Mozilla Plans App Store, More Details At MWC 2012 | TechTree.com

Mozilla Plans App Store, More Details At MWC 2012

Could also announce a smartphone operating system.

 

Mozilla, which developed the Firefox internet browser, is expected to make an announcement about its own app store for smartphones. The app store, called the Mozilla Marketplace, will launch later this year, and will offer mobile apps for the iPhone, Android phones, and Windows Phone devices. The company is also said to be working on a smartphone capable of breaking free of the ecosystems that is limited by mobile OSes at present. It will attempt to achieve this by enabling the apps to run within the phone's browser, thus eliminating the current app store-specific ecosystem limitations. An early prototype of this project, codenamed Boot to Gecko, could be unveiled at the Mobile World Congress 2012 (MWC 2012) beginning next week.

According to company Vice President Jay Sullivan, the company's mission has not changed since 2004, "...it's just that our world has moved on. Instead of your choice for a particular (mobile) device narrowing your options, we'd like to see the user have control over their online life". The open-source Firefox browser has created some serious competition in the monopolistic browser market, and it seems that its goal is to provide more options to the end-users, so that they do not feel limited by the device they own.

The smartphone in question would come with web technologies such as HTML5 and JavaScript directly on the device's hardware without the need of an OS. You can think of it along the lines of Chrome OS, which is a browser and an operating system. While the later is found mostly on netbooks, Mozilla's version will be for mobile devices. The app store launching this year will survive by providing apps to current devices, as a commercial version of the Mozilla smartphone is probably over a year away. Brendan Eich, CTO of the company said, "Hang onto your hats; we're moving fast. A few years down the road, with Web technologies continuing to evolve, you should be able to do all the beautiful games and the presentation and the tools that you see in native mobile apps, but with a Web-powered phone".


TAGS: Apps, Mobile Phones, Events, MWC, Mozilla, Jayesh

 
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