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Comment by shardling | Hacker News Reader

Firefox OS is two things: an idea, and a particular implementation of that idea.

The idea is that you write apps in HTML/js/etc, using some well-defined APIs to access the underlying hardware capabilities.

The implementation is an underlying Linux system (Gonk), and Firefox's rendering/javascript/etc engines.

If you ask, 'can it run alternate browsers', what exactly are you asking? The browser app of FF OS is written the same way other apps are -- in that sense you definitely can. But it'll still be running on top of Gecko et al.

Ok, so can you replace Gonk/Gecko with some other underlying implementation? Well, that's kind of the whole idea! But if you do that, you won't be running FF OS anymore.

The reason we care about alternate browsers is choice. FF OS enables choice by promoting standards. They want an app written for the system to work just as well on Chrome or Safari (whenever Google/Apple get around to implementing the same APIs.)

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> They want an app written for the system to work just as well on Chrome or Safari (whenever Google/Apple get around to implementing the same APIs.)

I'm a fan of what Mozilla is doing, but I encourage you to go look at Gaia code and then come back and repeat this. None of it will run in other browsers for two reasons:

1) They use JavaScript 1.7 features that no other browser is going to implement until ES6.

2) They use -moz prefixes in their CSS but don't include the other vendors: https://github.com/mozilla-b2g/gaia/blob/master/apps/calenda...

These seem somewhat moot points while there aren't any other implementations. (Which is what I find really odd about the whole "will it run other browsers" question.) It would be kind of premature to provide other vendor prefixes while it was impossible to test whether the app worked or not!

If someone steps up and wants to provide an alternate middle layer under Gaia, I really doubt Mozilla will stand in their way.

A lot of that is simply because we need to ship 1.0. Many of the apps will be heavily improved in a short period of time once we get stuff shipping.

But you're not going to do a

  sed -i 's/const/var/g' *

right? So I'm not sure how any of the Gaia apps are going to run on non-Firefox browsers until other vendors start implementing ES6, so a year from now at least.

Definitely not, I believe the plans are to significantly refactor the apps (carefully) because there's a bunch of good practices that they don't follow. It's true that they probably won't run in other browsers for a while though.

Chortle, if only Chrome and IE weren't guilty of much worse.. I guess for a change they can have some 'standards' forced on them if they'd like to remain competitive

> 1) They use JavaScript 1.7 features that no other browser is going to implement until ES6.

ES6 is already here, piece by piece it is being added. It's just like HTML5 - there is no future date when suddenly it will show up. Firefox, Chrome, etc. all have parts right now.

> 2) They use -moz prefixes in their CSS but don't include the other vendors: https://github.com/mozilla-b2g/gaia/blob/master/apps/calenda....

Sounds like a bug, filing an issue would be appreciated I am guessing.

> ES6 is already here, piece by piece it is being added. It's just like HTML5 - there is no future date when suddenly it will show up. Firefox, Chrome, etc. all have parts right now.

Not sure what you mean, here's a compatibility table: http://kangax.github.com/es5-compat-table/es6/

Doesn't seem to be "already here" by any reasonable definition of here. Looks like no one but Mozilla is adding stuff that aggressively. Knowing the companies, I'd say it's very doubtful that Apple or Microsoft implement much until ES6 is finalized.

Firefox might be ahead, but Google is putting a lot of effort into it too as you can see in that chart.

It isn't "here" as in all here, but parts of it are, and more are added all the time. My point was that just like HTML5, it's a gradual thing, at least for Firefox and Chrome - it's possible other browsers will hold off, as you say, although I hope not.

Hi Matthews,

I think that the main idea is that your app should be portable between Firefox OS and other mobile web browsers such as Opera Beta and Chrome for Android.

Gaia is not meant to be run under another browser. I think as other vendors implement the needed APIs, they will be unprefixed.

I think it's pretty clear that the endgame should be that Gaia can run in other browsers when they're ready. The ideal situation would be that the platform is developed and standardized enough that you can swap out the middle layer without any problems, even in complex apps like Gaia.

But it would be a bit silly for Mozilla to pursue that at the cost of an expedient release of FF OS, when there aren't even any other implementations to test with. :)

so if IE promoted standards it would be ok by you if they disallowed other browsers on windows?

That's not analogous by any stretch of the imagination. Policy around web standards in IE would have zero bearing on why people are actually locked into Windows: the non-portable, native applications.

Exactly. If they called it Internet Explorer OS, why not? But not while abusively using the Windows brand name that most people would blindly get because they don't know better.

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