The new operating system will be available this year in Brazil

Jan 8, 2013 08:03 GMT  ·  By

Mozilla’s Firefox operating system for mobile devices has been in development for quite some time. The company made a few announcements last year informing mobile phone users Firefox OS would be launched this year in South America.

In fact, the first devices powered by Firefox OS will be available for purchase in Brazil. It appears that Mozilla did all its research in this country where consumers cannot afford an Android/iOS smartphone.

It appears that Mozilla wants to take it step by step and a worldwide release for Firefox OS would have required a lot of resources, which the company does not wish to spend at this time.

Anyway, the folks over at Engadget stopped at Mozilla’s booth at Consumer Electronics Show 2013 (CES) in order to find out more info on the Firefox OS.

Luckily, they were provided with demo tour of the upcoming operating system, which was running on an entry-level ZTE A21 Plus smartphone.

Obviously, the A21 Plus is a developer device, but the Firefox version that powers it is final. However, last minute changes might be added, which shouldn’t modify users' overall experience.

The good news is Firefox OS is compatible with a range of Android smartphones, so anyone with a desire to test it can now download it and flash it onto their devices.

Firefox OS is all developed on HTML5 and includes CSS animations and Java Script to open apps. This means that developers who want to create applications for Firefox OS will be able to reuse it extremely easy on other platforms as well, including iOS, Android or even on desktop.

Mozilla claims a smartphone that runs Android is actually slower than the same device powered by Firefox OS. Check out the video below for more details on Mozilla’s upcoming operating system for mobile devices.