Heilmann: The Fox is out of the bag #FirefoxOS [LWN.net]

On his blog, FirefoxOS developer Christian Heilmann reflects on why he is excited about the phone operating system in light of the announcement of the first FirefoxOS smartphones. One of five things he highlights: "FirefoxOS does not assume a fast, stable and always available connection. When traveling I start hating my Android phone which I love to bits otherwise. Having dozens of megabyte updates over roaming is out of the question and neither is using flaky and slow wireless connections. Firefox OS has no native apps – all of them, including the system apps are written in HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Thus they are much smaller and can have atomic updates instead of having to be replaced as a unit every single time."

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Heilmann: The Fox is out of the bag #FirefoxOS

Posted Jul 2, 2013 0:41 UTC (Tue) by heijo (guest, #88363) [Link] (20 responses)

I fail to see what's the advantage compared to Android + Firefox for Android + some way to package HTML5 sites as apps.

In fact, I only see a huge disadvantage of not running Android software.

Also, considering good phones cost at least 600 euros, I fail to see how a 70 euro phone can be usable, and in fact, looking at the specs on GSMArena, it's a piece of shit compared to the Galaxy S4 and HTC One.

The laughable 320x480 screen is enough to wonder how one could possibly use this thing except perhaps to keep a door open, hold some papers down or fix a table with a short leg.

Heilmann: The Fox is out of the bag #FirefoxOS

Posted Jul 2, 2013 0:50 UTC (Tue) by mattdm (subscriber, #18) [Link] (5 responses)

A large part of the exercise is to make a phone which brings the modern mobile internet to people who can't afford a 600€ phone. You may not be able to play Hero's Duty IV: The Slaughterfest on it, but it looks like you can have decent mobile web access, with all of the communication, social, and utility benefits that provides.

Heilmann: The Fox is out of the bag #FirefoxOS

Posted Jul 2, 2013 0:53 UTC (Tue) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link] (4 responses)

As long as I can play blackjack on it while I'm stuck in line at the DMV... it'll meet my particular needs.

Heilmann: The Fox is out of the bag #FirefoxOS

Posted Jul 2, 2013 1:07 UTC (Tue) by mattdm (subscriber, #18) [Link] (3 responses)

I think you may be to settle for solitaire at this point. If that doesn't work for you, though, maybe you could use the web browser to renew your license so that you don't need to stand in that line.

Heilmann: The Fox is out of the bag #FirefoxOS

Posted Jul 2, 2013 1:13 UTC (Tue) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link] (2 responses)

How dare you presume that I live in a state that is actually progressive enough to have invested in online driver license renewal infrastructure.

How dare you sir.

-jef"no seriously that would be great... feel free to write my governor to actually extend online renew to driver license instead of requiring in person every other renewal"spaleta

Heilmann: The Fox is out of the bag #FirefoxOS

Posted Jul 4, 2013 7:18 UTC (Thu) by salimma (subscriber, #34460) [Link] (1 responses)

Or adopt the EU model, where your driver license is valid at least until retirement age? That'd require offloading the functionality of identification to a separate document, though, something that US and UK libertarians seem to have an irrational fear about

(as a result of which, too many organizations in the US require driver license and SSN, which arguably is a dangerous invasion of privacy)

Heilmann: The Fox is out of the bag #FirefoxOS

Posted Jul 5, 2013 11:16 UTC (Fri) by jezuch (subscriber, #52988) [Link]

> (as a result of which, too many organizations in the US require driver license and SSN, which arguably is a dangerous invasion of privacy)

A more widespread problem is that it facilitates identity theft.

Heilmann: The Fox is out of the bag #FirefoxOS

Posted Jul 2, 2013 5:36 UTC (Tue) by maxiaojun (guest, #91482) [Link]

I think it doesn't matter which market section FirefoxOS targets.

I rather see some impedance mismatch between 70-euro and all-HTML5.

I personally like HTML5 technology and find JS a quite good language, though.

Heilmann: The Fox is out of the bag #FirefoxOS

Posted Jul 2, 2013 8:18 UTC (Tue) by renox (guest, #23785) [Link]

I agree about your take on Android but "considering good phones cost at least 600 euros" made me laugh..
You have a strange definition of 'good phone'.

Heilmann: The Fox is out of the bag #FirefoxOS

Posted Jul 2, 2013 9:06 UTC (Tue) by ibukanov (subscriber, #3942) [Link]

I have a phone with even smaller screen and it works for occasional email, sporadic web browsing and even GPS maps.

Heilmann: The Fox is out of the bag #FirefoxOS

Posted Jul 2, 2013 9:29 UTC (Tue) by Quazatron (guest, #4368) [Link] (4 responses)

You are not the target for this phone.

This phone is targeted at people like me, that find that 80€ is the most you can spend on a phone.

So while you may find it laughable that someone would buy such a low powered device, I'm sure that if your monthly income was about 800€, you'd think twice about spending 600€ on a phone.

Heilmann: The Fox is out of the bag #FirefoxOS

Posted Jul 2, 2013 19:58 UTC (Tue) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (3 responses)

This was tried before. This approach just does not work. Smartphone is well, a phone which is smart. And smarts are added by some additional software (apps, dedicated web sites, etc - does not matter). Creators of said software, strangely enough, want to be paid. And if you target less affluent people then naturally they spend less money. This can be compensated (for example Android with it's 50% is now about as attractive as iOS with it's 20% because it targets slightly less affluent people), but if you only target lowest level of the market then the incentive to create smarts is just not there which in turn means that your smartphone is not all that smart - and then why buy it if you can have more reliable and even cheaper dumbphone?

Nonetheless the phone is out there and this is a start. We'll see how it'll work long term: FirefoxOS has decent carriers support which means it have a fighting chance. Not a large chance, but still...

Heilmann: The Fox is out of the bag #FirefoxOS

Posted Jul 2, 2013 22:50 UTC (Tue) by kragil (guest, #34373) [Link] (2 responses)

What you are saying boils down to:
We need big closed ecosystems that try to recreate the web in apps to be successful.

I don't think that is true. It may be what we end up with, but it is not the best solution.

I don't know how many times I wanted information that is easily available on the desktop web, but on mobile it was hard to get. Sure I could have searched for an app, installed it and then used it for getting that info.
OR I could have gotten it from a good mobile web page .. those often don't exist because we have apps now.

Brave new world!

Heilmann: The Fox is out of the bag #FirefoxOS

Posted Jul 4, 2013 13:03 UTC (Thu) by salimma (subscriber, #34460) [Link]

I must be missing something, but in what way is Android a closed ecosystem?

Heilmann: The Fox is out of the bag #FirefoxOS

Posted Jul 7, 2013 10:03 UTC (Sun) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

We need big closed ecosystems that try to recreate the web in apps to be successful.

You need big ecosystem, period. It does not need to be closed (Linux servers ecosystem is pretty open: even if RHEL plays important role there it's not the only game in town), but needs to be big.

Short-term you can attract developers who hope you'll grow big soon and hope to grab larger piece of smaller ecosystem, but if you are 10 times smaller then other players then it may be better to have 15% there rather then 90% here.

I don't think that is true. It may be what we end up with, but it is not the best solution.

It's the only sustainable solution. Even if someone (e.g. government) will send money to support you (like it was done with FGCS) or you keep some small niche for itself (like Apple did with desktop publishing) long-term you either need to grab larger piece of the pie or you'll die out.

Brave new world!

Yup. I have always wished for my computer to be as easy to use as my telephone; my wish has come true because I can no longer figure out how to use my telephone. Desktop web moves in the same direction, too: more and more dare are presented as AJAX-driven webapps and the data is given to search engines when and where it's convenient for app writers. Similarly on the phone apps are receiving the ability to plug in "global search" tool. This all converges in more-or-less the same point - the only problem is that point is far, far away from "all information is easily crawlable and accessible" ideal of early web.

Heilmann: The Fox is out of the bag #FirefoxOS

Posted Jul 2, 2013 10:43 UTC (Tue) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link]

Also, considering good phones cost at least 600 euros,

Lessee... 600 euros is about 500 quid (actually slightly more) at today's exchange rate. With that information in hand, and judging by the GBP prices on a certain major High Street chain's website, your "good phone" appears to be everyone else's "this year's top-of-the-line phone". The only company with more than one model at or above £499.99 SIM-free is Apple.

Heilmann: The Fox is out of the bag #FirefoxOS

Posted Jul 2, 2013 10:43 UTC (Tue) by epa (subscriber, #39769) [Link] (1 responses)

The top of the line Blackberry was 320x240 not so long ago, IIRC. And you could read your mail, make calls, and browse the web. Web browsing is hard because of the incontinence of page authors putting up navigation bars, advertisements, pointless graphics and so on - but that problem doesn't entirely go away when you have more pixels, since you still have a small physical screen.

Ironically, the smaller the screen resolution, the more you really need native apps rather than web pages. While it's possible to write websites that are fast and usable on a 320x240 display, nobody really bothers to. A native app by definition is written to be usable on that particular hardware.

Heilmann: The Fox is out of the bag #FirefoxOS

Posted Jul 3, 2013 10:37 UTC (Wed) by Lennie (subscriber, #49641) [Link]

That is the whole point of HTML/CSS you can make apps that scale from a large to a small screen and support both mouse/keyboard and touch navigation.

Yes, there is a large part of the web which does not yet do that, but the apps are mobile optimized websites/webapps.

It is worse that their are no search engines for native app content.

Heilmann: The Fox is out of the bag #FirefoxOS

Posted Jul 2, 2013 13:39 UTC (Tue) by pboddie (guest, #50784) [Link]

Some people want it all: a cheap phone, the latest and greatest in screen, processor and storage technology, millions of "apps", a sensor for everything and free services to keep it all entertaining. Some people even want the ethically important stuff, too, like responsible sourcing and manufacturing (Fairphone) or hardware that isn't hostile to Free Software (GTA04, perhaps), but usually this is the first thing thrown overboard when the screen on the device in question isn't "3D hyper-retina" or whatever the buzzwords of the day might be.

So: cheap, good, ethical, available. Pick maybe three of the four!

Meanwhile, as far as "apps" are concerned, one very good reason for bringing Web technologies into the picture is that it lets organisations target devices without having to get into the development silo around the popular mobile platforms. If you're already doing vanilla Web development, there's a chance you won't need to either get up to speed yourself in Java/Android or Objective-C/iOS and all the pitfalls, or to pay someone good money to do a mediocre job on your behalf.

Heilmann: The Fox is out of the bag #FirefoxOS

Posted Jul 2, 2013 22:01 UTC (Tue) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link]

Also, considering good phones cost at least 600 euros

Where do you shop? I purchased a very nice Nokia N900 for less than 200 euros from eBay and in my opinion, it's far superior to any Android phone out there.

You can even get new Android phones for much less than 600 euros where I live (Canada; maybe CAD $300 or so for a decent Samsung Galaxy.)

Heilmann: The Fox is out of the bag #FirefoxOS

Posted Jul 3, 2013 9:19 UTC (Wed) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link]

Also, considering good phones cost at least 600 euros

EUR600 is approximately £500. For £500, I can get not merely a good smartphone, but at least some of the latest top-of-the-line smartphones (a few creep as high as £600, and there's one insane outlier at £1000). I can get last year's top-of-the-line smartphone for about £380, and that phone's slightly-cut-down little brother (which is still better than 2010's top-of-the-line smartphones) for about £250.

And those are the SIM-free (i.e. unsubsidized) prices.

AM I THE ONLY ONE?

Posted Jul 2, 2013 1:23 UTC (Tue) by BrucePerens (guest, #2510) [Link] (13 responses)

Hi folks,

I think the web took a wrong turn with the advent of Javascript, and has proceeded down that wrong path since. Just considering the abysmal performance (having various Android devices, I don't like Java either), the lack of a separation between model, view, and controller, and the fact that the language is sort of a throwback to the '80's.

I know it's bad to say everybody else is nuts, but looking at all of this cruft, that's exactly what I think.

Bruce

AM I THE ONLY ONE?

Posted Jul 2, 2013 1:37 UTC (Tue) by mgb (guest, #3226) [Link] (2 responses)

MVC separation is a function of application design, not language.

I miss the rigor of C++ but love the fact that in Javascript I can write an application with a tenth of the code and spending most of my time thinking about application logic rather than nuts and bolts.

AM I THE ONLY ONE?

Posted Jul 2, 2013 4:22 UTC (Tue) by BrucePerens (guest, #2510) [Link] (1 responses)

Certainly the platform can facilitate MVC or even enforce it to some extent, and most languages come with a platform of their own these days. For example Ruby on Rails really does enforce that each of M V and C are in separate files. You can mix them together if you try, but you are guided to do things the right way by the platform.

AM I THE ONLY ONE?

Posted Jul 2, 2013 8:23 UTC (Tue) by andreashappe (subscriber, #4810) [Link]

In the same spirit you could have pointed to http://www.angularjs.org/ or http://backbonejs.org/ as examples of javascript frameworks that lead to MVC patterns.

I still don't like Javascript, but MVC is a framework (not language) inherent pattern.

AM I THE ONLY ONE?

Posted Jul 2, 2013 2:13 UTC (Tue) by artem (subscriber, #51262) [Link]

I think that the influence and importance of one particular language is much less than you'd think. Yes it took about 20 years for the collective mind of average developer to figure out which parts of javascript are good and which are bad, but once you get into the habit of using right idioms it's not actually that bad - there are languages in wide use today that are *much* worse.

AM I THE ONLY ONE?

Posted Jul 2, 2013 3:45 UTC (Tue) by geofft (subscriber, #59789) [Link]

You're going to have to come up with better reasons than performance (modern JS engines are some of the fastest out there, even before considering asm.js), MVC (all the cool-kid frameworks that I know nothing about, like Backbone.js and Knockout.js, are about exactly this), and the language (JavaScript: The Good Parts, ECMAScript 6, CoffeeScript and every other ThisScript and ThatScript, etc.).

There are probably valid arguments, but those aren't them.

(Also, speaking of languages that are a throwback to the '80s, have you heard what Apple's language of choice is???)

AM I THE ONLY ONE?

Posted Jul 2, 2013 5:51 UTC (Tue) by dark (guest, #8483) [Link] (3 responses)

I think JS is just the latest link in a long chain. Every time we standardize worldwide, it creates a new platform and we reinvent everything on top of that. We layered all networking (even local networking) over IP, we layered all protocols (even stateless ones) over TCP, we layered all protocols again over HTTP, now we're doing it with JSON.

In the same time frame we've created the "standard app suite" again and again, with more layers under it every time. Running the apps in a web browser is just another link in that chain. And now these chains are merging. Perhaps now, finally, something different will happen :)

AM I THE ONLY ONE?

Posted Jul 2, 2013 21:25 UTC (Tue) by alankila (guest, #47141) [Link] (2 responses)

Just today I wrote a boneheaded client for WS-ReliableMessaging, which appears to layer something like TCP on top of XML on top of SOAP on top of HTTP on top of TCP on top of IP on top of whatever.

AM I THE ONLY ONE?

Posted Jul 2, 2013 21:26 UTC (Tue) by alankila (guest, #47141) [Link] (1 responses)

Criminy, SOAP and XML should be swapped in that order.

AM I THE ONLY ONE?

Posted Jul 3, 2013 2:44 UTC (Wed) by bbaetz (subscriber, #42501) [Link]

> Criminy, SOAP and XML should be swapped in that order.

I'm not sure that that clarification improves the situation...

AM I THE ONLY ONE?

Posted Jul 2, 2013 7:00 UTC (Tue) by oldtomas (guest, #72579) [Link]

No, you're not the only one.

Feels good to know you on my side ;-)

AM I THE ONLY ONE?

Posted Jul 2, 2013 8:52 UTC (Tue) by ibukanov (subscriber, #3942) [Link]

It depends on what one calls a model. If the model is JSON-like data and the view is generated HTML+CSS, then the JS have very nice separation. In fact it is better than many C++/Java frameworks as JS view is not updated until the whole code that is triggered by the current event is run. Effectively in JS one can get very complex updates without any flicker.

Also JS allows nicely preserve GUI state with #bookmarks which gives as a bonus an extra way to navigate the GUI using the address bar. Just try that that in any native application - most of them have hard time recovering just the state where they were before the user closed them.

AM I THE ONLY ONE?

Posted Jul 2, 2013 23:40 UTC (Tue) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

MVC is overrated and in general a bad idea. I haven't seen any advanced applications with fully decoupled view and model.

And JS has very nice frameworks, like http://knockoutjs.com/ that beat almost all 'classical' UI frameworks in usability.

Things have advanced

Posted Jul 5, 2013 11:00 UTC (Fri) by man_ls (guest, #15091) [Link]

Bruce, it sounds like you haven't actually tried the brave new world of JavaScript development. JavaScript was created to be "Scheme on the browser", but things have advanced a lot from the old browser demos.

For the record, which are your language and platform of choice?

Heilmann: The Fox is out of the bag #FirefoxOS

Posted Jul 2, 2013 2:35 UTC (Tue) by fedtroll (guest, #91489) [Link] (5 responses)

Do the math. Firefox was FOSS a few years ago, and then Google infiltrated it. Google and Microsoft are $US billion dollar corporations. The latest Firefox is sending unknown (?) encrypted data to Google when I connect to my ISP: "Google Safe Browsing". I used to trust Firefox, but then I read how Google joined the Mozilla Foundation. I don't need "safe" browsing or the monster Google spying on my browser or OS.

Heilmann: The Fox is out of the bag #FirefoxOS

Posted Jul 2, 2013 5:09 UTC (Tue) by kugel (subscriber, #70540) [Link] (3 responses)

Never heard of that, but it sounds like it could be the phishing protection. Try if it's still sending after turning it off.

Heilmann: The Fox is out of the bag #FirefoxOS

Posted Jul 2, 2013 5:19 UTC (Tue) by dtlin (subscriber, #36537) [Link] (2 responses)

This is not the first such comment from fedtroll.

https://lwn.net/Articles/555776/

Heilmann: The Fox is out of the bag #FirefoxOS

Posted Jul 2, 2013 6:07 UTC (Tue) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link] (1 responses)

I do appreciate that he's used such an accurate username. Its actually sort of inspiring. I wonder if lwn would let me change my username to let me better set expectations as to what to expect from my posts. Is there username "longwinded" still available?

Heilmann: The Fox is out of the bag #FirefoxOS

Posted Jul 2, 2013 8:37 UTC (Tue) by robert_s (subscriber, #42402) [Link]

Don't know, but "canonicalatemybaby" is.

Heilmann: The Fox is out of the bag #FirefoxOS

Posted Jul 3, 2013 9:30 UTC (Wed) by gerv (guest, #3376) [Link]

Just to de-troll: here's the privacy policy for the Safe Browsing service: https://developers.google.com/safe-browsing/firefox3_privacy . The list of dangerous sites is regularly downloaded; Firefox does _not_ send the URL of every site you visit to Google (at least, not by default; we used to have an option to do that, not sure if we still do). Here's the code: http://dxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/source/toolkit/com...

Also, Google has not "joined" the Mozilla Foundation. The Mozilla Foundation is overseen by a board of 6 directors, as listed here: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/about/ . It does not have institutional members.

HTH, HAND.

Gerv

Heilmann: The Fox is out of the bag #FirefoxOS

Posted Jul 2, 2013 9:15 UTC (Tue) by ibukanov (subscriber, #3942) [Link] (1 responses)

Firefox phones will be supported with updates much longer than, say, Samsung models. It is Mozilla, not operators, who updates the browser with security fixes. And since everything else is HTML+JS, then even a serious bug in the kernel or a low-level native library can be worked-around in the browser without the need to update the firmware.

Heilmann: The Fox is out of the bag #FirefoxOS

Posted Jul 3, 2013 6:10 UTC (Wed) by rahvin (guest, #16953) [Link]

More importantly we need a standard compliant phone ecosystem. Many people forget that Apple initially promised a phone that only supported HTML 5 but gave in on the idea when they realized developers wanted them to create platform lockin (which is in both developers and Apples interest, after all you can't take a 30% cut of the sale if the application is HTML5 and loaded directly from the website).

Mozilla has the chance to not only prevent Android monopolizing the entire stack (there are already sub $100 android phones that are selling like hot cakes in the developing world) but to try to get a real HTML 5 application ecosystem developed that isn't dependent on the specific operating system. I believe it's in everyone's interest for this to be successful even if you never buy the phone.

Heilmann: The Fox is out of the bag #FirefoxOS

Posted Jul 2, 2013 9:53 UTC (Tue) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link]

Having dozens of megabyte updates over roaming is out of the question and neither is using flaky and slow wireless connections. Firefox OS has no native apps – all of them, including the system apps are written in HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Thus they are much smaller

Really? It seems to me most of what takes space in modern apps is images and other media resources, where all that HTML5 goodness does not help. On WP7, where everything except the system is in C# and distributed as some kind of bytecode (I guess), apps and their updates seem to be 1Mb apiece in most cases (according to what the phone reports - it probably rounds to nearest Mb).

FirefoxOS does not assume an always available connection.

Posted Jul 2, 2013 19:23 UTC (Tue) by Alterego (guest, #55989) [Link] (1 responses)

This great.

I take train daily to go to work, and cross a kind of 'desert for connection' during 20 minutes.

The power management of android is a disaster in that case. It consumes a huge amount of battery while searching for networks, which last only one day if i forgot to put my phone in plane mode, whereas it lasts more than 5 days otherwise. (and my phone is configured, with G2 only connection, powersave, no autoupdate etc.)

If FirefoxOS adresses this problem, i'll switch with no hesitation.

FirefoxOS does not assume an always available connection.

Posted Jul 10, 2013 13:49 UTC (Wed) by cesarb (subscriber, #6266) [Link]

> It consumes a huge amount of battery while searching for networks

I do not think FirefoxOS will help you. The code which manages the cellular network on all smartphones I know of is closed source, and even runs on a separate ARM core. AFAIK, it will not be specific to the operating system, only specific to the hardware.