Mozilla plans web-based operating system for mobiles

San Francisco, Jul 26: The Firefox maker Mozilla announced its plan to create a new web-based operating system for mobile and tablet platform.

According to Mozilla researcher Andreas Gal, the project named Boot to Gecko (B2G) will be a complete standalone operating system for the open web. The aim behind the new project is that the company wants to make sure that developers can build Web apps like HTML 5 apps that are similar to native web apps.

"We will do this work in the open, we will release the source in real-time, we will take all successful additions to an appropriate standards group, and we will track changes that come out of that process. We aren't trying to have these native-grade apps just run on Firefox, we're trying to have them run on the web," Gal said.

Areas of Development:

• New web APIs: build prototype APIs for exposing device and OS capabilities to content (Telephony, SMS, Camera, USB, Bluetooth, NFC, etc.)
• Privilege model: making sure that these new capabilities are safely exposed to pages and applications
• Booting: prototype a low-level substrate for an Android-compatible device;
• Applications: choose and port or build apps to prove out and prioritize the power of the system.

The technology blog PCWorld opinionated that the new project may help developers to write a single code for their apps to run on the various mobile-phone platforms.

OneIndia News