In theory, you could one day install Firefox for Android and access the Firefox Marketplace to use Firefox OS apps on Android. For example, Mozilla creates a full-featured version of Firefox for Android. Mozilla also wants these apps to be portable. Web apps could also be accessed from outside the store as typical websites, of course. Mobile carriers can also set up their own Firefox OS app stores. Mozilla provides their own app store in the form of the Firefox Marketplace, which is the official source of Firefox OS apps. You could theoretically “view source” on the dialer to view its code, just as you could view a web page’s source code. It runs locally, but is implemented with web technologies. For example, on Firefox OS, the dialer you use to dial numbers is written entirely in HTML and JavaScript. To accomplish this, Mozilla has added a variety of APIs that allow web apps to interface with hardware features. Much of the code in these apps may run locally, but they’re still written in web technologies. Instead, every app on Firefox OS is a web app written in HTML and JavaScript. Mozilla wants to create a mobile operating system based on web standards, bringing first-class web apps to the mobile world and fighting back against the new trend towards proprietary ecosystems with their own incompatible apps.Īs you might expect given Firefox OS’s name and Mozilla’s vision, Firefox OS doesn’t run traditional “native” apps.
Apple, Google, and Microsoft all have their own ecosystems with their own apps that will only run on certain operating systems. These apps must be written specifically for each platform and are generally distributed in app stores. However, smartphone and tablet users spend much of their time in native apps. Whether it’s checking email or watching videos, people probably do it in a web browser - and there’s a good chance they’re using Firefox to do it. This is more and more the case on desktops and laptops, where people spend most of the time in their browser.
Mozilla believes in web-based software on the open web, and wants to replace native applications with browser-based ones built on open standards.