Behind Your Business

Mozilla has begun work on a mobile operating system for smartphones and tablets based on the free open-source Gecko engine for HTML layout used in many applications created by the organization's developer community. The goal is to displace today's proprietary, single-vendor stacks for mobile-app development with an open mobile OS called Boot to Gecko (B2G).

Though Mozilla's developers continue to work on Google's Android, they see the need for an alternative because Google's mobile platform has APIs based on a "proprietary Google sauce" rather than freely available web standards.

"Android used to be at least 'available source' where Google would publish internally developed source code/technology after the fact as products ship, but even those times seem to be over now," noted Mozilla researcher Andreas Gal. "I would love to boot my custom Android build on my Galaxy Tab 10-inch, but no luck. Google refuses to release the source code."

Building Native-Grade Apps

To reduce friction for consumers to own and productively use multiple devices, as much of the device data, content, configuration and personalization as possible needs to be moved to the cloud, noted Al Hilwa, director of applications development software at IDC.

"This is the value proposition of Google Chrome OS and now this initiative from Mozilla," Hilwa explained. "It is also what Apple and Microsoft will drive going forward, Apple with iCloud and its family of devices, and Microsoft with Windows 8, Windows Phone, and Xbox over the next couple of years."

Mozilla wants to identify the gaps that currently prevent web developers from being able to build mobile apps "that are -- in every way -- the equals of native apps built for the iPhone, Android, and Windows Phone 7," Gal wrote. "We want expertise from all over Mozilla -- and from people who aren't yet part of Mozilla -- to inform...