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Comment by kryptiskt | Hacker News Reader

I think FirefoxOS is a much more viable contender. It has a head start; it is not going straight up against iOS and Android in the massive undertaking of building an app ecosystem, but is exclusively using web technologies; Mozilla controls a deeper part of their stack than Canonical; they have deals in place; and they are aiming low-end phones, where there is an opportunity as iOS doesn't exist and Android 4.0 performs like crap.

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I keep hearing this. Could you explain why pure web technologies with no other options is better than giving developers the best of both worlds (deeply integrated web apps as well as native apps, if the performance is needed)? HTML5 browser technology isn't even able to render current iOS games in full blown desktop browsers, how is it going to be adequate for embedded devices in the coming few years?

In the long run you may be right, but it's going to take quite a bit longer and until then the mobile market is going to be even more entrenched than now.

This is about making a virtue out of necessity. There is no way a small player launching a native SDK now can attract enough developers to not look like a total joke beside Android and iOS (or even Windows Phone).

Mozilla controls and understands the vital parts of their platform, their rendering engine and JS VM, they can concentrate their work on making them performant enough to compete and making sure that the long run will come sooner rather than later.

So yeah, I'm impressed by them having a narrow focus and playing to their strengths rather than making something that is just like Android, only with no apps.

It makes sense for a new entrant that doesn't have an existing ecosystem to only support apps that are compatible with the big players. If you're android or apple, you can ask developers to build native apps. It's a struggle for microsoft and RIM to get developers building native apps, no company smaller than them has a hope in hell of getting developers to build apps for their platform, unless they can offer compatibility.

Sure, native apps have advantages. But those advantages only exist if native apps exist, and for all the new mobile platforms, native apps don't really exist.

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