I don't suppose the re-assigned devs are going to anything useful, like multi-process Firefox.
The conclusion was that multi-process Firefox isn't magically going to make the browser more responsive, and will make it use more memory instead. Actually fixing the bugs that make it less responsive does seem like a much more useful spending of developer time.
What do you need a 64-bit email client for? Bigger pointers so it uses more memory?
Depends on what the applications see. In case of Firefox OS, they'll see the Firefox JS runtime. In GNU/Linux, they see GNU libc.
It also works the other way around. Mozilla needs to convince people to use their browser and install it on desktop. If you get a Firefox phone (because it comes with the plan or whatever), you don't need to be convinced.
accuracy of rendering pages
It's the same engine as desktop Firefox. What you're seeing is that a lot of websites send "Webkit-only" markup to Android devices. (Dolphin uses Android's rendering engine) This is something Firefox can never fix. There's an add-on that makes it pretend it's desktop Firefox, that generally stops misbehaving sites from sending broken markup. I suspect most sites will get their act together eventually.
I don't see the "slanted font" problem you talk about on my Galaxy S2, so that's rather strange. The "small font" problem can be solved by setting text size to "tiny" (yes, it's pretty retarded that you have to do the exact opposite of what you would expect, from what I understand it's because that option is completely misnamed).
That was originally what the iPhone was supposed to do
News to me, to be honest. But in any case: we're quite some years later now. Maybe the Firefox phone won't be too late, but the iPhone was too early instead
ou won't until you get high-bandwidth non-capped connections
What? Bandwidth is irrelevant there. If it's bad, both the HTML/JS based app and the native App will suffer. If it's offline, neither of them cares.
Odds are pretty big that the first phones will be ones originally mean for Android.
The main hurdle for late comers would be the apps ecosystem.
From what I understand they're banking on the fact that writing an app for Firefox OS will use the same technologies as making a webpage, which should make it viable for a huge developer community. Apps for Firefox OS will also run on the desktop browser (and the reverse), which isn't something Android or iOS can do.
It's an interest situation, for example if you compare to the need to totally recode everything for Android (Java) and iOS (Objective C).
then it all goes to shit because all of the developers time is spent dealing with corner cases that each affect 500,000 users (after all, money isnt made in the mobile space until you have a few hundred million phones out there)
I'm guessing that is how Firefox development already looks right now, they have 300M users or something thereabouts? Compare the "Bluetooth headset disconnecting" to "Firefox leaks memory, oh and I have these 20 add-ons installed".
publish a very polished OS that lacks some very basic features for the first few years until you get your legs under you?
Let's hope the restriction to low-end phones keeps this firmly in check. I know loads of people who'd be happy with a cheap smartphone that only has basic functionality (plus web browsing) but not terrible bugs like Android has now...
Security -> The browser already contains a fully sandboxed JS runtime environment since, what, 1995 or something?. They have to do almost nothing there, and it'll probably be actually a lot safer than the comparatively entirely untested Android security model.
Extensibility -> Pretty sure the idea is to just make as much as possible the "original" webpages more usable on a mobile device, instead of requiring the user to install half-assed "apps". There's already API's for pretty much everything in JS.
The Betanews article is wrong in almost every paragraph, so let's just point out the biggest hole in the authors understanding:
Mozilla should stick to where they’re good at, which is the browser market.
Mobile devices are the fastest growing web clients market. There *is no browser market* on iOS, on Windows 8 RT or on Bada. It's not even fully clear yet if there's really a "browser market" on Windows 8.
The only way to get a browser market now is to have an OS out, too. The alternative is to die a slow and certain death. Google search money isn't going to keep coming if there's no devices on which Firefox can even be installed.
There are loads more fundamental misunderstandings in the article, such as the idea that Mozilla will make money on those phones. How can they do that, it's free software... They'll likely just make a deal about who the default search providers are and make money off that. They don't have to care about the margins on the phones at all...
There's been quite some evidence mounting that most of the (continuing) price hike cannot be explained by the disaster itself.
I don't understand the point of this at all. The idea of the Mozilla Foundation was to be a non-profit to promote web standards. So it makes a lot of sense to work on their own rendering engine Gecko, which can be used to implement new web standards, and a browser that contains it (Firefox).
This is just a WebKit shell. What purpose does it serve that furthers that goal? Is Mozilla abandoning Gecko in favor of WebKit? They've said several times that would never happen because multiple implementations (engines) are needed to have a real standard, yet they are now promoting Apple's WebKit version.
Calling this a browser is a lie. Mozilla went from being a company that made browsers and made it a statement to point out where this was not allowed (Apple's ecosystem, and recently Microsofts) to a company that is comfortable locking itself in into those closed ecosystems with fake products that do nothing to promote the open web, perhaps even on the contrary.
That said, I can't seem to find anything on Mozilla's pages, so for all I know this is the press getting things entirely wrong yet again. But I'd love to see some clarification here - it's almost unbelievable if this goes through.
As covered in the article about mobile browser choice yesterday, just by virtue of being on the Apple Store this cannot be a real browser in any significant meaning of the word. So saying it's a "separate standalone browser" is just a flagrant lie. At best it's a shell around the existing WebKit/Safari browser on those devices.
Given that it's also listed as an "extension for Chrome, Firefox, and Safari", what is this really? Yet another privacy-invasion toolbar?
The problem of WebKit is that it has BSD parts that may be susceptible to patents, and the core development is entirely in control of two huge for-profit corporations. Firefox/Gecko has the same problem (too many core devs from one company), and obviously so does Opera (not even open source).
But at least you have competition between those 3 teams now. If WebKit achieves total dominance, Google and Apple control the web, open source or not.
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