Firefox OS now available for testing

[DarkTower87]

Those of you ready to move to the next big operatingsystem for your phone, desktop, laptop, tablet, or whatever you’ve got on hand will be glad to know that Mozilla has moved to the next stage: beta testing for their Firefox OS. This operating system is made first for phones and tablets, but is available for testing only on your OS X, Windows, or Linus machine for the moment. Developers will be able to begin testing out whatever they’ve got on hand immediately.

http://www.slashgear.com/firefox-os-...ting-20239602/

[b1lk1]

If it works as poorly as Firefox does on Android OS then this is best to avoid.

[BigE4u]

Firefox is all i use as a browser(w/adblock+), it's been working great for me... no OS is perfect, but it will be hard as nails to compete with whats already out there(windows/os x/ubuntu/redhat/etc).

[WordMasterRice]

I can't imagine that it will really compete on the desktop but it might be an interesting mobile OS. I think that might be pretty difficult to break into as well though, the established players have too many advantages.

[AruisDante]

It's just a really interesting concept. The whole OS, everything user facing, is a web-app. As long as your web app is built to target web standards, it will run on the OS. That's... quite a powerful thing. And really is where a lot of the industry is heading towards.

Additional Comment:

Originally Posted by b1lk1

If it works as poorly as Firefox does on Android OS then this is best to avoid.

Yeah I don't know what happened there. When it first came out Firefox on Android was awesome. It rendered faster than the native browser and had plugins like ABP. And then they moved to the new UI, and it just went to ****. It's slow, buggy, and unreliable now. Makes no sense at all.

[Jahova]

I wonder how security will be after the release. We know Firefox browsers are more secure, but is the OS going to be secure?

[AruisDante]

Originally Posted by Jahova

I wonder how security will be after the release. We know Firefox browsers are more secure, but is the OS going to be secure?

Well, the idea is that there's no native access. It's all done through web standards. So theoretically it's just as secure as any firefox implementation would be. From how I understand it, it's basically an implementation of their Gecko rendering engine bootstrapped onto the Android kernel. So it basically replaces the Android UI and the Dalvik VM with Gecko. The underling kernel for hardware enablement and drivers is still Android though.

[Sparkey247]

i would switch to chrome but my biggest problem is about 5 addons that are not supported by chrome that i used on a daily basis. from what i have read chrome browser is faster and i have tried it but again the plugins are what keep me from jumping on the band wagon.

my biggest gripe with firefox is the dang memory hole. i used to just hibernate my second rig so i would not loose any web pages but after about 3 or 4 times firefox ends up chewing up about 1.5 gigs of ram and to keep from loosing all my pages i would kill the task and restart firefox now i just make it save all my pages and shut down normally.

also from what i have read is the memory hole in firefox was never addressed. wonder if the os might suffer from the same prob

[Jahova]

Is that anything like Photoshop CS3, where it will only utilize 4Gb of memory at max? I hate that issue. When I have 5-10 PSD files open, I want to use my full 8Gb of memory for performance reasons. CS5 is so expensive I don't want to pay for it.