mwcampbell,

Thanks for your reply. =D

In the high-end market, it doesn't matter, everyone is good. In the low-end market, Firefox OS has better performance than Android.

From a high level analysis, your comment appears spot on but unfortunately it is not that simple. Dalvik VM is GREAt and we all know the bad parts of JS. The problem is that there is a lot going on on android phones. Its not as if there is only Dalvik and your app. In Firefox OS Gecko is so close to the hardware that it doesn't need to go thru hops. Firefox OS can be said to be nothing but a browser running on bare metal. Android is not slow, but on low-end hardware it is not as responsive as it should be. Pick a Galaxy Ace for example, its specs are similar to ZTE Open (ZTE Open has better specs) and the price is similar but the experience is much better and more responsive on ZTE Open.

Dalvik was created to be efficient, and it is. My comment is not about Dalvik being bad, it is not. Its about low end phones running android offering a bad experience. I don't know if you ever used those phones or if you ever tried a Firefox OS phone.

> Hacks on top to turn this combination of hypertext markup language and poorly designed programming language into a tolerable UI toolkit and application platform

HTML evolved. The current standards and practices are pretty good. Check out new JS proposals, the language is evolving and becoming better. While you may perceive the combination of HTML/CSS/JS as something horrible, others like it. Check out enyojs at http://enyojs.com for example, it is a great framework for app development that shows the potential for pure web based solutions.

As you said:

> What matters is that, as far as I can tell, the Android platform was designed for efficiency, while the Web platform was not.

And yet, the web runs pretty well inside a browser in Android right? Even with all Android around it, open web apps running in a browser (when built correctly) do pretty great. Now remove Android and just leave the browser. Imagine how much complexity went away. How much CPU cycles and memory you saved if you have nothing but a web runtime.

We all agree that Android is a great platform. As I said, this is not an attack on Android. Firefox OS is a return to simplicity where you have just a web based architecture that is being optimized and refactored into a great mobile platform. We're not picking Desktop Firefox and shoehorning it into a mobile device. Firefox OS is being built for mobile.

You certainly know your tech and so I will leave you with an invitation. Android development is not open, Google releases new versions of Android when it wants to and then you see the source code. Even so, Android is hard to hack. On the other hand, Firefox OS is developed in the open. All source code, including whats is being worked on is live on github.

Better than me sprouting opinions and experiences here is for knowledgeable people such as you to check the code out. See how it is being built and how things work together. Help shape a better platform for everyone. Everyone is encouraged to contribute to Firefox OS. If you think SpiderMonkey (or IonMonkey or OdinMonkey) is slow, help improve it, we could all use some help! :D

https://github.com/mozilla-b2g/

As I said, one of the key thinks about Firefox OS is how open it is. Want to try to develop new features? Check out the repo, hack away and if it good enough, talk about a pull request on IRC.

If you want to check out the system without building it, pick the Firefox OS Simulator, it is just a add-on for Firefox at https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/firefox-os-simulato...

For example, you will notice that we use the Android kernel and parts of Android SDK tools such as adb and fastboot. The cool think about open source is that you can reuse the good bits and not use what you don't want to.

So I invite you to check out the platform. The web may appear badly designed and not build for performance but there are more and more people working on it and it just grows and surprises us. No one believed in JS for gaming until people saw the unreal engine running inside the browser without plugins. JS and its friends will keep improving and cross-plaform open solutions tend to win in the long run.