For one thing, the link you provide doesn't contain that quote anywhere that I can see. Perhaps you intended to post a different link?
Secondly, I have been using a Firefox OS developer preview phone for several months (one less powerful than the ZTE, I believe), and the UI is extremely snappy. As all 1.0s it still has rough edges that I only hope will be softened by future upgrades, but I find the user experience generally pleasant.
Finally, you can certainly grab a refurbished iPhone if you prefer. iOS 6 is certainly visually nicer than Firefox OS 1.0. But the whole point of FirefoxOS is freedom from silos. One of the consequences is that the appstore will not simply drop support on you whenever Apple (or whoever owns your silo) decides that they want to force you into buying a new phone. Unless I'm mistaken, another of the consequences is that any application bought on FirefoxOS will still belong to you if decide to move to an Android phone or to your Windows/MacOS/Linux personal computer (sorry, no iPhone support, Apple wouldn't want that kind of thing to happen). Oh, and of course, with a Firefox OS phone, you can just write and deploy your own apps without having to ask anybody's permission. I wrote a (small) game during a conference and released it a few days later, before the Marketplace was even open. If visual effects are more important to you than this kind of freedom, yes, by all means, go ahead and buy a refurbished iPhone.
Caveat: I'm a Mozillian.
http://reviews.cnet.com/smartphones/geeksphone-keon/4505-645...
Hard as it is for me to admit, MS did an amazing job with Windows Mobile 8. For low-end hardware it gives a silky smooth OS performance. On the apps side though, I wasn't too impressed with the Nova 3 and Asphalt 7 on the phone I tested. I'm not sure if this is a fault of the OS, hardware, or just that iOS developers have more experience optimizing for that platform. Given the same hardware, I'd put money on iOS, Win8, and even Android (w/ NDK) outperforming Firefox OS.
So I'll take your bet :)
Why is that hard to admit?
If I can already get all of that with Android, and so much more (such as decent performance, the ability to develop apps in languages other than JavaScript, access to a huge number of existing applications, and so on), what is it that should be compelling me to use Firefox OS instead?
Furthermore, various incidents since the release of Firefox 4 have also shaken my trust in Mozilla. Time and time again, we've seen decisions made with very limited community input, and apparently little regard to the impact that they'll have. I'm talking about how the approach to releases was changed in a way that broke extensions time and time again, for a long time. I'm talking about how the status bar has been removed, and the menu bar was hidden by default. I'm talking about how the protocol isn't shown in the URL bar. I'm talking about the latest incident from today, where the preferences dialog option for disabling JavaScript will apparently be removed in Firefox 23.
Incidents like those make me very skeptical of the "openness" claims we hear time and time again with respect to Firefox OS.
Firefox had to be switched to a faster release model to keep pace with Chrome. That's what competition does. Firefox adapted and excelled. Some extension developers took a while to catch on and understand the new process. But as there are 6 weeks of time to test each new version and generally extensions don't change unless there is an API change, it's not much of an issue. Any commercial developer that falls down on this is simply irresponsible.
The status bar is there and shows up whenever it needs to (during loading or hovering over a link). There's no need for it to be there the rest of the time. Any old-school extensions that had UI elements in the status bar simply moved to the toolbar.
The protocol is shown in the URL bar whenever it's something besides http (so for ftp, https, chrome, etc). http is redundant as it's assumed. Same reason we don't use it when giving web addresses via other media.
You can still disable JavaScript in the about:config window and using all kinds of extensions to add UI elements if you want a quick toggle. It's being removed since it's not very useful anymore as much of the web requires JavaScript. Lots of developers don't even bother testing sites for when JavaScript is disabled anymore (nor do they really need to as no one disables it except a core group of a couple million geeks and these folks know that if a site breaks, they need to whitelist it in NoScript).
It is true that power users can install apps without going through the Android Play Store. Regular users (i.e. your customers, if you are a developer)? I wouldn't be so sure. That's your first clue that Android is not the pinnacle of mobile OS.
For most users, Android is effectively a silo. Worse than that, it is a silo in which all your otherwise private data belongs to a single company. As a user, this is a pretty big clue to me that Android is not the platform I want for me, or for my children.
As for developing apps in languages other than JavaScript, well, here are "a few" other languages that you can use: https://github.com/jashkenas/coffee-script/wiki/List-of-lang... . This includes C, C++, C#, Python, Java, etc. Heck, even I have developed a language in that list :)
Caveat: I am a Mozillian (and I'll stop writing this at the bottom of my messages, I grow tired of it).
On Android, I can use Java, C, C++, C# (via Xamarin), JavaScript, or the languages that compile down to JavaScript.
Yet somehow Android "is a much worse platform in terms of language choice"?
In each case there's some variant of Linux, on top of that is a JavaScript and web browser implementation, and on top of that is the application implemented in JavaScript.
The use of something like PhoneGap in the Android case, to package the JavaScript code, markup, styles and to interface with the native browser, is quite peripheral. The majority of end users won't care, as long as the app works.
In the end, the fact remains that developers can use JavaScript to develop apps for Android. But these Android developers also have numerous other options available to them, including Java, C, C++ and C#. This final part is not true for Firefox OS. That inherently means that Android is a much better platform in terms of language support, contrary to what you're suggesting.
Now, on one side, the default language is Java + proprietary APIs. Through the NDK, this can be extended to native stuff and through Cordova/Phonegap, this can be extended to HTML5-ish stuff. On the other side, the default language is JavaScript + portable-but-not-available-everywhere APIs. Through Emscripten, this can be extended to native stuff and through the list I posted earlier, this can be extended to gazillions of languages. While you seem to prefer Java, it really strikes me as roughly equivalent in terms of freedom of choice for the language.
Both platforms are impressively richer than iOS, one defaults to Java, the other to JavaScript, news at 11.
Every Emscripten demo I've seen so far has either not worked, or been horribly slow. As far as I'm concerned, it really isn't a viable option at this point for anything remotely serious. It may be an interesting experimental idea, but it still needs a massive amount of work before it's seriously usable.
In the end, they're merely an abuse of JavaScript, rather than providing proper support like NDK provides for C and C++ under Android, for instance.
Asm.js is still just JavaScript. Emscripten isn't currently production-grade software, and it still just compiles down to JavaScript.
I hope you understand that either of those options is still a case of using JavaScript. Are you seriously disputing that?
We can develop production-grade applications using Java, C, C++, C# and JavaScript for Android. We can only do a very small fraction of that when using Firefox OS. Firefox OS clearly provides far fewer viable options than Android does.
>Emscripten isn't currently production-grade software, and it still just compiles down to JavaScript.
took you two sentences to contradict yourself and move the goalposts again. Nowhere were we talking about "production grade".
> I hope you understand that either of those options is still a case of using JavaScript. Are you seriously disputing that?
That's a strawman fallacy. [1]
OK cidadel under ASM.js was pretty cool and memory boat seemed under control. Nice job BTW! So I set FF as my default browser. Next day I come to HN and open some CSS3 hair demo in a new tab. Next thing I know my browser is completely unresponsive. Until I find the offending tab and close it. Back to multi-process Chrome as my default.
As a Mozillian can you please explain why Mozilla is wasting their resources trying to power budget phones with a bloated outdated browser? Fix your browser, and by then, maybe the mobile hardware will be fast enough to justify the performance hit from running everything inside a JavaScript VM.
I have several answers to that. Firstly, budget phones running everything inside a JavaScript VM works today. We have now proved it. Almost every optimization/new technology we have achieved along the way has also been made available to Firefox for Android and Firefox Desktop, so it's hardly an exclusive or. One of these new technologies is the much-wanted support for multi-process. It is not ready for deployment, far from it, but it is now field-tested, so I hope that we will all be able to benefit from this feature soon.
Also, if you are a developer, you are certainly aware that this is not how things work. You simply cannot wait until a product is perfect before getting started with another product, because this is the road to never releasing anything, ever.
Finally, glad that you returned to Firefox, however briefly :), and glad that you liked some of the experience. I hope we'll have you back once we have finally released a multi-process version. Or once you grow weary of Google owning all your data :)
It's great that Mozilla is experimenting with new tech like FF OS, but It takes a great deal more resources to turn an experiment into a shipping product. And it's clear from the state of their desktop browser that their focus in on FF OS.
It's clear that Mozilla is resource limited. I was also pushing for Thunderbird to replace Outlook, but after Mozilla's announcement that they were ending feature updates, that is never going to happen now.
Fortunately, despite our limited resources, we manage to improve the Firefox browser considerably, too.
- We finally beat Chrome in terms of performance: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/chrome-27-firefox-21-ope... - We have recently added the so-called "Social API", which is a way for websites to extend the browser. - We have recently added asm.js. - We keep extending and improving the developer tools. - We keep adding support for new HTML5 tags/objects including WebAudio, the Clipboard API, the Web notification API, etc. - WebRTC has finally graduated. - etc.
It seems that you care a lot about multi-processes and, sadly, we don't have that yet. Doing it right (i.e. much better than Chrome, we hope) takes time, but we are working hard on it.
Oh, and if you want to add yourself to our resources, don't hesitate to ping me :)
I tried figuring out the CSS needed to fix it, but was unable to locate any real documentation on it.
There is nothing technical in the browser engine that prevents Gecko from being multi-process; support for it is actually integrated quite deeply into the engine, more like WebKit2 than Chromium. The reason that Firefox isn't multi-process is purely an application-level issue, not an engine-level one.
As I explained, the engine is not "bloated" or "outdated", at least in regards to multi-process or auto-update. Firefox OS uses the Gecko engine, but not the Firefox front end. The Gecko browser engine has full support for both of these features.
Google Chrome gets installed into the APPDATA directory. In that location, any process running on the system under the current user can alter Chrome's files, since it isn't within Program Files and isn't subject to UAC/admin. This makes a standard Chrome install inherently less secure than Firefox, Opera, etc installed according to Windows' guidelines within Program Files. Google makes available another Chrome installer that installs into Program Files, but it isn't promoted to users (so they're unaware of the security differences) and it can't be updated without UAC/admin rights.
It looks like my browser was not updating because of a 1.5 year old bug #711475 which is still marked at “New”. If it hadn't been for my interest in asm.js, I'd still be sitting at version 17 or 18, despite auto-updates and background service both being checked.
Not auto-updating the browser is a much bigger security risk than your hypothetical issue for Chrome.
Or did I misunderstand what feature you are referring to?
> As a Mozillian can you please explain why Mozilla is wasting their resources trying to power budget phones with a bloated outdated browser?
Do you really expect anyone that isn't a developer to be running on a desktop in 2018? Really?
You might be surprised (as I was) but Windows 8 is the most responsive mobile OS I've ever seen. Maybe it's even the best mobile OS at the moment.
You can get a new Nokia Lumia 521 for about $150. A very underestimated phone.
My main gripe with Windows Phone isn't the OS, but the phones themselves. They just don't look that nice, and they retain the old-fashioned "brick" feel of old Nokia phones.
I have a Galaxy Nexus now, but if Microsoft were to release their own Nexus-like range of phones that were both high-spec and looked great I'd happily switch.
I own the HTC 8X, which I don't think is very brick-like either. I love the textured back, and my friends and colleagues love the way it looks and feels.
You can really see problems with the 521 on IE. The browser performance reminds me of Android 2.3.
Now, the Lumia 9xx series is rock solid. But I haven't been able to give up my 4s (Nokia should really be giving them away)
However there are still some downsides you need to be aware of if you planning on getting one:
[1] Windows is highly paranoid about security (Irony), no application can access the call logs, messages or even basic settings such as brightness etc. So don't expect to find apps that customize your phone to your liking.
[2] Apps - Saw your friend using that awesome Starbucks app and want it? Nope you won't find it on the store like many many others. To make it worse, Google is hellbent on never creating apps for Windows Phone. Luckily there are better or acceptable alternatives for most of their core products.
[3] Phones - Not many choices. If you want a solid phone stick with the Nokia brand. The exclusive apps will itself win you over.
Yeah I listed one pro and three cons, that is definitely a pro MS post. According to you, anyone who says anything good about MS or Google is a shill. Glad we aren't living anymore in the 90's M$-hate slashdot era.
>resurgence
If 8+% market share is "resurgence", I have no idea what you are going to say about Firefox or Ubuntu Mobile OS.
also, good job with that strawman you put up there. you sure knocked it down real well.
Yes, the same applies for you calling everyone who doesn't share your view a "shill". So according to my posts, I am pro MS, pro Firefox, anti Chrome, pro Google etc. I sure hope I dint invalidate the "pro MS" with the cons this time. Has it every occurred to you that maybe people talk positively or negatively about product X or Y, not because they are a shill, but because they can relate to it or have some experience with it? I humbly request you to change your mindset from the pre-2000 slashdot era, grow up and stop calling everyone who doesn't share the same views as you a "shill".
Check out your Argumentum Ad Hominem! [1]
> "shill"
> shill
> "shill"
are you quoting me when you say "shill"? where did I use that word? If I didn't use it, doesn't that make this a Strawman Fallacy? [2]
>I humbly request you to change your mindset from the pre-2000 slashdot era
Perfect example of Association Fallacy [3].
> grow up
followed by an Appeal to emotion! nice! [4]
-
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man
You can't have IE in Kid's Corner (the guest mode) so you'll want UC Browser as an alternative. There are also alternative phone dialers since you can't have the default phone dialer in Kid's Corner.
Windows 8 explicitly blocks the installation of any browser other than Internet Explorer (+ skins) on ARM. This is not due to a technical reason. This is due to the fact that Microsoft imitates Apple's policy that prevents any browser other than Safari (+ skins) on iOS [1]. While anti-trust rulings have forbidden Microsoft from doing this on PCs, Microsoft claims that ARM-based computers are not PCs and that the anti-trust rulings therefore do not apply. I therefore suspect that Microsoft will continue with this behavior unless a court of justice decides that ARM-based computers are also PCs. Hence my above comment.
And if anyone wonders why we need open platforms for mobile devices, that's a pretty good reason.
One source among many: http://www.linuxstall.com/microsoft-blocks-chrome-and-firefo...
[1] Yes, technologically speaking, Chrome for iOS is a reskinned Safari bundled with utilities.
Other than that, the phone itself performs it's basic functions just fine and the battery life is quite good if you don't touch any of the "smart" features.
Having said that, the device is a developer preview and I like Mozilla and their mission and I hope they will succeed with subsequent versions.
Also an iPhone is the opposite of a free phone, so this is no competition for Firefox OS.
Now, I'm a big anti-apple/open source proponent too, but just having that as a selling point isn't gonna win them a whole lot of users; just look at what happened with the OpenMoko project.
After watching the demo, I think it might've made a decent competitor back when Gingerbread was still fresh, but now I'm not so sure. If there's one thing I do admire about Apple, it's that they seem to really only release stuff that's 'fully baked', even if not everybody agrees with the decisions they make.
Unfortunately, they overbaked Maps.
Now of course, we live in the world of apps and the iPhone has become what it was always destined to be: a mediocre-to-crappy, yet socially acceptable, gameboy. Ha-ha, only serious.
No really, having all those things in one touchscreen device was pretty cool, and certainly pointed the way to the future. The predictable myth-making around Apple is as boring as ever though.
It's just I can remember when the myth-making was around the iPod and "it only does one thing, and it does it really well", and suddenly the iPhone comes along and does everything and anything, usually (though not always) quite a bit worse than dedicated devices. And suddenly perfection gets redefined (yet again) to whatever Apple is currently doing.
Trust is the baseground of any purchase.
> "native performances" still makes sense if you are talking
> about building physics engines or whatever kind of heavy
> simulations, but not for 90% percent of the smartphone
> apps today.
Update: after watching this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iu8q-oISbas I do not understand how anyone can call UI responsive and maintain a straight face. Or I do not know what are you comparing it to. Just take a look how the contacts app works :(
[1] no pun intended, although given my Keon's case colour, it is quite a good one :)
"Its unresponsive screen makes typing a laborious process requiring painstaking precision. Every action from swiping to tapping onscreen controls takes a beat until you see results, so using the phone for a prolonged period steals minutes of your time. Lag carries into the camera, which is slow to launch, snap, and reset."[1]
For $90, I would rather have a refurbished iPhone 3GS. A 3GS has 16GB of internal storage vs this phones 512MB and runs Apple's latest iOS 6. With native performance you get a silky smooth experience from the homescreen to apps even on budget hardware.
[1] http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-57591716-94/firefox-os-phon...