[LowDog]

Thanks for highlighting the least emphasized but the most important aspect of the operating system, which is being completely free and open. Too often I see people criticizing Firefox OS because it looks slow and the current hardware is inferior to whatever device they have now, but to me, that's completely besides the point. The market needs an open mobile OS that respects the user's liberties, and it's only because of Firefox OS that I finally went for my first smartphone.

The OS definitely has a really long way to go and I've noticed quite a few bugs and plenty of missing essential features, but I'm optimistic about its future, provided the developers acknowledge these issues. I think people also need to be made aware that as development continues, they will be able to install the OS on other more powerful devices if they fall outside of current low end, cheap smartphone market.

On a side note, thanks for sharing the link to your guide because I've been looking all over the place for a good resource to help me start learning how to develop web applications.

[hackuser]

> The OS definitely has a really long way to go and I've noticed quite a few bugs and plenty of missing essential features

What are the (significant) bugs and missing features? I had guessed that, being in production, the basics were finished.

[LowDog]

There are too many list, but I will name a few. If you want a thorough list, head over to the Firefox OS section on Bugzilla.

-Default applications, such as Settings, will intermittently go completely blank. If you zoom out to list all applications, it will look normal, but when you zoom back in, the screen is completely blank.

-Group messages (MMS) are barely functional. You can receive them and initiate them in an unorthodox manner, but you cannot partake in group conversations, nor are they properly displayed as a single thread.

-You cannot add import .ics files to use in the Calendar application. You cannot create recurring events. It's as basic as a calendar can get.

-The clock application doesn't display world time.

-The OS will claim that a SIM card is not inserted when you power on/reboot the phone, even though you can still make calls and send texts. You need to enable and then disable airplane mode in order for it to acknowledge the SIM card (necessary for the Usage application).

-The browser doesn't support extensions. So far, you have tabbed browsing, and you can clear your cookies and your history. That's it.

-Since I last updated my phone, it returns to 100% brightness every time I wake it up from standby. This means that I essentially use the display/brightness settings as my home screen so that I can lower the brightness every single time I want to use my phone (this might be ZTE's fault, but I didn't have this problem before the recent update).

Even my old feature phones from many years ago support some of these features, like proper group messaging. Some of these bugs and feature requests have existed for nearly 2 years on Bugzilla. Nevertheless, I'm enjoying the phone, and I love it when the Marketplace gets updated with new applications to check out. I'm really looking forward to the 2.0 update, and I hope that ZTE rolls it out to the Open C, unlike how they completely abandoned support for the original Open.

[thegeomaster]

I have used the OS and I can confirm your headaches, and maybe even worse (because I've used 1.1 and it was far more bad than the current release version).

They released it too early. It wasn't ready. It still isn't ready, from what I've seen. I'm aware that Android was in a pretty bad state in its own v1.4, but when they release a mobile OS today, it has to put up to expectations set forth by others. No one is going to say "it has so many bugs and far worse functionality than Android/iOS, but it's okay because it's only v1.4" simply isn't going to fly because users expect what they're accustomed to.

And the choice of technology is a little problematic. How can you ever implement Skype, for instance, in Javascript? (But with acceptable performance, naturally.) I guess they have to improve asm.js support astronomically in order to enable such use-cases.

I've developed for FxOS (you can find an app I made on my Github) and it's been really fun and liberating (I have an Android phone so I tried developing for it but I don't like Java, especially the way Android uses the language, and it's been more or less a horror to work with, sadly) but there is a lack of standardization, and supporting docs and building blocks are still not up to my expectations, which is exactly where Android (and I presume iOS) shines. Then again, Javascript is not a bad language. With first class functions, for example, I consider it rather powerful and easy to work with. (But easy to fall into the inefficiency trap, I suppose.) Myself, being a guy who has been writing C/C++ and PHP for scripting it was a great break from routine.

[bzbarsky]

> How can you ever implement Skype, for instance

This is why http://dev.w3.org/2011/webrtc/editor/webrtc.html exists.

[thegeomaster]

I was talking more about video encoding/decoding in real time as Skype uses a proprietary protocol and encoding scheme IIRC.

[sphink]

That is what webrtc is for too, without the "proprietary" part.

[rimantas]

  > The market needs an open mobile OS that respects the
  > user's liberties

How do you know that?