#FirefoxOS arrives this month in select markets! Celebrate the 1st smartphone powered completely by Web technologies! http://mzl.la/14HlgeB
– Tweet from Firefox
Mozilla is going into the smart phone realm with FirefoxOS! With a lot of partners and predicted size of its app collection, FirefoxOS looks to be a pretty smooth animal, one that may be a decent competitor with Microsoft’s Windows Phone.
The reason I said the Windows Phone is that Mozilla would have to overtake Microsoft first before touching the Android and Apple markets, which show a prominent market share.
Firefox OS (sometimes abbreviated FxOS) is a new mobile operating system developed by Mozilla. It uses a Linux kernel and boots into a Gecko-based runtime engine, which lets users run applications developed entirely using HTML, JavaScript, and other open web application APIs.
Firefox OS is currently under heavy development; we are constantly working on ways to make it easier for you to use and hack on Gaia (the default set of apps) and create your own. However, you need knowledge about systems in order to do things like build the entire Firefox OS stack, or flash a phone with a build of Firefox OS. Linked below are guides meant for Web developers interested in running and making changes to Gaia or developing apps to run on Firefox OS devices.
– MDN