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Hands-on with Mozilla’s Web-based “Firefox OS” for smartphones


Launching a new mobile OS is a difficult project since the market leaders, Android and iOS, havesuch a big lead. Even Microsoft, with its near-infinite financial resources and vast ecosystem of complementary products, has struggled to gain traction. And new entrants face a chicken-and-egg problem: developers don't want to write apps for a platform without many users, while users don't want to buy a phone without many apps.
Mozilla, the non-profit foundation behind Firefox, believes it can tackle this dilemma. In 2011, itannounced a new project called Boot2Gecko to build an operating system around its browser. Last year the project was re-brandedFirefox OS, and Mozilla began preparations for a major push into the mobile phone market.
In February, Mozilla unveiled an impressive initial list of hardware and network partners. If all goes according to plan, Firefox OS phones will be available in a number of countries, mostly in the developing world, later this year. Firefox OS phones won't reach the United States until 2014.
To sustain any early momentum, Mozilla will need to convince developers to build Firefox OS apps. The company has a plan that's so crazy it just might work: Firefox OS apps will be built entirely using HTML5. According to Mozilla, the thousands of developers who already know how to build Web apps will be able to build Firefox OS apps with minimal additional training. And because they're built on open standards, Mozilla hopes that Firefox OS apps will work reasonably well on other platforms that support HTML5—which is to say, all of them.
Is it actually possible to build full-featured mobile apps entirely in HTML5? Earlier this month, Mozilla sent us a review unit of the Geeksphone Keon with a "developer preview" of its new OS, and we put the system and its "Web apps" approach through their paces.

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