Mozilla will woo operators for its mobile OS project
Boot 2 Gecko set for release later this year as a multiscreen, cloud-oriented system to free developers from mobile siloes
Published: 20 February, 2012
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Next week's Mobile World Congress should see Mozilla's mobile platform coming out from the shadows, and the open source browser group is likely to be partnering closely with operators, tapping into their desire to have a counterweight to Android. This could see Mozilla's B2G (Boot to Gecko) project using the open APIs which underpin the cellcos' chief initiative to limit Google's power, WAC (Wholesale Application Community).
Of course, this approach is the great hope for all alternatives to Android and iOS, from Windows Phone, which presents itself as the 'third ecosystem', to less successful open source efforts such as LiMO - once backed heavily by certain cellcos and also close to WAC.
Mozilla is just saying that it is "partnering up" and will release details in Barcelona next week, according to CTO Brendan Eich. B2G is likely to be a modern cloud-oriented platform, more comparable to Google's Chrome OS than Android, with the browser and HTML5 supplying the user experience and a stripped-down Linux OS underneath.
In a post on the Mozilla.dev site, Mozilla researcher Andreas Gal said B2G aims to "find the gaps that keep web developers from being able to build apps that are, in every way, the equals of native apps built for the iPhone, Android and [Windows Phone]." This will incorporate elements of Android, but the organization says it "intends to use as little of Android as possible, in fact."
There will also be an open marketplace for web apps, which Mozilla says will span different device types and free developers from the siloes of the current app ecosystems. According to CNet, there will be a cross-platform web runtime, dubbed Apps/WebRT, which leverages the existing web rendering engines Gecko and WebKit as a starting point, and add native OS integration for installing, launching and managing apps.
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