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Mozilla Boot to Gecko Review

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Mozilla Open Source HTML5 phone
Since its inception, Mozilla has been a champion for the open web. Many of the advances that have been made on the web over the last year have been largely in part to encouragement, development, and lobbying from Mozilla. As such, the modern web has enjoyed things like HTML5, and the promotion of open source on the web as a standard. As the technology ecosystem has grown, many users have added smartphone use to their daily web access methods. As Mozilla watched the smartphone ecosystem grow, it became clear to them that they needed to help foster the same sense of openness enjoyed by today’s web users on the mobile landscape. To accomplish this, Mozilla announced project Boot to Gecko.
Boot to Gecko, which we are told is just the project name, and will not be the name of the OS when released, is an open source operating system Mozilla hopes to put on smartphones. The Linux-based OS focuses on a mostly HTML5 driven environment, where everything you do exists on the web. In fact, your home page, dialer, and apps are all HTML5 and work towards the goal of removing the limitations of a locked in environment that can only be written in specific ways. Mozilla documents every step of the process so far with Boot to Gecko and their UI, currently named Gaia, on their website.
We were briefly offered some time with Boot to Gecko during CTIA: All Things Mobile. As everything is run in HTML5, and the UI is incredibly fast. Swiping past the lockscreen and through the dialer, battery information, and jumping to the browser was just as fast as we’ve experienced with recent Snapdragon S4 handsets, like the HTC One X.
As it exists right now, the Gaia UI can be seen as fairly similar to Android in some respects, but altogether has some very real potential to offer users a great experience.
That’s it for now — like we said, the hands-on was brief — but we’re on the ground at CTIA and should have more time with B2G before the week is over.

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