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Tuesday, July 26, 2011

Mozilla Building Mobile OS

Mozilla seems to have set its eyes on tablets and smartphones. The open source foundation has revealed plans to take its Gecko engine and turn it into an open-source operating system that will eventually work on phones and tablets.


Gecko engine drives its Firefox browser and e-mail client Thunderbird.
Mozilla's project will be called Boot to Gecko and code will reportedly be made available to the public as Andres Gal, a Mozilla researcher, wrote in a forum post, "...we propose a project we are calling "Boot to Gecko" to pursue the goal of building a complete, standalone operating system for the open web".
He also identified four areas for development:
- New Web APIs: build prototype APIs for exposing device and OS capabilities to content (Telephony, SMS, Camera, USB, Bluetooth, NFC, etc.)
- 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.
- Privilege model: making sure that these new capabilities are safely exposed to pages and applications 

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