See Mozilla’s Boot2Gecko mobile OS in action, partners to be revealed at MWC

A year ago Mozilla announced its plans for a mobile OS based on web standards called Boot2Gecko (B2G). Then, in November last year the company showed us simple drawings of its prototype mobile OS and now it has come to this – Boot2Gecko is out for everyone to taste.

Not only that, but according to company’s CTO Brenden Eich, at this year’s Mobile Web Congress in Barcelona, Mozilla will announce some of its hardware manufacturing partners interested in building B2G running products.

B2G, as the name suggests runs entirely on Firefox’s Gecko HTML rendering engine and its user interface called Gaia is build with Web compliant HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript. This means that the mobile OS could draw web developer’s attention quite a lot.

The bottom layer of Boot2Gecko includes the Linux kernel and is called Gonk. It is responsible for controlling the different aspects of the hardware, the telephony stack and other low-level system components. Furthermore, Mozilla says in its documentation that Gonk borrows some of the underlying code from the Android Open Source Project. This is done so that Android manufacturers could run B2G on Android hardware without breaking too much sweat.

Gaia UI

As I mentioned before, Boot2Gecko’s user interface is written entirely in HTML, CSS and JavaScript and everyone with moderate understanding of those languages can alter the look for themselves. Initially, though, here’s how the lockscreen and homescreen look like.

Screenshots courtesy of ArsTechnica

At first glance it looks pretty much like Android and iOS but as it advances I am sure more and more different designs will be created. There’s also fully functional dialer, contacts, messages, settings and maps apps.

Screenshots courtesy of ArsTechnica

Even now, at Boot2Gecko’s early development stage it is possible to get it running on the Samsung Galaxy S II. Here’s a video of how it handles phone calls.

Looks pretty cool and what’s even cooler is that Mozilla is planning its first product showcase some time in Q2 of this year, so we’re not too far off from seeing the first Boot2Gecko-running smartphone.

And since Boot2Gecko’s Gaia UI is done in HTML and JavaScript, you can give the mobile OS a whirl by downloading the latest Firefox Nightly and Gaia’s UI code from GitHub (click the ZIP button). Come on, give it a try and we’ll be waiting you back here for your first impressions and thoughts on Mozilla’s mobile OS.

Via | Source