Mozilla.org Unleashes New Firefox Mobile OS – No Need For Gatekeepers

Mozilla rolled out its Firefox OS that will power the world’s first Open Web Devices at the Mobile World Congress 2013 in Barcelona this week. The first wave of Firefox OS devices will be available to consumers in Brazil, Colombia, Hungary, Mexico, Montenegro, Poland, Serbia, Spain and Venezuela. Additional markets will be announced soon.

Mozilla say they are working with manufacturers Alcatel (TCL), Huawei, LG and ZTE to build the first Firefox OS devices, all powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon chipset.

Firefox OS is touted as offering offers the performance, personalization and price you want in a smartphone and a beautiful, clean, intuitive, personalized and easy-to-use experience, and including all the things people need from a smartphone out of the box – calls, messaging, email, camera and more – as well as things you wish a smartphone offered, like built-in cost controls, social features with Facebook and Twitter, location-based services, the Firefox Web browser, new ability to discover one-time use and downloadable apps, Firefox Marketplace and more.

Firefox OS also features deep contextual search that will take you to the exact content you want instead of just generic apps in the same category, allowing far more sophisticated and deeper search capabilities as you can search both within apps and on the Web at the same time, which is not possible with native apps. For example, search for your favorite music artist and get results to buy your favorite song, concert tickets or even listen to your favorite song instantly.

With Firefox OS, you can simply enter any search term and instantly create a one-time use or downloadable app. Creating and consuming these apps on demand puts you in complete control of your app and smartphone experience and will make it possible for you to get the exact content you want, when you want it.

Firefox Marketplace will offer apps in categories like games, news and media, business and productivity. These apps are tied to you and your online identity to take across devices and platforms. Leading mobile apps and Web developers around the globe will leverage the power of the Web unlocked by Mozilla to release apps in the Firefox Marketplace.

With Firefox Marketplace, Web developers can easily create and distribute HTML5 apps so you can find an app for whatever you want – even local, niche and emerging topics. Firefox Marketplace will include popular apps such as AccuWeather, Airbnb, Box, Cut the Rope, Disney Mobile Games, EA games, Facebook, Nokia HERE, MTV Brasil, Pulse News, SoundCloud, SporTV, Terra, Time Out and Twitter as well as personally-tailored and local apps that are relevant to users in their respective regions.

Most mobile apps are built with Web technologies at the core and then wrapped in a proprietary technology to distribute the app on a specific platform. Mozilla is unlocking the Web as a mobile development platform with Firefox Marketplace and unwrapping mobile apps to enable more opportunity and control for developers and consumers.

Firefox Marketplace’s open Web platform and these new Web APIs also enable developers to distribute apps directly, with no need for gatekeepers, true to the Mozilla mission of creating choice, innovation and opportunity on the Web.

Firefox Marketplace can be previewed on Firefox for Android Aurora and will be offered with the first Firefox OS phones to launch later this year.

For more information, visit:
http://blog.mozilla.org/