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Offline commodorejohn

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Re: Firefox OS
« on: February 25, 2013, 01:35:27 AM »
I suppose anything that can help break up the Apple/Google hegemony is good, but the whole idea of a browser-based OS makes me want to retch.
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Offline commodorejohn

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Re: Firefox OS
« Reply #1 on: February 25, 2013, 02:46:13 AM »
Javascript, from what I read. That alone should be enough to send any sane person running screaming for the hills.
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Offline commodorejohn

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Re: Firefox OS
« Reply #2 on: February 25, 2013, 06:46:32 AM »
I don't even get what the point is. You're not gaining cross-platform compatibility because the only other browser-based OSes use their own frameworks for anything above the JS/HTML5 base level anyway, and nobody is going to run cell-phone apps on a PC because that would be stupid. You're not creating a good development environment because JS is a crap language for serious application development unless you bolt monstrously huge frameworks to it and HTML was never intended for applications to begin with. And you're sure as hell not gaining anything efficiency-wise. And at a lower level it's just another Linux. Literally the only thing it's got going for it is name recognition - which, as persia points out, Firefox has been torpedoing anyway, with this ridiculous version-of-the-month club and barely-to-not-at-all-contained memory bloat...
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Offline commodorejohn

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Re: Firefox OS
« Reply #3 on: February 25, 2013, 07:18:16 PM »
Quote from: bloodline;727510
Fee free to list all the "crap" points of JavaScript and make sure you include everything bad about html5 while you are at it.
Well, first let me point out that I said Javascript (and HTML5) are crap for application development. As tools for enhancing webpages, they're a bit janky but ultimately usable (well, JS is, HTML5 still sucks,) but people keep trying to push them outside the environment for which they were intended.

That said, let's rip into this bitch. Anybody who thinks that dynamic typing is a good idea for large-scale development is insane. It's object-oriented but does not feature classes, which A. means you have to do all your inheritance by cloning and altering existing objects like some mad geneticist, and B. also fits into the "howling chaos of type ambiguity" model seen in JS in general. Objects in JS overall look like a terrible kludge to add object-oriented programming to a procedural language that someone did when OOP was the trendy new hotness in programming but didn't really care about the end result. All scripts share a global namespace. Variables are global unless otherwise specified. const is only implemented in certain browsers. And then there's the implementation madness seen in TheBilgeRat's video...

As for HTML5, it sucks because it's an attempt to turn something that was never, ever meant for application development into an application-development framework. HTML was never intended for this. Standards zealots spent the entire '90s screaming at people about how HTML was supposed to be for organizing information, not doing layout or apps. It wasn't meant for layout, it wasn't meant for UI, it was meant for creating documents that link to other documents. And on top of all that, it's manifestly slower than Flash, which has been accomplishing the exact same things HTML5 tries to do since the mid-'90s. HTML5 is not a good solution for application UI because it's a hack on top of an entirely different thing. It's also not a good solution for application UI because it means having to drag in an entire webpage parsing and rendering engine just to get buttons on a damn form, so everything runs as slowly as the web browser does. It's just dumb.

Quote from: bloodline;727512
I have no real opinion regarding FirefoxOS... It  just seems to me to be the most logical progression of technology,  that's fine with me.
How is it logical? They're kludging a set of tools intended for one thing into being used for an entirely different thing. Just because I can play my piano by means of exceedingly careful hammer whacks doesn't mean it's a good idea.

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At the moments he most used platform in my  household is iOS, but that will change as ARM CPU's get more powerful,  and use less electricity, and the web browser will be the platform...  With html5 as the "Hardware Abstraction Layer" and event driven  JavaScript the common client language...
Oy, always with the "more horsepower makes stupid ideas not stupid anymore!" Yes, Firefox OS is slower than iOS now, but just wait until ARM CPUs get faster! Then it'll be...still slower than iOS, because iOS will be using the exact same faster ARM CPUs! And the web browser will be the platform, just like it was going to be in 1995. Yeah, I've got news for you: the web browser will take over as a dominant platform when it's as fast as native applications and behaves and renders consistently on all browsers. Which will be never.
« Last Edit: February 25, 2013, 07:22:57 PM by commodorejohn »
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Offline commodorejohn

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Re: Firefox OS
« Reply #4 on: February 25, 2013, 10:01:21 PM »
I don't really know enough about performance on Android/iOS systems to say for sure, but I seriously doubt that. Running an interpreted language (even if they have a fast JIT,) an interpreted library framework, and a full HTML5 parsing/rendering engine instead of native code and a dedicated GUI toolkit/window manager and getting better performance on worse hardware? Was it programmed by Jesus?
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Offline commodorejohn

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Re: Firefox OS
« Reply #5 on: February 26, 2013, 01:16:39 AM »
Quote from: takemehomegrandma;727565
XHTML won't go away, you will still be able to use XHTML 1.0 Strict (or XML of course) to format and structure your information in the purest way and use it in combination with CSS to create layouts for various media, it will work in the future as it works today.
I never said that it wouldn't.

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When it comes to document creation and structuring information, HTML 5 brings some content-specific additions, like
,
,
,
And that stuff is pretty reasonable, if maybe a little over-specific.

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But beyond that, HTML 5 brings lots of improvements for exactly what you moan about here – application development! Local data storage, Local file access, Local SQL database, Application cache (much enhanced speed and offline usage), Javascript workers, and of course XHTMLHttpRequest 2 is all brought to the table with application development in mind, and in combination with the canvas, inline SVG, WebGL, the new media tags and CSS3 it will mean a great revitalization of the "AJAX" concept and there is no doubt you will see a "version 2.0" of "Web 2.0" in a near future! ;)
Yes, I know that HTML5 adds features intended for application development. My point wasn't that it didn't have features to support it, my point was that adding features to support it is a fundamentally misguided and stupid idea because HTML was never intended to be an application platform in the first place. It's like putting weapons hard-points on a tricycle - if you're doing it, you obviously don't understand what a tricycle is for, and you're just going to bog the thing down for its intended purposes.

HTML is never going to be a good application platform because it was never intended to be an application platform at all, and because you can pick any two browsers (or many combinations of versions of the same browser, even) and your site will not look or work the same across both. And adding features intended for application development is going to make it much easier to create terrible, terrible webpages. Handing over things like local file access to J. Random Web  Developer is madness from a security standpoint (how long before  we have ad scripts that deposit links to client websites on your  desktop? We're certainly going to need canvas-blocker plugins in the  near future.)

Oh, and what does "Web 2.0" mean this month? Has it stopped being a vague, meaningless buzzword yet and started referring to any specific thing?

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I think you vastly underestimate the importance of the possibilities  with HTML5/JS/CSS3 as well as the demand for "Web 2.0" kind of  applications. The possibilities are enormous and is just about to get  better by a magnitude.
I think you vastly over-estimate it. There is essentially nothing that can be done with HTML5 that wasn't already done with Flash, and people stopped wanting Flash applications sometime around ten years ago, when they realized that browser-based applications are obnoxious, slow, and practically never fill a need that there isn't perfectly decent native software for. That should be a lesson, but the people behind HTML5 aren't interested in lessons; learning lessons would require acknowledging that someone might know more than them about something.

"The possibilities are enormous?" Well, that's arguably true - but it's never been about possibilities, it's been about results. You can use an application made with HTML5/JS, but it's only going to be as fast as your browser allows, and only going to have as coherent a UI as the quality of your browser's rendering engine and the constraints of building a graphical user interface out of webpage elements will allow. Alternatively, you could just find native software that does what you want, which will be far better able to harness the power of your system, and which may even have a GUI designed by someone who knows about more than how to finagle CSS into rendering consistently across a few of the most mainstream browsers. Gee, I wonder which is the better option.

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I will follow these kind of developments with great interest, although I think it's a bit misleading to speak of "Web OS" when all there is to it is what the user look and feel, the UI, etc (and not the underlying OS). But OTOH, this is the only important thing to 99.9% of the users. As a user you never see any low level stuff. You can't see a driver, you can't see a file system. The users may experience the *results* from stuff like that being present, but they will do it through the UI, which I guess will be handled by HTML5/CSS3 empowered AJAX.
I can't see the wind, either, but I can sure as hell feel its effects. Javascript is a crappy language for application-scale development, replete with design choices that encourage bugs, bloat, and plain old bad coding. It's also an interpreted language, which is and will always be slower than native code. HTML5 is loaded down with features that should never have been introduced to the standard, heavier than its predecessor (which was no lightweight to begin with.) The combined overhead of all this is going to have a noticeable effect on performance, especially on mobile hardware, and even an ordinary user can sure as hell tell when the computer is being slow.

And an ordinary user can definitely tell the difference between a UI created with a proper UI toolkit and a UI cobbled together out of HTML and CSS elements, if nothing else.

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Many possibilities with this IMHO, and I have seen many demos and examples that has convinced me that not only is it possible, but it may actually be quite good.
Again, possibilities are meaningless. Given sufficient memory and horsepower, anything is possible in any Turing-complete language. You could write full-fledged applications in INTERCAL, too, but that wouldn't make it a good idea. And even assuming that the results were good (which would require all of the following: an efficient Javascript JIT, an efficient, strongly standards-compliant page rendering engine, and a developer who can create solid, efficient, low-bug software in a language prone to none of the above - and only the last factor is even something that the developer can control,) it would still never be any better than what native software can achieve.

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(BTW, there are some links in this first post you can take a look at! :))
Yes, there certainly are. And every single one of them would've been done better with either native software or ordinary HTML4. There's a lesson in there, somewhere.
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Offline commodorejohn

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Re: Firefox OS
« Reply #6 on: February 26, 2013, 02:00:17 AM »
Quote from: bbond007;727570
Having played with Android SDK/NDK, I can say  that probably JIT is not the issue with the performance but the garbage  collector. If you were to code in such a way to avoid relying on the GC  then I think you'd get similar performance to compiled c with the added  advantage that when a new CPU architecture comes along, you don't have  to recompile with optimizations for that CPU.
Javascript has a garbage-collector? I think you're thinking of Java.

Quote from: bbond007;727570
Anything has to be better than flash as far as performance.
That might be true if it weren't for the fact that Javascript performance is a constantly moving baseline. Browser X makes its JIT faster and then everybody starts coding their JS apps with Browser X in mind because hey, screw anybody who's not using the very latest software! (Bonus no-points for adding a nag-box whining at users of old or less mainstream browsers to upgrade to Browser X so that they can get the absolute best experience out of this crappy site as possible.) Then Browser Y pulls ahead and the same thing happens, and so on and so forth.

And hence, even though Flash is notoriously balky and inefficient, I can still get full-screen playback of Flash cartoons or games on my Core 2 Duo, but because I'm using an older version of Firefox with a slow JIT (since the aforementioned version-of-the-month club approach has left newer versions requiring something like a terabyte of RAM and a hyper-advanced CPU mail-ordered from Skynet via time-travel delivery service for smooth operation,) equivalent-complexity JS/HTML5 thingamajigs are still choke-and-die experiences for me. (And NoScript is even more necessary for a bearable web-browsing experience than it normally is.) Fun.
« Last Edit: February 26, 2013, 02:05:37 AM by commodorejohn »
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Offline commodorejohn

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Re: Firefox OS
« Reply #7 on: February 26, 2013, 03:01:45 AM »
Quote from: takemehomegrandma;727574
I think you still may be talking about XHTML; the puritan's response to the "dirty" first versions of HTML. I think you should look at this as a fork now. The XHTML 1.0/1.1 will live on (and even evolve), and the HTML5 is taking a slightly different direction, with measures to get there.
No, I'm talking about HTML, period. It was not intended for application development, ever. The only reason it's being pushed into that role now is because people kept insisting on perverting it into an application framework anyway.

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Awareness about this is also high, so most developers tests with the whole flora of engines and takes whatever measures needed to make it work similar everywhere.
No they don't. They test it with the absolute latest version of Chrome, Safari, Firefox, and maybe Opera and then put up nag boxes whining at you to use the absolute latest version of one of those if they detect anything else.

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Flash isn't slow on none-slow HW (and there are even HW accelerators).
Flash applications are slower than native applications, just as JS/HTML5 applications are slower than native applications.

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I actually don't think speed will be a problem.
It already is, and the way JS programmers code it's not likely to get better.

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You can do applications completely in JS (I agree there are challenges), but in some cases, JS will probably mostly be a part of the UI, the rest of the application, the *depths* of it, can be whatever. Wherever.
As in Firefox, where the "chrome" layer is JS-driven but the renderer isn't? Sure, you can do that. I don't think it's the best use of resources, but you can do that. But that's not what we were talking about. We were talking about JS/HTML5 applications, and more specifically, we were talking about Firefox OS, wherein JS/HTML5 is the official framework for all software. Possible other approaches are completely irrelevant in that discussion.

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There are accelerators and there are different ways of building an application. You can make it fast enough.

And ARM/mobile hardware isn't slow anymore. And they are rapidly getting even faster.
Supposing that's true (and if Firefox OS is focused on budget mobile hardware, I doubt it,) then what? You're blowing perfectly good hardware resources on getting decent performance out of a crap language and a bloated web framework.

And for Firefox OS, their competitors aren't. Android doesn't use HTML5 for its UI, and while it does use an interpreted language, it at least takes compiled bytecode binaries instead of raw source text (one less step it has to go through,) and uses a markedly less terrible language than Javascript. iOS doesn't use HTML5 for its UI either, and it even runs native-code applications with a language that's actually pretty good. FFOS is going to have a hard time measuring up to either.

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Will they in a year from now?
Given that, a year from now, UIs cobbled together from HTML and CSS elements will still be cobbled together from HTML and CSS elements? Yes they will.
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"\'Legacy code\' often differs from its suggested alternative by actually working and scaling." - Bjarne Stroustrup