Skip to main content

Mozilla Announced New Mobile OS

Mozilla has announced an ambitious project few hours ago to pursue the goal of building a complete, standalone operating system for the open web. It revealed preliminary plans to take the Gecko engine that drives its Firefox browser which will eventually work on mobile phones and tablets.

 

image

 

This new project will be called Boot to Gecko and the code will be made public in next few weeks. This OS is inspired by Google’s Chrome OS, where developers can easily build web apps and in HTML5.

According to the official announcement -

To that end, we propose a project we’re calling Boot to Gecko (B2G) to pursue the goal of building a complete, standalone operating system for the open web. It’s going to require work in a number of areas.

    New web APIs: build prototype APIs for exposing device and OS capabilities to content (Telephony, SMS, Camera, USB, Bluetooth, NFC, etc.)
    Privilege model: making sure that these new capabilities are safely exposed to pages and applications
    Booting: prototype a low-level substrate for an Android-compatible device
   Applications: choose and port or build apps to prove out and prioritize the power of the system.

The post also mentioned that this project won’t use the Android SDK but instead run new and current web app APIs.

In an open forum discussion, Mozilla noted that its "starting point" is a device running Firefox for Android as its home screen, with some custom APIs thrown in. It also admitted that there is an "ultimate goal" to the project, that of "breaking the stranglehold of proprietary technologies over the mobile device world."

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Windows Phone 7.5 Tango Officially Renamed As ‘Refresh’

The next version of Microsoft’s Windows Phone operating system after Mango 7.1 is officially renamed as ‘Windows Phone 7.5 Refresh’ – according to the head of Windows Phone division for Microsoft Italy.     According to Italian version of the post , 7.5 Refresh update will mostly be an update to the minimum specs of the devices it’ll be able to run (minimum RAM requirements is dropped from 512 MB to 256 MB). Other updates which may include in this release are better media messaging, location awareness icon, export and manage contacts to SIM card. The next major update after ‘Refresh’ is called Windows Phone Apollo (probably Windows Phone 8) could certainly be an exciting release from Microsoft. This Apollo update may have BitLocker kind of support on mobile devices, multi-core support. [ via ] [ Image ]
Post a Comment
Read more

Your Google Apps Account is Changing

Google is about to make more of its services available to organizations with Google Apps accounts. This is an early adopter phase, and all domains may not get this option to move to the new infrastructure. What this means for you: In addition to the core suite of messaging and collaboration applications, Google Apps users may now access many more Google services with their Google Apps accounts.     Those who are eligible for this early adoption, Google Apps administrator will be presented with the above banner to start with the migration. In your organization, you can transition selected pilot users and admins, or you can start the transition now for all your users. The transition for pilot users can be reverted if necessary. After successful transition, your users will now be able to use other Google popular products like AdSense, AdWords, Alerts, Analytics, Android, Blogger, Finance, Google Desktop, News, Orkut, Reader, Voice, YouTube (Full list here ). Als...
Post a Comment
Read more

How To Install Windows 8 on a Virtual Machine

Now that Microsoft released Windows 8 Developer Preview build officially this Tuesday, want to see and test all new features right from your machine without disturbing existing operating system? Read on.. Interesting part about Windows 8 is that Microsoft is foreseeing an OS that scales right from small form factors, tablets and all the way to big servers. Major updates in this new operating system include Tablet Optimization, Picture Password, New Start Screen with ‘Tile’ (apps), Metro UI, Charms, IE 10.     In order to test out Windows 8 Dev Preview in a virtual machine, I tried installing it in Microsoft’s Windows Virtual PC and as well as VMWare. Unfortunately, installation failed in both virtualization technologies with random blue screen errors. And here is the screenshot of all new re-imagined version of blue screen in Widows 8.   Even I tried installing on Oracle’s Virtual Box with default settings. It failed in that too. Finally, after tweaking so...
4 comments
Read more