It's a little slow on my Nexus 6, but really surprisingly usable.
The fact that this is even possible is pretty great. I've been getting more and more frustrated with Android lately, but being able to do things like this is still a really great feature.
Very neat way to get a feel for Firefox OS without the need for new hardware.
Probably even slower on my Nexus 5, took some time to show up, and crashed as soon as I clicked on the top search bar. Agreed it's a great thing that we can do it, but I guess I'll have to wait for Firefox OS to become really polished.
> let you use Gaia (the user interface of FirefoxOS) on your Android device, as an alternative homescreen.
So.. this is just a launcher? Not anything to do with actually running an OS, just pretty icons and such? Shame. I was really looking forward to some kind of dual-boot or co-exist setup. I guess FFOS is in the same place a lot of small and hobbyist projects are at - without the marketshare of android, you simple do not have drivers available for your platform and considering the closed nature of most SoC's, its impossible to write you own.
Its kinda sad that smartphones didnt evolve like PCs. Drivers and specs have become proprietary trade secrets and that hurts us all.
That said, a FFOS Android distro would be pretty nice, especially if it broke away from the Google world of google play services, play store, etc. Imagine CM but without all the suckitude. I could see that having a chance and the driver problem would be solved.
Author of the project here. This is still very unpolished.
So... my goal with doing that is to lower the barrier to entry and get more people to try the Firefox OS user experience. Currently it needs some dedication (either getting a supported device, or flashing your existing one), and that's obviously preventing us to get mindshare, both from users and developers.
Having simply to install an android app is vastly simpler for many people that are just curious at first. Some things will always be a bit different in the android version compared to a full flash, but I expect that to be relatively minor. I'm trying to get as much meaningful OS integration, like opening links from android apps in our browser frames, bridging our Web Activities and Android Intents, etc.
Please make it an official Mozilla (sub) project and keep us updated with reoccurring news. Great work, it works really smooth on a highend smartphone, comparable to Android UI and iOS.
I haven't played with it, but if I had to take a guess, it should be functionally equivalent to FFOS (for apps, anyway). The closest parallel may be the iOS Simulator - it gives you access to the iOS APIs on your Mac. This _should_ allow you to run FFOS apps on your Android device.
Since the userspace of FFOS all runs on web tech, if this has enough of the runtime to power the homescreen, it should be able to power the apps too.
That's a good point. I think the interesting thing is that Android drivers do exist for all these device features, so any ODM that has an Android device could respin it as a Firefox OS device.
Right. As more of an enthusiast than any sort of developer (I've flashed my share of third party Android builds but never tried to create my own) I've always understood this to be why anyone can't just port the latest version of Android to a given device. Drivers need to be baked in and without access to proprietary driver code, you're still beholden to OEMs unless your hardware is supported by AOSP.
What value would FFOS really provide on a phone that was sold with Android? Is replicating the guts all that important, if Mozilla's innovations are elsewhere?
One thing I really liked about this was the vertical scrolling of the home screen. I think it would be cool if Android did this with their home screens. That seems to be how we naturally read on our devices (webpages, news apps, email etc), so why should we have to horizontal swipe to change screens?
> so why should we have to horizontal swipe to change screens?
Because you change screens and you don't scroll. As the swipe motion is over more than 80% of the screen that would not work from top to bottom, only scrolling feels natural.
If anyone is interested in trying out Firefox OS, Multiboot is a great way to try it out (if your device is supported by multiboot). Truth be told, I don't know if running Firefox OS through multiboot has any caveats, but it worked for me when I tried it.
Nice way to get a feel but it is very laggy on my MotoG gen 1. I'd love to switch but... Whatsapp... Yeah, I hate it but it is THE thing among my friends. Same thing goes for Ubuntu Phone. Definitely a shame multibooting is not easier then it is now.
No, Firefox OS is built on top of the same Linux kernel as Android, and can use the same drivers as Android, but that's pretty much the only common stuff.
Last time I looked, Gonk used a significant amount of Android code as well that wasn't drivers[1]. That being said, they are fairly significantly different at a few levels.
As a user of a ~$800 Android flagship phone I can't wait for the day that I can leave this to rot to use my Flame (or install FxOS on this device, but .. yeah. Exynos, the worst of the worst thing you can buy today. Don't do it. Never do it).
No use derailing the thread, this project is cool!
As a current owner of the current top of the line iOS, Android, and FirefoxOS devices. I would LOVE to ditch Android and iOS for FirefoxOS on high-end android hardware.
Android shares more and more information with every app on your phone, with each update (ex. every app get your Google email address and all wifi networks, even with "no special permissions"). iOS is closed source and walled off. FirefoxOS is a refreshing change. For the first time there is a usable mobile OS that puts users in control of everything.
Firefox made sense from a business point of view (in the sense of making something people want, never mind its search bar money) because it had a lot of features that IE lacked, such as tabbed browsing, not being the primary target for hacking, and its cross-platform support. Those are reasons people actually used Firefox.
Firefox OS doesn't make sense the same way, because they aren't making anything that people want. As far as I can tell, it's a way for Mozillans to testify their faith in JavaScript.
For a lot of people, the appeal of Firefox at the time was that it was developed by a company whose primary goal was to improve the internet as public infrastructure.
With the mobile market being dominated by Google, Microsoft and Apple, Firefox OS makes sense in the same way.
For users, it is about building a platform in which users are not locked to a proprietary silo, and are not spied upon by default.
For carriers and hardware vendors, it is about building a platform that is not 100% controlled by Google. Recall that Google can decide to revoke Android license from any vendor on arbitrary grounds, and if you lose your Android license, you pretty much lose everything (no AGPS, no Google Maps, no Google Play, etc.)
Oh, and yes, it's also a third thing: it's designed to be a cool platform for [web]developers.
>For users, it is about building a platform in which users are not locked to a proprietary silo
How are they not locked into the 'silo' of FirefoxOS and the FirefoxOS APIs? If the answer is that the apps are 100% web standards compliant then users already have web browsers that can run those apps without needing to use FirefoxOS, so what is the point of FirefoxOS for users?
>Recall that Google can decide to revoke Android license from any vendor on arbitrary grounds, and if you lose your Android license, you pretty much lose everything (no AGPS, no Google Maps, no Google Play, etc.)
While this is shitty, it still just leaves you pretty much in the same place as FirefoxOS (being able to access (some of) those services through a web browser rather than a native app). If a hardware vendor is worried about losing the licence to use the native google maps app, why would they move to FirefoxOS - a platform without a native google maps app?
The entire project seems more about politics and religion than an actual business case. Which is fair enough, but isn't a recipe for commercial success or market penetration.
> How are they not locked into the 'silo' of FirefoxOS and the FirefoxOS APIs? If the answer is that the apps are 100% web standards compliant then users already have web browsers that can run those apps without needing to use FirefoxOS, so what is the point of FirefoxOS for users?
Because the other platforms don't support all of the standards developed by FirefoxOS, and will have no incentive to implement them without competition. Basic economics.
> How are they not locked into the 'silo' of FirefoxOS and the FirefoxOS APIs?
FirefoxOS is fully open source, while the Google platform is not. At the very least, that provides an environment where the source code for all the official supported platform is Free Software, which isn't true for Android.
This means that all users could share the same experience without depending on proprietary software (except maybe for drivers and BIOS specific to the hardware platform).
So instead of losing all the Google apps with an Android fork, let's throw away all the other Android apps, too! That sounds like a great way to kick off your fine-grained-permissions-having phone project.
History lesson from an old guy: Firefox was born out of a stagnating IE (MS was pissed about the whole DOJ saga) and a bloated Netscape. Opera was a fun/weird side project (it used to fit on a floppy!) but Firefox was literally born in the dark ages of browser development to serve a clear need(s): lean, fast, modern.
Once could argue this same "need" exists for smartphone OS's. However, not so easy to swap those out, in contrast to Firefox which was an easy switch for most.
> Firefox was literally born in the dark ages of browser development to serve a clear need(s): lean, fast, modern.
Yes, and imo Firefox was the best browser for several years, until Chrome/Chromium took hold. Chrome is faster, it's developer tools are still better than Firefox's, and maybe more importantly, by usage it currently ranks highest: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers
Mozilla has really struggled in the past several years with Firefox, and Firefox OS is similarly fighting. As noted in http://www.cnet.com/news/firefox-os-in-flux-as-mozilla-loses... "Mozilla joined Microsoft, Samsung and BlackBerry in learning that it's brutally hard to compete successfully. Of the 334 million phones shipped during the first quarter of 2015, Google's Android OS accounted for 78 percent and Apple's iOS 18.3 percent, according to analysis firm IDC. That leaves just 3.7 percent for all other challengers."
> One could argue this same "need" exists for smartphone OS's.
I'm not sure if I agree completely. Firefox OS is modern in the sense that it aims to be HTML/CSS/JS-based, but in what sense is it either lean or fast? If it is HTML/CSS/JS-based, it probably won't take up less space than compiled apps would. And from others here, you can see there are complaints about its speed.
I will continue to use Firefox at home, but I think Firefox OS needs to be rethought before I'll use it. I don't think lean/simplistic and fast should be the goals. Instead I'd suggest:
(1) Freedom: How can it be used almost anywhere for almost anything? Why just mobile devices? What about building atop the Linux kernel, thereby having access to a slew of possible devices, and providing easy access to them via JS?
(2) Fun: How can it be fun to both use and develop for via well-designed but easy to use libraries along with great documentation that automatically generated and given lots of attention along with lots of examples for each version.
However, that would be a huge undertaking and I don't foresee them doing it.
Google didn't donate money to Mozilla (not large-scale anyway), it paid for being the default search engine just like it pays Apple and Opera, for instance. Very traditional business deal.
I'm not quite sure what you mean. It was a revenue sharing deal at that time and very orthodox at that. It was new in that it was the first time a search / advertising company paid a browser vendor, but that doesn't make it a one-sided charity act or some special kind of deal that could be summarized appropriately with "Google funding Mozilla", as this only tells half of the story.
at 2015 firefox aka mozilla is a waste of time and a good way to waste productivity and firefox os is one of the great example. they made open source a business and they use it .. bad ass
in less: "Firefox is like: share about us, talk about us, contribute us, do anything for us because we are the real guy of open-web, social, secure, fast, faster, fastest, open-source …." copied from this post https://medium.com/@rakibtg/excuse-me-mozilla-do-not-impose-...
The fact that this is even possible is pretty great. I've been getting more and more frustrated with Android lately, but being able to do things like this is still a really great feature.
Very neat way to get a feel for Firefox OS without the need for new hardware.