


In July 2012, Boot to Gecko was rebranded as 'Firefox OS', after Mozilla's well-known desktop browser, Firefox, and screenshots began appearing in August 2012. Jan Jongboom at the Simonyi Conference - 2014 Development history The goal of these efforts is to enable developers to build applications using WebAPI which would then run in any standards compliant browser without the need to rewrite their application for each platform.įile:XI. These are intended W3C standards that attempt to bridge the capability gap that currently exists between native frameworks and web applications. This assumption is employed in Mozilla's WebAPI.
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He characterized the current set of mobile OS systems as " walled gardens" and presented Firefox OS as more accessible: "We use completely open standards and there’s no proprietary software or technology involved." Gal also said that because the software stack is entirely HTML5, there are already a large number of established developers. In 2012, Andreas Gal expanded on Mozilla's aims. According to Ars Technica, "Mozilla says that B2G is motivated by a desire to demonstrate that the standards-based open Web has the potential to be a competitive alternative to the existing single-vendor application development stacks offered by the dominant mobile operating systems."
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The project proposal was to "pursue the goal of building a complete, standalone operating system for the open web" in order 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 7." The announcement identified these work areas: new web APIs to expose device and OS capabilities such as telephone and camera, a privilege model to safely expose these to web pages, applications to prove these capabilities, and low-level code to boot on an Android-compatible device. On July 25, 2011, Andreas Gal, Director of Research at Mozilla Corporation, announced the "Boot to Gecko" Project (B2G) on the mailing list.

Project inception and roll-out Commencement of project

Mozilla has also partnered with T2Mobile to make a Firefox OS reference phone dubbed "Flame" which is designed for developers to contribute to Firefox OS and to test apps. As of December 16, 2014, Firefox OS phones are offered by 14 operators in 28 countries throughout the world. In January 2013, at CES 2013, ZTE confirmed they would be shipping a smartphone with Firefox OS, and on July 2, 2013, Telefónica launched the first commercial Firefox OS based phone, ZTE Open, in Spain which was quickly followed by GeeksPhone's Peak+. As such, it competes with commercially developed operating systems such as Apple's iOS, Google's Android, Microsoft's Windows Phone and Jolla's Sailfish OS.įirefox OS was publicly demonstrated in February 2012, on Android-compatible smartphones. It is being developed by Mozilla, the non-profit organization best known for the Firefox web browser.įirefox OS is designed to provide a complete, community-based alternative system for mobile devices, using open standards and approaches such as HTML5 applications, JavaScript, a robust privilege model, open web APIs to communicate directly with cellphone hardware, and application marketplace. Template:About Template:Use mdy dates Template:Infobox OSįirefox OS (project name: Boot to Gecko, also known as B2G) is a Linux kernel-based open-source operating system for smartphones and tablet computers and is set to be used on smart TVs.
