Mozilla Challenges the Chrome Web Store with Open App Ecosystem

Mozilla is moving forward with its plans to create an alternative to the Chrome Web Store, the Open Web Apps ecosystem. The idea is to create a place for cross-platforms web applications which would be easy to find and acquire.

"We designed and built a prototype of a system for open Web apps: Apps built using HTML/CSS/JavaScript that work both on computers and mobile phones, have many of the characteristics that users find compelling about native apps and provide developers with open and flexible distribution options," Jay Sullivan, Mozilla's vice president of products, explained.

"Today, we are releasing technical documentation of the proposed system and a developer preview prototype that allows you to install, manage and launch Web apps in any modern desktop or mobile browser," he announced.

The announcement today is of more interest to developers and browser makers than it is for the users.

Mozilla is not launching an actual web app store, just the specifications and prototype implementation for it and the apps. But it does have a demo app store set up to illustrate the concept.

From the get go, there is one big caveat which is actually the store's biggest strength, it doesn't actually integrate with the browser in any way. Mozilla has set up web pages for all stages of the process of installing, managing and running web apps.

For example, 'installing' an app just adds it to your App Dashboard, which, again, is just a web page hosted by Mozilla.

The apps themselves will probably make use of things like local storage, built into HTML5, but that's about it.

Of course that could change, with Mozilla or others building browser extensions that would better integrate the web store.

However, this approach also means than an open store will work on any relatively modern browser like Firefox 3.6 and later, Firefox for mobile, Internet Explorer 8, Chrome 6, Safari 5, Opera 10 and WebKit mobile.

The project is very much in the early stages, but the aim is clear, Mozilla wants to provide an open alternative to the Chrome Web Store. You can check out the more technical details and demo products here.