Mozilla Prepping Mobile Operating System for the Web

 

App development is a big business, but one of the frustrating things about the process is that developers must focus on one mobile operating system or develop for several platforms. Mozilla is looking to change this with the development of a mobile OS for the Web that will initially borrow some components from Android.
The company, known for its Firefox browser, announced plans for the Boot to Gecko (B2G) project, which will focus on the development of a "complete, standalone operating system for the open Web."

"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," the group working on the project said in their announcement. "We aren't trying to have these native-grade apps just run on Firefox, we're trying to have them run on the Web."

B2G will draw some of its inspiration from Android. On booting, for example, the project will "prototype a low-level substrate for an Android-compatible device." When asked on the Google forums why the team was taking this approach rather than booting from a PC, Mike Shaver, vice president of technical strategy for the Mozilla Corporation, said "we might prototype some stuff on a PC, but the project is really about the device space. We had to pick somewhere, and this seems like where the energy is best spent."With desktop devices, meanwhile, it's often difficult to find "good open drivers ... without pulling in things like X," Shaver wrote.
Shaver insisted that B2G intends "to use as little of Android as possible." The team wanted to "start from something that's known to boot and have access to all the devices we want to expose."

Another forum user commented that Android often "brings a lot of baggage that's useful for building a mobile phone running Java apps but does less for bringing up a Gecko." Brendan Eich, chief technology officer at Mozilla, responded that B2G "won't be taking any of that stuff ... just the kernel and device drivers."
"These days the device makers are moving to Android. To get all the HAL benefits, we want to reuse its lower layers," Eich continued.

The idea behind B2G is to push the envelope of the Web, the team said. "Mozilla believes that the Web can displace proprietary, single-vendor stacks for application development," they wrote.
They pointed to the pdf.js project, which is tracking gaps in HTML5 that need to be filled in order for it to become a superset of PDF. "We want to take a bigger step now, and 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 WP7," they said.

In addition to the Android-based prototype, developers said B2G will require work in several other areas, including the development of new Web APIs that will support things like telephony, SMS, camera, USB, Bluetooth, and NFC. It will also require a privilege model, which will make sure these new capabilities are safely exposed to pages and apps.

The team stressed that B2G is still "in its infancy," but said they wanted to discuss it publicly in order to get as much feedback as possible from inside and outside Mozilla. They encouraged interested parties to join the discussion online.In September, Mozilla Labs released a concept design (video below) for a hypothetical smartphone, dubbed "Seabird," but said at the time that it didn't plan to make the device.