Mozilla seems to have set its eyes on tablets and smartphones. The open source foundation has revealed plans to take its Gecko engine and turn it into an open-source operating system that will eventually work on phones and tablets.
Gecko engine drives its Firefox browser and e-mail client Thunderbird.
Mozilla’s project will be called Boot to Gecko and code will reportedly be made available to the public as Andreas Gal, a Mozilla researcher, wrote in a forum post, “…we propose a project we’re calling “Boot to Gecko” to pursue the goal of building a complete, standalone operating system for the open web.”
He also identified four areas for development:
– 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.