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Boot to Gecko phones coming in 2013
Mozilla Corporation has announced
plans for the first set of phone handsets to be built using its "Boot to
Gecko" technology. "Device manufacturers TCL Communication
Technology (under the Alcatel One Touch brand) and ZTE today announced
their intentions to manufacture the first devices to feature the new
Firefox OS, using Snapdragon processors from Qualcomm Incorporated, the
leader in smartphone platforms. The first Firefox OS powered devices are
expected to launch commercially in Brazil in early 2013 through
Telefónica’s commercial brand, Vivo."
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Boot to Gecko phones coming in 2013 Posted Jul 2, 2012 17:02 UTC (Mon) by webmastir (guest, #59528) [Link] I'm pretty excited to see where b2g(Firefox OS) goes from here. I think it'll be pretty cool to see what it brings to the smartphone market.
Boot to Gecko phones coming in 2013 Posted Jul 2, 2012 21:15 UTC (Mon) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link]
As someone who eventually wants to run Debian on a mobile device, Boot to Gecko isn't that interesting since it is yet another "free" platform that accepts hardware-related blobs. I would expect it will be about as useful to FreeSmartPhone.org and Replicant folks as Android is.
Boot to Gecko phones coming in 2013 Posted Jul 2, 2012 22:41 UTC (Mon) by b7j0c (subscriber, #27559) [Link]
mozilla will have to do more, much more than just deliver an embedded rendering engine
native development for android and iOS is much more predictable. no guessing about what css3 features are available. no stupid hacks like modernizr to query various javascript capabilities. your api is versioned and you know exactly what is available in that version. and in that api is access to the DEVICE, not an abstraction layer that obscures or hides device features behind a maze of security abstractions.
javascript is a terrible large systems language. css is only now supporting elastic-layout features that TeX had when i was in diapers. html5 is an improvement, but it still requires both js and css, which are long past their sell-by date, as is http.
if mozilla is telling me that boot2gecko is a way of bringing web development as we do it today to the phone, then don't bother...web development today is a huge mess, and will be even if you narrow down the deployment target to one. if mozilla is telling me that boot2gecko is a starting point for re-imagining mobile development that simply starts with a subset of ideas from the web stack, then sign me up
Boot to Gecko phones coming in 2013 Posted Jul 4, 2012 11:41 UTC (Wed) by gb (subscriber, #58328) [Link]
Quite funny to read that http is long past it's sell-by date.
What kind of large system you going to develop for your phone? Do you fully realize that web is very different from tex, on web 'paper size' is always different for every user and one of main points of css handle this?
Boot to Gecko phones coming in 2013 Posted Jul 4, 2012 11:57 UTC (Wed) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]
CSS is a PITA.
HTML's rendering model, frankly, is braindead. It's extremely hard to create a really flexible GUI even in modern HTML+CSS. Ironically, good old HTML tables are often much better than DIVs with reams of CSS.
Even new supposedly advanced web2.0-ish HTML+CSS+JS frameworks often use fixed or semi-fixed designs.
Boot to Gecko phones coming in 2013 Posted Jul 4, 2012 13:09 UTC (Wed) by gioele (subscriber, #61675) [Link]
> Even new supposedly advanced web2.0-ish HTML+CSS+JS frameworks often use fixed or semi-fixed designs.
I wouldn't say so. Many designs for the mayor CMS are OK. (Most of current design are designs for CMS. This means that if you get them right once they will be right for many sites.) There are also many well paid and free designs that are fully responsible, i.e. they react via media queries to the changes in the viewport, adapting from very small but hi-dpi mobile screens to huge, lo-dpi screen projectors.
Pure CSS may not be the best tool to use right now. The current trend is toward pre-compiles SCSS/SASS/LESS stylesheets. In the future CSS will contain enough programming facilities to do without this compilation step.
The CSS rendering model, although not perfect, is a very nice middle ground for most of the applications. You can see this looking a Qt and GTK+: they both have style engines based on CSS-like stylesheets.
Boot to Gecko phones coming in 2013 Posted Jul 4, 2012 13:32 UTC (Wed) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]
Let's see:
http://www.cnn.com/ , http://www.bbc.co.uk/ , https://www.youtube.com/ all use fixed layout. On my 1920x1080 screen there's a lot of white space around the narrow central column. Fail.
The only major site that I visit that have flexible layout: http://www.amazon.com/ and Wikipedia.
CSS simply doesn't help with layout management - it can't be used to change the order of elements (modulo absolute positioning hacks) and it has very little support for flexible layouts. It's so bad that some libraries use JS to calculate layouts.
Boot to Gecko phones coming in 2013 Posted Jul 4, 2012 15:40 UTC (Wed) by gb (subscriber, #58328) [Link]
From my small web-dev experience it's not CSS/implementation problem, problem is that designers is working with fixed size paper for centuries, so it is much easier to design something in fixed, for flexible you need different style of thinking.
Boot to Gecko phones coming in 2013 Posted Jul 4, 2012 17:12 UTC (Wed) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] http://www.cnn.com/ , http://www.bbc.co.uk/ , https://www.youtube.com/ all use fixed layout. On my 1920x1080 screen there's a lot of white space around the narrow central column. Fail. I think there is something to be said for a layout that doesn't scale beyond a certain point, since at some stage text lines may become too long to read comfortably. I'm usually more disappointed about sites that don't adjust well to a fairly narrow browser window. CSS simply doesn't help with layout management - it can't be used to change the order of elements (modulo absolute positioning hacks) and it has very little support for flexible layouts. I've done CSS-based web sites that had, e.g., the left-hand navigation bar after the main content, so at least that is possible. It's also quite possible to make CSS-based web sites that scale and adjust properly with varying window widths in most cases, without resorting to Javascript. I don't dispute that this sort of thing could be a lot easier, but impossible it isn't.
Boot to Gecko phones coming in 2013 Posted Jul 5, 2012 5:47 UTC (Thu) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]
I don't mind if some people like to have narrow text columns. That's fine. However, it's very hard to do a website that can fluidly change layout based on available space.
For example, an obvious feature - adaptable multi-column layout has only recently been added to CSS and still doesn't cover all required scenarios.
> I've done CSS-based web sites that had, e.g., the left-hand navigation bar after the main content, so at least that is possible. It's also quite possible to make CSS-based web sites that scale and adjust properly with varying window widths in most cases
CSS media queries and flexbox Posted Jul 4, 2012 21:52 UTC (Wed) by skierpage (guest, #70911) [Link] CSS ...has very little support for flexible layouts.For some definition of "very little". This seems rather flexible. With CSS media queries, e.g. media="screen and (max-device-width: 480px)", you can modify layouts for different screen sizes without needing JavaScript. CSS flexbox adds further layout control besides the normal CSS flow and floats.
CSS media queries and flexbox Posted Jul 5, 2012 5:51 UTC (Thu) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]
Yeah, a great example. NOT.
http://www.zimagez.com/miniature/screenshot-07052012-0849...
Somehow the site with CSS propaganda can't itself make use of it.
Boot to Gecko phones coming in 2013 Posted Jul 5, 2012 6:38 UTC (Thu) by bluebugs (subscriber, #71022) [Link]
I can only but agree with you. HTML5 push a lot of work back into JavaScript. Things that are highly impacted by memory performance and were we are already struggling to do fast in C. It's also absolutely not friendly with embedded device as it doesn't make it possible to lower the frame rate or stop rendering easily.
And in an embedded world, every little operation you do cost you your battery. So HTML phone can only be poor in front of any native phone. That means iPhone will always be ahead of that.
Second problem, the security model, you are giving to one process access to all your private data and it is permanently accessing internet. You only need to compromise it to get an access to them. The only way to mitigate this is to have an aggressive update plan that let no choice to user but to upgrade. This means that Operator will have no way to say a word when Mozilla need to push an update on all his device.
Then the third problem, creating a complete mobile OS imply today to provide a communication suite and integrate all of them nicely. On Internet this is done by using webserver that provide some remote API to do that integration. On a device, that means you need a local server to do it or use a remote one. First solution, that means their is another way to do application on that phone and we have a full webserver for this services. Second solution, well never go outside of a city or your phone will just be an useless piece of plastic !
Boot to Gecko phones coming in 2013 Posted Jul 13, 2012 10:10 UTC (Fri) by JanC_ (guest, #34940) [Link]
About the "third problem": you seem to think that JavaScript applications that run on Gecko can only use the same API as a web page can. It's not that complicated to add extra APIs to use the phone functionality, probably based on a permission system (not all apps need all features). In any case, there is no need for a "HTTP daemon" (at least, not for that purpose).
Boot to Gecko phones coming in 2013 Posted Jul 11, 2012 12:20 UTC (Wed) by cesarb (subscriber, #6266) [Link]
> Ironically, good old HTML tables are often much better than DIVs with reams of CSS.
Even if said divs have "display: table", "display: table-row", and "display: table-cell"?
TeX rendering Posted Jul 5, 2012 8:15 UTC (Thu) by danielpf (subscriber, #4723) [Link]
>Do you fully realize that web is very different from tex, on web 'paper >size' is always different for every user and one of main points of css >handle this?
TeX was certainly not designed for web pages, since TeX predates the Web by a decade, but contains all the algorithms to adapt text and complicated math to any page dimension, and certainly makes a much much better job than any other text processing I have ever seen, except LyX which is actually rendering TeX on the fly. TeX minimizes ugliness not by line or by paragraphs, but over a full page (what the reader sees in her visual field) by adjusting finely white spaces between characters, lines and paragraphs. The source code is available and free, so there is no excuse for later 1-dimensional text processing systems like html not to at least achieve the same level of quality TeX was able to deliver since the early 80's.
Boot to Gecko phones coming in 2013 Posted Jul 5, 2012 17:41 UTC (Thu) by b7j0c (subscriber, #27559) [Link]
css most certainly can and should do TeX's elastic-style fill: indeed, the entire webdev community is now very excited about flexible-box models, which does just this.
and yes http is vastly inferior to a native socket for any performance-intensive application
criticisms from the present Posted Jul 4, 2012 21:18 UTC (Wed) by skierpage (guest, #70911) [Link]
Despite all your complaints, people already write apps in HTML + CSS + JavaScript. The future only gets better. The shipping B2G phones will all run a Gecko of 2013 , so all will have a solid CSS 3 baseline including flexbox that will be highly compatible with 2013's Webkit/Opera/MSIE. Developers who choose to support earlier browsers can use so-called hacks in layers like modernizr and Phonegap to hide the differences. As a consumer I don't care whether an app gets my location and reads the screen tilt "directly" or through an API you judge inferior.
"web development today is a huge mess"... that's also the most active and fast-moving area of software, and remains the development and delivery mechanism for most new software. While typing their criticisms (into a web browser of course), do HTML haters never wonder why software development itself didn't get the memo about how it sucks so bad? github/gerrit/gist/Cloud 9/jsfiddle/etc. are all web applications to help build other applications, and maligned JavaScript is the runtime for a lot of language developments like CoffeeScript.
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