Mozilla's 'modest' proposal: Dump the smartphone OS

Mozilla has a "modest proposal" about smartphones and it's simply stated. "Dump the operating system. All of them."

But unlike the famous essay by British satirist Jonathan Swift, Mozilla isn't fooling around. And at Mobile World Congress, the non-profit creator of the Firefox browser and its partner, the Spanish telecom giant Telefonica, showed just how serious they are. The companies unveiled details for a smartphone platform that has the merest sliver of an OS, a small Linux kernel and other low-level elements, which act mainly to support device drivers and to launch the Gecko rendering engine, the heart of Mozilla's Firefox. Coupled with a growing array of new APIs, and a user interface dubbed Gaia, the platform can fully control the phone and its features without the complexity of a conventional OS. The platform, geekily dubbed Boot to Gecko, gives users access to the ever-growing array of Web-based applications and services, and gives developers an app model based on Javascript, HTML 5 and associated standards such as CSS3.