from Hacker News

Boot2Gecko demo & quick hack

by there on 6/12/12, 12:11 AM with 22 comments

  • by programminggeek on 6/12/12, 2:44 AM

    I like the idea of Boot2Gecko, but it's 100% pointless as a project. We had a shot to have a pure web based OS with webOS, and absent awesome hardware and marketing nobody bought it. Mozilla building their own Firefox version of webOS is not going to make this kind of thing successful.

    Great devices are a marriage of hardware and software. Focus too much on one at the peril of the other.

    Shipping an OS to basically closed hardware devices - phones is a much different ballgame than shipping a web browser app on a preinstalled operating system and with Android already being both free and popular and open source, I don't know why any hardware maker would use Boot2Gecko.

  • by denysonique on 6/12/12, 1:32 AM

    I predict that HTML5 + JavaScript is the future of desktop and mobile apps.

    This is probably the most widely known technology to people. Apart from Boot2Gecko you can develop HTML/JS apps for Windows Phone and Windows 8 (metro style)

  • by yobbobandana on 6/12/12, 4:40 AM

    One thing I hope this promotes is a good interface for accessing device hardware via HTML. In particular i had a hard time trying to access a webcam feed to embed in a webpage when i tried it a while ago. The ability to simply capture images/audio/video for use in a web app, from your phone or your webcam, would be tremendously fun.

    As far as i'm aware the current solution for this is still to use Flash, or a native application. I'd be happy to be wrong. In any case making a phone entirely controllable via web standards will ensure that such capabilities are avilable and proven.

    If anyone has more info on webcam integration with HTML5 video, this stackoverflow post could use some love: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1318834/whats-the-status-...

  • by mcot2 on 6/12/12, 2:48 AM

    This is going to be great. Should be far easier than Objective-C, Java and whatever Windows Phone 7 uses for simple apps.

    I'm still not totally convinced about large code bases being developed in JS but I would say that MOST iOS and Android apps don't need "programming in the large" features. But, I could also see some kind of compile-to-javascript language like CoffeeScript making this easier.

    I hope this stays up to date with the now fast moving Gecko for Desktop so it has the latest and greatest HTML/CSS/JS features as they get implemented.

    Another concern would be: Where does mozilla stand with hardware manufacturers and cell carriers? I feel that this isn't going to gain much traction if someone has to buy an Android device and then hack it. Windows Phone 7 has proven that even if you have the hardware, you still need Verizon and AT&T (in the U.S) on your side as well.

  • by digdugdirk on 6/12/12, 1:40 AM

    I'm in love with this project. Any news on a timeline for a usable(ish) release?

  • by geuis on 6/12/12, 2:18 AM

    Most definitely can research this on my own, but I'm curious if its possible to run this on iPhone hardware? i.e. replace the native OS?

  • by regularfry on 6/12/12, 9:44 AM

    ...and now I'm wondering if it'll run on an RPi.