Firefox OS (project name: ''Boot to Gecko'', also known as ''B2G'') is a discontinued

open-source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use and view the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open source model is a decentrali ...

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware and software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ...

made for

smartphone A smartphone is a mobile phone with advanced computing capabilities. It typically has a touchscreen interface, allowing users to access a wide range of applications and services, such as web browsing, email, and social media, as well as multi ...

tablet computer A tablet computer, commonly shortened to tablet, is a mobile device, typically with a mobile operating system and touchscreen display processing circuitry, and a rechargeable battery in a single, thin and flat package. Tablets, being computers ...

smart TV A smart TV, also known as a connected TV (CTV or, rarely, CoTV), is a traditional television set with integrated Internet and interactive Web 2.0 features that allow users to stream music and videos, browse the internet, and view photos. Smart T ...

s, and

dongles A dongle is a small piece of computer hardware that connects to a port on another device to provide it with additional functionality, or enable a pass-through to such a device that adds functionality. In computing, the term was initially synony ...

Mozilla Mozilla is a free software community founded in 1998 by members of Netscape. The Mozilla community uses, develops, publishes and supports Mozilla products, thereby promoting free software and open standards. The community is supported institution ...

and external contributors. It is based on the rendering engine of the

Firefox Mozilla Firefox, or simply Firefox, is a free and open-source web browser developed by the Mozilla Foundation and its subsidiary, the Mozilla Corporation. It uses the Gecko rendering engine to display web pages, which implements curr ...

web browser,

Gecko Geckos are small, mostly carnivorous lizards that have a wide distribution, found on every continent except Antarctica. Belonging to the infraorder Gekkota, geckos are found in warm climates. They range from . Geckos are unique among lizards ...

, and on the

Linux kernel The Linux kernel is a Free and open-source software, free and open source Unix-like kernel (operating system), kernel that is used in many computer systems worldwide. The kernel was created by Linus Torvalds in 1991 and was soon adopted as the k ...

. It was first commercially released in 2014. Firefox OS was designed to provide a complete, community-based alternative operating system, for running

web application A web application (or web app) is application software that is created with web technologies and runs via a web browser. Web applications emerged during the late 1990s and allowed for the server to dynamically build a response to the request, ...

s directly or those installed from an application marketplace. The applications use

open standards An open standard is a standard that is openly accessible and usable by anyone. It is also a common prerequisite that open standards use an open license that provides for extensibility. Typically, anybody can participate in their development due to ...

and approaches such as

JavaScript JavaScript (), often abbreviated as JS, is a programming language and core technology of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and CSS. Ninety-nine percent of websites use JavaScript on the client side for webpage behavior. Web browsers have ...

and

HTML5 HTML5 (Hypertext Markup Language 5) is a markup language used for structuring and presenting hypertext documents on the World Wide Web. It was the fifth and final major HTML version that is now a retired World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) recommend ...

, a robust privilege model, and

open web Web standards are the formal, non-proprietary standards and other technical specifications that define and describe aspects of the World Wide Web. In recent years, the term has been more frequently associated with the trend of endorsing a set of st ...

API An application programming interface (API) is a connection between computers or between computer programs. It is a type of software interface, offering a service to other pieces of software. A document or standard that describes how to build ...

s that can communicate directly with hardware, e.g. cellphone hardware. As such, Mozilla with Firefox OS competed with commercially developed operating systems such as

Apple An apple is a round, edible fruit produced by an apple tree (''Malus'' spp.). Fruit trees of the orchard or domestic apple (''Malus domestica''), the most widely grown in the genus, are agriculture, cultivated worldwide. The tree originated ...

iOS Ios, Io or Nio (, ; ; locally Nios, Νιός) is a Greek island in the Cyclades group in the Aegean Sea. Ios is a hilly island with cliffs down to the sea on most sides. It is situated halfway between Naxos and Santorini. It is about long an ...

Google Google LLC (, ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company focusing on online advertising, search engine technology, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, consumer electronics, and artificial ...

's Android,

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company, technology conglomerate headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Founded in 1975, the company became influential in the History of personal computers#The ear ...

Windows Phone Windows Phone (WP) is a discontinued mobile operating system developed by Microsoft Mobile for smartphones as the replacement successor to Windows Mobile and Zune. Windows Phone featured a new user interface derived from the Metro design languag ...

BlackBerry BlackBerry is a discontinued brand of handheld devices and related mobile services, originally developed and maintained by the Canadian company Research In Motion (RIM, later known as BlackBerry Limited) until 2016. The first BlackBerry device ...

BlackBerry 10 BlackBerry 10 (BB10) is a proprietary mobile operating system for the BlackBerry line of smartphones, both developed by BlackBerry Limited (formerly known as Research In Motion). Released in January 2013, BlackBerry 10 is a complete rework from t ...

Samsung Samsung Group (; stylised as SΛMSUNG) is a South Korean Multinational corporation, multinational manufacturing Conglomerate (company), conglomerate headquartered in the Samsung Town office complex in Seoul. The group consists of numerous a ...

's/

Linux Foundation The Linux Foundation (LF) is a non-profit organization established in 2000 to support Linux development and open-source software projects. Background The Linux Foundation started as Open Source Development Labs in 2000 to standardize and prom ...

Tizen Tizen () is a Linux-based operating system primarily developed by Samsung Electronics and supported by the Linux Foundation. The project was originally conceived as an HTML5-based platform for mobile devices to succeed MeeGo. It was backed by o ...

, and Jolla's

Sailfish OS Sailfish OS is a paid Linux-based operating system based on free software, and open source projects such as Mer as well as including a closed source UI. The project is being developed by the Finnish company Jolla. The OS first shipped wit ...

. In December 2015, Mozilla announced it would stop development of new Firefox OS smartphones and, in September 2016, announced the end of development. Successors to Firefox OS include the discontinued B2G OS and Acadine Technologies' never-released H5OS as well as KaiOS Technologies'

KaiOS KaiOS is a mobile Linux distribution for keypad-based mobile phones. It is designed and optimised for affordable and low-power feature phones, while retaining access to Internet services through web apps, based on the Gecko engine. KaiOS was ...

and Panasonic's My Home Screen for smart TVs.

History

Firefox OS was publicly demonstrated in February 2012, on Android-compatible smartphones. By December 16, 2014, fourteen operators in 28 countries throughout the world offered Firefox OS phones. On December 8, 2015, Mozilla announced that it would stop sales of Firefox OS smartphones through carriers. Mozilla later announced that Firefox OS smartphones would be discontinued by May 2016, as the development of "Firefox OS for smartphones" would cease after the release of version 2.6. Around the same time, it was reported that Acadine Technologies, a startup founded by

Li Gong Gong Li ( zh, s=巩俐, t=鞏俐; born 31 December 1965) is a Chinese-born Singaporean actress. She is regarded as one of the best actresses in China today, known for her versatility and naturalistic performances. She starred in three of the ...

(former president of

Mozilla Corporation The Mozilla Corporation is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation that coordinates and integrates the development of Internet-related applications such as the Firefox web browser, by a global community of open-source developers, s ...

) with various other former Mozilla staff among its employees, would take over the mission of developing carrier partnerships, for its own Firefox OS derivative H5OS. In January 2016, Mozilla announced that Firefox OS would power Panasonic's

UHD UHD may refer to: Technology * Ultra-high-definition television * Ultra HD, any of several high-definition graphics display resolutions * USRP hardware driver, used with Universal Software Radio Peripherals * Ultra HD Blu-ray, an enhanced varian ...

TVs (as previously announced Firefox OS "would pivot to connected devices"). In September 2016, Mozilla announced that work on Firefox OS had ceased, and that all B2G-related code would be removed from mozilla-central.

Project inception and roll-out

Commencement of project

On July 25, 2011, Andreas Gal, Director of Research at

, announced the "Boot to

" Project (B2G) on the mozilla.dev.platform mailing list. The project proposal was to "pursue the goal of building a complete, standalone operating system for the open web" in order to "find the gaps that keep web developers from being able to build apps that are in every way the equals of native apps built for the iPhone, Android, and Windows Phone 7." The announcement identified these work areas: new

web API A web API is an application programming interface (API) for either a web server or a web browser. As a web development concept, it can be related to a web application's client side (including any web frameworks being used). A server-side web AP ...

s to expose device and OS capabilities such as telephone and camera, a privilege model to safely expose these to web pages, applications to prove these capabilities, and low-level code to

boot A boot is a type of footwear. Most boots mainly cover the foot and the ankle, while some also cover some part of the lower calf. Some boots extend up the leg, sometimes as far as the knee or even the hip. Most boots have a heel that is clearl ...

on an Android-compatible device. This led to much blog coverage. According to

Ars Technica ''Ars Technica'' is a website covering news and opinions in technology, science, politics, and society, created by Ken Fisher and Jon Stokes in 1998. It publishes news, reviews, and guides on issues such as computer hardware and software, sci ...

, "Mozilla says that B2G is motivated by a desire to demonstrate that the standards-based

open Web Web standards are the formal, non-proprietary standards and other technical specifications that define and describe aspects of the World Wide Web. In recent years, the term has been more frequently associated with the trend of endorsing a set of st ...

has the potential to be a competitive alternative to the existing single-vendor application development stacks offered by the dominant mobile operating systems." In 2012, Andreas Gal expanded on Mozilla's aims. He characterized the current set of mobile operating systems as " walled gardens" and presented Firefox OS as more accessible: "We use completely open standards and there’s no proprietary software or technology involved." (That changed in 2014; see

Digital rights management (DRM) Digital rights management (DRM) is the management of legal access to digital content. Various tools or technological protection measures, such as access control technologies, can restrict the use of proprietary hardware and copyrighted works. DRM ...

, below.) Gal also said that because the software stack is entirely HTML5, there are already a large number of established developers. This assumption is employed in Mozilla's WebAPI. These are intended

W3C The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the main international standards organization for the World Wide Web. Founded in 1994 by Tim Berners-Lee, the consortium is made up of member organizations that maintain full-time staff working together in ...

standards that attempt to bridge the capability gap that currently exists between native frameworks and web applications. The goal of these efforts is to enable developers to build applications using WebAPI which would then run in any standards compliant browser without the need to rewrite their application for each platform.

Development history

In July 2012, Boot to Gecko was rebranded as 'Firefox OS', after Mozilla's well-known desktop browser,

, and screenshots began appearing in August 2012. In September 2012, analysts Strategy Analysts forecast that Firefox OS would account for 1% of the global smartphone market in 2013, its first year of commercial availability. In February 2013, Mozilla announced plans for its global commercial roll-out of Firefox OS. Mozilla announced at a press conference before the start of

Mobile World Congress MWC Barcelona (formerly but still commonly referred to as Mobile World Congress) is an annual trade show dedicated to the mobile communications industry. The event is held in L'Hospitalet de Llobregat, Spain, at the Fira de Barcelona Gran ...

in Barcelona that the first wave of Firefox OS devices would be available to consumers in Brazil, Colombia, Hungary, Mexico, Montenegro, Poland, Serbia, Spain and Venezuela. Mozilla also announced that

LG Electronics LG Electronics Inc. () is a South Korean Multinational corporation, multinational major appliance and consumer electronics corporation headquartered in Yeouido-dong, Seoul, South Korea. LG Electronics is a part of LG, LG Corporation, the fourth ...

ZTE ZTE Corporation is a Chinese partially state-owned technology company that specializes in telecommunication. Founded in 1985, ZTE is listed on both the Hong Kong and Shenzhen Stock Exchanges. ZTE's core business is wireless, exchange, opti ...

Huawei Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. ("Huawei" sometimes stylized as "HUAWEI"; ; zh, c=华为, p= ) is a Chinese multinational corporationtechnology company in Longgang, Shenzhen, Longgang, Shenzhen, Guangdong. Its main product lines include teleco ...

and

TCL Corporation TCL Technology Group Corp. (originally an abbreviation for Telecom Corporation Limited) is a Chinese partially state-owned electronics company headquartered in Huizhou, Guangdong province. TCL develops, manufactures, and sells consumer elect ...

had committed to making Firefox OS devices. In December 2013, new features were added with the 1.2 release, including

conference call A conference call (sometimes called an audio teleconference or ATC) is a telephone call in which several people share a telephone line at the same time. The conference call may be designed to allow the called party to participate during the cal ...

ing, silent SMS authentication for mobile billing, improved

push notification Push technology, also known as server Push, refers to a communication method, where the communication is initiated by a server rather than a client. This approach is different from the "pull" method where the communication is initiated by a client ...

s, and three state settings for

Do Not Track Do Not Track (DNT) is a deprecated non-standard HTTP header field designed to allow internet users to opt out of tracking by websites—which includes the collection of data regarding a user's activity across multiple distinct contexts, and the ...

. Async Pan and Zoom (APZ), included in version 1.3, should improve user interface responsiveness. Work was done to optimize Firefox OS to run a 128 MB platform with version 1.3T. A 128 MB device is out that seems to use that version but it may be unfinished. In 2015, Mozilla ported Firefox OS (an "experimental version") to MIPS32 to work in a sub-$100 tablet (that can also run Android 4.4 KitKat). Mozilla has worked on developing the OS for Smart Feature Phones. Firefox OS was discontinued in January 2017.

Digital rights management

In 2014, Gal announced a change in course, writing that future versions of the Firefox browser would include

digital rights management Digital rights management (DRM) is the management of legal access to digital content. Various tools or technological protection measures, such as access control technologies, can restrict the use of proprietary hardware and copyrighted works. DRM ...

(DRM). Implementation of DRM in the Firefox browser began with version 38. In August 2015, attempts by Matchstick TV (based on Firefox OS) to add DRM caused the demise of Matchstick, a decision that

Boing Boing ''Boing Boing'' is a website, first established as a zine in 1988, later becoming a group blog. Common topics and themes include technology, futurism, science fiction, gadgets, intellectual property, Disney, and left-wing politics. It twice wo ...

called "suicide-by-DRM".

Demonstrations

2012, Mozilla and

Telefónica , S.A. () is a Spanish multinational telecommunications company with registered office and headquarters located in two different places, both in Madrid, Spain. It is one of the largest telephone operators and mobile network providers in the ...

announced that the Spanish telecommunications provider intended to deliver "open Web devices" in 2012, based on HTML5 and these APIs. Mozilla also announced support for the project from

Adobe Adobe (from arabic: الطوب Attub ; ) is a building material made from earth and organic materials. is Spanish for mudbrick. In some English-speaking regions of Spanish heritage, such as the Southwestern United States, the term is use ...

and

Qualcomm Qualcomm Incorporated () is an American multinational corporation headquartered in San Diego, California, and Delaware General Corporation Law, incorporated in Delaware. It creates semiconductors, software and services related to wireless techn ...

, and that

Deutsche Telekom Deutsche Telekom AG (, ; often just Telekom, DTAG or DT; stylised as ·T·) is a partially state-owned German telecommunications company headquartered in Bonn and the largest telecommunications provider in Europe by revenue. It was formed in 199 ...

’s Innovation Labs would join the project. Mozilla demonstrated a "sneak preview" of the software and apps running on

Samsung Galaxy S II The Samsung Galaxy S II (also unofficially known as the Samsung Galaxy S2) is a touchscreen-enabled, Slate phone, slate-format Android (operating system), Android smartphone developed and marketed by Samsung Electronics, as the second smartphon ...

phones (replacing their usual Android operating system). In August 2012, a

Nokia Nokia Corporation is a Finnish multinational corporation, multinational telecommunications industry, telecommunications, technology company, information technology, and consumer electronics corporation, originally established as a pulp mill in 1 ...

employee demonstrated the OS running on a

Raspberry Pi Raspberry Pi ( ) is a series of small single-board computers (SBCs) developed in the United Kingdom by the Raspberry Pi Foundation in collaboration with Broadcom Inc., Broadcom. To commercialize the product and support its growing demand, the ...

. Firefox OS is compatible with a number of devices, including Otoro, PandaBoard, Emulator (ARM and x86),

Desktop A desktop traditionally refers to: * The surface of a desk (often to distinguish office appliances that fit on a desk, such as photocopiers and printers, from larger equipment covering its own area on the floor) Desktop may refer to various compu ...

, Nexus S, Nexus S 4G,

, Galaxy Nexus and Nexus 4. A MIPS port was created by

Imagination Technologies Imagination Technologies Group Limited is a British semiconductor and Computer software, software design company owned by Canyon Bridge Capital Partners, a private equity fund based in Beijing that is ultimately owned by the Chinese government. ...

in March 2015. In December 2012, Mozilla rolled out another update and released Firefox OS Simulator 1.0, which can be downloaded as an add-on for Firefox. The latest version of Firefox OS Simulator, version 4.0, was released on July 3, 2013 and announced on July 11, 2013. Mozilla's planned US$25 Firefox smartphone displayed at MWC, is built by Spreadtrum. Mozilla has collaborated with four handset makers and five wireless carriers to provide five Firefox-powered smartphones in Europe and Latin America so far with cellphone launches being led by UK marketer John D. Bernard. In India, Mozilla planned a launching at $25 in partnership with Intex and

Spice In the culinary arts, a spice is any seed, fruit, root, Bark (botany), bark, or other plant substance in a form primarily used for flavoring or coloring food. Spices are distinguished from herbs, which are the leaves, flowers, or stems of pl ...

, but the price ended up being $33 (converted from 1,999

Rupees Rupee (, ) is the common name for the currencies of India, Mauritius, Nepal, Pakistan, Seychelles, and Sri Lanka, and of former currencies of Afghanistan, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, the United Arab Emirates (as the Gulf rupee), British East Afr ...

Core technologies

The initial development work involves three major software layers: * ''Gonk'' – platform denomination for a combination of the

and the HAL from Android * ''

'' – the

web browser engine A browser engine (also known as a layout engine or rendering engine) is a core software component of every major web browser. The primary job of a browser engine is to transform HTML documents and other resources of a web page into an interacti ...

and application run-time services layer * ''Gaia'' – an

layer and

user-interface In the industrial design field of human–computer interaction, a user interface (UI) is the space where interactions between humans and machines occur. The goal of this interaction is to allow effective operation and control of the machine fro ...

system

Gonk

Gonk consists of a

and user-space

hardware abstraction Hardware abstractions are sets of routines in software that provide programs with access to hardware resources through programming interfaces. The programming interface allows all devices in a particular class ''C'' of hardware devices to be acc ...

layer (HAL). The kernel and several user-space libraries are common open-source projects: Linux, libusb,

BlueZ A Bluetooth stack is software that is an implementation of the Bluetooth protocol stack. Bluetooth stacks can be roughly divided into two distinct categories: # ''General-purpose'' implementations that are written with emphasis on feature-richn ...

, etc. Some other parts of the HAL are shared with the Android project: GPS, camera, among others. Gonk is basically an extremely simple Linux distribution and is therefore from Gecko's perspective, simply a porting target of Gecko; there is a port of Gecko to Gonk, just like there is a port of Gecko to OS X, and a port of Gecko to Android. However, since the development team has full control over Gonk, the developers can fully expose all the features and interfaces required for comprehensive mobile platforms such as Gecko, but which aren't currently possible to access on other mobile OSes. For example, using Gonk, Gecko can obtain direct access to the full telephone stack and display

framebuffer A framebuffer (frame buffer, or sometimes framestore) is a portion of random-access memory (RAM) containing a bitmap that drives a video display. It is a memory buffer containing data representing all the pixels in a complete video frame. Mode ...

, but doesn't have this access on any other OS.

Gecko

is the

of Firefox OS. Gecko implements

open standard An open standard is a standard that is openly accessible and usable by anyone. It is also a common prerequisite that open standards use an open license that provides for extensibility. Typically, anybody can participate in their development due to ...

s for

HTML Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It defines the content and structure of web content. It is often assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets ( ...

, CSS, and

. Gecko includes a networking stack, graphics stack, layout engine, virtual machine (for JavaScript), and porting layers.

Gaia

Gaia was the user interface of Firefox OS and controlled everything drawn to the screen. Gaia included by default implementations of a lock screen, home screen, telephone dialer and contacts application, text-messaging application, camera application and gallery support, plus the classic phone apps: mail, calendar, calculator and marketplace. Gaia was written entirely in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. It interfaced with the operating system through Open Web APIs, which were implemented by Gecko. Because it used only standard web APIs, it could work on other OSes and other web browsers.

Release history

Forks

Panasonic is a Japanese multinational electronics manufacturer, headquartered in Kadoma, Osaka, Kadoma, Japan. It was founded in 1918 as in Fukushima-ku, Osaka, Fukushima by Kōnosuke Matsushita. The company was incorporated in 1935 and renamed and c ...

continues to develop the operating system for use in their Smart TVs, which run My Home Screen, powered by the Firefox OS. Acadine Technologies has derived their H5OS from Firefox OS as well.

, the founder of the company, had overseen the development of Firefox OS while serving as president of

. A fork called

has been used on a few feature phones, including

Alcatel Alcatel SA was a French industrial conglomerate active between 1963 and 2006. It has roots to ''Compagnie Générale d’Electricité'' (CGE), a conglomerate founded in 1898 as an early state owned cable and telephone equipment company that lat ...

's OneTouch Go Flip (known as Cingular Flip 2 on AT&T),

Reliance Jio Reliance Jio Infocomm Limited (d/b/a Jio) is an Indian telecommunications company and a subsidiary of Jio Platforms, headquartered in Navi Mumbai. It operates a national LTE (telecommunication), LTE network with coverage across all 22 telecom ...

's JioPhone (LYF F30C), and Intex's Turbo+ 4G. The system brings support for 4G LTE, Wi-Fi, GPS, and HTML5-based apps onto non-touch devices with an optimized user interface, less memory usage, and longer battery life.

B2G OS

B2G OS (Boot 2

) was a community-developed

mobile operating system A mobile operating system is an operating system used for smartphones, tablets, smartwatches, smartglasses, or other non-laptop personal mobile computing devices. While computers such as laptops are "mobile", the operating systems used on the ...

, and the successor to Firefox OS. It follows the Firefox OS goal of providing a complete, community-based alternative

, that runs software as

s. Its

mobile app A mobile application or app is a computer program or software application designed to run on a mobile device such as a smartphone, phone, tablet computer, tablet, or smartwatch, watch. Mobile applications often stand in contrast to desktop appli ...

s therefore use open

web standards Web standards are the formal, non-proprietary standards and other technical specifications that define and describe aspects of the World Wide Web. In recent years, the term has been more frequently associated with the trend of endorsing a set of st ...

and programming languages such as

and

, a robust privilege model, and

s that can communicate directly with the device's hardware. It is now the basis of

which has (as of January 2019) over 17 percent of the Indian

mobile phone A mobile phone or cell phone is a portable telephone that allows users to make and receive calls over a radio frequency link while moving within a designated telephone service area, unlike fixed-location phones ( landline phones). This rad ...

market and is the third most popular phone OS. KaiOS is

closed-source Proprietary software is software that grants its creator, publisher, or other rightsholder or rightsholder partner a legal monopoly by modern copyright and intellectual property law to exclude the recipient from freely sharing the software or modi ...

History

B2G OS was forked from Firefox OS following Mozilla's decision to discontinue support for their mobile operating system. The decision was made, according to Ari Jaaksi and David Bryant, in order to "evolve quickly and enable substantial new architectural changes in Gecko, Mozilla’s Platform Engineering organization needs to remove all B2G-related code from mozilla-central." , B2G OS is no longer maintained.

Capyloon

Capyloon is a modern fork of Firefox OS started in 2022 which additionally makes use of decentralized web technologies such as IPFS. Builds are available for

Pixel 3a The Pixel 3a and Pixel 3a XL are a pair of Android (operating system), Android smartphones designed, developed, and marketed by Google as part of the Google Pixel product line. They collectively serve as mid-range variants of the Pixel 3 and Pixel ...

and Pixel 6a devices, as well as GSI images for

Android 10 Android 10 (code name, codenamed Android Q during development) is the Android version history, tenth major release and the 17th version of the Android (operating system), Android mobile operating system. It was first released as a developer pre ...

based devices. Linux mobile devices such as the

PinePhone The PinePhone is a smartphone developed by Hong Kong–based computer manufacturer Pine64, designed to provide users with full control over the device. This is achieved through the utilization of mainline Linux-based mobile operating systems, ass ...

, PinePhone Pro and

Librem 5 The Librem 5 is a smartphone manufactured by Purism that is part of their Librem line of products. The phone is designed with the goal of using free software whenever possible and includes PureOS, a Linux operating system, by default. Like other ...

are also supported.

Comparison with Android

Firefox OS used the Linux kernel like Android does. Firefox OS used the Gecko engine on top of the Linux kernel to render the screen output. Apps were written using HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript—all three being cooperative languages used in making internet webpages. In essence, apps on Firefox OS were web apps and the OS could be thought of as a Web browser that stored content off-line. On the other hand, Android's apps are coded in Java using Android Studio. Android also enjoys greater maturity and support. Despite these differences, Firefox OS did feature all the essentials required to use a smartphone. Firefox launched its first official device in Germany in 2014, which was an Alcatel One Touch Fire. The device had a 3.5” HVGA screen, Cortex A5 processor, 256MB RAM, and 512MB storage. , Mozilla had launched 12 smartphones across 24 countries.

Criticisms

Chris Ziegler of the technology website ''

The Verge ''The Verge'' is an American Technology journalism, technology news website headquarters, headquartered in Lower Manhattan, New York City and operated by Vox Media. The website publishes news, feature stories, guidebooks, product reviews, cons ...

'' wrote that Firefox OS would take app distribution back to the pre-iPhone era, requiring application developers to deal with multiple carriers and their app stores. At the

, Mozilla's CEO Gary Kovacs said that Firefox OS has the advantage that users need not install an app to use it. Mozilla sought to make the most of this with the search functionality built into Firefox OS, a core feature of the platform. Janne Lindqvist, a mobile security researcher at the Rutgers University WINLAB, expressed concern about the discovery mechanism of a Web-based platform, but a Mozilla spokesperson stated that Mozilla required developers to "package downloadable apps in a zip file that has been cryptographically signed by the store from which it originated, assuring that it has been reviewed." In addition, "apps coming back from search are given only limited access to device programming interfaces and applications, unless the user grants permission for further access." Ben Francis, an engineer on the Boot to Gecko and Firefox OS projects, described the changes in direction of the project from open web technologies for app development, to cheap smartphones, to connected devices; and how evaluation of its success was reduced to its market share as a third smartphone platform (after Android and iOS).

Devices

Officially and unofficially supported devices

The structural similarities between Firefox OS and Android allow the Mozilla platform to run on a number of devices that ship with Android. While some ports of Firefox OS are hardly different from their original versions, others are heavily modified to fit the device in question. There are quite a few to note that are specifically made for Firefox OS as stated above. There are some that are designed for the developers themselves and others that are consumer-phones. There are also emulators for testing both apps and the OS itself on the desktop which are designed for both OS testing and the developers themselves. Firefox OS specific devices for developers: * Geeksphone Keon * Geeksphone Peak * T2Mobile Flame * ZTE Open * ZTE Open C Firefox OS specific devices for consumers: * Alcatel Onetouch FireC 4020D * Alcatel Onetouch Fire E (6015X) * APC Paper * Cherry Mobile Ace * Intex Cloud FX * KDDI Fx0 * Spice Fire One MI FX1 * Spice Fire One Mi-FX 2 * Symphony GoFox F15 * Zen 105 Firefox * ZTE Open II Firefox OS has been ported to the following devices: * Fairphone 2 * HTC Explorer * Huawei Ascend G510 * Huawei Ascend Y300 * Ingenic JZ4780 based devices (2015) * Moto G * Nexus 4 * Nexus 5 * Nexus 7 (2013) * Xiaomi Redmi 1S *

Samsung Galaxy S2 The Samsung Galaxy S II (also unofficially known as the Samsung Galaxy S2) is a touchscreen-enabled, slate-format Android smartphone developed and marketed by Samsung Electronics, as the second smartphone of the Samsung Galaxy S series. It has ...

* Sony Xperia E3 * Sony Xperia M2 * Sony Xperia SP * Sony Xperia T2 Ultra * Sony Xperia T3 *

Sony Xperia Z1 The Sony Xperia Z1 is an Android (operating system), Android smartphone produced by Sony Mobile Communications, Sony. The Z1, at that point known by the project code name "Honami", was unveiled during a press conference in Internationale Funka ...

* Sony Xperia Z2 *

Sony Xperia Z3 The Sony Xperia Z3 is an Android (operating system), Android smartphone produced by Sony Mobile, Sony. Part of the Sony Xperia Z series, the Xperia Z3, at that point known by the project code name "Leo", was unveiled during a press conference at ...

* Sony Xperia Z3 Compact * Sony Xperia Z3 Tablet Compact * Wileyfox Swift * ZTE Blade III * ZTE Kis3/Kis III There is also non-compiled source code of B2G firmware for Sony Xperia E (C1505/C1506) on Sony servers. In earlier versions of Sony EMMA software you could download precompiled firmware, but nowadays it's impossible to do it as the software no longer supports this phone and probably the .FTF files needed to flash were deleted from Sony's servers

References

External links

* {{Linux distributions 2013 software ARM operating systems Discontinued operating systems Embedded Linux distributions Free mobile software Gecko-based software Linux distributions Mobile Linux Mozilla Smartphone operating systems Software that uses XUL X86 operating systems

History

Project inception and roll-out

Commencement of project

Development history

Digital rights management

Demonstrations

Core technologies

Gonk

Gecko

Gaia

Release history

Forks

B2G OS

History

Capyloon

Comparison with Android

Criticisms

Devices

Officially and unofficially supported devices

See also

References

External links