Mozilla Makes Firefox Apps a Reality

Mozilla has made good on its promise to introduce an open, cross-browser apps platform. It's a developer preview for now, but those that are interested can get in at this early stage.

The eventual goal is to create a marketplace for browser applications that work on any browser (that supports them) and to also provide the tools to build them.

The concept of browser apps was introduced by Google Chrome, which also launched the Chrome Web Store. It's been somewhat of a success, but those apps, even though many of them are just basic websites, only work in Chrome.

Mozilla liked the idea but wanted an open market with applications that worked on any browser. Since they're built with web technologies, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, there's no reason why these apps, even those that run locally, shouldn't be made available and work in any browser.

"The Mozilla Labs Apps project enters a new phase with today’s launch of the Apps Developer Preview and App Development documentation in the Apps Developer Community on MDN," Mozilla announced.

"The tools and resources in the MDN Apps Developer Community documentation enable developers to create rich, cross-platform and cross-device app experiences using web standards and open technologies such as HTML5, CSS and JavaScript," it explained.

"The Mozilla Labs Apps project also aims to create a rich distributed ecosystem of app stores including a Mozilla HTML5 app marketplace to launch in 2012," it added.

Mozilla is inviting developers to sign up for the Mozilla Labs Apps Developer Preview to test the marketplace. Only 3,000 developers will be let in, the first that sign up.

Firefox users that want to test the platform can install the Mozilla Labs App Runtime Add-on, on the desktop, or the Mozilla Labs App Runtime application on Android, which adds an app management dashboard.