Today we have made Firefox OS 2.5 available worldwide. We are also making an early, experimental build of the OS – Firefox OS 2.5 Developer Preview – available for developers to download on Android devices.
So you can flash Firefox OS 2.5 as a standalone operating system, or run parts of it atop your existing Android device.
On a related note:
Firefox for iOS lets you take your favorite browser with you wherever you go with the Firefox features you already love including smart and flexible search, intuitive tab management, syncing with Firefox Accounts and Private Browsing.
iOS, of course, doesn’t provide real browser choice to its users, so even this Firefox iOS browser uses iOS’ own rendering engine.
I am not a fan of moving everything into “the cloud”, but I am getting so frustrated with the state of security on the major OSes that I am going to give this a try.
If they give us enough flexibility to turn off unwanted “features”, and redirect others to our own servers, then it might be worth switching. There is some peace of mind in the fact that it is open source, at least.
How does that work? The clouds are using all the major OSes.
It might not work. But I’m still going to give it a try. ;^)
For instance, if I decide that I need bookmark sharing, I could set up my own server, since Mozilla offers this option.
I loaded this POS onto my Android this morning. It has completely borked my phone and I’m still trying to workout how to remove it.
I just opened the android settings program (it’s still an icon in this launcher, although the firefox setting has the same name with different icon) then removed it from the apps page.
Pretty easy to disable.
Not when the buttons stop working. I eventually had to do a factory reset.
This is only Android app that has ever caused me serious headache in the past four years.
Edited 2015-11-13 08:23 UTC
Unlucky. I too loaded it onto my phone, and wasn’t impressed with the lack of stability (though of course, this is a developer release so I was expecting problems.) It got removed in short order.
But releasing this is good, I think, and is the only viable option in the short/medium term. FirefoxOS development has been woeful on devices other than OEM supported devices, so it’s unlikely anyone would jump ship to FirefoxOS by choice.
I tried an old release (c1.2-1.3) build on a spare Huawei Y300, and while smooth enough (smoother than android on said hardware,) it wasn’t very useful over and above plain AOSP.
It is consistent with the tag “Developer Preview”. This app is for developers to test, developers of Firefox specifically. Since it is unusable even for the software developers at large. What I do not like about software vendors, especially open source is that they try to release a software that is really unusable to the public(Still looking at you KDE). Why in the world they want to do this madness? I mean they already have a QA at least those QA people have Android phones of various brands. Releasing a buggy desktop software is not so damaging to users’ experience, but releasing a buggy smartphone app that can choke up your phone warrants action against those who release that software, in my opinion, because it will cause so much inconvenience to users of smartphones unlike in Desktop testing.
I like the new Firefox version for iOS, it works just fine, and syncs my desktop bookmarks across all my iOS devices. This is something I have been wanting for ages, and I am very happy that it has now happened. I don’t care at all that it has to use the Safari rendering engine, because that engine works just fine as well.
And by the way, instead of a snarky remark about browser “choice”, why doesn’t Thom write an original article comparing Safari and Firefox on iOS, the functionality and usage differences, if any, since they both use the same rendering engine and he feels this is so important that it is necessary to make a snide statement about choice? What differences are there? Is one faster than the other despite using the same rendering engine? Does bookmark syncing work better on one or the other? Is one or the other better at handling embedded video? I could go on, these are legitimate questions that could be addressed in an article instead of making some stupid trash remark that does nothing but incite comment wars. Then again, maybe that’s the intent since it happens so often on this site.
Edited 2015-11-15 12:34 UTC