Firefox OS fanning out from phones

Mozilla unveiled the first Firefox OS phones less than one year ago, but already the browser-maker is branching out into other classes of device. In a series of blog posts the first week of January, Mozilla announced that the lightweight, Web-centric platform would soon be available on smart TVs, tablets, and desktops, as well as on higher-powered smartphone hardware, and that the organization would be starting a developer program intended to accelerate development of the OS.

The first blog post was from Jay Sullivan, Mozilla's chief operating officer (COO), on January 6. He noted first that at the end of 2013, three different Firefox OS phone models were available in fourteen separate markets. Those numbers, he said, exceeded Mozilla's expectations. But, he continued, while Mozilla itself will continue to focus its Firefox OS efforts on "developing markets"—where supporting lower-end phone hardware has the biggest impact—hardware vendors have expressed interest in deploying it elsewhere. The first such example is phone vendor ZTE (who released the Firefox OS developer phones in 2013); Sullivan said to expect the announcement of higher-end Firefox OS phones within the week.

Targeting a high-end device is indeed a deviation from Firefox OS's initial plan, which sought to pair up the lower overhead of a minimal OS running only Web applications with less expensive hardware. But an even bigger departure is Panasonic's announcement that it would be using Firefox OS for a line of smart TVs.

Panasonic's press release is (as is typical) short on details, but says that "basic functions, such as menus and EPGs (Electronic Program Guide) which are currently written as embedded programs, will be written in HTML5, making it possible for developers to easily create applications for smartphones or tablets to remotely access and operate the TV." The press release also says that Panasonic is partnering with Mozilla to develop the products, which is undoubtedly good news to those who are wary of Mozilla's historic dependence on Google's search-engine placement fee as the organization's only significant source of revenue.

The second blog post addressing Firefox OS's next steps appeared (without a byline) on the official Mozilla Blog, shortly after Sullivan's. It repeats the information about Panasonic's smart TV plan and ZTE's higher-end phones, adding the detail that the new ZTE phones will include "dual core options like the Open C and Open II" (which are reputed to be ZTE product names).

Perhaps more interestingly, the post also announces that Mozilla is working with motherboard manufacturer VIA on a "nettop"-style desktop device powered by Firefox OS. The device in question comes from VIA's "APC" line, which initially marketed a $49 motherboard designed to run Android on the desktop. The new revision includes a bit more branding—a newer motherboard called the APC Rock is available based on the ARM Cortex-A9 processor, as is the APC Paper, which includes the same motherboard inside a diminutive case that looks like a hardbound book (down to the book-like cardboard cover). No word, so far, on anything called Scissors. VIA's own press release about the product includes a link to the source code for the Firefox OS image shipped on the Paper and Rock, hosted at GitHub, and notes that developers who fix known issues (tagged with the "Free APC" label in the GitHub repository's issue list) will be rewarded with a free device.

The final nugget of Firefox OS expansion news is Mozilla's own contributor program, which was outlined on the Mozilla Hacks blog. The program is aimed at adapting Firefox OS for the tablet form factor. The initial tablets (which will be seeded to accepted developers) will be 10-inch devices built by Foxconn. Sign up is not yet open for the program, but will be announced later on Mozilla Hacks. Notably, the post specifies that not just core Firefox OS contributors, but other participants including localization and translation contributors and bug fixers, will all be accepted.

Foxes, foxes everywhere

Expanding to tablets, TVs, and desktops all at once certainly sounds like rapid growth, perhaps even to the point where one might worry that the Firefox OS team could be spreading itself a bit too thin if it is not careful. On the other hand, some of these form factors are arguably a more natural fit for the Firefox OS model—where all applications are implemented in HTML5 and the rest of the operating system is bare bones—than they are for a full-fledged, traditional distribution.

Take smart TVs, for instance: despite the name "smart," the vast majority of the apps and services that run on current smart TV products are pretty minimal, concerned as they are with pushing content one way from a service provider directly to the screen. Rendering a video stream is usually handled by dedicated hardware, most apps do little but perform authentication and provide a content-selection UI, and generally only one app is run at a time—all factors that argue in favor of a lightweight OS. The South Korean electronics manufacturer LG, for one, licensed webOS (which is similarly low on resource consumption and tailored for HTML5 apps) from HP in February 2013, and has been shipping webOS smart TVs since. Tablets are much more similar to phones of course, but there, too, there is proven demand for less-interactive apps. As much as developers may (rightly) bemoan the consumption-only model that Apple has pushed with the iPad, there is little doubt that most consumer tablets are used primarily for accessing web services, read-only apps, and other CPU-un-intensive tasks.

VIA's Rock and Paper are certainly an oddity—even more so when one considers the cardboard case—but that does not mean that they will be unsuccessful. When Firefox OS was first announced, a lot of commentators dismissed it as untenable, particularly when compared to the smartphone juggernauts of iOS and Android. But the project has survived, is shipping, and even seems to be growing. That is good news for fans of web technology, as well as for fans of Mozilla, since success with Firefox OS will presumably enable the project to undertake still more work in the months and years to come.