Mozilla's Boot to Gecko becomes Firefox OS

Boot to Gecko, the browser-centric mobile phone operating system Mozilla has been working on, will become part of the Firefox family and be rebranded "Firefox OS". The company announced the, now traditional for Mozilla projects, change of name along with the news that Mozilla has widened the range of supporting carriers it is working with. 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. These devices are now expected to arrive on the commercial market in early 2013 in Brazil.

Firefox OS is a kernel which boots an HTML5-based viewing application only. 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".

(djwm)