Firefox OS Pivots into Connected Devices

You might have heard that Mozilla pulled the plug off its Firefox OS for smartphones. After more than 3 years of continued guerrilla battles with the giant Apple-Google mobile duopoly, Mozilla is trying to pick new battles which it hopes it can win. In particular — the vast and blurry world of the Internet of Things (IoT). Firefox OS will now be pivoted into Connected Devices, and its technology will be used for IoT innovation processes. Mozilla foresees that the IoT boom will be a bigger one than the smartphone boom was a decade ago. Unlike with Firefox OS, there is no need to bridge such a wide gap with competitors — the Internet of Things is still a new enough concept that new players are able to shape its vision.

Meanwhile, Firefox OS is being transitioned to a community maintained project. This means no Mozilla staff will be allocated to it after 2016. Furthermore, the project will be renamed back to the Boot to Gecko (B2G). This has been announced in the Mozilla Community Forums.
With the Connected Devices strategy, Mozilla aims to reserve its spot in the IoT space too.

In the following article, we will take an early look on Mozilla’s related IoT projects, which will set the stage for Mozilla’s role in the IoT scene.

Note: All projects are in very early stages, so throughout 2016 you will notice many of them merging, splitting and changing.

FlyWeb

FlyWeb is one of Mozilla’s more concrete projects with which the Firefox creator wants to break new grounds. It is the internal codename for a project to bring the web application architecture to local-area interactions.

The FlyWeb design proposes using local-area discovery mechanisms to enable two computational endpoints (where one of those endpoints is usually a smartphone controlled by the user) to establish a web application session using local-area transport protocols.

In all of these interactions, one endpoint plays the role of web server, and another plays the role of web client. A smartphone can play the role of a local-area web client, consuming services exposed by endpoints around it. Additionally, a smartphone app can act as a local-area web server, exposing services to other smartphones around it. Or alternatively, using the web application architecture to “push” computation to endpoints around it.

FlyWeb is a very simple idea at its core. Instead of phones interacting only with the cloud, they can discover and interact with electronics around them that are running empty web clients, such as TV’s, projectors, game consoles, etc. The electronics come to life when connected to phones. The key here is that either the phones serve web apps to these electronics, or the electronics serve web apps to the phones.

Mozilla seems to be reallocating a lot of its energy and resources to the Connected Devices / IoT space, with the vision in mind that the latter could be part of a bigger revolution than the smartphone revolution was.

A very early demo of FlyWeb has been shown at the Mozilla Festival London 2015, showing the potential uses of it:

The FlyWeb project seems to be a crucial part of the new Connected Devices strategy. To find out more (apart from being patient), you can head over to the Mozilla Wiki.

CHIRIMEN

CHIRIMEN is a developing environment where you can control physical things/devices such as sensors and actuators through web technologies. Furthermore, it allows you to control virtual things (content) on computer screens and physical things (devices) simultaneously as well. The project includes both the board computer as well its software. Specifically:

• Board computer hardware
• The Boot to Gecko operating system (unbranded Firefox OS)
• Low level API’s (WebGPIO, WebI2C)

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by Elio Qoshi via SitePoint