Episode: 1759
Title: HPR1759: A brief review of Firefox OS
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1759/hpr1759.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 08:54:26

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This is HPR episode 1,759 entitled A Brief Review on Firefox OS.
It is posted by first time post still void and in about 17 minutes long.
The summary is, I recently bought a Geeks phone revolution and this is my review of running
Firefox OS on it.
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Hello and welcome to another episode of Hacker Public Radio.
This is my first ever show so I'll briefly introduce myself.
My name is Steve, still void on the internet.
You'll find me under the name still void in all sorts of places so you can search for
those yourself or indeed look in the show notes if you want to get in touch with me at all.
I've been a Linux user since 1999 when a guy I knew from university got talking to
me and handed me a CD with Debin Potato 2.2 which I then installed on the PC I had at
home.
I was still living with my parents at that point and I was hooked from then on.
As a reluctant PC user, I'd been using an Amiga up until maybe five years before then.
I was dissatisfied with Windows but didn't really know of anything different.
So as soon as I found Debin and found that I could install different window managers and
configure everything exactly how I wanted it, I felt like I was back in the Amiga days
and that's what really drew me into Linux and has kept me there ever since 16 years now
I guess.
Anyway I think that's enough of an introduction and I think it brings me neatly onto the topic
I want to talk about which is a review of my experiences of using Firefox OS for the
first time.
Now I recently broke my Nexus 4 and found myself in the position of having to consider what
to do next.
I lived for three weeks or so with a broken phone and didn't really miss having a phone
too much so I decided that buying a brand new phone like a Nexus 5 or Nexus 6 was pretty
much off the cards and even the cost of repairing my Nexus 4 which by now I suppose almost
an end of life device seemed quite expensive.
So I went hunting around for cheaper phones and I stumbled upon the Geeks phone revolution
which is a cheap device which I think it cost 170 euros plus another 10 or so for shipping.
It comes pre-installed with Android 4.4 but with an option in the settings to install
Firefox OS which of course is the very first thing I did with the phone.
As you'll have guessed from the introduction I like to tinker with things that's why I'm
a hardcore Linux user and why I could never go back.
And Firefox OS gives me exactly that on my phone.
Now the unique thing about Firefox OS is that it's based on the Android open source project
to get the phone to a point where the hardware is all up and running and it's got control
of the display etc and from then on it launches a browser and everything else that happens
is through a browser although you wouldn't know it because you know effectively it's a
full-screen browser but everything you're seeing is web content in some way or other.
That is to say that the entire user interface is written using web technologies, HTML, JavaScript,
CSS.
So that's interesting to me from a hackability point of view.
Certainly I have web development skills and more or less the majority of hackers, developers
don't have web development skills.
Overall after using Firefox OS for a few days now, I think I can sum up my opinion by
saying that I'm less disappointed than I expected to be.
I know that doesn't sound like high praise but Firefox OS is still pretty raw and they're
kind of playing with a fairly new idea and it's very rough around the edges but given
all of that I'm finding it pretty usable obviously I can make phone calls and send text messages
perfectly fine and that's really the only thing I need my phone to do.
I have a tablet which I use a lot of the time while I'm at work for taking notes and all
that sort of thing so as long as I can make phone calls I'm not too worried about the
rest of what my phone does so I'll start with the bad things, the things that really
hurt me about the user interface because that's what I think probably most people want
to hear first and the main thing is purely the lack of consistency across things so for
example if you open the settings application you see a pretty standard list of settings
categories and you can tap on any one of those and it takes you through and you'll see
details of those settings and then if you want to go back to the main list of settings
the back button is in the top left however almost everything else in the phone is based
around a kind of single page web application idea so for example the Facebook app which
is really just the Facebook web page displayed in its own self-contained browser bundle
I guess all of those have the back button and indeed default and refresh etc buttons
at the bottom of the screen in a little sort of self-hiding dock so that's extremely
inconsistent and I actually quite like the way it works for the web elements Facebook
Google plus Twitter etc having the back buttons at the bottom is to me a lot more usable
than the button in the top left but you go into the settings app as I said and it's buttons
at the top left and there seem to be a division of two types of app there are the apps which
wrap up a website they behave in a certain way and there are apps which seem to be built
as more native apps now obviously there's still web apps but things like the email application
for example that has a certain design where it's similar to the settings app if you open
an email and you want to then get back the button is in the top left the menu buttons are in
the top bar action buttons are in the top although sometimes action buttons are at the bottom as
with the email application whereas for things that just wrap up a website almost all of the display
is the website of course and then you have the little dock at the bottom which let's you go
forwards backwards and refresh as I said and that seems to work very well the next thing that
irks me and I know this would work a lot of people as well and I think it's been fixed in later
versions of Firefox OS is that the the keyboard the keys displayed are all uppercase now I thought
this is something that would has been solved for many many many years street signs navigational
signs use lowercase it seems natural to everyone uppercase is harder to read but the Firefox OS
keyboard has everything in uppercase and it just seems weird and you don't know for sure whether
you're about to write something in uppercase or not the only thing that will tell you is if the
shift button is highlighted another problem with Firefox OS at the moment and again I know this
is something they're working on is that there's no way to start apps on startup so you'll have
your email and instant messaging and everything set up nicely but you won't receive any notifications
after you booted your phone until you've opened those applications for the first time I'm sure
will be fixed another thing apps like the Facebook app as I mentioned it's just wrapping up the
website and if you receive a Facebook notification there's no way for that to get back to the operating
system and for you to see the notification in the fairly traditional pull down notification draw
again I'm sure that's something that's being worked on as obviously other applications do have
the ability to do that such as email and instant messaging on the whole I'd say the the OS seems
fairly laggy I had albeit very briefly Android installed on this same device when I first got it
and that seemed to respond fairly smoothly whereas Firefox OS simple things like scrolling up and
down can sometimes seem a bit laggy and the hardware on the Geeks phone revolution is reasonably
capable now I know that performance is a well-known thing having trolled through a few Firefox OS forums
so again I'll put that down to it being early days at Firefox OS so moving on to the good stuff
there are some apps that really demonstrate what you can do with this web platform and show that
you can actually build a pretty well-functioning app even if the operating system around is quite
rougher on the edges the default contact application for example is actually quite good although
laggy if once the performance issues go away and I'm putting that down to the operating system rather
than the contacts app itself the features built into the contacts app are actually quite nice you
can import your Facebook contacts and your sim contacts and all from various other places
and it does quite a good job of figuring out where there are duplicates obviously just by name
and then combining them all together and then if you open one of those those contacts you can see
all of those details together in a display that actually looks quite good so that that's quite
impressive also the telegram app and if you're not aware of telegram it's just just another instant
messaging application it happens to report itself to be quite secure but there are various reports
on the internet and that's perhaps not as true as they would like you to believe it is but that's
actually quite a well put together app and it really shows that just because everything's built on
a web stack just JavaScript and HTML that you can still build an app that looks good performs nicely
has a decent UI the next good thing about Firefox OS is that it has really good developer documentation
and that's really what brought me to Firefox OS in the first place anyway it's a hackable thing
I know I'm going to be able to play around with it the documentation is great walks you through
the build process I've given it ago the build process is a monster and it will lead up gigabyte
some gigabytes of disk space and takes a long time to compile but it's relatively straightforward
pretty much anyone could do it if you're familiar with common development tools a slight
oddity at the moment is that the geeks phone revolution has its operating system built on a fork
from the main Firefox repository so I can't take the sort of current Firefox sources and just
build them and run it on my revolution so I'm currently on Firefox OS 2.0 because that's all
that the geeks phone guys have ported whereas Firefox OS is up to 2.2 so admittedly some of the
things in my review may have been fixed by now in 2.2 although I've played around with it in an
emulator and I can't see that too much has changed it's a little bit slicker and generally a bit nicer
but I think most of the things I'm saying stand that said the user interface which is called
Gaia and that's that's what you're actually presented with as soon as the phone's booted
is a standalone repository and you can just pull down that and build that and just push
Gaia apps to your phone so I think that's what I'll mostly be playing with I've had a bit of a
go so far and started to get my head around how the repository is structured and I've not got to
the point of really building anything and pushing onto my phone yet but I play around in an
emulator so in general I really like the idea that everything is a web app I love the fact that
there's great hackability it's a really low barrier to entry but are those things going to matter
can Mozilla be quick enough to capture any of the market from Android and iOS time will tell I suppose
in conclusion I think I'm I'm going to stick with Firefox OS for the reasons I've stated because
I don't particularly care how my phone performs I don't need it to be particularly robust or slick
I need it to be able to make fun calls other than that I'm quite happy to have it as a thing
that I play around with and there's quite a nice feeling of being quite unique obviously I'm the
only person I know that has a Firefox OS phone I hope that's going to change I hope this will take
off I hope it gets slicker I hope all the things I've mentioned get fixed because I think there are
genuinely really good things about this and the way things like the Google plus app the Twitter
app the Facebook app the fact that they are just the website but self-contained kind of bundled
up into a bit of an app thing if that can be extended so it's got more interaction with the
operating system I think that's a really nice concept so I intend to hack around with Guy a
bit and try and build a few things and who knows maybe I'll even get an app out into the Firefox
marketplace one day so I'm going to wrap it up there I hope you've enjoyed listening to me
if you've got any questions or comments for me please do feel free to contact me as I said at
the beginning this was my first ever HPR recording so thanks for listening and please consider
recording something yourself
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