The jury remains out on whether Chromebooks will sell like hotcakes (we’re guessing not), but regardless of to Mozilla. The organization behind Firefox has plans to develop its own operating system for mobile devices — a transparent shot around the bow at Google’s browser-based Chrome OS . In a page on Mozilla’s own wiki, a handful of senior developers announced their intentions to create a “complete, standalone operating system for the open web” running HTML5 apps. The OS, codenamed “Boot to Gecko,” would be designed with tablets and handsets in mind, says Mike Shaver, the foundation’s VP of technical strategy. And here’s the fascinating part: the OS will rely upon Google’s own Android drivers and kernel besides the device. In a Google Groups discussion thread, the lead devs said they selected Android over a Linux stack since such a lot of device makers have focused their efforts on Android, and so it is sensible to “reuse its lower layers.” Still, they insist that they otherwise intend to borrow from it as low as possible. Obviously, don’t hold your breath for Firebooks, because the project’s a great deal in its infancy, but meanwhile there’s some mighty interesting conversation happening in that discussion thread about Mozilla’s lofty end game: breaking “the stranglehold of proprietary devices over the mobile device world.”
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