[_ea1k]

I'm not sure that adding another OS was the thing to do to fight the ongoing trend towards a proprietary internet.

A better browser, including a better mobile browser is much more useful than Firefox OS every could be, IMO. In fact, this is part of what makes pure OSS Android a practical environment to work in.

I am very glad that they are continuing to put a lot of effort into Firefox on mobile.

[jallmann]

There is a lot to be said for having choice. Just because the dominant browser today is OSS (Chrome) doesn't mean Mozilla should declare victory and pack its bags with Firefox. Likewise, Android is hardly the ideal torch bearer for a Free mobile OS -- while AOSP is open-source, the development process is certainly not open, apps are not open, and that's ignoring other problems of abysmal performance, locked down hardware, and vendor crapware.

The reason that Firefox had the impact it did was because the browser is the gateway to the Internet. Firefox came of age just as the Internet was maturing as a platform, and because of that, Mozilla was able to play an important role in influencing the semblance of openness that we do have on the Internet today.

There was a similar platform shift to mobile, and Mozilla totally missed the boat. Now, please tell me, how will a FOSS (mobile) browser help open up the greater mobile ecosystem? The OS is the gateway to mobile, not the browser, and we need a better gatekeeper.

[atopal]

> There is a lot to be said for having choice. Just because the dominant browser today is OSS (Chrome) doesn't mean Mozilla should declare victory and pack its bags with Firefox.

Just since this is repeated so often: Chrome is not and never has been open source software in any shape or form. Chromium is OSS, but has only a tiny fraction of Chrome's market share and AFAIK nobody really knows what the differences between those two are (outside of the obvious: Flash player, pdf reader, etc.). Btw, Firefox is still the only major browser that's OSS, neither Safari nor Edge/IE are open source.

This isn't academic nitpicking either. Mozilla had to build a PDF reader from scratch (pdf.js), it couldn't just reuse what Chrome was using to display pdfs, since it wasn't open source. However everyone can now use pdf.js for the same task.

[comex]

Note that Chrome's PDF reader was open sourced almost two years ago as pdfium - it was closed source prior to that because it was licensed from Foxit rather than written from scratch.

[pekk]

Chromium behave so similarly to Chrome that it makes no difference to me to use one instead of the other, except for my feelings about the Google brand. It is not a terrible mystery what the differences are. If Chrome were really a proprietary product on the same order as Microsoft Windows, it would not be practically or legally possible to have Chromium at all.

[rplnt]

Does Chromium include all the spyware features found in Chrome?

[jallmann]

I know, but then claiming Chromium as the most popular browser would invite pedantry the other way around, "Hardly anybody uses Chromium, they use Chrome!"

And the analogy holds with AOSP versus the Android that is distributed with Google apps. In any case, comparing the development of Android to Chrom(ium), it is night and day in terms of openness.

[acdha]

Hyperbole does not lead to anything useful.

You might not consider Chrome to be open-source by your personal definition of the term but that's fine hair splitting: you can submit a patch to Chromium and some weeks later millions of Chrome users are running it; you're similarly free to fork chromium and make significant changes while still pulling in code from upstream. Yes, license nerds can argue about philosophical meanings but it's far from the closed-source world of IE/Trident, Opera, etc.

> Mozilla had to build a PDF reader from scratch (pdf.js), it couldn't just reuse what Chrome was using to display pdfs, since it wasn't open source

That's a single, separate component which, as comex pointed out, was licensed from a third-party vendor and nicely illustrates that Chrome is in fact open-source: the only reason it wasn't an option is because it wasn't part of the open source Chrome codebase.

You're also leaving out a key part of the pdf.js (and Shumway for Flash) story which was people at Mozilla trying to demonstrate that you could write complex renderers inside the JavaScript environment and sharply reduce the amount of exposed C/C++ code. I suspect they would have gone with pdfium had it been available but the security improvements would still have made that decision non-trivial.

[wfunction]

> There is a lot to be said for having choice.

Yes there is: https://www.ted.com/talks/barry_schwartz_on_the_paradox_of_c...

[jallmann]

That's a really lazy rebuttal. Having another option that would be superior along multiple dimensions leads to analysis paralysis? We're not talking about Javascript frameworks here.

[astrodust]

Maybe Mozilla isn't a big enough company to tackle it, or it diffuses their focus, but it's important to do.

Ubuntu is still trying, so there's that, and that's great.

http://www.ubuntu.com/phone

[chrisdew]

I am looking forward to using an 8GB RAM 8-core 64-bit ARM phone with 2560x1440 HDMI, running Ubuntu desktop as my main PC in a year or two.

Currently only the quantity of phone RAM and the display resolution are hardware issues.

[azinman2]

Waste of effort. It's never going to work -- the gap is so far and the network effect of apps and ecosystem are so entrenched that Ubuntu would have to do something revolutionary versus an incomplete copy of what other's already have invented and are still improving with massive (collective) resources. Add a dedicated hardware requirement and you've got the nail in the coffin.

[bryanlarsen]

It'll work the same way it happened in PC land.

1: Microsoft will ensure that capable hardware (both phones and peripherals) exists so that Continuum succeeds.

2: Ubuntu will leverage the hardware so that it's usable by the 1% who actually want it. 1% of a really big number is still a big number, so it'll be viable, if only barely.

[azinman2]

Except that's not how this can work.

First Microsoft is going to fail. They already are. Eventually they'll stop producing hardware, but I'll just assume you mean Samsung or whatever.

The hardware is specific to what each phone provides (which changes per device), and usually the hardware vendor ships the drivers closed source integrated with the rest of the OS. In the PC land we had a neutral Microsoft that packaged drivers and distributed them since anyone might want to change their video card. That's not what happens with phones. So Ubuntu will most likely need a very specific phone just as they are currently doing and selling. Which means random people can't just try it out, since the phone they already have and like isn't compatible (let alone "dual boot.")

Now Ubuntu and their partners have stock that needs to get sold, and everything unsold is a loss. I can't install their OS on my iPhone, so there's no community support to be building this in an open and decentralized way. My galaxy won't be supported well because of driver issues, and since android is already open source enough there's no big momentum there to change things either.

Microsoft with all their resources and power can't manage to keep their marketshare and is around 1.7%. 1% of smartphones is huge -- you think Microsoft's billions of dollars and a known name couldn't do it, but Ubuntu can on their own hardware that you now have to buy?

I wouldn't hold my breath.

[nickik]

Well, we are in a simular, or maybe better position then desktop was 10 years ago. So yes, it might not work, but I would not wave the flag yet.

[bobajeff]

I'm not sure, but I think that on Android resources are restricted in ways that give first priority to Dalvik vs other runtimes. I also suspect Chrome is given priority when it comes to integration with it.

There's also something to be said about the advantages that default browser's get in terms of market share.

Mozilla's move to making their own OS might have come too late but the reasoning behind it was both strategically and technically sound.

[_ea1k]

Android doesn't run Dalvik any more and Chrome doesn't appear to be given "priority" in any meaningful sense.

Their reasons may have seemed sound technically, but the business of building a phone ecosystem on a completely new OS were well beyond their abilities.

[bobajeff]

You seem to have ignored the strategic reason for having a platform. It's very hard to compete with a default application.

Sure it may not have been in their wheelhouse but they certainly had reason to try.

[Touche]

They had to build another OS because they couldn't build a better browser on iOS.

[usrusr]

Perspectives for building a better OS running on iPhones weren't that rosy either...

[erikpukinskis]

The problem is Apple and Google have financial incentives to drag their feet on things like WebRTC to prevent the web from eating into app sales in their walled gardens.

VR will be a fascinating glimpse at where we stand in this power struggle. Do I have the right to distribute software to my iPhone owning friend? No. Only Apple has that right.

A web OS would bring us back to the age of decentralized distribution we once had with PCs and boxed software sales. It would offer a check to Google and Apple's attempt to own centralized centralized control of software distribution. An escape valve for the users who Apple and Google are currently preventing from writing the software they'd like to write (like web VR).

Without an open source web OS such apps are gated by what perhaps a few hundred engineers at these two companies can imagine, implement, and push through internal politics.

---

Sent from my iPhone.

[greggman]

In what sense as Google dragged their feet on WebRTC?

[erikpukinskis]

It wasn't supported on Android until December.

But regardless, I didn't say "Google dragged their feet" I said "Google has an incentive to drag their feet". It's the incentive that scares me. I still trust Google to some degree, but not unconditionally.