Mozilla working on Boot to Gecko, a standalone Open-Source Operating System for the Web

July 26, 2011

Mozilla has started working on an standalone Open-Source Operating System for the web called Boot to Gecko(B2G). The project is the idea of Andreas Gal, Brendan Eich, Chris Jones and Mike Shaver.

The project aims to work in various areas such as:

* New web APIs: build prototype APIs for exposing device and OS capabilities to content (Telephony, SMS, Camera, USB, Bluetooth, NFC, etc.)
* Privilege model: making sure that these new capabilities are safely exposed to pages and applications
* 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.

Andreas Gal says,” We aren’t trying to have these native-grade apps just run on Firefox, we’re trying to have them run on the web.” There is every chance that B2G could become a major competitor to Google’s Chrome OS.

Tagged as: Firefox, Google, Mozilla