firefox os

It's been a busy year at the home of Firefox, as Mozilla went public with major developments meant to change the Web, but it's about to get much busier as it looks to make those initiatives a reality. A key step forward will be to unify its development schedules under a project named Kilimanjaro.

Oh, and it wants to have Kilimanjaro bagged by September of this year. The related bugs blocking Kilimanjaro have all been marked as "highest priority."

Damon Sicore, vice president of engineering at Mozilla, explained in a forum post that Kilimanjaro is about … Read more

Mozilla's Marketplace has begun accepting app submissions, looking toward the ultimate goal of building a standalone operating system for the open Web.

As part of the company's Boot to Gecko project, these apps would allow for cross-device and multi-operating system integration, which means anchoring the apps to the user and not to the device or platform.

"Using HTML, CSS and JavaScript, a developer can build an app using responsive design, and that app can offer the same look and feel as a device-native app, without having to rewrite for every desired target platform," Joe Stagner, Mozilla'… Read more

BARCELONA, Spain--Telefonica today showed off B2G, the Mozilla browser-based operating system for mobile phones, saying it's good enough to sell to today's feature-phone customers later this year.

You may or may not agree. To help you judge, here's a video of Carlos Domingo, Telefonica Digital's director of product development and innovation, demonstrating a prototype phone at a press conference today at the Mobile World Congress show here. At the event, Telefonica announced its mobile OS pact with Mozilla.

Having watched the demo myself, the phone looked workable but awfully pokey. And touch input-- specially the keyboard--was … Read more

BARCELONA--Half of Telefonica's customers are in Latin America, where smartphones are scarcer than in wealthier parts of the world. But the mobile network operator hopes Mozilla's new browser-based operating system, B2G, will change that.

"What we're selling the most in these countries is feature phones, which is ridiculous, said Carlos Domingo, Telefonica Digital's director of product development and innovation, in an interview at the Mobile World Congress show here in Barcelona, Spain. "We think we can bring smartphones to the masses in developing countries with this approach."

How affordable, exactly? The B2G phone … Read more

BARCELONA, Spain--Mozilla took a big first step in making something real out of B2G, its browser-based mobile operating system, by signing on mobile network operator Telefonica as a partner.

In addition, the Firefox maker discussed another step, a close relationship with mobile processor maker Qualcomm to create the hardware for the first phones, expected to launch later in 2012.

Those are two very important steps. But they're only one of dozens that it must take to create an operating system competitive with Apple's iOS and Google's Android, much less one that fulfills Mozilla's grander ambition. The … Read more

Firefox developer Mozilla will reveal partners later this month for its Boot to Gecko project, an ambitious attempt to build a browser-based operating system for mobile devices.

At first glance, it's easy to write off Boot to Gecko (B2G) as doomed from the start. When it comes to taking on iOS and Android, WebOS was a dud, BlackBerry OS is struggling, and Microsoft is carving out a niche for Windows Phone only by dint of extraordinary effort.

But B2G has a couple things going for it. First, it's a browser-based operating system, meaning that Web apps become its … Read more

Although Mozilla has never limited its stated goals to merely building an open-source browser, there's no doubt that Firefox has been the highest-profile project from the Mozilla Foundation.

But now, with skyrocketing mobile connectivity and Google's shockingly fast ascent in the browser world, Mozilla Messaging CEO David Ascher restated yesterday what the nonprofit organization is about, where it's going, and why you should care.

Ascher noted that the first few years of the Mozilla mission have borne useful fruit. Internet Explorer may still be dominant, but it doesn't command anywhere near as much of the market … Read more

Mozilla revealed preliminary plans today to take the Gecko engine that drives its Firefox browser and turn it into an open-source operating system that will eventually work on phones and tablets.

Called Boot to Gecko, it is known that the source code will be released to the public "in real-time," wrote Andreas Gal, a Mozilla researcher. Gecko is the rendering engine that powers Firefox and the e-mail client Thunderbird. By contrast, while Google's Android mobile operating system is open source, the main development work on it does not become available until after Google has green-lit its publication--sometimes … Read more