back to article Mozilla debuts Firefox Marketplace for Android apps

Android users who enjoy living on the edge might like to try out the alpha version of Firefox Marketplace, the Mozilla Foundation's new online bazaar for mobile apps based on web technologies. "Just last year, we started working to turn the Web into a viable apps development platform," the Mozillians wrote in a blog post …

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  1. John Tserkezis
    Thumb Down

    #$%$#ing upgrade merry-go-round again.

    With a regular browser:

    "Desktop support is temporarily disabled (learn more). Please try this app in Firefox Mobile on your Android phone."

    On my phone:

    "To use this app, upgrade Firefox".

    I've had enough. I've upgraded to firefox 14 on the desktop, made the mistake of blinking, and now they're at 16.

    To hell with firefox for android, i'm not going to bother upgrading that.

    1. miknik
      WTF?

      "Those who dare to take the plunge"

      Just to be clear... We are talking about installing an app store from a well known and trusted internet company here, not jumping out of a capsule at the edge of space or anything, right?

  2. MrT

    There's no 'maybe'...

    ... this is definitely an off-store app so checking the option to install from anything other than Google Play is needed. It'll need to be left that way or rechecked with each alpha update, although fans of the mobile beta path who don't fancy opening up the install sources are covered as that is in-store.

    It's different, but is quick. I run the FF beta on desktop and have been using this alpha for a short while on mobile. There are a few glitches (it sometimes stalls when entering text on screen - try editing a search phrase on the FF store) but overall it's steady on this SGS3...

    Given that many apps just open a web view anyway, I don't see much difference in the way the FF ones operate. Hopefully by using a full HTML5 client, slightly clumsy stuff like the My T-Mobile one won't get stuck when spawning a page (they'd need to rewrite it for this platform, which is another issue all together).

  3. dssf

    Does this spell implidations for C++, javascript, java, etc?

    If i want to make and sell a .dbf based app, using HTML5, what should i be thinking about long term?

    1. Captain Save-a-ho
      Coat

      Re: Does this spell implidations for C++, javascript, java, etc?

      A different career choice, perhaps?

  4. JeffyPooh
    Pint

    Firefox OS...

    Exactly like 'The Library of Babel' short story (recommended), once there are too many OS choices in play (ding!) at once, they'll slowly become uninteresting infrastructure that just silently and totally compatibly work in background. It'll all merge into one big happy soup of OSesness abstraction. We're almost there.

    The idiot fanbois of the world will then be forced to focus their arguments on the next higher level of a yet-to-be-conceptualized ISO abstraction model. Remember the "My BIOS is better than your BIOS!" of the 1980s? LOL.

    1. FrankAlphaXII
      Joke

      Re: Firefox OS...

      My BIOS is better than your BIOS. In fact, its so good its not even a BIOS, its UEFI!

      Whatcha gonna do? Flash me?

  5. Mark .

    "why bother?"

    This is a nonsense argument. I might as well say, if I already have an HTML5 twitter client, why would I go to the hassle of installing one that's native, but otherwise behaves exactly like my old one?

    The answer is that you probably wouldn't – unless, that is, you were really keen on building native apps - right?

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Marketplace for Android

    I like the term Android Repository much better.

  7. Steve Medway
    Flame

    re-inventing a wheel that already fell off.....

    Before the iOS app store there was supposed to be a world of rich HTML5 based apps, that didn't exactly pan out how Steve Jobs intended.

    Then there was ChromeOS with it's HTML5 rich web based apps and NaCl to remove one of the too many layers, that did really well in the market too.....

    Are the devs at Mozilla smoking too much crack, been asleep for the past five years, simply run out of ideas or were both of the above just too ahead of their time?

  8. Ian Johnston Silver badge
    Thumb Down

    Is there anything the Firefox people aren't trying to do?

    Except providing a small, fast, bug-free browser like they used to?

  9. David Gosnell

    Category icon bottom left in the screenshot?

    Is that for tits or ass?

  10. DrXym

    Firefox gets banned from Play store in 3, 2, 1...

    The Play Store terms and conditions are fairly liberal but you can't put up apps which offer rival app stores. Mozilla are playing with fire to put this functionality in because they could easily find themselves banished from the store for doing so.

    1. PaulR79
      Thumb Down

      Re: Firefox gets banned from Play store in 3, 2, 1...

      Did you read the article? The version required to run this is *not* on the Play Store and has to be downloaded and installed (unknown sources) separately. Whether that changes as it matures is not mentioned and likely a long way away.

      1. DrXym

        Re: Firefox gets banned from Play store in 3, 2, 1...

        Except that the Firefox Beta which I run on Android put an explicit Firefox Market icon on my desktop when it updated about 2 days ago. So much for that.

  11. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Errm, didn't Opera already do this 2 years ago?

    http://developer.vodafone.com/blog/2010/06/02/updated-vodafone-widget-sdk-now-available-jil-12-and-android-support/

  12. ukgnome

    Just what we need

    yet another online market place for apps.

    How long before we have a hypermarket?

    1. David Gosnell

      Re: Just what we need

      It's high time Google relaxed whatever criteria it enforces to include the official Google Play store. It helps none with perception of the platform to find that probably 50% (by model, not by volume) of the Android tablets in particular out there only officially support some crappy third-party (and sometimes even manufacturer specific) store with none of the apps people want (like iPlayer) - and certainly not the classic Google set like Maps, gMail etc that people might reasonably assume not only to be available but indeed already installed, but oh no. There's already enough fragmentation on the platform without more introduced by sheer politics rather than technological limitation.

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