Mozilla Is Building An Operating System?

[DaveP]

Link: Boot to Gecko (B2G)

Not much to say right now as the project is still in the early stages.

...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...

Watch this space...?

[jinnantonnixx]

Interesting.

It seems they're targetting small mobile devices, rather than netbooks and laptops. This seems odd, as they'll be using the Android base as a platform to compete with... the juggernaut that is Android?

Boot to Gecko is Mozilla's response to Chrome OS

[Dos_Box]

According to the BBC here: BBC News - Mozilla starts coding for mobiles and tablets
I question whether there is space for a fourth party in this race alonside Apple, Microsoft and Android?
This part of teh article however does make intersting reading:

Although the project will draw on some parts of Google's Android mobile operating system much of the code will be freshly written.

Once finished the operating system will compete with Android as it will run on the same devices.

The project team said all code development would be done in the open and shared as soon as it was written.

If it has low overheads and can rejuvinate older devices then I suspect there may be a place for it after all.

[kmount]

DaveP's started a discussion about this.

http://www.edugeek.net/forums/genera...ng-system.html

Interesting.

[dhicks]

I question whether there is space for a fourth party in this race alonside Apple, Microsoft and Android?

Simple Firefox-running-on-Linux is, obviously, already working on laptops, so really all that needs to be done is the user interface be trimmed right down to lose the whole "desktop" idea, just have a browser window. I've got a system almost like this working at home, I just can't get the blasted sound working - a basic Debian installwith added X and Xfce, Firefox (IceWeasel under Debian) and Flash /PDF plugins taking up 2GB of disk space. I can understand an OS for smaller mobile devices needing to be a separate project, although I hope they release a stripped-down version of Firefox that's easy to reuse in other Linux distributions.

I don't like Google's approach to handling offline working - yet another technology for developers to deal with (Gears) isn't the answer. I prefer simple virtualisation - your mobile device runs proper server applications in individual virtual machines that handle synchronising with a master server if available. This is why I like Xen - you can still use Atom-based mobile devices without hardware support for virtualisation, and memory overheads are minimal.

[nephilim]

If its like firefox when it first started out, then it would be buggy to begin with, besides they are too far behind now, look at Apple iOS, Android and Windows Mobile, not to mention Blackberry RIM, even the nokia OVI system, there are too many to compete with and the big boys (Apple, BB and Android) wont see much sliced off their profits and I dont think it will make much of a dent in terms of the phone market unless the bring out a phone like Google did with the nexus.

[Arthur]

I don't like Google's approach to handling offline working - yet another technology for developers to deal with (Gears) isn't the answer.

Google is using (or soon will be) the HTML5 off-line storage API. What's not to like about that?

[Dos_Box]

I'm going to merge the threads.

[nephilim]

Honeycomb is already running HTML5 along with flash so you get the best of both worlds, firefox have said they will follow suite with this, so will it be another "flavour" of android?

[Arthur]

will it be another "flavour" of Android?

No....

Mozilla's current tentative plan is to adopt a slim layer of existing code from the lower levels of the Android operating system for hardware enablement purposes and then build a completely custom user interface and application stack around Gecko, the Firefox HTML rendering engine. Android was chosen because it will theoretically offer compatibility with existing hardware, but Mozilla ultimately intends to use "as little of Android as possible." It will not use Android's Java-based environment and it will not support programming in native code. (Source)

[nephilim]

But it will be based from the same source code...so it will be a flavour of Android (much like you can say Ubuntu is a flavour of unix ) I would definitely like to see it scalable, on my Samsung Q1 UMPC I have quad boot at the min (Win 7, Android, Ubuntu and Chrome OS) so wouldn't mind sticking another one on there!

Win 7 for stuff like RDP and the like
Ubuntu because I like the OS and it runs nicely
Android for my daughter so she can play stuff like bubble blast and angry birds
Chrome OS as it integrates with everything I have from google nicely...

Firefox added on would just be a guilty pleasure! lol