The first handsets to be powered by Mozilla's Boot2Gecko OS, which we tried out at Mobile World Congress, will reportedly arrive in Brazil via Telefonica as early as the end of the year. Mozilla CEO Gary Kovacs made the timing announcement today in São Paulo, confirming that the platform will make it past concept development and into the retail smartphone market.
Chris Blizzard served his last day as Mozilla's director of Web platform this past Friday, March 16, he revealed on his blog. He will move on to a "very small startup" based in Palo Alto, though didn't go on to name it. Blizzard would only say the work involves the intersection of systems, compilers, and web-scale problems.
Mozilla research director Andreas Gal has proposed a rare change of heart that could see Boot2Gecko, and possibly Firefox, adopt H.264 playback. The mode would let HTML5 pages use the video tag for in-page H.264 as long as the OS underneath already supports the codec. At least in theory, it would let Mozilla officially keep active support only for open formats like WebM while acknowledging the reality of H.264's much wider reach.
(Update: Telefonica details) Mozilla is finally showing off its Boot 2 Gecko operating system that is completely based on web standards. The company brought Samsung's Galaxy S II to Mobile World Congress, however the Android OS was stripped away to allow the device to boot Gecko and run apps based on HTML5, JavaScript and CSS.
Last July, Mozilla acknowledged that it was planning to build a mobile operating system. Today, the non-profit development organization that created the Firefox browser and Thunderbird email system provided an initial view of what that foundation, named Boot2Gecko (BTG), will look like. Mozilla is promising to demo it at the upcoming Mobile World Congress later this month.
