Mozilla's new Boot to Gecko mobile OS and Samsung's Tizen may look like competitors as dueling open-source, Web-based mobile OSes. But they're actually on the same team,

NEW ORLEANSMozilla's and Samsung's Tizen may look like competitors as dueling open-source, Web-based mobile OSes. But they're actually on the same team, said Todd Simpson, Mozilla's chief of innovation.

"If Tizen and Boot to Gecko converge on device APIs and Tizen does amazingly well, the Web is going to do amazingly well. we don't look at that at all competitively," he said.

Samsung just handed out the first Tizen developer devices at a conference in San Francisco, according to Engadget. While Boot to Gecko is purely a Mozilla project, Tizen is the descendant of the Linux Foundation's LiMo, Intel's MeeGo and Nokia's Maemo.

The key is that as an idealistic nonprofit, Mozilla isn't in the mobile game to dominate. The foundation just wants to advance a common, open set of Web standards. If somebody else does that - such as Tizen - then Mozilla's all for it, Simpson said. If Tizen and Mozilla agree on standards, Mozilla can help Tizen, too.

"The way you get things standardized on the Web, if you're familiar with the W3C you can actually move the process pretty quickly. Since we've been doing that for 10 or 12 years, we think we can help ourselves and Tizen through this and get these APIs standardized pretty quickly," Simpson said.

And since Mozilla isn't in this game for the dollars, OEMs may find Boot to Gecko a friendlier Web-based phone OS than Tizen, Simpson said.

"Samsung is highly invested in Tizen, other OEMs are not necessarily. Hopefully we will end up with multiple competitive web-centric OSes. That's the way competition becomes healthy," Simpson said.

A Web-Centric Phone

As PCMag columnist Michael Miller saw at Mobile World Congress, Boot to Gecko replaces all the user-facing parts of a mobile OS with a browser. While it's running on the same Linux kernel as Android, all the apps are HTML5 rendered through Firefox's Gecko engine - even core apps like the dialer.

The OS isn't ready for launch yet. While Simpson said it'll run fine on devices with 600-MHz processors and 256MB of RAM, I found the current early build to be sluggish on a dual-core Samsung Galaxy S II phone. BtG won't have the years-long development process that we saw with mobile Firefox, though: Simpson said it'll show up on a phone sold in Brazil by Telefonica in 2013.

Boot to Gecko is designed primarily for first-time smartphone users, Simpson said. The main menu is a grid of nine large icons, with the usual built-in smartphone apps represented. Of course, all the apps are really just HTML5 packages, written in HTML, JavaScript, with WebGL for games. The OS will come with an app store, but BtG will be able to run any HTML5 app designed to open Web standards, Simpson said. That makes it a truly free alternative to Google's Android.

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