Mozilla has started working on an open source operating system for the open web it labeled Boot to Gecko or B2G for short.
Unveiled to the public under the mantra “Booting to web” the B2G project is in embryonic stage at this point in time, but taking into consideration the strong support from its large community, this emerging open web platform is bound to move forward quite fast.
Boot to Gecko seems a very ambitious endeavor, and there’s no telling whether it will be successful against rivals such as Chrome OS or Windows 8, both of which stretch into the Cloud to embrace applications developed with web technologies.
But B2G’s purpose is clear, and stressed in the introductory paragraph of its official wiki description:
“Mozilla believes that the web can displace proprietary, single-vendor stacks for application development,” Mozilla reveals.
“To make open web technologies a better basis for future applications on mobile and desktop alike, we need to keep pushing the envelope of the web to include --- and in places exceed --- the capabilities of the competing stacks in question.”
Since B2G aims to support the open web, the platform is also designed from the get go to encompass an as broad as possible array of form factors.
Built on the underlying rendering engine of the Firefox browser Gecko, B2G will end up borrowing code from single-vendor stacks, including APIs (application programing interfaces), but also much more.
In addition to APIs, Mozilla also needs to work on the security model of B2G, and on building an ecosystem of applications designed to run on the platform.
But at the same time, the open source browser vendor stresses that the Boot to Gecko operating system is not about getting apps to run on Firefox alone, but on the web instead. A sort of platform for platform agnostic Cloud applications, if you will.
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