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I haven't been following Firefox OS that closely, but one question comes to mind: why didn't Mozilla fork Palm's excellent WebOS?
by jdc 13y ago
I haven't been following Firefox OS that closely, but one question comes to mind: why didn't Mozilla fork Palm's excellent WebOS?
- S201 13y agoOne reason is that Firefox OS uses the Android kernel. This means that Mozilla doesn't have to beg device manufacturers for hardware support. If a device runs Android, it should be able to run Firefox OS with little software modification. Another reason is that Firefox OS uses Gecko as the UI. So the two major components, the kernel and userland are taken care of; there is no benefit from forking WebOS.
- garysweaver 13y ago> One reason is that Firefox OS uses the Android kernel. It uses parts of Android in HAL, but Gonk isn't Android.
- Argorak 13y agoVery simple. HP announced open sourcing WebOS in Winter 2011, Boot 2 Gecko (as Firefox OS was called back then) was announced in July 2011. Expect that Mozilla worked on it well before that. Firefox OS predates the open WebOS.
- _delirium 13y agoThe actual release of the WebOS code was even later, August 2012.