Mozilla

Archive for July 1st, 2013

Success and Firefox OS

July 1st, 2013

Firefox OS is launching today.  With that in mind, it’s a good time to recap why Mozilla builds products, what our products represent and how our products relate to our goals.

Mozilla’s goal is to build openness, innovation, and opportunity into online life.   One of our biggest levers is of course building products.   We build products that provide a great user experience and engender openness, innovation and opportunity into the technology of the Web itself.

Firefox has done this in many ways.  Firefox was a pioneer in the world of open source consumer products, in open techniques for feedback, support, and quality, just to name a few examples.  We have always built Firefox to give developers huge opportunities for innovation in areas they care about.  We do not seek to control the ways developers can innovate, or the way people take control of their software.

As a result, Firefox helped usher in a whole new era of Web computing, bringing new experiences for users and new freedoms for developers.  Today Firefox continues to pioneer new technologies and features that benefit users.  Some recent examples include features such as Do Not Track, which allows people to tell websites they do not wish to be tracked around the Web, and our Social API that makes the browsing experience more personal and customizable.

With Firefox OS we hope to do something similar with the mobile computing environment.  We want to bring the power of the open Web to this world.  We want to bring the same kinds of flexibility, opportunity and freedom to this computing environment that the original Firefox brings to the desktop.  More specifically, we want  Firefox OS to:

  • Prove that the Web is the platform, surprise people with what HTML5 is capable of on mobile devices.
  • Advance adoption of mobile Web standards and APIs across the industry, including on other operating systems.
  • Spur developer innovation; break the mold of what a mobile app is capable of.
  • Make the open Web accessible to more people.
  • Spur competition in making the Web the platform for mobile computing.
  • Excite people.
  • Provide a powerful, exciting and open alternative to the current closed ecosystems.

You’ll note that I haven’t included something like “we want to ship X numbers of phones.”  Ultimately, we want enough people choosing Firefox OS to confirm we’ve built a great product and to move us toward  a more open mobile computing platform based on the Web.    Our goal is to provide an alternative that has a deep and exciting user experience based on openness, choice and competition.

Skip past the sidebar