Comments on: Why Firefox OS may bring balance back to the smartphone industry

By: Sam

Sam — Thu, 28 Feb 2013 03:09:00 +0000

How soon people forget: when the iPhone was introduced, there was no app store, except for a few built-in apps, it was all supposed to be web based. Well, Apple shifted gears pretty quickly, they were too far ahead of the time (think back to using web apps with EDGE as your data transport…)

Is it time for pure web apps to be sufficient? With much more powerful phone CPUs and much higher bandwidth (and lower latency?) networks, maybe; however, it still seems that mobile platform apps outperform webapps in usability and power by significant margins, so maybe not quite yet.

By: FreedomIsExpensive

FreedomIsExpensive — Wed, 27 Feb 2013 13:21:33 +0000

This sounds great in theory. But as far as privacy goes, this appears to be signaling the end of privacy as well. With other platforms, including desktop and mobile platforms, it is possible to inspect the connections that are being made from the device to remote locations. Since all apps on the Firefox OS devices are not native apps, this is not possible.

So when the carrier’s install their own backdoors in the phones (and you know they will), you will have zero privacy from eavesdropping, packet sniffing, phoning home, etc. Even when on a wifi connection, you will not be able to keep the carrier, or any app that you use for that matter, from sniffing your local LAN.

By: Britt Severence

Britt Severence — Tue, 26 Feb 2013 17:03:09 +0000

As a web-app developer, we’ve bet on HTML5 for cross-platform accessibility, and it’s exciting to see Firefox unveil an OS for mobile that enables “publish once”, “access everywhere”, no matter the device type.

The Android and iOS app-store silos are burdensome to the consumer and costly for the small developer to manage.

The developers at: web-e-books.com

By: Barry

Barry — Tue, 26 Feb 2013 15:39:03 +0000

Check out Tizen: https://www.tizen.org/.

By: roflmao

roflmao — Tue, 26 Feb 2013 10:49:46 +0000

Not anymore, the PIGS have been moved to Africa for economical reasons ;)

By: Edward Beckett

Edward Beckett — Tue, 26 Feb 2013 06:00:12 +0000

@Mike

18 Carriers are already on board with the FirefoxOS:: and when there are carriers there are OEMs …

By: Mike Madden

Mike Madden — Tue, 26 Feb 2013 00:58:24 +0000

This will eat up the low end Android market share. Cheap devices for developing countries and non power users like Grandma and pre-paid users will be the ones using this. I don’t see this making a splash like Android as the OEMs will not be marketing their flagship phones with Firefox OS.

By: Danox

Danox — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 21:24:51 +0000

Some people never were in Windows, nothing to miss still just good enough.

By: Danox

Danox — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 21:20:58 +0000

You are right, Mac and iOS fans won’t try it, Firefox over the years has had very little on the Mac platform and even less on iOS. Good Luck to them.

By: karst333

karst333 — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 20:10:01 +0000

I think this is about 6 years ahead of its time. The last decade belonged to Blackberry, Windows Mobile and Palm. This decade belongs to IOS and Andriod, but the next decade will revert back to to HTML5, it has too. That is why we went to the web in the first place to get out of the Windows Desktop walled garden.