The system is still extremely buggy. It closes in mid-writing-a-text message or mid-call. You expect this behaviour from a toy, but not a phone.
Mind you, to people in emerging markets, it is a tool, not a toy, even if they only pay $25 for it. To these people, it's a lot of money.
The hardware is very slow. It is too slow to render HTML5, which is especially hard when you have to type on the touch screen. The problem is that the system lags quite long after you touch the screen, so you are a few letters ahead of what is on the screen. There is no feedback.
So, to me, Mozilla is really disconnected from reality if they think this could work.
I love what Mozilla is doing and I'm tempted to move everything possible to Mozilla.
I love the idea of ruthlessly developing for low end systems rather than just assuming everyone has 1 GHz and 1GB.
I hope designers and coders enjoy the challenge of working with such limited systems.
I tried to use Paypal website on an iPhone 4 yesterday. It was painfully slow. It was loading a bunch o stuff that I just didn't need or want. Horrible experience.
Firefox OS is very, very heavily focused on the use of HTML5, JavaScript, and other web technologies for the development of mobile applications.
Yet as you found out recently, apps or websites built using these technologies are often extremely inefficient, even when highly tuned by very experienced developers.
To get good performance on limited devices, the best thing to do is to move away from HTML5, JavaScript, and related technologies. Applications written in C, C++, Objective-C and even Java vastly outperform HTML5/JavaScript-based apps, especially on devices with limited capabilities.
Yet this is completely contrary to what Mozilla is doing with Firefox OS. So it seems really unusual to me to support them and their efforts, when it's clear that their approach flies totally in the face of what you'd like to see happen.
> Applications written in C, C++, Objective-C and even Java vastly outperform HTML5/JavaScript-based apps, especially on devices with limited capabilities.
Citation when it comes to Java (assuming you're talking about Dalvik, because that's the relevant Java implementation on mobile)? Dalvik is not generally considered as fast as either V8 or SpiderMonkey. For example: https://blog.mozilla.org/javascript/2013/08/01/staring-at-th...
The issue is not wether spidermonkey or v8 is faster than dalvik, the issue is wether the UI feels responsive or not.
On a low hand device,you cant honestly say, an HTML5 ui on firefox os will be faster and more reponsive than an android ui coded with the android framework. Wether X javascript engine is fast or not is irrelevant. Users are not stupid, they can tell a fast and responsive ui from a clunky HTML/JS one.
Finally Javascript gives you 0 tool for manual memory management,which is central for any embedded programming. On Android and Iphone one can go down to C/C++ if necessary.
The idea of a 25$ device that would run javascript programs/uis efficiently is preposterous.
> Finally Javascript gives you 0 tool for manual memory management,which is central for any embedded programming. On Android and Iphone one can go down to C/C++ if necessary.
asm.js offers manual memory management, with no garbage collection. You can compile C and C++ and it will run essentially natively, modulo the sandboxed safety checks.
Unrealistic micro-benchmarks aside, I've yet to find an Android app written using HTML5 and JavaScript that feels anywhere near as smooth and efficient as native apps written in Java. I suppose I don't have numbers to back me up, but I'm not sure that really even matters. The performance difference is something that users notice.
Firefox OS' developer story is definitely a worse-is-better strategy. The number of people that know JavaScript outnumbers the ninety odd people who know Objective C, Android's flavour of Java, or some new native application framework Mozilla might have created.
No, that's the point. This ridiculously overpowered phone was cripppled by PayPal's website. The phone slowed to a crawl. The website was loading odd stuff and doing weird things.
It is slow and the touchscreen is poor. The OS build that it shipped with wasn't very good, and updates have been slow and problematic.
But. I've been happily using it as my main phone since I got it in early January, and I expect that to stay true for a fair while. It's not at all 'unusable'. It makes phone calls and sends and receives text messages. It even seems to handle MMS better than my Galaxy Nexus did. It browses the web, although that can take some patience. The Marketplace has few apps, and fewer good ones, but it does my calculations, tells me the weather, helps me find directions when I'm lost, and has numerous Flappy Bird clones.
I think it's amazing that it only took $100 to have something that does all that arrive on my doorstep. Sometimes it's more amazing, though, that the technology around us is so cool that to m[ost|any] people that doesn't feel good enough.
Mind you, to people in emerging markets, it is a tool, not a toy, even if they only pay $25 for it. To these people, it's a lot of money.
The hardware is very slow. It is too slow to render HTML5, which is especially hard when you have to type on the touch screen. The problem is that the system lags quite long after you touch the screen, so you are a few letters ahead of what is on the screen. There is no feedback.
So, to me, Mozilla is really disconnected from reality if they think this could work.