Hacker News Reader

Comment by zhyder | Hacker News Reader

What makes Firefox OS inherently more cost effective than Android? I doubt you'd need a weaker CPU or less memory for the same amount of responsiveness. Or is that it's possible for Android phones to be as inexpensive, but no one's bothered creating a decent one at that price yet (just like no one bothered creating even a decent $130 one until the Moto E).

View on HN

Fewer layers between machine and app -- just Gonk (linux layer) and Gecko (application runtime). With Android, you have all the Android runtime in between.

How do you figure there are "fewer layers"?

Both are built upon Linux. So we can say that they're pretty much equivalent at that level.

Then there is a runtime and libraries providing common functionality above that. Again, we have pretty much the same in both cases.

Then we have the apps running on top of that, making use of the functionality of the two lower layers. Once again, it's a similar situation in both cases.

I really don't see the differences that you claim are there.

And don't forget that HTML + JS + CSS came from a completely different use case than Java, so there's a certain amount of parsing overhead too. Whether or not there being more native code in FFOS can counterbalance this overhead is yet to be seen, but it will be interesting to compare.

(In any case I would like to see more native code apps for mobile devices, as they are naturally more resource-constrained.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com