Firefox OS, the mobile platform being developed by Mozilla, is not something I'm not convinced will ever matter, although I could be wrong — and I kind of hope I am. After all, another platform, more developers, more competition and the promise of truly open web standards for mobile devices are all good things. The odds, however, appear stacked against its success. 

The Odds Firefox OS Faces

Presently, Google's Android dominates the smartphone market, accounting for approximately 70% of all new smartphone sales. In its short life, Android has amassed 48% of the global smartphone market. Apple's iPhone follows with 19%. Both platforms are supported by highly capable, deep-pocketed tech giants, and both platforms are growing their overall base. There may simply be no room for a viable third platform.

Not that Firefox OS is only facing off against Android and iPhone, of course. Blackberry was the third-best selling smartphone platform in 2012, and it has recently launched its own new operating system, BB10. Next comes Windows Phone, which despite the considerable backing of both Microsoft and Nokia this OS continues to generate only middling interest.

Then there are numerous other smartphone operating systems, including some with significant corporate sponsorship. Samsung and Intel, for example, continue to develop Tizen. Amazon has its own version of Android. There are also Bada, Jolla, Aliyun, webOS, Ubuntu and others, including the hybrid Nokia Asha platform at the low end. 

The Opening

Mozilla Corporation, which oversees Firefox OS development, remains undaunted, perhaps with good reason. While Android and iPhone continue to grow, other smartphone platforms are either in decline or treading water. If there's to be a viable third smartphone platform — which, of course, is far from a certainty — it could still be Firefox. 

As CNET reported from last month’s Mobile World Congress, Mozilla CEO Gary Kovacs is enticing developers and carriers with visions of a smartphone OS that could appeal to the next "2 billion smartphone users." 

I find it impossible to understand how 3, 4, 5, or 6 billion people are going to get their diverse needs satisfied by one or two or five companies, no matter how delicious those companies are. 

Is the farmer in the Indian countryside going to have the same needs and requirements as a lawyer sitting in New York?"

Truly Open And Web-Based

The primary appeal of the Firefox OS is that it is built using web standards, including HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Mozilla has deep roots in the web, which are clearly reflected in its vision for the new OS:

Built entirely using HTML5 and other open Web standards (and) free from the rules and restrictions of existing proprietary platforms.

App developers, particularly those already familiar with Mozilla and Firefox, can leverage these open standards to effectively transform a web page into an app. This could theoretically jumpstart usage. The Mozilla’s Developer Network offers developers a guide to get started. This could prove crucial. As CNET remarked earlier this year: 

Using this browser-based approach poses some technical challenges, but it also means that a huge amount of services already work on the phone, at least in principle, simply by pointing the phone at a Web page.

Moreover, Mozilla just announced a series of app workshops to encourage development of new apps — albeit with clear specifications:

If you know how to build mobile app experiences with HTML5 and JavaScript, we’re looking for you —especially if you’d like to develop apps in Spanish, Polish or Portuguese! If you’re fast and focused, this is the time to take first-mover advantage.

Admittedly, there are no guarantees that developers in any of these regions will embrace the platform, web standards and workshops notwithstanding. It's not merely a question of revenue potential. As ReadWrite noted last year, Facebook famously reversed course on web-standard HTML5 and went native.

Firefox OS ensures handset makers a platform free of current licensing restrictions — and costs — while simultaneously providing consumers with an alternative to the two major platforms.  And it could be time for a truly open, accessible — and alternative — platform. For example, ReadWrite noted how Samsung has become so dominant within the Android ecosystem that other phone makers are struggling to compete.  

Keep Hope Alive 

The first smartphones running Firefox OS are expected to be released this summer, initially in South America, then Asia.  ZTE, LG, Huawei and Sony have all announced smartphones based on the operating system. Two developer preview phones have recently been released.

The Mozilla Foundation appears fully committed to the platform. The organization is wisely focusing on South America first, then Asia — where low-cost devices and mobile web services are commonplace. At last month's Mobile World Congress, per CNET, Mozilla announced support not only from select device makers but also “18 mobile network operators across the world.”  Several of these, including Telefonica and Deutsche Telekom have substantial footprints.

I do not expect Firefox OS to ever achieve above 5% of the smartphone market, and probably less. But Mozilla appears ready to make me a believer. 

Image courtesy of Shutterstock

It started with a gecko, of sorts. It then became a fennec, a type of winter fox. Now, it is a smartphone, and soon it will be available all over the world.

We are, of course, talking about Firefox OS, the open source, Web-based smartphone operating system created by Mozilla. The company announced Sunday at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, that it has partnered with device manufacturers and mobile operators across the world to launch Firefox smartphones in 2013. 

Mozilla also officially launched the Firefox Marketplace, an app store featuring mobile Web applications and websites that will be able to operate on the new smartphones. Both the Firefox OS and Marketplace are optimized towards HTML5 development and open Web standards using Mozilla’s Firefox browser as its backbone. 

Mozilla claimed three initial manufacturers ready to build and deploy Firefox OS smartphones: LG, Alcatel and ZTE. These devices will be distributed to 17 global carriers in nine countries, including Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, Serbia, Montenegro, Poland, Spain, Hungary and Venezuela. (Note that these are largely developing markets, and the list does not include the United States.) Since the announcement yesterday, Sony has also said that it would build and release Firefox OS smartphones in 2014. On the other hand, market leader Samsung has said that it is not interested in building smartphones for Mozilla (likely due to its investment in the similar Tizen platform).

Mozilla’s Evolution

The seed of Firefox OS came from Mozilla’s first ventures into the mobile browser wars against Android. Mozilla started with its rendering layout engine, Gecko, and applied it to Android as a third-party browser. Initially, the Gecko-boot of Firefox for Android was named Fennec. 

Mozilla then started thinking bigger.

As HTML5 has evolved into the newest open Web standard, Mozilla became a leading developer and evangelist for HTML5 websites and apps. The problem that Mozilla had with smartphones, though, was that it was not possible to tie smartphone hardware capabilities to mobile browsers. If you ever hear of the “Web vs. Native” argument when it comes to apps, the issue of tying Web browsers to smartphone and tablet hardware (like a camera, accelerometer etc.) is central to the issue. Mozilla wanted to fix that and created what it calls Web APIs (application programming interfaces) to access hardware through a browser. 

(See more ReadWrite coverage of HTML5.)

That goal was what ultimately led Mozilla to announce its own smartphones this year at Mobile World Congress. It has dedicated itself to open Web standards and mobile evolution, all in the name of consumer choice. Firefox OS smartphones will be extremely affordable and targeted at emerging smartphone markets where there is still a lot of potential to make a dent in the industry. 

Building The Marketplace

As shown in the rise of Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android, the name of the game in smartphones is apps. Mozilla plans on leveraging the power of the Web to build out its app store by enabling websites and app developers to create apps for the mobile Web that can easily be integrated into Firefox OS. 

To start, Firefox announced that a variety of content and app partnerships with the likes of AirBnB, Box, Disney Mobile Games, EA Games, Facebook, Pulse News, Sound Cloud, Twitter and others. Mozilla stated that it will have a variety of games, news and media, productivity and business apps.

When it comes to apps built for the likes of iOS, Android, Windows Phone and BlackBerry, many already have a core of HTML5 and Web-based technology powering them. Apps are often built as mobile websites and then “wrapped” with native properties to help them connect to device hardware before being deployed to the various native app stores. Mozilla’s plan is to eliminate that need to “wrap” apps and let developers build straight for the Web. The potential  is that almost any app that will work in browser can easily be deployed to the Firefox Marketplace, reducing the cost for developing and distributing apps.

We will see the first Firefox OS smartphones in developing markets later this year. Does Firefox OS excite you? Let us know what you think of the project in the comments. 

Top: Keon Bottom: Peak Mozilla is turning its dreams of a smartphone running its own custom-built mobile operating system into a reality. In conjunction with Geeksphone, Mozilla announced two developer preview mobile devices today, dubbed Peak and Keon. Running Mozilla’s Firefox OS, neither of the phones are much to look at from a hardware perspective and are designed to bring the Web back to the forefront of the mobile ecosystem. 

Keon is a low-range hardware option running a 1-GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor with a 3.5-inch screen, a 1580 mAh battery and a 3-megapixel camera. If that sounds basically like an iPhone 3G, well, it's really close to one from a hardware perspective. 

Peak is slightly more powerful. It runs a 1.2 GHz Snapdragon processor with a 4.3-inch screen, 8-MP back and 2-MP front camera with a 1800 mAh battery. This phone would have been very happy at the top of the smartphone market… in 2011.

Keon and Peak do not need to be powerful devices to serve Mozilla’s purposes. Foremost, these are developer preview phones designed to allow publishers to get a sense of how their Web apps will perform on Firefox OS. Second, and most importantly, the way that Firefox OS is designed means the phones do not need to be incredibly powerful to run the operating system or the apps that go with it.

Beyond Native Apps

Firefox OS is of the Web, for the Web. There is no such thing as a “native” app to Firefox OS. If an object exists as a web page, it can easily be turned into an app for Firefox OS by essentially turning it into a shortcut for the browser-based operating system to access. Instead of having to develop specifically for mobile platforms like iOS, Android or Windows Phone, the Web is the platform for Firefox OS. 

Mozilla’s plan for Firefox OS is to target emerging markets that are not already saturated with smartphones. Hence, do not expect Keon or Peak (or their equivalents when official consumer devices become ready likely later this year) to have a major market presence in the United States. Mozilla’s approach is evident by looking at the schedule for its Fire OS App Days developer tour. The events, designed to get developers building Web apps for Firefox OS, only had one stop in the U.S., in Mountain View on Jan. 19. The rest of the tour takes Firefox OS around the world to places like Bogota, Bangalore, Nairobi, Taipei, and Jakarta, as well as cities like Seoul and Rome. 

Mozilla’s next goals with Firefox OS are two-fold: get more developers on board to flesh out the Web app ecosystem and entice smartphone manufacturers to get on board to build and ship the devices. Those goals go hand in hand with each other as the more apps are built for Firefox OS, the more attractive it looks to manufacturers and vice versa. 

If you are a developer, you can build an app for Firefox OS by making some small changes to your website. You can then test the app by downloading the Aurora Marketplace onto your Android or using the browser-based Firefox OS Simulator. 

Developers – are you going to test out Firefox OS on Keon or Peak? Let us know in the comments. 

Apple's stock is taking a beating as analysts and investors are waking up to the very real likelihood that market share matters, and Google's Android is dominating mobile market share with its one-two punch of zero license fees and open source flexibility.  Meanwhile, Microsoft has been attempting to insert itself into the mobile conversation with a slick, Apple-esque Windows Phone 8 strategy, which seems unlikely to work, given that Apple has already claimed the high end and Google has taken the mass-market, commodity middle ground.  What's left for Microsoft?

How about Mozilla's Firefox OS?

No, I'm not insane.  Yes, I know there's a fair amount of history and bad blood between the two organizations.  But Mozilla is building a mobile OS that could prove disruptive enough to carve out a serious chance for Microsoft. 

Firefox OS: (Much) More Than Just A Browser

First things first.  It's a given that for Microsoft, or anyone else, to work with Mozilla, they're going to have to give up any fetish for control.  Mozilla's great gift to the industry, as I've written before, has been to insist on open source and open standards, with no single organization, including Mozilla, dominating the browser market.

But as Samsung has shown with Android, one needn't own an OS to profit from it.  Samsung's operating profit in its fourth quarter rose 89% to hit $8.3 billion.  That's real money that even Apple can't sniff at.

Firefox OS: Sample Screen (Credit: Mozilla)

What, exactly, is Mozilla building? 

Firefox OS is an attempt to make the web a first-class citizen on mobile devices.  In some ways, it's similar to Canonical's aims for Ubuntu Mobile, but it's arguably much more ambitious.  Mozilla wants to eradicate the walled-garden, native app approach popularized by Apple and Google, replacing it with a completely open mobile OS that frees carriers, developers, and users from locked-down app stores.  

To turn this ambition into reality, Mozilla is heavily investing in advancing the state of the art for HTML5 and device APIs. Mozilla isn't blind to the performance hit that web apps have historically faced on mobile.  But as Mozilla CTO Brendan Eich told me in a phone interview, the organization feels confident that it can change this, delivering "60Hz, artifact-free rendering under touch control."

Historically, HTML5 has fizzled when serious graphics or low-bandwidth were involved.  And for those devices without hardware acceleration?  Forget about it.

Which is why Mozilla's approach is so intriguing.  The company isn't going after high-end smartphones, but rather after low-end, emerging market phones.  To accomplish this, Mozilla can't wait around for hardware to get better.  Instead, it needs to make the web stack better - now - such that it can work on even barebones phones, including in areas of limited or no bandwidth.  Mozilla has therefore developed its web apps to be offline from the start, and to use equal-or-less bandwidth than native apps.  

This is groundbreaking stuff, and it appears to be working.

Importantly, it's working not just for Mozilla, but for everyone.  I asked Eich whether Firefox OS development will benefit anyone beyond Mozilla.  His response?  Mozilla is trying to rid the industry of its "end-to-end" mentality, so everything it's building is highly modular.  In particular, its standards work with the W3C requires multiple implementations, and Samsung and others have been picking up Mozilla-developed APIs like its battery status bite-sized API.  Mozilla knows it can't win alone: Mozilla's idea of winning is a highly competitive industry where mobile users and developers are in control.

Mozilla + Microsoft

Which brings us back to Microsoft, and its need to disrupt an industry that has already been disrupted by Google's Android.  It's not going to be enough to ape Apple.  Microsoft needs to do something different.

Microsoft has actually been a big proponent of HTML5, perhaps sensing that it needed to embrace the web in order to compete with Apple.  But I think it needs more than just great support for HTML5.  It needs a clear HTML5 strategy, and that has to be more than ensuring WP8 is a great platform for HTML5 development.  

Why not throw its weight behind Mozilla?  Mozilla has taken on a huge task, one that Microsoft's engineering and financial resources can help to accelerate.  And while Mozilla is unlikely to give any special favors to Microsoft in terms of distribution, the very fact of embracing and distributing Firefox OS would give Microsoft influence in the Firefox OS community.  That's how open source works: being the source of code matters as much or more than owning source code.  

None of which is to suggest that Microsoft attempt to "own" Firefox OS.  Mozilla wouldn't allow that.  Rather, it's a suggestion that Microsoft could both help Firefox OS development and be helped by having a disruptive mobile OS strategy, one that still allows Microsoft plenty of room for profit through mobile advertising, applications, etc.  It's not as if Microsoft has a future of licensing Windows for mobile: no one makes money that way in the mobile OS world. 

An Open Mobile Future

The economics of the web favor its chances in mobile, just as they have on the desktop.  Mozilla is the web's laboratory for the next generation of mobile, and Microsoft and others looking to compete with Android or iOS need to think seriously about working with Mozilla.  Unlike any other player in the industry, its interests are not selfish.  Microsoft and Mozilla may historically have been at odds as Microsoft fought off Mozilla's attempts, ultimately successful, to open up the browser market, but the two organizations are perfectly aligned in wanting and needing the web stack to free up the mobile market.  They should work together.