Mozilla's Ambitious Boot to Gecko OS Is Getting Ready for a First, Early Release

A while ago, Mozilla presented quite an ambitious project, Boot to Gecko (B2G) a complete operating system built around Gecko, the rendering engine in Firefox.

It's a similar idea to what Google is doing with Chrome OS, strip out everything but what's essential for web browsing. However, Mozilla has a different target with B2G, it wants it running on mobile phones rather than light notebooks.

Mozilla will be using Android as a base, but will write a lot of custom code, including the entire interface, of course.

It's also working on a system of accessing a phone's radio chips, needed for anything related to calls, messages, data connections.

All the low level apps, the phone dialer, SMS system and so on will be built by Mozilla, though the plan is to reuse some Android components, at least at first.

It's an ambitious project, but one that Mozilla is treating very seriously, so much so that it hopes to have something to show for it by the end of the year.

Don't get your hopes up just yet, anything that Mozilla will have ready by that time will be strictly a bare-bones version of the OS that may not even have complete basic functionality.

Even if Mozilla manages to complete everything it set out to in this milestone, it's very early alpha code, nothing suited except for developers actively involved in the process.

However, beyond the first milestone, Mozilla plans to have a working demo in time for Q1 2012. That means that it hopes to have something to show off to users, but again, this is not going to be something usable on a day-to-day basis.

It's a long term project, but Mozilla seems focused. And building on Android's open source roots, Boot to Gecko may become a viable option even as early as next year.