Firefox OS 2.0 wants to set iOS and Android ablaze

Ryan Daws is a senior editor at TechForge Media with over a decade of experience in crafting compelling narratives and making complex topics accessible. His articles and interviews with industry leaders have earned him recognition as a key influencer by organisations like Onalytica. Under his leadership, publications have been praised by analyst firms such as Forrester for their excellence and performance. Connect with him on X (@gadget_ry) or Mastodon (@gadgetry@techhub.social)


Everyone loves an underdog, but when it comes to your mobile OS unless you want to spend your days looking at the competitions’ full app stores – your choice comes between iOS, Android, and the fast-rising Windows Phone

Mozilla launched the first iteration of their plucky Firefox OS last year to little fanfare and a fair bit of confusion from consumers. Why was a web browser launching an OS? What can it do different from current beloved platforms?

The answer lies in the “web” part of the above paragraph. Firefox is the world’s second most-used internet browser (with 26.4% market share according to w3schools.) Mozilla and their team know the web, and more specifically, its standards.

With Firefox OS, Mozilla hopes to bring the openness of the web to mobile devices and release users from the confines of Apple and Google’s ecosystems. It makes use of controversial HTML5-based applications and features “web APIs” to access hardware from the web.

Devices running the OS are available from Alcatel, LG, ZTE, Huawei, and Geeksphone. Whether due to a lack of apps available on the platform, or lack of promotion… none have gained marketshare worth noting.

With the second version of Firefox OS due for release soon – we’re already hearing of some essential features making the roadmap;

  • Select, Copy, and Paste abilities.
  • Enhanced lock screen with music player and list of notifications.
  • Phone locator called ‘FindMyFox’.
  • Single sign-on with Firefox Accounts.
  • Ability to create ringtones from music.
  • Keyboard predicts next letter and invisibly increases the expected next tap target to prevent mistypes.
  • NFC support.
  • Call directly from the call log.
  • Quickly jump to the top of an email inbox.

These additions are less-spectacular than what we would expect from the next Android and iOS releases. What they do however is make Firefox OS a competent open-platform which can rise alongside HTML5 applications – if they take-off on the smartphone.

Mozilla is under some amount of disrepute at the moment due to controversy surrounding ex-CEO Bredan Eich. Only last month ZDNet wrote about his appointment with an article entitled “Mozilla hires new CEO who will focus on Firefox OS.

Less than a month later and he’s out the door. We can only hope whoever replaces him has the same focus on Firefox OS to make it an underdog we can all get behind.

What do you think about Mozilla’s underdog OS? Let us know in the comments.

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