Mozilla moots open source web OS for mobiles

Mozilla has revealed plans to create an open-source web-centric operating system along the lines of Google's Chrome OS but designed to compete with Android on phones and tablets. The Boot to Gecko project will "pursue the goal of building a complete, standalone operating system for the open web" in a bid to "displace …

[Silver]

Nice but...

I hope this project isn't diverting much needed resources away from boring and mundane tasks such as fixing bugs, speeding up javascript and page rendering and the old chestnut of reducing memory footprint.

I quickly ran a search in bugzilla (so I'm sure someone will pick holes in the methodology) but there appears to be 676 confirmed issues (with more than 5 votes) which haven't yet been resolved.

Even if I have concocted the search incorrectly, there must be at least a good couple of hundred that could do with being looked at.

[g e]

Hope they have a good bat

To whack all the sueballs they'll suddenly attract from IP 'Innovators' like Apple, Lodsys, TrollCo, etc

TopTip: Don't make anything rectangular with round corners or lay icons out in a grid

[Ru]

Is there a point?

Chrome is of pretty tenuous usefulness as it is. What does BTG offer that we can't already get from Android, or some more conventional linux installation?

[dotdavid]

Considering how long it took to make the Firefox Mobile app...

...I wouldn't expect this to be ready to use before, say, 2020.

[Paul Shirley]

have they learned nothing from the past?

Remind me why this isn't the same colossal mistake Microsoft made embedding Internet Explorer so deeply in the OS?

I want my net facing apps as strongly isolated from my local system as possible and that's a hell of a lot quicker and easier to get right if they're just apps, not parts of the OS. Mozzila will just end up reinventing the OS+Browser, so I suggest they just work on the browser part, let someone else deal with the OS layer.

[Gordon 10]

What is it with Mozilla?

They have this habit of coming up with an open source version of a good idea years after it has left the station.

First mobile firefox was years too late, now this.

As another poster said why don't they just concentrate on making their core product better?

[xj25vm]

Bugs

The darned import of contacts into Thunderbird from Outlook still chokes aplenty - bug which has been with Thunderbird for years - but clearly fixing it is not sexy enough work for the great minds at Mozilla. Why don't they give the money they receive to some other group of people ready to do all that boring - but desperately necessary work of building useful software.

Oh - and if they want a new project - why don't they work on a calendar and contacts server to go with Thunderbird and Lightning - capable of seamlessly syncing few thousand appointments over a slow link?

Oh, sorry, I forgot - they are only capable of copying whatever fad the other big IT companies are into right this minute.