Mozilla plans mobile OS

Mozilla is joining the mobile operating systems bandwaggon and plans to launch Boot to Gecko (B2G) an open operating system designed to run web applications in the cloud.

Google has already gone part of the way with ChromeOS which so far has only been deployed on Netbooks (while Android boasts native apps). HP's WebOS is also out there, on both phones and tablets.

Intel are also trying with MeeGo - though the loss of Nokia (who have migrated to Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 or WP7) might have slowed things down.

The B2G will support Firefox (Mozilla's open source browser), they're are not tying the OS to it and will support 3rd party browsers if they wish to support B2G.

Another mobile OS may just confuse the market more, though the Mozilla product is likely to be completely open source (as far as any OS can be that supports closed parts such as the GSM/2G/3G stacks).

Firefox 3.6 is here

The latest version of Mozilla's Firefox web browser has been released now supporting new CSS attributes, new DOM and HTML 5 specifications and full-screen video (which both YouTube and Vimeo are starting to support).

Javascript should speed up by about 12% and web pages load about 20% faster than Firefox 3.5. More calls have been made asynchronous, so the whole system should feel 'snappier'.

There are also security enhancements to report out of date old plugins (and the ability to single click to download an updated version) and the browser will no longer automatically download plugins.

This is a must have upgrade for anyone running v3.5 of Firefox.

At the moment downloads are reasonably fast but as more people learn about the upgrade, there's likely to be some congestion as the USA wakes up today.

It can be downloaded from here or via the Help/update in Firefox itself.