Hi Sam, On 9 February 2016 at 20:53, Sam Foster <[email protected]> wrote:
> I'm also intrigued by this idea. One strong point in its favour is that > while my phone has some critical functions it *must* fullfill, my tablet is > a secondary device that I'm happier to experiment with. > > In the context of the smart home, the tablet is an important piece of the > puzzle. Unlike your phone, it can belong in a particular place, be > physically and conceptually tied to a house. While I might use my phone to > watch a video, read a magazine article, check my family's calendar - these > are all things the tablet does better. > > If we want to put a UI on the smart home, a tablet is the natural fit. > We'll need a device to explore the flyweb use cases, and a tablet seems a > good fit there as well. > Exactly. > > Given that, I guess the question is, why wouldn't I put stock android on a > tablet and run fennec? How does owning more of the stack benefit the user > and further mozilla's mission? > I'm glad you brought up this question because I expect to be asked it a lot :) I think you could ask the same question of Chrome OS - why not just put Linux on a laptop and install Chromium? I think the answer is a) Less features is sometimes better and b) Think about the target market. If you or I wanted a tablet just for web browsing, we might re-purpose an old tablet, flash a newer version of Android/CyanogenMod onto it and install Firefox. Maybe get the browser to launch automatically and run full screen if I could. But that's not something my Mum or Dad would do, or my Grandma. FWIW my Mum owns a Chromebook and my Grandma has a simplified tablet called a Breezie which is promoted by an age charity in the UK but runs a very insecure old 2.x version of Android under the hood. They both mainly use them for sending emails using GMail and browsing the web. The point of this project would be to create a device which is one of many devices in the home, does one thing and does it well. I think we did some great work with Firefox OS building a nice lean stack on which to run the web and I don't want to see that work go to waste. I think this device could solve real user problems and really appeal to some specific market segments (see the thread above). In my opinion owning that full stack is a huge asset for Mozilla and gives a seat at the table for standardisation. It enables us to build a unique web experience we can be proud of, in a way that playing inside the sandbox provided to us by Google or Apple does not. I also think we can make that stack even leaner and easier to maintain with a reduced feature set. Ben
_______________________________________________ dev-fxos mailing list [email protected] https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-fxos
