Mozilla Releases Firefox OS Simulator 3.0 As Firefox Extension
At the beginning of this year, the folks at Mozilla rolled out the 1.0 version of the Firefox OS Simulator, which provided folks--especially developers--an opportunity to try out the company's promising new mobile operating system. The simulator worked on computers rather than mobile devices, and many developers used to get a taste of the new platform.
Now, Mozilla has announced version 3.0 of the simulator, and it's clear that these simulator upgrades remain aimed at giving developers a chance to evaluate and work with the OS. You can try the simulator yourself by installing it as an extension in Firefox.
According to Mozilla Hacks:
"You can download version 3.0 of the Firefox OS Simulator from our add-ons web site. As part of this release, we’d also like to highlight our updated Firefox OS Simulator documentation on MDN and also our Firefox OS Simulator walkthrough example."
In our preview coverage, we listed the new features for this version:
- Push to Device
- Rotation simulation
- Basic geolocation API simulation
- Manifest validation
- Stability fixes for installation and updates to apps
- Newer versions of the Firefox rendering engine and Gaia (the UI for Firefox OS)
We wrote about the early preview of this release here. And this post quoted Mozilla's Christian Heilmann making it very clear that Mozilla is not concerned about immediately competing with the iPhone and Android phones. Instead, Firefox OS phones will be low cost devices with simple feature sets. Heilmann has written:
"How do developers test on a platform that is not sold in their locale as it would be pointless to add to a saturated market with a lower-spec phone? The answer is developer tools like the Firefox OS simulator and affordable testing devices where you can really see how responsive the hardware with the OS is."
Developers mean everything to the success of Mozilla's mobile operating system, and we'll see very shortly if compelling apps arrive for phones based on it.