Porting B2GOS on Pinephone, a way for B2G OS to come back

B2G OS Building and Porting
#1

Hello,

What do you think about porting B2G OS to https://www.pine64.org/pinephone/

A little bit before Mozilla killed our cherished and awesome OS (I still can’t believed it happened), I contacted Pine64 to know if they were interested by Firefox OS on their platform. They were and they were ready to send devkit for that.
Unfortunately, nothing ever came out because it was the end of FFOS.

Today I have been recontacted about this subject because of the release of this Pinephone and I guess it would be fun to see B2G OS working on it.
If anyone is willing to do it, come and say it in here, https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=1271&pid=46258#pid46258 . They might provide you with a dev kit to do so.

When I read this kind of article, it makes me nostalgic of FFOS, it was really in advance of its own time :

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#2

Hi @Thatoo!
Your plan sounds similar to what I thought about a few months ago when I proposed getting B2G OS to run on the Necunos NC_1: Plan to ship Necunos NC_1 with B2GOS loaded

However, my suggestion was not met with any enthusiasm for one main reason - it would still be based on Gecko 48, which is now very outdated. Unfortunately, after Gecko 48 support for B2GOS was removed so to recreate it on the latest version of Gecko would basically be a completely new project. What is your plan for approaching this problem?

About your link about PWAs: any new B2GOS would need to support PWAs instead of the old mozApps approach. Lots of people have lots of ideas about what a new B2GOS should include in its feature set, so there should be lots of enthusiasm for bringing B2GOS back, but strangely there seems to be very little.

I hope you get more people interested in your post than I did :wink:
Cheers :smile:

#3

As @madbilly said, you need to do a complete fork of

  • firefox 48 as desktop browser, updating the things that are deprecated or outdated
  • the inner things of b2g os -> gecko, gaia and gonk, which means to update the android kernel and such

The reason that there were a lot of attempts and no one appears successful until they have a lot of money behind (as kaios for example) is because it requires a lot of manpower to be a reality. Servonk for example… is just the effort of one man with random support.

Today is very difficult to use firefox os, many pages don’t load because the javascript or they simply crash. AND when the marketplace was shutdown the little amount of phones were turned on just featured phones. An usable b2g should see these things too n-n

I ever thought than a crowdfunding campaign and a external foundation that tries to keep the b2g legacy could be useful to organize the current solo-man efforts but this idea has no support three years ago and perhaps never will be

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#4

That would have been great but Mozilla didn’t warn anyone when they decided to stop B2GOS and it was so sudden that energy of everybody dropped… Too bad, so sad…