Mozilla Announces Firefox Mobile OS Partners

Mozilla on Monday confirmed that the company will launch several phones with a new Firefox operating system in early 2013 and in the post Mozilla announced several of the partners who will team with Mozilla’s “Boot to Gecko” project.

The new operating system which will run HTML5 apps will provide a low-cost operating system for smartphones and is expected to focus on developing markets where the cost of entry is lower.

Among the company’s announced partners are Sprint, Smart and Telefica along with device manufacturers Alcatel and ZTE.

Through the Firefox OS’ Gecko foundation Mozilla will allow HTML5 apps to access phone capabilities that had only previously been made available to native applications for software offered by Apple, Google Android and Windows Phone OS. For example the company will offer calling, messaging and gaming capabilities via HTML5.

According to Mozilla the optimization of HTML5 with the elimination of middleware layers should help lower the cost to carriers while driving mobile adoption across emerging markets.

Firefox OS won’t be the only platform entering the market in 2013, devices from HTC, Acer and Asus are expected to run the Samsung-Intel creted Tizen OS which is also largely based on HTML5 and focused on emerging mobile markets.

Other partners ready to give the Firefox OS a try include Deutsche Telekom, Etisalat, Telecom Italia and Telenor are the initial carrier partners for Firefox OS.

In the meantime we are still awaiting the release of Mozilla’s first mobile internet browser, another space that became more crowded this past week after the Google Chrome browser debuted for iOS based devices and quickly became Apple’s No. 1 downloaded free app.