Mozilla building mobile OS to battle Chrome

Sensationalist title. The Ars article[1] was much better.<p><i>A foundational goal of the B2G project is to explore and remedy areas where current Web standards are insufficient for building modern mobile applications. Instead of haphazardly grafting vendor-specific markup or extensions into the application runtime, Mozilla will seek to propose new standards to address the challenges that emerge during development.</i><p>Nicely aligns with their main aim of promoting openness, innovation and opportunity on the web.[2]<p>[1] <a href="http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2011/07/mozilla-eyes-mobile-os-landscape-with-new-boot-to-gecko-project.ars" rel="nofollow">http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2011/07/mozilla-eyes...</a><p>[2] <a href="http://www.mozilla.org/about/mission.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.mozilla.org/about/mission.html</a>

I wish people would stop calling the act of scraping together a new linux distro "writing an OS."

This may seem obvious but operating systems tend not to be replaced by other operating systems, but rather subsumed by the very applications built on top of them.<p>For example, DOS was not replaced by another OS but was subsumed by a DOS application, Windows 3.1, which eventually grew down and became a standalone OS in Windows 95.

My biggest problem with this is that the biggest problem with Mobile web browsers right now is that they pale in comparison (both feature and performance) to their desktop counterparts. Last time I checked the iPad browser (probably the best tablet browser) was something like 15x slower than Chrome desktop in javascript benchmarks.<p>This is the #1 blocker to mobile web app adoption. Try viewing a SVG on a mobile browser and see what happens. You're flipping a coin. Why doesn't Mozilla focus on bringing mobile/desktop feature parity before adding device level APIs?

"Mozilla will seek to propose new standards to address the challenges that emerge during development"<p>I'd love to be able to get excited about this, but sadly I can't. Here's why: <a href="http://xkcd.com/927/" rel="nofollow">http://xkcd.com/927/</a><p>Plus, like someone already said, Mozilla is maybe stretching itself a bit too thin.

I dream of a future of sophisticated mobile web apps and no vendor lock-in to a particular mobile OS.

Ok somewhat confused the article implies its to battle Android not Chrome..?

Mozilla's biggest problem is not aligning with wants of mobile OEMs..<p>Right now a significant part of mobile OEMs wants mobile widget engine technology..such as BONDi..Mozilla could be ahead of the game by putting BONDi inside their engine for mobile..<p>My bias; exactly 18 months ago was interviewed by Mozilla for an xml dev job and suggested that very path.