A potentially quite interesting entry into the mobile OS market comes from Mozilla, makers of the Firefox browser. Mozilla is building a brand new OS from the ground up, all constructed with open web standards—HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and others. The OS has no middleware layer, as iOS or Android does, and the system APIs all use JavaScript to interact directly with the hardware. Building a new OS is a bold undertaking, and I look forward to seeing how it performs.
As part of that effort, Mozilla realized they needed to develop many of the existing device APIs and create many more. This project is called WebAPI, and although many of the included APIs have been covered already in this chapter, a few are unique to Firefox OS at the moment.
Here are some of the new APIs: WebTelephony, for sending and receiving calls; WebSMS, for sending, receiving, and managing text messages; Contacts, for accessing and managing the address book; and Device Storage, for accessing shared files or folders such as the picture gallery featured on many phones.
The fate of Firefox OS and broader implementation of these APIs remain to be seen, but I’m quite excited about a smartphone OS that is built using only open web technologies and the many possibilities that opens up for web developers with regard to device interactions.