Some of us might have read about Mozilla foundation coming up with a new mobile operating system which will be developed in HTML5, called Firefox OS. And we all thought that it will be one big HTML5 web page when booted up! Well its much more than that. Its a complete mobile operating system now. Mozilla now have a working emulator of the OS called r2d2b2g. The OS can be previewed on Firefox browser as an add on. Its a 61.2 Mb download and once done you can test it by selecting Tools > B2G Desktop. BTW b3g stands for ‘Boot to Gecko’.
With the OS, Mozilla is targeting markets that cannot afford a smartphone like the iPhone or Android. The complete OS is written in HTML5, JavaScript and CSS expect the hardware drivers and Linux kernel. The emulator comes with many apps pre-installed and even a dialer. As always with Mozilla foundation the OS is open source. One of the interesting thing about the emulator is that you can install a web page as an app. You can do this by selecting Tools > Install Page as App. For example, navigate to Wikipedia on Firefox and select Tools > Install Page as App. The Wikipedia is then installed as an app on the emulator. This is possible because each app runs in its own virtual Firefox/browser process. Lets hope we soon see the OS in action in actual smart phones.
Links: r2d3b2g , Firefox OS
Girish R