> Aside from games, rendering a markup language is one the most taxing things we do on our mobile devices. When I get handed a new phone to play with, the first thing I do is load a non-mobile optimized website and see how it scrolls. This worst-case scenario is a good indicator for how laggy and jittery a mobile OS will be at sporadic times throughout the day.
The point here though is that you have less overhead by focusing just on the web. Running a web browser on a normal mobile OS, as you mentioned, runs a browser stack on top of the normal OS. There is additional work there, for example, on Android to run the browser you also run the Dalvik VM, etc. And the underlying OS and userspace is optimized for native apps for that platform, not just for the browser.
B2G purposefully has just one VM - JavaScript - and just one native app - a web browser, and the underlying OS is optimized for running exactly that, not native Android apps or native iOS apps in addition to a web browser.
It's too early to say how the final result will be. But the approach makes sense and is worth trying.
The point here though is that you have less overhead by focusing just on the web. Running a web browser on a normal mobile OS, as you mentioned, runs a browser stack on top of the normal OS. There is additional work there, for example, on Android to run the browser you also run the Dalvik VM, etc. And the underlying OS and userspace is optimized for native apps for that platform, not just for the browser.
B2G purposefully has just one VM - JavaScript - and just one native app - a web browser, and the underlying OS is optimized for running exactly that, not native Android apps or native iOS apps in addition to a web browser.
It's too early to say how the final result will be. But the approach makes sense and is worth trying.