It was a year ago when Mozilla announced its intentions of plunging into the mobile OS market. It was a decision to be expected, but still the disclosure left a lot of questions marks. Will Mozilla be working alone? What would the company be calling it and most importantly, what does it plan to bring new to the table to survive in the jungle of already heated competition?
Mozilla’s vice president of products, Jay Sullivan seemed quite excited about the prospects that B2G brings to the world of mobile phones, last week:
“B2G – A truly Web-based OS for mobile phones and tablets would enable the ultimate in user choice and developer opportunity, both from a technology and an ecosystem point of view.”
Time has passed, and we can give you a couple more answers. The OS will be named Boot2Gecko or B2G and details about the partners working with Mozilla to produce this new interface will surface very soon…at the Mobile World Conference in Barcelona. As the name suggest, the operating system will be running entire on Firefox’s Gecko HTML rendering engine. Its user interface named Gaia was created using mainly HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript. This might become very interesting to developers.
The other layer of Boot2Gecko is made up of the Linux kernel and will be called Gonk. It’s function is to be a sort of main controller: being in charge of hardware and other system components. Some images of the Gaia interface are already available on the web, and users can take a look at some. At first glance, everything is pretty reminiscent of Android or iOS but this is just a startup, we’re pretty confident that as things advance, the differences in design will start popping up. The menu incorporates a functional dialer, contacts, messages, settings and maps apps.
It will be quite interesting to see if this new OS will manage to stand out of the crowd at the Mobile World Conference in a couple of days.
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