We've made major strides since Firefox OS 1.0, but even with everything we think we can do there, a $25 phone is not going to feel like what you're used to. No one is claiming that it will.
To understand why that's OK, imagine that you gave up your hero phone and spent a couple of years using a $50 feature phone over 2.5G. And then picked up a Firefox OS smartphone for about $25 and compared them.
We can and will beat the feature phone experience for billions of people who are or will soon be ready to make the leap from feature phones to smartphones and who won't be served by the high cost of iOS and Android devices.
They will have access to a comfortable phone with real web browsing, popular apps, an onscreen keyboard, cameras, notifications, etc, and if we're effective, a great experience that's affordable enough to help them move to this modern online era well before they otherwise might have.
While the big guys are fighting over upgrades for the 4th and 5th generation smartphone users, we're figuring out how to get the next 4 billion people online with their first smartphone.
Maybe we're crazy. I remember a lot of people telling us we were crazy to think we could dethrone Microsoft's browser monopoly. I'm an optimist. I think we're just crazy enough to pull it off. I think the world is counting on us.
Users in richer nations upgrading to newer generations of Android and iOS devices has resulted in a huge number of used devices ending up in developing nations. These devices are extremely inexpensive, yet still quite capable.
How are Firefox OS and these near-unusable devices supposed to compete with the imported used Android and iOS devices that are far more capable?
When somebody in a developing nation can get a 2 or 3 year old device for $25, and it runs Android or iOS, and it gives a pretty good experience, I just don't see why they'd subject themselves to the comparatively poor experience of a equivalently priced Firefox OS device that gives a worse experience.
And it wasn't Firefox that "dethroned Microsoft's browser monopoly". It was very clearly Chrome's doing, thanks to the 40%+ share of the market it now holds. Firefox played second fiddle, only ever capturing approximately 30% of the market at its peak. With Firefox likely accounting for less than 20% of all browser users today, it's even more apparent that Chrome is mostly responsible for IE's loss of popularity.
If you'll read what I wrote more carefully, you'll notice that I didn't say Firefox dethroned Microsoft.
What I wrote was that Mozilla dethroned Microsoft's browser monopoly. There's a significant difference.
To your mostly off-topic point, I'll note that it was actually that toppling that made Chrome possible.
Back in the day, the Firefox team included many the guys that would later go on to start Chrome. A couple years earlier Mozilla's team also included the guys that started Safari -- which, you'll remember, emulated Mozilla's rendering and asked for Gecko content in its UA.
The other browser back then, Opera, took a different rout and emulated IE user agents and tried tackle most of the IE DOM in both core code and client JS hacks. Look where they are. Apple said "like Gecko" in Webkit's user agent and look how that turned out.
That Safari and then Chrome could ship and most sites "just worked" for most users is not some accident. Google did some great work with Search back in those days, but they absolutely did not carve those Web standards paths or even pave those roads. That's what Mozilla spent 1998 to 2004 doing. We moved the Web to standards with our browser effort and made it possible for other players to come to market with a focus on features and performance confident that sites would mostly "just work."
Mozilla isn't simply Firefox. When you confuse that as you did above, you miss the most important thing about Mozilla. We exist to improve online life for everyone, not just people using Mozilla products.
Whoa. Let's not rewrite history. Firefox deserves all the credit it gets for resurrecting browser competition in the 2000s. To "dethrone a monopoly" you don't have to knock it down to less than 50% market share, you just need to reduce it enough that the monopoly has to react to competition again.
Yet these experiments like Firefox Os are exactly the reason why Mozilla is not what it used to be. And Firefox browser did not came out of the void neither, it wouldnt have existed without Netscape.
Great, but I don't care. I still have 1.0 on the ZTE. Sure, it's the manufacturer that won't update it, but it's your fault that you don't force the manufacturer to update it. Yes, it's a socio-political problem, not a technical one, but it's your biggest problem right now and it needs to be solved. Android has this problem too, but at least some devices are kept up to date.
> spent a couple of years using a $50 feature phone over 2.5G. And then picked up a Firefox OS smartphone for about $25 and compared them.
Funny you mention that, because that's exactly what I did. I had a $50 feature phone. It made calls, it made SMS, it was easy to type using T9. It even had Opera mobile, which sucked; wow, how much that sucked, but I did use maps on it once to find my way. Point is, this dumbphone was very reliable and very easy to use.
Now the ZTE open lags horribly even in the most basic usage. The touchscreen is so bad and the software response so slow it's really, really, really hard to type on it. It's way harder to use write an SMS compared to the old phone.
Yes, it has a browser, it renders so slowly and lags so much that I will never use it. I'd say the browsing experience is roughly at the dumbphone level quality. Yes, it renders pages better but it takes 5 times as long and then you can't scroll because it takes two seconds for the page to start moving.
The GPS won't work except in the widest of spaces, and the maps are so laggy and so slow, that I just gave up.
This phone is a scam. You brag about the list of features and how this will enable billions of people to do whatever, but it's not true. It won't enable anything, hardware is just too slow.
Please note I did't say anything about the software, which at least in 1.0 was horrible as well. I understand this is not a finished product and I accept the consequences, even if it means sometimes I can't make or answer calls. But this product will never work on low-end hardware.
I have the Keon (https://marketplace.firefox.com/developers/dev_phone) here. It's not good - I could say it's directly manufactured electronic waste, but that would be rude, so I won't.
The first iPhone and android phones were better - more than 5 years ago.
I have the Keon. It is perfectly fine for my usage (mostly texts and light browsing), and fast enough in most default apps.
I am also quite impressed by how fluid applications from the market are, Cut the rope included (I expected it to have very crappy framerate, but no).
My HTC Hero (which is totally obsolete by now - you can't upgrade Android phones once the manufacturer released other phones and doesn't care anymore) is only fluid on the home screen. Everything else (even the Play store!) is slow and laggy. I can't play most games and can't install most apps on the Hero (armv6 means no Firefox, no Telegram, no 'anything using jni').
So I strongly disagree: the Keon is good enough, and the first Android phones were NOT better (you seem spoiled, high-end user! Just because it's not as fast as $400 phones does not mean it can't be interesting).
sorry,you cant honestly recommand that phone.It's pure crap and a total waste of money.I suggest people looking for cheap feature phones to buy some old midlet based nokia/lg/sony.They do what a phone is supposed to do and they do it right,unlike Firefox os based phones which are pure crap.
HTML5 based os need a lot of processing power,webos already proved it in the past. That's why firefox os will fail,it's not designed for lowend devices.
You seem like you can't conceive that html apps on a FirefoxOS phone can be just as fast as any good app on another phone.
If you tried Cordova/Phonegap on Android and didn't find the performance adequate, if you tried a web view on iOS and didn't find the performance adequate, just don't take the shortcut of believing that you would get the same inadequate performance on Firefox OS. The whole stack is different.
HTML5 based os need a lot of processing power,webos already proved it in the past.
WebOS and its fate proves nothing regarding the performance of mozilla's OS.
That's why firefox os will fail,it's not designed for lowend devices.
It IS designed for lowend devices. My Keon boots more than 3 times faster than my HTC Hero. In its early days, B2G was even booting in 10 seconds (flat). You just didn't see it with your own eyes.
I suggest you revise your 'pure crap' opinion when you actually see the OS running in front of you.
If this was a troll (feature phones? are you kidding me? We're talking about a phone that can really browse the web, here), I don't know what to say. Otherwise, you're just full of FUD.
Disclaimer: I have only used the Keon. I don't have any experience with the ZTE or another one, but I'm still pretty confident they're not 'pure crap and a total waste of money'.
I tried the ZTE model. Honestly at that price,it's a scam,especially when for the same price you can get an Android 2.3.X phone,which has a browser and all the apps you'd ever want...
I guess you're running the version that shipped over a year ago. Try switching to one of geeksphones other update channels on downloads.geeksphone.com. I've been dogfooding for a year now and its getting more plesant all the time!
The system is still extremely buggy. It closes in mid-writing-a-text message or mid-call. You expect this behaviour from a toy, but not a phone.
Mind you, to people in emerging markets, it is a tool, not a toy, even if they only pay $25 for it. To these people, it's a lot of money.
The hardware is very slow. It is too slow to render HTML5, which is especially hard when you have to type on the touch screen. The problem is that the system lags quite long after you touch the screen, so you are a few letters ahead of what is on the screen. There is no feedback.
So, to me, Mozilla is really disconnected from reality if they think this could work.
I love what Mozilla is doing and I'm tempted to move everything possible to Mozilla.
I love the idea of ruthlessly developing for low end systems rather than just assuming everyone has 1 GHz and 1GB.
I hope designers and coders enjoy the challenge of working with such limited systems.
I tried to use Paypal website on an iPhone 4 yesterday. It was painfully slow. It was loading a bunch o stuff that I just didn't need or want. Horrible experience.
Firefox OS is very, very heavily focused on the use of HTML5, JavaScript, and other web technologies for the development of mobile applications.
Yet as you found out recently, apps or websites built using these technologies are often extremely inefficient, even when highly tuned by very experienced developers.
To get good performance on limited devices, the best thing to do is to move away from HTML5, JavaScript, and related technologies. Applications written in C, C++, Objective-C and even Java vastly outperform HTML5/JavaScript-based apps, especially on devices with limited capabilities.
Yet this is completely contrary to what Mozilla is doing with Firefox OS. So it seems really unusual to me to support them and their efforts, when it's clear that their approach flies totally in the face of what you'd like to see happen.
> Applications written in C, C++, Objective-C and even Java vastly outperform HTML5/JavaScript-based apps, especially on devices with limited capabilities.
Citation when it comes to Java (assuming you're talking about Dalvik, because that's the relevant Java implementation on mobile)? Dalvik is not generally considered as fast as either V8 or SpiderMonkey. For example: https://blog.mozilla.org/javascript/2013/08/01/staring-at-th...
The issue is not wether spidermonkey or v8 is faster than dalvik, the issue is wether the UI feels responsive or not.
On a low hand device,you cant honestly say, an HTML5 ui on firefox os will be faster and more reponsive than an android ui coded with the android framework. Wether X javascript engine is fast or not is irrelevant. Users are not stupid, they can tell a fast and responsive ui from a clunky HTML/JS one.
Finally Javascript gives you 0 tool for manual memory management,which is central for any embedded programming. On Android and Iphone one can go down to C/C++ if necessary.
The idea of a 25$ device that would run javascript programs/uis efficiently is preposterous.
> Finally Javascript gives you 0 tool for manual memory management,which is central for any embedded programming. On Android and Iphone one can go down to C/C++ if necessary.
asm.js offers manual memory management, with no garbage collection. You can compile C and C++ and it will run essentially natively, modulo the sandboxed safety checks.
Unrealistic micro-benchmarks aside, I've yet to find an Android app written using HTML5 and JavaScript that feels anywhere near as smooth and efficient as native apps written in Java. I suppose I don't have numbers to back me up, but I'm not sure that really even matters. The performance difference is something that users notice.
Those companies have an agenda to sell regarding HTML5 development
They do. However, don't be so quick to dismiss the point they are making: on high-end devices at least, html5 apps are at least as good/performant as native apps.
By the way, Apple, Google and Microsoft each have an agenda as well: to enclose developers in their walled garden, making them learn and use proprietary non-cross-platform APIs so that apps can't achieve a "ship new features everywhere, at the same time, easily" approach. They also want you as a user and a developer to abandon your phone after a while by deprecating APIs and making the OS effectively non-updatable, and making it very hard to update manually (do you know how to port Cyanogenmod to your device? Fix its bugs?).
as soon as your target middle to low end handsets it is turtle speed time.
... on Android. It probably isn't great on low-end or old hardware (although light pages should still run fine). However, Firefox OS is designed and optimized for running those webapps on low-end hardware, contrary to Android.
Which vendor do you trust to make the web fast? The ones who have nothing to gain from it, because they wouldn't be able to retain users anymore who could switch to a new OS in a heartbeat if all the apps were webapps? Or the vendor who made huge contributions to the open web?
Firefox OS' developer story is definitely a worse-is-better strategy. The number of people that know JavaScript outnumbers the ninety odd people who know Objective C, Android's flavour of Java, or some new native application framework Mozilla might have created.
No, that's the point. This ridiculously overpowered phone was cripppled by PayPal's website. The phone slowed to a crawl. The website was loading odd stuff and doing weird things.
It is slow and the touchscreen is poor. The OS build that it shipped with wasn't very good, and updates have been slow and problematic.
But. I've been happily using it as my main phone since I got it in early January, and I expect that to stay true for a fair while. It's not at all 'unusable'. It makes phone calls and sends and receives text messages. It even seems to handle MMS better than my Galaxy Nexus did. It browses the web, although that can take some patience. The Marketplace has few apps, and fewer good ones, but it does my calculations, tells me the weather, helps me find directions when I'm lost, and has numerous Flappy Bird clones.
I think it's amazing that it only took $100 to have something that does all that arrive on my doorstep. Sometimes it's more amazing, though, that the technology around us is so cool that to m[ost|any] people that doesn't feel good enough.
It's unusable. Completely unusable. I can't fathom how a $25 phone works.