"The web is the only technology platform that can establish itself as a third platform alongside ios and android," mozilla’s head of research and development, andreas gal, told news agency dpa on tuesday.
Android is the system developed by google, which has become the most widespread smartphone platform on advised by different manufacturers. This is followed by ios, which will be used on apple’s iphone. For windows phone, it will be difficult to convince enough developers to program all the interesting apps for it, gal said. With the firefox OS, the open source project mozilla will show "that the web is competitive in every way with closed technologies".
The firefox phone is to be an entry-level device for emerging and developing countries. The market launch is planned in brazil and other latin american countries – "for users who have never seen a smartphone before," explained gal, who moved to california from germany and was hired by mozilla as an expert in rapid deployment of javascript applications.
The firefox smartphone is to be designed to be particularly stable. "And we want to make sure that it starts up quickly, that all the applications and animations are fluent," said gal. The most important apps for web, e-mail and social networks form the basic equipment. There will also be apps for local needs. The mozilla marketplace is to provide many applications – and there will also be a search engine for web applications.
"We don’t want a closed app store, we want a free platform based on open technologies," said gal. Mozilla will also not be the only organization that will provide these phones. The next step will be for others to develop similar systems. "The core of the system is that no one controls the web."
Firefox OS leverages the capabilities of the HTML5 web standard and the javascript scripting language to access hardware resources directly. When you start your firefox smartphone, the web engine and javascript engine – the basic software for executing the corresponding code – are loaded into the memory of your mobile device. The traditional browser environment is disappearing, gal explained. Compared to so-called native applications for closed operating systems, there are still deficiencies, for example in the fast execution of 3D games, the mozilla chief developer admitted. But such gaps were gradually closed. There is also a web application in firefox OS that can display PDF documents directly – using only javascript and HTML5.