Firefox OS on the ZTE Open [LWN.net]

Firefox OS on the ZTE Open

Posted Sep 6, 2013 17:46 UTC (Fri) by Lennie (subscriber, #49641)
In reply to: Firefox OS on the ZTE Open by khim
Parent article: Firefox OS on the ZTE Open

Supposedly FirefoxOS has a number things going for it:
- FirefoxOS needs less resources to run than an Android phone

- there are 6 million webdevelopers and 'only' a couple of 100000 app developers for Android and iOS combined, many are even HTML5-apps with a native wrapper

- it's open source and I've heared it has an update process which updates the top part of FirefoxOS (so not the kernel and binaries) on regular basis. Just like Firefox and Chrome on the desktop

- there are still a lot more people with feature phones than smartphones. There are 6 billion phones in use, only 1.1 are smartphones. Most of these people don't life in a western country and don't have a smartphone partly because of price. A FirefoxOS can already be had for only 3 euros a month (for the fist 3 months, data is free the first 3 months).

Even if FirefoxOS fails, Mozilla has produces a whole slew of new WebAPIs:
https://wiki.mozilla.org/WebAPI

Most of them have been proposed as standards at W3C and a number of them have become standards.

Including a new payment system for the web to bring a one-click payment system to the web. Just like the app-store model now has.

So still a win in Mozilla's book if it improves the web.

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Firefox OS on the ZTE Open

Posted Sep 6, 2013 21:14 UTC (Fri) by brouhaha (subscriber, #1698) [Link]

Supposedly FirefoxOS has a number things going for it:
[...]
- there are 6 million webdevelopers and 'only' a couple of 100000 app developers for Android and iOS combined, many are even HTML5-apps with a native wrapper

So you're saying that it's an advantage for FirefoxOS to only run web apps, vs. an Android phone being able to run either web apps or Android apps?

Firefox OS on the ZTE Open

Posted Sep 6, 2013 23:29 UTC (Fri) by Lennie (subscriber, #49641) [Link]

Well, the goal of FirefoxOS is to be able to run web apps better on the same hardware.

Their slogan of their developer education/evangelism/promos videos is:

"Firefox OS: the platform HTML5 deserves"

Firefox OS on the ZTE Open

Posted Sep 6, 2013 22:13 UTC (Fri) by liam (subscriber, #84133) [Link]

- FirefoxOS needs less resources to run than an Android phone

I hope this is true, but thus far its only been said and not demonstrated.

Firefox OS on the ZTE Open

Posted Sep 7, 2013 13:18 UTC (Sat) by roc (subscriber, #30627) [Link]

FirefoxOS can run Web apps and a good Web browser on phones that can't possibly run Chrome on Android (and the Android "stock browser" is rubbish).

For Web browsing and running Web apps, running both Android's frameworks and a Web browser is a lot of overhead on low-end phones.

Firefox OS on the ZTE Open

Posted Sep 9, 2013 14:38 UTC (Mon) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

But users don't care about HTML5 and for them native apps (and there are way more native Android apps then good HTML5 apps) are better: faster, less battery-hungry, etc.

In a world where there are millions of HTML5 applications and few Android ones FirefoxOS will make sense, but this is not our world right now.

Firefox OS on the ZTE Open

Posted Sep 9, 2013 22:25 UTC (Mon) by roc (subscriber, #30627) [Link]

There are a very large number of Web sites that don't have an equivalent Android app.

It remains to be seen whether the average "native Android app" (I can't tell whether you mean NDK apps or Dalvik apps) is "faster, less battery-hungry, etc" than the average FirefoxOS HTML5 app or Web page in the FirefoxOS browser.

Firefox OS on the ZTE Open

Posted Sep 10, 2013 18:17 UTC (Tue) by hummassa (subscriber, #307) [Link]

For a lot of time facebook's mobile web interface was better, faster, less battery-hungry than and as featureful as its dalvik-application. AND it didn't nag you with notifications all the time.