Then we asked about that device. It was a crappy ZTE with 600 MHz CPU and with the poorest Qualcomm chipset. This blew out my mind: a non-optimised system was running with acceptable performance on the lowest of smartphones. I can't imagine how will this perform when it's fully optimised on a high-end smartphone. They're doing a great work.

Edit: Didn't read carefully. You already mentioned that developer versions would be available worldwide soon. Any mailing list to subscribe for the announcement?

Like all Mozilla projects, this is developed completely in the open. You can get an original Galaxy Nexus and flash it over to the latest nightly relatively easily. It probably works on other phones, but the nexus is what they gave out at JSConf so that's what I use. ;)

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Boot_to_Gec...

Surprised that even the tech community doesn't understand the significance of this.

Yeah, and I find the complete and utter lack of any mention of WebOS in TFA troubling.

> What went wrong? Well, apparently[1] there were some big performance issues

Your link points to insufficient hardware though, not software issues. Hardware which seems to have been the main recurring problem on all WebOS machines (according to reports, there were also issues with the software being shipped far too early for v1.0, against the wishes of the engineers working on it)

And the fact that after installing Android 4.0.4 on it, it feels like whole new machine (speed-wise) - I really blame webOS here.

The rest of the article is really exciting, and I really hope you can launch and get some traction. I agree that Mozilla is important in this space for exactly the same reasons Firefox was important when it launched. I just think it would be kind to tip your hat to WebOS along the way.

I am not trying to criticize them but there are inherit differences between the two projects. I am thinking Mozilla is also partly betting its reputation of protecting user information while being developer friendly.

The free market will decide of course but at least initially that free market won't be North America.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Boot_to_Gec...

@gcb.

Just curious gcb, you know you are hell banned but keep on posting - why is that? Have you tried appealing?

Of course I can only see you because I keep "show dead" on.

FxOS is all web pages (even the IME!) though currently has the same basic PalmOS launcher model that iOS and Android have; no multitasking window manager.

Enyo2 was released recently and is being incorporated into Open WebOS: http://enyojs.com/

How anyone can stand to use javascript for anything significant is beyond me, but Enyo, and hopefully whatever FxOS uses, can have substantial parts of an app's logic written in something like Coffeescript or Clojurescript.

One of our engineers answered this recently on Quora, I hope it helps explain the differences a bit: http://www.quora.com/How-does-Mozillas-Boot-2-Gecko-compare-...

* WebOS added custom API's to handle parts of the phone hardware that are not web standard, for eg. phone calls, SMS

* The Firefox project also added custom API's, except they are submitting them for standardization as web interfaces

Why not just implement the WebOS API's and thus make them a standard, or are they considered flawed in some way that the B2G project now solves?

This option would have had the added bonus of immediate interop with WebOS applications, developer learning curve, documentation, etc.

I'm sure that Firefox OS used the WebOS API's as inspiration though.

This would have been great if webOS was in a form ready to be adopted by Mozilla or someone else.

As it stands, open webOS has still yet to ship (hopefully soon). Most likely because it has taken this much time to untangle the non-open bits.

Even though I understand the reasons why, I'm still extremely bummed that this effort does not cover the Pre3 (or phone based device). Which means people will not be able to go back and retroactively fix a lot of the unfinished bits on the phones.

For example, they moved from a Java based solution to JS using v8 from webOS 1.x to 2.x.

Hopefully, Firefox OS will not suffer from the same issues. And I would certainly like to hear more about the under-the-hood architecture. It's pretty eye candy but things like power management quickly jump to the forefront when you actually try to use the device as a phone on a regular basis.

As far as the webOS performance issues go, it was less the hardware and more the fact that most of the software were not optimized and shipped with an ENORMOUS amount logging turned on. Put simply, Palm essentially did a "make debug_build" and shipped it.

Not trying to be harsh, just what I have observed from poking around webOS.

Wow, you may want to do some basic checking on your assertions there:

* webOS never used Java, Luna (webOS-to-be) was a skunkworks alternative to the Java-based Prima project. there was java stuff below from Prima, it was not the application core and was never made available to developers

* webOS always used both Webkit and V8 for its application runtime (Palm was the first company to ship a mobile V8 port)

http://blogs.gurulabs.com/dax/2009/06/palm-pre-webos.html

http://www.theverge.com/2012/6/5/3062611/palm-webos-hp-insid...

I was having a brain fart moment last night and meant node when I mentioned v8. Specifically, webOS 2.x+ shipped with node based services which replaced a lot(all/most?) of the java based services.

Those two things IMO were major things affecting webOS. Pretty much all the phone devices shipped with insufficient memory.

And given that Fx OS is JS, HTML etc. based, those things have a tendency to chew up a fair bit of mem. Throw in a JIT and suddenly you are in a mem swap situation (which is definitely not batt friendly).

So, yeah I would like to see more docs about how those are going to be addressed.

edit: oh and as to the failing of the author to acknowledge WebOS speaks to the author's knowledge or honesty, take your pick.

If there's a subset of the world for whom an iPhone or a high end Android smartphone is just a pipe dream, then the pipe-dream devices won't be much of a distraction.

[edit] If someone offers you n options, always pick option n + 1.

Isn't that a bit like saying "OS X is based on BSD so it will only be of interest to hackers"?

Execution is important - just because somebody screwed up an idea before doesn't mean that nobody else can make it work.

WebOS was straight webkit with additional APIs for telephony and hardware access, and a bundled framework to help with laying out.

Said framework having been extracted for regular in-browser JS[0]

> Firefox OS runs on pure HTML5 standards.

Firefox OS runs straight Gecko with additional APIs for telephony and hardware access, without a framework to help getting started.

It's the exact bloody fucking same thing.

[0] http://enyojs.com/