The main function of the World Wide Web was to access the widest range of documents with the help of internet. But 20 years down the lane ever since its evolution, it has become a portal for accessing wide range of music, videos, games and countless applications.
But today, the world is mobile. Referring to this, I mean web browser on our home PC has taken a back seat which once acted as a gateway to email, social networks and video-on-demand. With the evolution of smart phones and tablets, web browser plays less important role than the millions of apps available on Android and iOS platforms to fulfill all these tasks.
But hold on- Here comes Mozilla
The not-for-profit organization “Mozilla” wishes to bring the web at front on mobile with Firefox OS, its completely open source OS designed especially to run apps built from latest web technologies.
Why do we need Web Technologies?
That’s a quite practical question and the answer to this is because web technologies can reach vast numbers of people. Practically anyone with access to a web browser can run a piece of software built using the latest web technologies such as HTML, CSS and JavaScript, whether that browser is running on an Android handset or any other.
In one way, the aim of Firefox OS is to get developers using the open web APIs Mozilla has developed, for accessing core mobile phone and tablet hardware in order to knit the OS and applications together, such as push messaging functionality.
Mark Surman, the executive director of the Mozilla Foundation said, “We’re not doing Firefox OS because we want Firefox OS to win, we’re doing Firefox OS because we want the web to win.”
The first ever version of the Firefox OS was released on April this year and following it, version 1.1 was released on October. Firefox OS 1.1 brings a number of performance improvements, including MMS support, a new push notifications API, app search and contact management enhancements to name a few.
What are the new features of the Firefox OS 1.1?
- Multimedia Messaging (MMS) support added to the messaging app so that you can send pictures, video, and audio to contacts, or a text message to multiple people at the same time.
- Saving images, video, and audio from the browser is now supported.
- Email account contacts can now be imported from Gmail and Windows Live Mail (Outlook).
- Email image, audio and video attachment download has been implemented.
- Attaching and sending Gallery images now supported.
- Email draft mode has been implemented.
- Improvements to the dialer and contacts, such as easily adding a dialed number to an existing contact and dialer suggestions to easily find contacts.
- Cell Broadcast implemented for simultaneous delivery of emergency messages to subscribed users.
- Major performance improvements around application launch time and scrolling.
- Music search to find music by artist, album or song title.
- Firefox OS offers Calendar features such as:
- Separate detail and edit views.
- Alarm sound notification selection.
- Direct event creation at specific date/time.
- Push Notifications API:Developers can make use of push to deliver timely notifications to apps and reduce overall battery consumption.
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