Mozilla’s Firefox is used by over 450 million people worldwide to surf and interact with the Internet. And as a web browser it is universally known. But Firefox as a free, open source mobile operating system? At this year’s giant Mobile World Congress (MWC) trade show in Barcelona, the event was draped in orange. That is the official Firefox color, and in honor of their coming-out party for the new Firefox mobile web browser, their employees were even wearing tangerine sneakers.
You may be thinking, do we really need another smartphone OS? Intel and Samsung are currently pitching their own brand-new open source mobile OS called Tizen, but a combination of Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android controls a whopping 85% of the mobile marketplace. When a power like Microsoft can only squeeze out a 3% market share with its Windows Mobile, you know that the marketplace is pretty content with the “big two”. Nevertheless, Mozilla CEO Gary Kovacs is pushing ahead eagerly with the new Firefox OS.
Kovacs believes the world needs the free Firefox operating system for two big reasons. He stated that it will help reduce carrier dependency on Google and Apple, and also claims it is a much lower-cost way to get people onto the Internet. And it doesn’t operate in the traditional operating systems since like IOS and Android. Written entirely in HTML5, the open-source operating system from Firefox was created in the basic underlying programming language of the World Wide Web.
Applications will run from the web and hook into your phone’s hardware and data when powered by the Firefox OS. They can even run off-line, and the new mobile operating system only uses about half the phone memory that Android does. This allows the handset to be priced well under $100, basically half the price of a low-end Android smartphone. Mozilla has used more than 500 engineers on this particular project for more than two years, and Kovacs could recoup costs by expanding the current Mozilla PC-browser search deal his company has with Google to mobile.
Though MWC was held back in February this year, not been too much said about this potentially powerful operating system. But a total of 18 wireless carriers including Telefonica have recently agreed to sell Firefox phones in countries like Brazil, Mexico and Poland starting as early as this summer. The handsets will be made by LG, Sony, ZTE, Huawei and others, and Strategy Analytics predicted recently that Firefox will be on a full 1% of global smartphones by the end of this year. Approximately 8 million programmers know how to write in HTML5, and that means plentiful applications could be ready for the Firefox mobile operating system in no time.
