With Firefox OS, Mozilla gets a little dirty to clean the mobile web
theverge.comI just read this great report by Chris Ziegler about Mozilla’s Firefox OS. I saw an early version last year at MWC and it has hung out in the back of my brain ever since. I’m curious to see what happens with it.
“It’s a means to an end — a good end, not an evil one. “We are fundamentally in the same place we were over a decade ago where [the web is] being unnaturally controlled by a few parties,” Kovacs said. “The same call that we heard over a decade ago is being asked again of us now, which is to free the web.” Mozilla wants to break the Apple-Google ecosystem duopoly by enlisting strange bedfellows — network operators — to support a low-cost phone that can run any app, published by anyone, anywhere, without restrictions. It just needs to get a little dirty to do it.”
Firefox OS is repeating the mistakes of others and hoping for a different outcome
engadget.comTerrence O’Brien for Engadget:
We’ve caught glimpses of Mozilla’s smartphone offspring before, but Mobile World Congress 2013 was really the proper coming out party. Finally we’ve been given a chance to touch it, see it action and peek at the hardware it’ll be running on. Unfortunately, at this cotillion, Mozilla failed to make a good case for anyone to court its debutante.
Firefox OS continues to intrigue me in some ways, but overall, I’m getting the sense that O’Brien will be right here. Because, well, history.
“We see an opportunity to serve users by converting them from feature phones to inexpensive smartphones. The action is in the emerging market, not going up against the top end of the market in the US, where Android is chasing Apple.”
—Mozilla CTO Brendan Eich talking to TechWeek Europe about Firefox OS.
On one hand, I think this approach is smart. Mozilla doesn’t have the ability to compete in the high-end of the smartphone market. But the low-end is ripe for the picking, and is going to come into play quickly.
On the other hand, I think it’s unwise to think that Apple and Android are simply going to cede the emerging markets. Apple clearly cares a lot about China. They’ve had some success there, but they need to get a cheaper iPhone on the market if it’s really going to work. Brazil, I imagine, will be extremely important to them as well. That’s going to be a tough call for Apple — just how far into their margins they’re willing to dip.
Android, of course, is the “free” OS, so naturally they’re going after the emerging markets as well. Except that “free” in this case often means paying Microsoft to use Android. Oh and some OEMs seem to want to do their own things with Android in those markets and then Google threatens to expel them from their “open” alliances.
Writing your first Firefox OS app
adobe.comRob Lauer shows how you can build a native application for the new Firefox OS using HTML, CSS and JavaScript.
Mozilla renames Boot 2 Gecko as Firefox OS, coming to mobile phones soon
Android, iOS and Windows Phone… and soon there will be one more player, Mozilla. Mozilla has had a mobile phone OS called Boot 2 Gecko for a year, but it’s mainly just been geared towards open source tinkerers. Today, they announced that B2G would now be called ‘Firefox OS’, and would be coming to phone carriers internationally. The first Firefox OS phones will be in Brazil in 2013, with the US coming a little later.
Hacking Firefox OS Apps with Github Pages
While planning a workshop for Dare2BDigital, a technology conference for young women, Lukas and I were looking for an easy way for girls to edit and test their own Firefox OS apps. We were trying to think of where we could host these apps when we decided to try using Github pages.
I’d never actually made a Github page before, but I learned it’s as easy as making a magically named “gh-pages” branch in your repo. To experiment, I decided to test this out on a simple wallpaper app I’ve been working on.
$ git checkout master $ git checkout -b gh-pages $ git push origin gh-pages
And voila! My app showed up at http://leibovic.github.com/mural/. This seems great for development because you can just push changes to the gh-pages branch to update a hosted app. But as a bonus for our workshop, we found you can easily modify the app by hitting the “Edit” button at the top of a file on Github, then committing your changes through the web interface.
Note: After the first push it can take up to 10 minutes for the page to appear. So be patient.
Take a sneak peek at the Firefox OS app marketplace
While Firefox has been offering up Firefox OS to developers for some time, this is the first look at the mobile operating system’s app store.
From what we’ve seen of the current store, it’s a significant break from the top-level storefront we saw back in the Boot to Gecko days, not to mention Mozilla Marketplace on the desktop. The deeper exploration shows a minimalist store that’s focused on quickly delving into individual categories rather than an abundance of highlighted apps.
The Real Firefox OS Mission
arstechnica.comClearly, we hope Firefox OS in itself helps a lot of people. But here’s the real mission:
In this sense, Firefox OS is as much a project to improve the Web as it is a project to build a new mobile operating system. Every Firefox OS API Mozilla can get adopted by other major browsers makes it easier for developers to convert vanilla Web apps into “native” Firefox OS apps, and vice versa. Even if Mozilla’s OS never gains significant market share, the effort to flesh out a complete set of Web standards for mobile computing will help to push the Web forward.
And:
Firefox OS could have a big impact on the Web even if it never gains significant market share. By pushing the Web forward, Mozilla is helping to ensure that mobile websites will continue to be relevant even as developers create hundreds of thousands of proprietary apps. Firefox could lose the battle for the smartphone OS market but still win the war for open standards.
Firefox OS comete los mismos errores de otros esperando un resultado diferente
engadget.comTerrence O’Brien en Engadget describe muy bien como Mozilla repite los mismos errores que otros en el pasado. Lo único que les separa del fracaso es que Firefox OS tiene a las operadoras apoyando el proyecto porque es un OS que consume menos/optimiza mejor el uso de datos.
