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A comment on Wanted: Awesome HTML5 app ports for Firefox OS and the Open Web.

Re:Wanted: Awesome HTML5 app ports for Firefox OS and the Op... by sdegutis on Friday February 21, 2014 @01:04PM (#7278314)
Browsers are supposed to be the new "platform" of the future. But their source code is so gigantic and inaccessible. A regular dev can't just pop in and help out, they have to learn a ton about internal browser infrastructure that they don't really deal with, and the learning curve is very steep. Contrast this with Linux, where most of us know the command line and can create/edit command line utilities much more easily.
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Re:Wanted: Awesome HTML5 app ports for Firefox OS and the Op... by georgemcbay on Friday February 21, 2014 @01:23PM (#7278452)
Well, the same is mostly true of traditional operating systems.

On the other hand, traditional operating systems support a myriad of local development options on top of them, whereas with browsers you're, at some level, using HTML/CSS for display and JavaScript for logic. Both of which I still find to be unfortunate despite how far they've evolved.

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Re:Wanted: Awesome HTML5 app ports for Firefox OS and the Op... by _jwilde on Saturday February 22, 2014 @04:08AM (#7281501)
This is absolutely an important issue. Brian Bondy from Mozilla's platform engineering team put together an awesome little website called Code Firefox (http://codefirefox.com/) with a series of 1-minute videos that teach you everything you need to know to get started. :D
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Re:Wanted: Awesome HTML5 app ports for Firefox OS and the Op... by pcwalton on Friday February 21, 2014 @01:18PM (#7278414)
To be fair, the Linux kernel is similarly opaque (although I agree that browser engines should make more of an effort to be clean and easy to understand—something we're working on with Servo!)

I think the right analogues to userspace utilities are something like Angular or jQuery, which are much easier to understand than the browser "kernel".

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Re:Wanted: Awesome HTML5 app ports for Firefox OS and the Op... by Touche on Friday February 21, 2014 @01:21PM (#7278430)
It's significantly easier for someone (an outsider) to build the Linux kernel for the first time than any of the OS browsers.
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