First Firefox Mobile OS Phones Announced

judgecorp writes "The first devices running Firefox Mobile OS, originally known as Boot to Gecko, have been announced. TCL and ZTE are making the phones, which will show up on Brazil's Telefonica Vivo network. Other operators are planning to give the phones a try. From their blog: '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.'"

Re:Do we need another mobile OS?

[cpu6502]

Not an OS. Just the Firefox browser running like an OS. "Is this going to be yet another platform for developers to code for?
"No..... We don't want this work to lead to applications that only run atop one platform, or only run in Firefox. That's an important difference between what we're doing and proprietary mobile stacks today: we don't seek a competitive advantage for Mozilla, we seek a competitive advantage for the Web." Read more here: http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/b2g/faq/ [mozilla.org]

WebOS achilles heel?

[vivek7006]

The last OS based on HTML (WebKit to be more specific) was WebOS, and was deemed slow because of that http://nyti.ms/KOMpBx [nyti.ms]. Wouldnt a HTML5 based OS face the same hurdles?

Re:oh great

[chrb]

You jest, but one of the interesting things about Boot 2 Gecko is that all the apps are just localled cached web apps, which means that they get "updated" seamlessly without having to interact with an app store or package manager. You get all of the updating advantages of a web app like Google Docs or Gmail, in that installation and upgrading is completely invisible to the user. Even the included apps (the launcher, the dialler, photo viewer, web browser, etc.), which would be native on any other platform, are all just web apps loaded from a particular URL - you can access the same URL using Firefox on a desktop PC, or from an Android phone running Firefox Mobile, and those apps will run. It's the cross platform solution that eliminates the need for native code (think Phone Gap [phonegap.com]).

Mozilla is aiming to produce a platform that will make apps just an extension of the web. And to standardize everything that they need to do, so that other platforms can implement their APIs. Is it possible for everything? Perhaps not. Does it feel like we are throwing away decades of work on native code? Perhaps, but the web stack of HTML and Javascript is the only cross-platform, globally accepted solution we have. Google tried to add native code to Chrome [google.com] - it's impressive, it works, but nobody's using it. We had Java applets on the web, but those are effectively dead now. There are projects now that can compile from native code to Javascript [github.com] - see this amazing demo of Sauerbraten in Javascript running with accelerated WebGL [syntensity.com]. It's not difficult to imagine a world where Javascript is basically the common bytecode, and with bridges to native APIs it becomes possible to access all hardware, do anything, from a web app that is running on any platform, be it iOS, Windows, Android, Linux, etc.

As I wrote in another comment: the current situation with apps is a bit of a throwback - can you imagine if viewing a web site required you to install it through an app store? And for an author, updating their web site required them to push their site to Dell, who would then approve it and push it out to people with Dell computers? But you need a different web site for people with Asus computers, and you have to push your Asus-build site to them for approval and redistribution? It's crazy, if that were the situation with the web it would've never taken off. Making apps more like the web, or expanding the web to consume apps, whichever way you look at it, is a good thing.