REVscene Automotive Forum - Mozilla Firefox OS smartphone

^ Yeah, they've been talking about this for awhile. Since Apps can be written in HTML 5, their thinking is "why do you need a full-blown OS like Android or iOS when you can just have your browser become the OS?"

There are some drawbacks, though. Performance will be one. Funtionality will be another since HTML5 won't have full lower level access to hardware.

And although they say 75% of Apps in iOS and Android stores are HTML5, that doesn't mean that 75% of the good Apps are HTML5. HTML5 is the "poor man's" way to quickly write an App. Any App that wants to take full advantage of a device, and have maximum performance, will be written natively. A good example is Facebook for iOS which is currently HTML5 and is being re-written in Obj C. People who have seen the early versions say it's smoking fast compared to the existing HMTL5 version.

Overall I think it's a good idea. HTML5 will make it easy for developers to make Apps and this OS should be much smaller and more efficient than iOS or Android, which means it should work OK on lower end hardware. I see this as a good device to sit between the dumb phones and the high-end smartphones. A smartphone at a feature phone price.