Firefox Mobile Threatens Mobile App Stores, Says Mozilla

Barence writes "Mozilla claims that its new Firefox Mobile browser could be the beginning of the end for the hugely popular app stores created by Apple and its ilk. Mozilla claims Firefox Mobile will have the fastest Javascript engine of any mobile browser, and that will allow developers to write apps once for the web, instead of multiple versions for the different mobile platforms. 'As developers get more frustrated with quality assurance, the amount of handsets they have to buy, whether their security updates will get past the iPhone approval process ... I think they'll move to the web,' Mozilla's mobile VP, Jay Sullivan, told PC Pro. 'In the interim period, apps will be very successful. Over time, the web will win because it always does.'"

Seems Unlikely

[saisuman]

I saw my wife playing Assassin's Creed on the iPhone today. I can't imagine a game of that quality being remade in Javascript unless it comes with some funky O3D-like capabilities.

I don't want web apps.

[obarthelemy]

I want local apps, with local data, that I can synch with anything (one of my PCs, on-line storage...).

I don't want to be dependent on a wireless net connection to access my apps nor my data. In my experience, even wifi is flaky. And I can't trust 3rd parties to have my apps and data available, secure, and safe.I'm a big ASS fan. I'd be interested in local javascript apps, with local data storage, maybe...

Plus the smallest-common-denominator issue: as long as different devices have different capabilities (color, accelerometer, multi-touch, video/3D acceleration...)

It's the flashy "store" people want

[nmoog]

"Over time, the web will win because it always does." Yeah, over time... "over time" linux will win too. It's true most of the apps from the app store could have been made identically as web apps. But then they wouldn't have been on the app store - and no one would have ever seen them. I'm continually shocked at the amount of money the non-nerds (bosses, project managers, those other people who I'm not sure what they do except go to corporate lunches) at my work spend on the app store. MONEY! that's crazy - I've never seen people voluntarily spend MONEY on apps before! But Apple made a great system for "the normals". They don't want to trawl the web for nifty web apps (like this JavaSript platform game [mrspeaker.net] I may or may not be shamelessly plugging). The just want a happy little environment where they can buy stuff while pretending to be typing important emails during meetings.

Beta is terrible

[jspenguin1]

The current beta is far worse than the native Maemo browser (itself based on Firefox): - No inertial scrolling. - One window per instance, no tabs. This is a deal killer. I don't necessarily need tabs, but opening a separate instance for each page I want to view simultaneously is unacceptable. - Extremely slow to start and load pages. - Package is not "optified" - it installs to the device root instead of /opt, taking 20MB out of 256 available in the root. - Currently there are only three add-ons not marked "experimental" and even in experimental there's no AdBlock Plus (at least, that I can find). Hopefully, these problems will be fixed, but for now, I'm staying with the native Maemo browser.

Two things.

[Hurricane78]

Two things, my friend:

1. Java is THE dominant platform if you want to program anything that works on pretty much all mobile phones on the planet. Apart from the iPhone, and some Windows Mobile phones, I don’t think there is a phone that can’t do Java.
2. In the real world, not many people care about the App Store or the iPhone. It has only 3-4% percent of the global market share, and technologically already was surpassed when it came to the market in Japan, was a novelty for about a month in most of Europe, and only in the USA has gained more than 10% for obvious reasons. Which means, others are still hugely dominant. So much in fact, that I don’t even think it’s worth targeting the iPhone platform. (I’m sorry, but if you now think I’m trolling, that’s the reality distortion bubble, created by the hype. I’m in no way hating the iPhone or anything. It has great raw power and a good UI. I’m just stating the facts as I know them from actually being in the market, and keeping up to date, because I need that to make a living. Prejudice is just stupid, and am happy to be corrected. :)

So I really see no point in yet another layer of inner-platform failure [wikipedia.org], to use JavaScript, when you already have fast Java with accelerated OpenGL, EAX-like audio support, and tons of functions. (Be aware that as much of it is accelerated, Java on mobile phones is vastly faster per raw CPU power, than on desktop VMs.)

If they can offer me all those hardware-accelerated APIs, an ability to check if the phone supports them, a fast JavaScript compiler, and 96% of all phones of the world having it pre-installed, I might consider writing for their platform. ;)

Amazingly Accurate

[sexconker]

I expect slapchop articles to be stupid, wrong, and shitty. I expect to be able to bitch and moan about them. It's why I come here.

But this article has that distinctive truthiness to it that flies in the face of what the masses love.

99% of the applications on the various mass-market marketplaces (Apple's, Google's, and Microsoft's) are pointless crap that would be better served up via a standard web page.

Of course, the browsers on those phones are crap, and no one bothers to get Opera Mobile even though it blows the shit out of your phone's standard browser (especially if your phone supports the non java version).

The bottom line is that this is a good thing.
I see far too much time, money, and energy wasted on "apps" (both by developers and by users) when a competent mobile web page would be a much better choice for the consumer.

But of course, if you can mask your web page as an "app" and SELL it on a virtual store that advertises for you, well shit yes the developers are going to focus on "apps" and ignore their mobile sites.

I seriously hope Firefox runs well on all the major mobile platforms (Windows Mobile 6.5 and up, iPhone OS, Droid, and the other one that a I always forget the name of, no not Blackberry). I'd love to have a competent browser SUCCEED in the mobile space. We already have Opera, but as I stated before, no one uses it. People will use Firefox.

(If you want to complain about my use of "truthiness", I'll just tell you it's as cromulent a word as "distinctive".)

Re:Um...how do you figure?

[BHearsum]

1: You're missing the point. The point is that developers will move to browser independent webapps rather than writing an iPhone+blackberry app+htc touch app, etc.
2: Web browsers are not appropriate for everything, but they're becoming increasingly faster, and increasingly more appropriate for more intense tasks.
3: There's already lots of subscription websites - Mozilla need not do anything to support this - people can do this on their own.
4: The browser already has access to everything you listed: camera, accelerometers, GPS, and multitouch. And yes, the hardware is abstracted away by the platform and made available through a standard API.

PastryKit

[fandingo]

Ars Technica had an article about a hidden framework that Apple was developing before Apps hit with 2.0. http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2009/12/pastrykit-best-iphone-web-app-library-you-never-heard-about.ars [arstechnica.com]

Actually looks pretty cool and could allow more web-based apps.

I still think that local apps will be preferreable. The thing is that a lot of apps are only useful on the web, so the concerns about not being able to access them w/o a net connection are baseless. Not all apps, but there's lots of social networking apps and others that need networks.

Re:Beta is terrible

[jspenguin1]

I'm still not convinced. There is still a lot that needs to be implemented, such as context-sensitive menus. I have not been able to find a way to save a link or an image, and it's only by trial and error that I was able to open a link in a new tab (open the keyboard, hold ctrl, wait for message about new tab, open tab bar, click on new tab).

The mock-ups I found here [mozilla.org] look good, but they are a long way from actually being implemented.

Re:web-app-web

[dgatwood]

Local storage is pretty cool, and the CSS animation and stuff doubly so. There's still the problem of having a good way to back up local storage.... *sigh*

That said, it's still not even slightly close to what you can do in a native app. Even if performance was identical, the DOM is beyond half assed as a GUI environment. There's not even a drag and drop mechanism built in that works across all browsers. There's no way to guarantee that your handlers won't get stripped out by some overzealous UI library that you load. Basic functionality like contentEditable (for WYSIWYG editing) is barely supported in any browser, replete with hundreds of serious bugs that make it very hard to deal with. There's no way to set up an automatically recurring callback with a guaranteed period. There's no way to spawn multiple threads of concurrent execution (except for a FireFox-specific mechanism). There's no standard way to talk to hardware. And those are just the huge problems.

Even simple things like specifying which UI elements should grow proportional to the window size is an utter pain. Creating clickable buttons that don't get their text content selected can be rather entertaining. Convincing the browser to not deselect the selected text in a contentEditable region when you do so is doubly so. Then, you have that fun box model that only a committee could love (all of us are dumber than any of us). Don't get me started on trying to do column layouts with CSS. I could go into specifics, but if you've ever tried to build any significant web application, you're already nodding in agreement.... :-)

Yeah, it's going in the right direction. It's got a long way to go, unfortunately. Right now, it takes mounds of custom GUI libraries just to get usable UI, mainly working around the fact that the web browser just wasn't designed to do this stuff. When I can write a web app that's lightweight and doesn't require bringing in something as heavyweight as Prototype just to get anything done, we'll be at least in the right ballpark./p>

Trusting the client

[tepples]

[Cross-Origin Resource Sharing] actually is [secure], for non-public resources (ones requiring a login).

The right solution in this case would be a 401 Unauthorized result, not a client-side-enforced limitation. Are you envisioning a situation in which the data is available to humans for free and to proxies for free but to client-side scripts for pay?

Mozilla promises, Opera delivers and gets ignored

[Ilgaz]

Currently, Opera 10 is available on every handset which is open to 3rd party. Read it as iPhone excluded.

J2ME (via Opera Mini), Symbian (which has 40% share and not even mentioned by Mozilla), Windows Mobile and Android supported. It is basically the same engine as Desktop one, bit by bit thanks to their ultra portable web renderer. Even "dead" (chap 11.) UIQ3 is supported somehow with a native client.

They are packing "Widgets" which are based on W3C standards for desktop right now, Opera 10.20 alpha does run same widget across 3 desktop platforms. Linux, OS X and Windows. It doesn't need to crack into their build system to predict they will go mobile with that idea.

What bothers me is, PC Pro, a UK based site doesn't even ask why on earth Symbian is not even mentioned or supported since Symbian is actually a british thing to begin with. Nor they fail to bother checking Opera which supports some handsets/operating systems which are abandoned by vendor themselves.

For web designers, widget developers, there is nothing to bother. They as a small company always supported standards, somehow failed to get market share because of it. So, there is no "Opera specific" quirk. It is all W3C.