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FIREFOX OS,
REPEATING
THE MISTAKES
OF OTHERS
DISTRO
03.08.13
FORUM
EDITORIAL
BY TERRENCE O’BRIEN
I feel bad for Mozilla, I really do.
Competitors and the march of time
are closing in quicker than it can raise
its defenses. Her crown jewel, Firefox,
is feeling the squeeze as Chrome encroaches
on its hard-won territory and
mobile offensives have proven largely
fruitless. This leaves Mozilla in an awkward
position: that of out-of-touch
industry stalwart. Being late to the
mobile game and Apple’s reluctance to
open up iOS to third-party browsers
has left the company boxed in. (Developers
can create browsers for iOS so
long as they use the same rendering
engine as Safari — a dealbreaker for the
Gecko-based Firefox.)
Mozilla has responded by borrowing
a page from the Google (Chrome)book:
build an operating system that is essentially
nothing more than a browser.
Firefox OS is yet another mobile platform
built entirely on HTML5 that treats websites
as apps. In fact, websites are the
“apps” — there is no such thing as native
code. And while there are legitimate arguments
for such a model, I’ve yet to see
it convincingly executed. We’ve caught
glimpses of Mozilla’s smartphone offspring
before, but Mobile World Congress
2013 was really the proper coming out
party. Finally we’ve been given a chance
to touch it, see it in action and peek at
the hardware it’ll be running on. Unfortunately,
at this cotillion, Mozilla failed
to make a good case for anyone to court
its debutante.
Let’s start with the basic premise of
Firefox OS. Like Chrome OS, there’s little
more here than a web browser running
on top of Linux. But, unlike Mountain
View’s product, Mozilla has focused exclusively
on mobile sites that are rarely as
fast, stable or functional as their desktop
counterparts. Ultimately the web-as-app
approach doesn’t work particularly well
when you’re trying to deliver a rich and
smooth experience, especially on mobile.
As Facebook has discovered, there are
serious performance issues with HTML5.
Mark Zuckerberg even went so far as to
say that relying on it for mobile apps was
one of the “biggest mistakes” the company
has ever made. It doesn’t help matters