Firefox OS dev phone shipping

Hi all,

Thought you guys might like to know the Firefox OS Developer Preview devices are shipping. You can pick them up here: http://shop.geeksphone.com/en/

For those that don't know, it's a fully open HTML5 mobile platform. We plan on supporting it with Mortar Melon ASAP.

Damn, they�re already out of stock ;(

I am somewhat curious as to how well our games will run on phones with b2g.

Damn they've sold out twice in one day. I was able to get one in the end :)

Firefox for Android has pretty poor performance with WebGL (slower than Canvas 2D, where on the same device Chrome is faster with WebGL), and I think it's a known longstanding bug. If anyone gets a Firefox OS device I'd be interested to know if it's better with WebGL.

Got my dev phone a few days ago and boy...performance is quite terrible. I've got a rather simple game without moving stages or many objects on the screen and the performance is so bad that I might not be able to offer this to users.

Here's a Vine showing performance:

https://vine.co/v/hW7wpBElQu5

Kenney ah that's disappointing. My phone got lost by UPS, but now consumer devices are starting to appear I'm just going to wait.

Any chance you could check Mortar Melon on there? firefoxos.mortarmelon.com All the xml is there ready to go.

Just tried it and I'm guessing the FPS is around 15 to 20, while playable it's not smooth at all. I don't think that number will change at all when it's a packaged app since it's all HTML5 based.

btw others can send their apps to me for testing, add an FPS counter if you want more accurate results ;)

Kenney thanks for testing it out! That's a shame, hopefully improvements are in the works. Have you tried with turning WebGl off?

Just did but that didn't seem to change anything at all, well, except for disabling WebGL effects.

Kenney I was just reading through this post: Optimizing your JavaScript game for Firefox OS.

Is there any noticeable improvement adding the moz-opaque attribute to the canvas tag in index.html?

Interestingly enough that breaks the whole app, displaying a black screen.

I have actually noticed Firefox OS runs faster with WebGL disabled. I can't really explain why. It must be the particularly weak CPU which can't optimise javascript so well.

Kenney Ashley

I got my phone through finally.

[TUBE]http://youtu.be/zZQbOZOlNY8[/TUBE]

Performance is pretty good. Certainly playable and much better than expected for the lowest spec development device.

Performance was initially terrible, I just had to update to a nightly build. More info here: Updating and Tweaking your Firefox OS Developer Preview phone/Geeksphone.