Mozilla is working on a new smartphone operating system called Firefox OS that hopes to compete with Android, iOS, and Windows Phone. The project was first announced back in 2011, and earlier this month, it was reported that Mozilla had made TCL Corporation its hardware partner.
It’s still early days for Firefox OS, but if you’d like to see what Mozilla has in store, you can now run the platform on your Mac using a Boot2Gecko (B2G) “nightly” build.
It takes a little bit of tinkering to get set up, according to Ars Technica, but it’s handy for those who are interesting in developing apps that are powerful with B2G.
Users will have to do a little bit of configuration in order to run the software. The process involves obtaining the latest Gaia code from the GitHub repository and generating a profile to use in the environment.
To begin, grab the latest build from Mozilla’s FTP server, and then follow the steps documented on the Gaia Hacking page of the Mozilla Wiki to get set up. By following these steps, you can get a B2G nightly build running under Mac OS X.
Ars notes that the platform is still a work in progress, and that what you see here is under heavy development, which means it’s likely to look a whole lot different when Firefox OS actually nears final release. Which is probably a good thing, because right now it just looks like someone applied a bad theme to an iPhone.
Source: Ars Technica
