Ask HN: What makes Firefox OS better than webOS?

[justinreeves]

I don't understand why Mozilla chose to create Firefox OS, rather than pick up development of Palm/HP's webOS?

It seems like a lot of what Mozilla wants to do could be done easily with webOS, since webOS has been open-sourced, it would run great on the hardware Mozilla is targeting, apps are developed with HTML+CSS+Javascript… what am I missing?

If webOS couldn't make it as a platform, why will Firefox OS?

[fabrice_d]

From a very practical point of view, webOS is/was webkit based, while we obviously wanted to leverage our own rendering engine (gecko). webOS also is not 100% web technologies (the "window manager" is native code iirc), and overall we had different ideas on how to improve the web platform to build an OS.

I don't know much about Enyo, but one important thing is that we think that no framework should be needed to build apps for firefoxOS. But I'd like to know if enyo apps can run on fxos. The UI of the phone itself (called gaia, https://github.com/mozilla-b2g/gaia/) is pretty much framework-less.

webOS didn't make it as a platform for various reasons: lack of devices, no strong community for instance. Mozilla is in a way better position here.

[hajile]

From a practical perspective, it doesn't matter if the window manager is native to the web (and gecko's proprietary iframe solutions are not). Also important is that webOS allows native development (a problem that would go away if w3c would agree to standardize something like LLVM bytecode).

Applications in webOS were not limited to Enyo. You only needed to access the proprietary API appropriately which is the same as with phone gap or the FF API (which isn't an approved standard).

Enyo 2.4 works on IE8+, FF4+ (actually 3+, but not tested), Chrome 10+ (once again, works on earlier, but not tested), opera, Android browser, Safari 5+, etc

You can check out the Enyo project at enyojs.com (it's apache 2 licensed). It currently has both a mobile theme (onyx) and a LG TV theme (moonstone -- for LG smart TVs). The partially finished Mochi theme (see the specs at https://github.com/enyojs/mochi/wiki/Mochi-Designs ) also has a lot of potential.

My personal issue with FF OS is that the UI sucks. With webOS being released under the Apache 2 license (which grants patent use), there was no reason to use a crappy design (except for "not invented here" syndrome). Even today, the core UI and features of webOS are better than iOS, WP, and Android (despite Matias Duarte's best effort to transform Android into webOS).

Only webOS is easy to use on a phone, but still feels natural on a tablet with almost no changes (and Enyo enables this app transition from the ground up which is why developers chose to use it instead of something else). In fact, webOS could even scale up to full-sized desktops with some modifications (as 10GUI shows).

Finally, webOS has a very large community for an OS that was discontinued a couple of years ago. The Preware community continues to release updates and new apps still make the occasional appearance.

[fabrice_d]

The difference is that Mozilla is actively working on standardizing the pieces of fxOS that we consider mature enough and for which there is interest from other browser vendors. That's not a fast process, but calling all our apis "proprietary" is unfair.

If you find that our UI sucks, please contribute to improve it!

[malandrew]

How are you guys doing the window management today on FirefoxOS? Is it Gaia? If so, how do you perform windowing in Gaia? The reason I ask is because that's one capability the framework I work on (famo.us) is particularly good at. I know some people at Mozilla have worked with it on Firefox OS devices (speaking of which, we do need to get some of the newly released dev phones).

[fabrice_d]

Window management is done in gaia by the system app that has a window manager implementation. It's all iframes dancing around!

[viraptor]

Probably the company behind it. HP dropped the tablets instead of investing in developing some software for it (you could review the whole catalog in an hour or so). WebOS itself was great (still is as Enyo framework) in my opinion. I'd really like it if Mozilla just picked up that project instead.

[e15ctr0n]

LG bought parts of webOS from HP[0] in 2013 and showcased a smart TV running on webOS[1] at CES this year[2]. HP continues to be involved in the development of Enyo[3].

[0] http://www.lg.com/us/press-release/webos-release

[1] http://www.lg.com/us/tvs/lg-55LB7200-led-tv

[2] http://lgusblog.com/product-news/lg-wins-35-awards-2014-inte...

[3] http://www.webosnation.com/lg-committed-open-source-webos-de...

[viraptor]

I know they're trying to continue, but neither HP nor Palm when they owned the brand did anything amazing with it. Palm pre was really cool and WebOS on Touchpad was great to use... it just really missed useful apps. I get a feeling that if they invested in getting even a 100 of good apps either written for or ported to WebOS at the time of the first tablet, it could turn out completely differently...

[e15ctr0n]

The Verge has a great article on the decay of Palm once HP bought it.

http://www.theverge.com/2012/6/5/3062611/palm-webos-hp-insid...

So, coming back to the point of contrast with Firefox OS, one has to acknowledge that Mozilla is pushing Firefox OS very hard. There is a dedicated app store which has more than a thousand apps now. Mozilla also has a passionate community behind it.

[justinreeves]

Yeah it seems like it was a great platform, and was just held back by the companies that owned it. I'd still like to see it be picked up again, even if it's not by Mozilla for the reasons that fabrice_d pointed out. I remember it looking really slick, and running incredibly smooth, even on the hardware that was available 5 years ago.