Firefox OS on the ZTE Open [LWN.net]

Firefox OS on the ZTE Open

Posted Sep 5, 2013 22:43 UTC (Thu) by liam (subscriber, #84133)
In reply to: Firefox OS on the ZTE Open by khim
Parent article: Firefox OS on the ZTE Open

Really? IMNSHO it's the other way around: there are some hope for Android yet nothing can make FirefoxOS responsive on the hardware where Android is laggy

I'm not saying there's no hope for Android. The problems with android seem down to: unoptimized drawing routines, scheduling issues, and uneven drivers. Since fxos is using android as a delivery for kernel/drivers, it's going to suffer from the driver issues as well. The scheduling may be something they could fix though it's not in their area of expertise. The drawing pipeline, however, could be a rather large difference. I've related my experience with running it with faster hardware and how the lag virtually vanishes. I haven't told of my experiences with android with various hardware.

Regarding native code, I think you are vastly underestimating how much of the pertinent code paths are actually using native code (apparently c++ according to roc below). This becomes increasingly the case as they use fully accelerated css paths rather than custom js.

Of course. You are throwing 10 times (or may be 20, 50, 100 times) more resources on the task then said task actually needs - no wonder it can be solved in such a way. But it's hard to produce "cheap phone for emerging markets" which have 10x more power then is needed for sane solutions (like iOS, for example).

I think you're missing the point. Running android 4.1 on my old nexus s results in similar levels of lag as the highest-end android devices. To stay with nexus devices and using geekbench for rough estimates of device capabilities, the nexus 4 is roughly seven times more powerful, yet, the lag difference is imperceptible to me. Thus my point about optimizations in the two platforms.

I get that you have disdain for interpreted languages, and I'm not going to argue the point, but I think you are wrong about this b/c I've never used an android device that didn't have that characteristic lag, and I have used a firefox "device" that didn't.

Lastly, running geekbench on my computer (core2duo t7500 with 4GB) it actually scored lower than my nexus 4 (which is a bit odd since the pc actually posted individual scores of about twice the nexus 4 for single core results), so we're not talking about huge performance deltas here.

(Log in to post comments)

Firefox OS on the ZTE Open

Posted Sep 6, 2013 11:20 UTC (Fri) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

Running android 4.1 on my old nexus s results in similar levels of lag as the highest-end android devices.

Have you actually compared them side-by-side or are you comparing experiences separated by years?

I've recently was forced to work with Nexus S (with Android 4.1, naturally) for a bit and quickly found out that it's laggy as hell when compared to Galaxy Nexus with Android 4.2.x/4.3 (I don't have Nexus 4). When I've used it as my primary phone years ago I've not noticed these same lags all that much.

To stay with nexus devices and using geekbench for rough estimates of device capabilities, the nexus 4 is roughly seven times more powerful, yet, the lag difference is imperceptible to me.

I'm not sure what exactly geekbench measures, but biggest problem with interpreted languages is not even CPU power, but memory consumption. You need gobs of memory to make them fast (on a desktop a single Chrome tab with GMail uses over 200Mb while the phone we are talking about only has 256MiB available).

Lastly, running geekbench on my computer (core2duo t7500 with 4GB) it actually scored lower than my nexus 4 (which is a bit odd since the pc actually posted individual scores of about twice the nexus 4 for single core results), so we're not talking about huge performance deltas here.

No, we are talking about some limited benchmark here. Raw computing power of "big" Intel CPUs may not be all that dissimilar from raw CPU power of ARM in synthetic benchmarks, but there are huge diffence in real life because of faster memory, bigger caches, better prefetch logic, etc. Also: are you sure you are comparing apples-to-apples and your "core2duo t7500 with 4GB" actually has proper 3D acceleration and everything? Latest versions of Android rely on GPU for various effects and software fallback is not optimized all that well. If CPU power is wasted on doing GPU effects (which even top Intel CPUs are not doing all that well), then of course interface will be laggy.

Firefox OS on the ZTE Open

Posted Sep 6, 2013 16:51 UTC (Fri) by ibukanov (subscriber, #3942) [Link]

According to about:memory gmail tab under Firefox on ARM takes 64 MB. Not good, but manageable on 256MB phone.

Firefox OS on the ZTE Open

Posted Sep 6, 2013 22:00 UTC (Fri) by liam (subscriber, #84133) [Link]

Have you actually compared them side-by-side or are you comparing experiences separated by years?

Side-by-side. The Nexus S still works as it always has (well, not considering the changes the updates have made).

I've recently was forced to work with Nexus S (with Android 4.1, naturally) for a bit and quickly found out that it's laggy as hell when compared to Galaxy Nexus with Android 4.2.x/4.3 (I don't have Nexus 4). When I've used it as my primary phone years ago I've not noticed these same lags all that much.

The lag have ALWAYS been there in every device, regardless of spec. The frame rates have been a bit worse since 4.1 came out. The input latency seems about the same (I can't say for certain since I wasn't able to test those side-by-side, of course).

***SNIP interpreted language rant***

I'm not going to do your research for you, so if you want to know what geekbench measures you can look for yourself, but I will say this: it categorizes its tests as int, fp, and memory/streaming performance. The memory category was of particular interest to me since that has been a consistent weak area for ARM. The intel cpu had a better memory interface (upto about four times better).