Mozilla has rebranded its Boot-to-Gecko project as Firefox Mobile OS, confirming the first devices will arrive next year. Several mobile carriers and device manufacturers have pledged support for the fledgling Firefox OS. Telefónica was the first company to jump on the Boot to Gecko bandwagon several months back, and it will be the first service to carry a Firefox OS phone, which is scheduled to land in Brazil sometime in early 2013. Now, Deutsche Telekom, Etisalat, Smart, Sprint, Telecom Italia, Telefónica and Telenor are signed up to support Firefox OS. Device makers TCL Communication Technology, who operate as Alcatel One Touch, and ZTE have also announced plans to make Qualcomm Snapdragon-based devices running Firefox OS.
Boot to Gecko is Mozilla’s take on the mobile OS; it sits on top of the Android kernel, booting directly into the Gecko rendering engine, and runs HTML5 apps rather than the proprietary apps favoured by rival platforms. The phone functionality is then entirely implemented as locally stored web applications, removing all user-facing native code and middleware layers from the device. Any APIs needed to fully exploit the capabilities of the phone are being implemented as Web APIs and then submitted to the W3C “for standardization”. The removal of OS services and middleware layers, Mozilla hopes, will make devices easier to build and introduce at a lower price point to “drive adoption across developing markets”.
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