http://www.extremetech.com/computing...its-own-device

Another "webby" OS... oh my.

I'm surprised that the couple of posts on boot2gecko haven't gotten any kind of response here. For a crowd that is obviously not satisfied with the current mobile OS status quo, I'd think something like this would get a little more attention.

True but I know a few like me are so wowed by Harmattan and its intuitive swipe interface that anything else seems a little depressing.
You wouldn't believe how many times I handle other people's phones and just want to swipe away apps, etc.

Let alone the whole "browser is the whole OS". What's wrong with an operating system anyway?

Honestly... I'd say a lot is wrong with an operating system on the cellphones. The level of expectations that we have here mean we'd expect nothing less than terminal, root, ssh, git, cap, ftp in a mobile OS. But that can get heavy. Can mean that the solution will require stronger/faster hardware.

But what about folks that want less? It needs to be cheap. It needs to be quick to port to and it could be web only. Does that mean that this will be a solution? No. But it's a possibility.

ChromeOS isn't doing too well, so this might not do well either. But let's see... I'm honestly curious.

If an LG smartphone running B2G actually hits the high street then I will get excited.

Well, all these things are no problem at even with very outdated hardware as quite a few people run SSH servers, FTP or GIT repositories on their home routers, that are much less powerful that even the N900, without any issues.

A proper GUI toolkit (Qt,EFL,..) integration (location, camera support, video playback, 3D) might be a bit more difficult to get going.

I think the issue is probably that the manufacturers don't see "us" (power-users/developers) as the target group for their devices so they don't bother to officially support all this.

On the other hand, who would like to develop applications for such a limited, locked down and everyday-unusable device (case in point - Windows Phone)? Not counting commercial developers of course.

It seems Mozilla have also got Telefonica (O2 in the UK) onside: http://blog.mozilla.com/blog/2012/02...-the-platform/

LG haven't done as well as they'd like in the smartphone market, hopefully an open platform and the interest of a major carrier will prove to be a real temptation for them.

Boot2Gecko OS for Nokia N9?

http://romaxa.info/fennec/IPCEmbeddi...arm_n9.tar.bz2

I submit to you that all of the above together are vastly lighter than your average twitter or facebook client, let alone an entire browser :-)

Indeed. I'm not at all excited by the concept, but its one saving grace is that Mozilla don't seem to have much vested interest in making devices that are actively hostile against their owners. Iff those devices materialise, it may be possible to do interesting stuff with them.