edited 2012-09-14 08:58 UTC |
| - Score: 1 |
| RE[3]: Another fallen mobile OS. |
| By bouhko on 2012-09-14 08:56:23 |
|
I agree that most of the problem is the document/JS boundary. Still, I've played a bit with WebGL and it can be quite fast when using static scene data and therefore the JS code only upload the data to the graphic card and that's it. If you start doing things in JS between each frame (like trying to add a physic engine or animate lot of stuff), then performances quickly drop. That being said, I would be happy to be proven wrong. It's just that claiming that JS games on mobile* run just fine without any proof triggered some alarms. * I've written a small Android game and I had to write most of it in C++ to get decent performances on low-end devices. |
| - Score: 2 |
| RE[3]: HTML as a toolkit for a mobile OS? |
| By moondevil on 2012-09-14 09:01:23 |
| This only works until the handset manufacturers start blacklisting web sites. |
| - Score: 3 |
| RE: Comment by clasqm |
| By swift11 on 2012-09-14 09:13:03 |
|
> May I ask a very silly, naive question? Is there any real, organized marketing push behind this, or is it just a bunch of geeks hobbying around. “We don’t like the fact that one part of the value chain of our business is tightly controlled,” Carlos Domingo, director of product development at Telefonica’s digital unit, said in an interview. “In the case of the emerging countries it’s worse, because it becomes a monopoly by Google.” http://www.bloomberg.com/news/20... |
| - Score: 1 |
| RE[4]: Another fallen mobile OS. |
| By Lennie on 2012-09-14 09:23:34 |
|
Game-engines are ported from C/C++ to Javascript with emscripten: https://github.com/kripken/emscri... I believe this is the talk/demo you might want to watch: http://blip.tv/jsconfeu/alon-zak... |
| - Score: 3 |
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