Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by garysweaver 4730 days ago
With two big differences:

1. Knowledge resources available to team and experience of the organization in the subject matter far exceed what the WebOS team had.

2. Was free/open and somewhat collaborative almost from the beginning. I say "somewhat collaborative" because the priority of the team was to create an operating system for a phone, with other forms (like a computer connected to other devices) taking a far backseat.

However, I agree in that, despite optimizations, it has a long way to go to compete with Android which almost "owns" the market it is after.

Politically, the timing is fairly good this announcement, though. Right after Google's black eye over privacy concerns, people might be slightly more likely to embrace Mozilla products. But, who knows. Competing in Android's turf is going to be a serious uphill battle.

It will succeed if:

1. They really embrace community input and provide incentives for people to get involved. That is part of being Mozilla. They don't need to be Apple or Google.

2. They need a charismatic leader with the vision of Jobs, someone with the design talent of Jony Ive, and someone that is capable of recruiting and organizing community talent like _______ (a name doesn't come to mind).

2 comments

There's also four years' worth of hardware advancement that they get to ride on for free. Mobile hardware is a lot more sophisticated now than it was in 2009, so making an HTML+CSS+JS interface that feels performant is easier today than it was then.
Let me know when then run at same speed as native apps, otherwise I can use existing mobile OS and their respective browsers.
Personally I won't ever exchange native apps performance for HTML5 based apps.
Which is funny, considering that a huge number of iOS and Android apps are actually HTML5 apps often using an engine slower than FirefoxOS', maskerading as native apps :)
I can guarantee not the ones on my devices.