Mozilla Partners Up With LG To Combat Apple and Google 163
MrSeb writes "At Mobile World Congress, which begins in three days, Mozilla will finally take the wraps off the Mozilla Marketplace and allow developers to submit their open web technology (HTML5, JavaScript, CSS) apps. While the Marketplace will play an important role in keeping Firefox in step with Chrome, these apps will actually play a far more important role: Boot to Gecko (B2G), Mozilla's upcoming smartphone and tablet OS, will also use the Marketplace. For B2G to succeed it must have apps, and to create apps you need developers. That's why, at MWC, according to a source close to the matter, Mozilla will also be announcing that it has partnered up with LG to make a developer-oriented B2G-powered mobile device. Even more interestingly, Brendan Eich, Mozilla's Chief Technology Officer, says that it will unveil other partners at MWC as well — probably carriers, who are eager to use the open B2G and its Marketplace to escape the huge control that Apple and Google currently exert in the smartphone space."
Re:Barcode scanner app (Score:2, Insightful)
It's called w3c.
Excellent. So after about twenty years of political bickering and bureaucratic deadlock, we'll have a half-written standard for camera access whose capabilities will be twenty-five years out of date to what everyone will be actually using at the time and won't be adopted by anyone but the most frothing and hardcore of open-source zealots who will be in a constant state of bewilderment as to why nobody wants to adopt this new "standard"? I can't wait!
Wait a minute . . . (Score:3, Insightful)
Um, am I right in thinking this will give carriers more control over my phone?
From TFA, "Basically, Apple and Google have so much control over the smartphone landscape that carriers have effectively become nothing more than retailers. Worse than that, their infrastructures have been reduced to that of a dumb pipe, where it is Apple and Google who ultimately decide how the network will be used."
I don't know about other countries, but the last thing I would ever do in the US is give a mobile carrier more control over my phone. It that is the case, I'll pass.