I think it should be a web-browser based platform for a few reasons:
- ease of development
- leveraging gains in the platform development
At this point, the web is already the biggest app store the world has ever seen. FFOS succeeded in one of the most difficult areas of building a new platform -- getting companies to write progressive web apps that ran on the phone. I even spent time writing little utilities, a tinder clone, and an instagram clone for the platform.
There are at least 3 big companies with huge dedicated teams to making that platform better and faster. Slowness can definitely be an issue but that's a lot more solvable than a dearth of applications or a lack of open interest in improving the platform. Optimization is a long-tail problem, and it's clear by android's dominance and the progressive slowing of apple software every year that you just have to be good enough, but hardware goes a long way to help.
Even more than this the biggest problem was the market FFOS was aimed for didn't give FFOS time to go down the optimization path. You can mask inefficient software with beefy hardware, and I actually had two firefox phones that worked wonderfully -- the Flame[0] and the Fx0[1]. Those two phones only scratched the surface of how powerful the hardware could be, and I didn't have any of the problems you mention. I still have 2 (!) FX0s in my closet somewhere.
I don't know about you, but i always see my ZTE Open as hardware that was horribly abused. I do not see it as weak or anything, the hardware was more than capable since - as i mentioned - much weaker hardware could do much more. It is the software that was garbage.
And my point is that the ZTE open is nothing compared to the hardware modern (even mid-range) phones are shipping. All software is shit (to varying degrees) and other platforms mask their inefficiency with beefy hardware, and continuous fucking updates that almost don't run on older phones.
If an analysis of FFOS being bad depends on (in my opinion) running good-enough software on terribly slow hardware, the wrong question is being answered.
My entire point is that the software isn't good enough, is that the software is garbage for the task of being used for anything else than browsing the web. The hardware isn't terribly slow, it is WAY beyond adequate for providing smartphone features, as proven by an actual smartphone that existed a decade before with hardware than 10% of the power that ZTE Open has yet provided a much better and snappier user experience.
The question on my original message was rhetorical - of course it doesn't have to be a platform built around a web browser. That is a massive waste of resources that could be used for a ton of other things.
- ease of development
- leveraging gains in the platform development
At this point, the web is already the biggest app store the world has ever seen. FFOS succeeded in one of the most difficult areas of building a new platform -- getting companies to write progressive web apps that ran on the phone. I even spent time writing little utilities, a tinder clone, and an instagram clone for the platform.
There are at least 3 big companies with huge dedicated teams to making that platform better and faster. Slowness can definitely be an issue but that's a lot more solvable than a dearth of applications or a lack of open interest in improving the platform. Optimization is a long-tail problem, and it's clear by android's dominance and the progressive slowing of apple software every year that you just have to be good enough, but hardware goes a long way to help.
Even more than this the biggest problem was the market FFOS was aimed for didn't give FFOS time to go down the optimization path. You can mask inefficient software with beefy hardware, and I actually had two firefox phones that worked wonderfully -- the Flame[0] and the Fx0[1]. Those two phones only scratched the surface of how powerful the hardware could be, and I didn't have any of the problems you mention. I still have 2 (!) FX0s in my closet somewhere.
[0]: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox_OS/Flame
[1]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Archive/B2G_OS/Phon...