After the demise of webOS and the continued failure of Windows Phone to gain significant market share, Android and iOS have been left to dominate the smartphone market. Mozilla started showing off its Firefox OS (previously called Boot to Gecko) last year, but at Mobile World Congress, Sony announced it’s getting together with the Firefox team and hopes to have a device out in 2014.
Sony has gone through a lot of mobile operating systems over the years. After dropping its own in-house efforts, Sony built on Symbian for several years under the Sony Ericsson brand. Android has been the company's focus for the last few years as it completely ignored Windows Phone.
Sony might have left the Ericsson partnership behind, but its Android devices still haven't taken the market by storm. The decision to devote engineering resources to developing Firefox OS might be part of a search for greener pastures. Sony is also known to be one of the most prolific contributors to the Android Open Source Project. Android is often described as a fairly closed open source project because most of the work is done by Google, and it keeps version information very close to its chest. Sony might be looking for a mobile OS it can have more control over.
Firefox OS is designed to run on ARM chips just like Android. In fact, most of the early test platforms are Android phones. Mozilla is employing a Linux kernel with apps based on the Gecko runtime. These would basically be web apps written in HTML5 and CSS, but integrated directly with the hardware through JavaScript. The competition has a big lead, but the Firefox browser eventually carved out a niche. Maybe the same will happen with Firefox OS.
Now read: Alcatel One Touch Fire to be the first Firefox OS phone up for sale this summer
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