While it has yet to become a significant player in the smartphone market, Mozilla is hoping that its open-source Firefox OS will be a game changer when the mobile operating system gains a larger presence in countries like the United States and United Kingdom. In the meantime, the software maker has gone on the offensive against rival platforms iOS and Android.
Mozilla chief technology officer Andreas Gal, in an article published by The Guardian this afternoon, criticized iOS and Android for being “closed systems” that rely on proprietary software with “almost a complete lack of transparency.”
Gal claimed that consumers should have the right to know how a device is using their information, especially in light of concerns over NSA surveillance allegations. “Right now the user has a choice between one phone where you can’t tell what goes on inside it and another phone where you can’t tell what goes on inside it,” he said.
The executive promoted Firefox OS as being a much more open alternative compared to the lack of transparency shown by software leaders Apple and Google. iOS has always been considered a closed ecosystem, while Gal argues that Android is simply Google’s way of getting in your front pocket to increase the company’s value.
“What an Android phone essentially is, it’s like Google’s agent in your pocket… they don’t intend to put you first, they put Google first because Google needs to increase their value,” he said. “They’d like to know things about you and track you so they can target you. Google sets the rules that serve Google in the end, not necessarily the user.”
Apple and Google have both removed privacy-focused apps from the App Store and Google Play on their respective platforms in the past, such as Disconnect and Clueful, with Google adhering to a policy against apps that interfere with others and Apple following suit with its strict App Store review guidelines.
“We don’t think it’s a good idea that corporations rule these massive ecosystems with arbitrary rules that sometimes can be completely opposite to what the user wants,” said Gal. “The user should be able to know what is happening to their data and have some influence over it.
Gal believes that the recent debate over government influence on software platforms may encourage more consumers to give open-source software like Firefox OS a closer look, and Mozilla has high hopes that the platform will help highlight the strengths and openness of the web.
“That’s what we hope people will choose over these closed systems,” he said. “We can’t change the industry over night but we can move in the right direction.”
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Where is the emoji for “dismissive wanking while wearing a tin foil hat” Are you SERIOUSLY trying to tell me Firefox OS won’t get hacked with NSA spyware? Heck, betas probably already HAVE.
Hey, I do think that the Mozilla folks have a great point. The fact is that we don’t know what Android does under the hood, and that Google itself gloats in its ability to build a tremendous dossier on each of its users. Remember the idea of “Do Not Track”? Yeah, it took Google to kill the concept by ignoring it and “warning” users about it. How about “Incognito mode”? Oh yeah, Google took that and made it hard to use in a way to protect privacy.
With Mozilla, you know that they care about privacy. And that’s why I use Firefox and DuckDuckGo, in order to reduce Google’s ability to further add information about me to my Google dossier.
I don’t mind people making a buck on the internet – until it comes to the trafficking of my private information. Google’s continued falsehoods about “anonymous tracking” and “aggregated behaviour collection” is simply a way to cover up the huge privacy fail that it is.
Mozilla? No, they are not perfect. But they sure are a hell of a lot more honest, open, and thoughtful than Google. Google, on the other hand, is an advertising firm with a tech company tacked on its tail. They make their billions by selling you stuff and by selling your data to 3rd parties that want to sell you stuff.
Don’t get me wrong – I think the folks at Google are tremendous. But the company isn’t good. It is just another lame hawker of ads and trafficker of your data.
Actually, we know completely well what “Android” does under the hood. You can download and compile it yourself and install it yourself. What we don’t know is what the Google services that are laid on top of stock Android do.
Stock Android with no Google services is, for all intents and purposes, FireFox mobile OS.
Mozillia people are overly full of themselves and it is incredibly eye rolling to listen to them speak with their holier than thou attitude. They recently tried to claim that they “saved” the internet because their browser once achieved 25% desktop market share. This completely glosses over the fact that Google Chrome, almost IMMEDIATELY, overtook them, and that their browser engines were a complete failure in the mobile space (everything is WebKit).
Is it so difficult for Mozilla to program a iOS Firefox Web browser so people can synchronize their bookmarks and passwords etc.? Why these idiots don’t bring a Firefox iOS web browser? I do not understand this.
they are not idiots. they are simply not allowed by apple to release firefox for ios. except it uses apples engine under the hood with other buttons on top. thats not a firefox anymore. better to be genuine and keep firefox out of ios.
Why would they do that? It would cancel out the argument they’re making. It would be admitting that iOS is where the customers are, and where they prefer to be.
We don’t need yet another OS – two, iOS and Android, are quite enough – fragmentation is bad.
You’re a moron. Having competition doesn’t cause fragmentation. The only concern for fragmentation is within the systems themselves. Duopolies are “bad”
If people thought this way how come Windows Phone hasn’t taken off outside of certain European countries where it was more about the Nokia brand cache than anything else? And how come in the PC space there’d basically Windows and Mac and very little else? It sure seems like the public isn’t clamoring for lots of computer operating systems.
@rogifan Do you read anything you write before you foolishly post them. Market not “clamouring”? That’s the most ridiculous assertion of the market I’ve heard in a while. The market wants GOOD products and currently, there are only a few corporations making GOOD products. Resulting in a duopoly, not because people want a duopoly you ignorant fool.
Gal hasn’t grasped the concept that both models have benefits and disidvantages. Just another nut job who can only view one side as being beneficial, the right way and only way of doing things. Nothing arbitrary about any of the rules in the respected systems, they have a purpose.
I disagree. Let those a-holes at Mozilla make their own OS. Then we can here developers and users bitch about their crap OS – give them a taste of their own medicine.
Enough of this “open” BS! Most customers don’t even think about that. You don’t ever hear someone say that they want a completely open mobile platform, except for the absolute geekiest people. If Mozilla wants to market itself to that group, so be it. If it does, it won’t ever make it into the mainstream. Here’s the dirty truth that Mr. Gal either doesn’t know, or is unwilling to admit for fear that it would ruin his argument… Most people don’t care what’s going on inside their mobile devices. They only care that they work, and work well. I agree with his views on Google though. Android has always been about increasing Google’s value, and advertising and data harvesting revenue. I’ve never cared that Apple has a “closed” system. It has not impacted me in a negative way, so I don’t care. iOS has proven to be far more secure, and far more stable and easy to use. Why would I want to trade those things for an “open” system just for the sake of it being open? This “open” wet dream that the people at Mozilla keep having is getting old.
i must have missed the part where anyone cared about Mozilla and/or their opinion.
Mozila can eat shit.
He’s right.
But that doesn’t say anything about the benefits or chances of success of another mobile platform. His “rightness” only goes so far – the lack of transparency in data usage, especially from Google, and the hypocrisy, again especially from Google.
I won’t soon switch away from iOS, but I’ve been hoping for years that Apple would allow its customers to divorce themselves from their default apps by defining alternative defaults (mail, web, music, video, photo, camera, etc.)
They’re a bit disingenuous about Android though. There _is_ a version of Android which is totally open and transparent and a few major custom ROMs (such as Cyanogenmod) are built on it. AOSP (Android Open Source Project) has code they release and use. For instance, you can use Cyanogenmod and never ever touch a Google service if you don’t want to. Now, doing so, you don’t get a ton of functionality out of it, but you _can_ do so if you want.
What he goes on to say about Google can be argued, but it isn’t really a “closed” system, yet not really an “open” system either.
The more open the system, the more vulnerable you are to hackers, viruses, malware, scams, rip-offs and so on. If Android is a closed system and is already 99% infected, how much worse would it be with a so called open system? No thanks, Apple got it right. I want apps to be quality controlled to make sure when I buy them I am not going to be infected with malware or scammed into an app that does absolutely nothing.
Open is just asking for every criminal out there to rip you off. Mozilla will regret trying to do this. It will be one OPEN headache that will fail.