Mozilla's Firefox OS: Take It Seriously

Back in February, we reported on how Mozilla is in an alliance with Telefonica and Qualcomm to become a serious player in the smartphone arena with its own open mobiile operating system. And, just recently, we reported on Techweek Europe's posts of a series of screenshots, seen here, showing Mozilla's mobile operating system with a look and feel that Mozilla claimed was non-representative of the final OS. What's being called "Firefox OS" looks very compelling, and is even showing up for the Raspberry Pi.

Now, there are a lot more videos and screenshots of the OS arriving, and the story just gets more interesting.

You can find collected updates on Firefox OS here. VentureBeat is also out with a very interesting piece on Firefox OS and how Mozilla is seeding an ecosystem of apps for it, noting:

"Mozilla’s fascination and faith in the mobile web has been well documented in the recent past, especially with the launch of Firefox for Android. But Firefox OS means Mozilla has to really put its money where its mouth is.

Firefox OS has, [JavaScript creator Brendan Eich] says, 'a thinner stack than the dominant mobile OSes. … This has enabled a lot of developers to get on board and has allowed us to populate the ecosystem from the web.'

What about performance issues, the kind that caused Facebook to shy away from its previously optimistic view of web and hybrid apps?

'We realize that the web stack is never perfect,' Eichs admits, 'but it always catches up, and it has the broadest reach. So we started working on the standards.”

Eich makes clear that Mozilla is very focused on open web standards for Firefox OS. The real question is how welcome a new open mobile OS will be in the smartphone market. It's likely that, just as many people have favored Android because it's open, Mozilla can rally lots of Firefox and FOSS fans behind its mobile OS.

Robert Nyman, a Technical Evangelist for Mozilla, has posted a Flickr gallery of screenshots of Firefox OS. Here is an example, showing a mobile OS that is worth watching: