Choice is a wonderful thing, but successful restaurants have smaller menus for a reason. If you’ve been grappling with making a decision on phone platforms as is, Mozilla’s about to chuck their hat into the ring with their Boot to Gecko mobile platform.
B2G, as it’s being called, aims to clean up mobile fragmentation with a standards-based web technologies OS which will of course be open-source. While work on the platform doesn’t seem to have progressed too far yet, they plan on publishing source code as it’s developed, so devs can add to it and help them out.
So where does Android fit into all of it? Mozilla understands that it’s difficult creating a new platform from the ground up, so is taking some of Android’s code that lets it work on hardware, and will add a new UI and application stack pulled from Firefox’s cross-platform layout engine Gecko. Lest you think this is just another Android phone with custom UI over it, think again — Mozilla has boldly said they won’t be adopting the Java language used in Android, nor will they support native code programming.
Back in September last year, Mozilla showed off a mobile phone prototype dubbed the Seabird, which explored the idea of an Open Web phone based on Android, with an 8MP camera, two pico-projectors and inductive wireless charging. Could the design shown in the video above be a tantalising glimpse of what to expect from B2G? Could Mozilla actually end up building a flagship phone to run their custom OS? Perhaps choice isn’t so bad after all. [B2G via Ars Technica via TechRadar]
poltak
Tuesday, July 26, 2011 at 9:00 PMI just hope they improve the firefox Android app… it’s very promising for current firefox desktop users with sync and all, but even on an overclocked Honeycomb tablet it runs rather sluggishly compared to Dolphin, Opera or the stock browser.
But either way, cool phone concept with the projectors.
Adrian
Tuesday, July 26, 2011 at 9:36 PMDear Mozilla,
Please make this phone with the dual pico projectors and give me one.
Thank you (:
Harvz
Tuesday, July 26, 2011 at 10:05 PMgod i still wish that phone would come to pass
Richard
Tuesday, July 26, 2011 at 10:48 PM“Mozilla has boldly said they won’t be adopting the Java language used in Android, nor will they support native code programming.”
Yeah good luck with that. I think the iPhone and Pre are great examples of OSs thats were rather limited until the SDKs for native apps were made available. The whole web based approach is great for certain types of applications however it certainly limits what you can do on todays hardware in other areas such as games etc.
Given mobile devices are being made or dyeing based on their application portfolio in many ways now days I don’t see an OS without any native apps doing particularly well. I don’t for instance see why I would choose it over Android if I can likely run everything on the Mozilla OS which will likely be web based on another handset. Even if the OS is nice, that functionality will surely make its way across the pond.
Seems like a non starter to me. The chrome OS competitor makes more sense to me.
Steve
Wednesday, July 27, 2011 at 1:05 AMFirefox is a bloated piece of junk. And not in an endearing Millennium Falcon way. The browser only caught a break at a time when IE was even worse.
Mozilla has neither the manufacturer leverage nor money to pull off something like this vs the likes of Google.