Mozilla has been setting out the future of Firefox, which it hopes will heavily impact on end-users, openness advocates and developers. On mobile, Firefox OS is described by Mozilla as a “new mobile ecosystem built entirely to open web standards” that will “enable the development of smartphones where every feature can be developed as an HTML5 application”.
In a new video of the in-development operating system, Mozilla showed off various features, including a page-based app icon grid, dialling, a camera, an image gallery, app installation, app switching and, naturally, its web browser. In the video, the OS appeared a little laggy, but when it’s complete Mozilla noted it will “for the first time allow HTML5 apps to access the underlying capabilities of a device, previously only available to native apps”, which it argued will improve mobile web performance through a lighter OS and faster browser, thereby providing “the best mobile web content and app experience”.