We already knew before that Firefox he was developing his own operating system based on HTML5, that's no secret to anyone but ... the secret for many is in the question of "Is it worth it?" and is that today we have in our hands very well positioned systems and with a lot of ground gained such as Android and IOS, followed by BlackberryOS and Windows Phone 7.5.
The point in all of this is that competing with the first two, at least in the beginning is almost impossible since the advertising and marketing apparatus of Mozilla is not even in dreams close to Google or much less to patent troll Manzana. Some say that in fact no new system is needed today since "everything is covered" and others say that variety is needed.
I personally see it this way:
IOS It is a closed system whose market is focused on Asia, the United States and parts of Europe. As I said before it is closed, too; For this reason, it does not win too many followers within the world of the most purist Geeks who love to put their hands on all their gadgets and also keep in mind that Apple does not have a good reputation with governments such as Italian or Spanish for reasons of fines and not wanting to offer two-year guarantees stipulated by law.
Android according to many it is the panacea; It is open, it has many manufacturers behind it, it is updated, it has the ROMs and many Google services, but there is a problem… Android uses Java as its programming language for its applications; which makes it uncomfortable for many developers (I include myself) since Java is ugly, slow, verbose and annoying to learn (and I'm not saying it at all) and for worse, closed, which is why it is a total annoyance.
Of the other two systems I do not speak because in fact I think that FFOS you can stand up to them much more easily.
The point is that, obviously HTML5 is not a fully developed standard, it needs to grow more and mature, it is good that there are projects like this that promote the standard in such a way but at least in the first place we can be clear that many of the native applications that the more we use
(whatsapp, for example) will not be present in FFOS. But there are advantages, and one of them is that the developer community surrounding HTML5 it is huge, which could cause an explosive growth of the ecosystem and attract large developers; that and that I prefer a thousand times to program in javascript rather than using Java.
Another advantage is that being based on HTML5 you will not need specialized software to develop graphical interfaces or elaborate and annoying SDKs, just HTML CSS javascript and some server language like Python, PHP or Ruby. It is not yet clear what the FF OS development environment will look like, but I am sure that as a platform, if it doesn't survive, it will pave the way for bigger things based on its concept.
Of course, there is something that I did not mention but that is important, it is called Tizen, which shares the same concept of FFOS, although a little different in certain points.
Definitely as soon as I can get my hands on a cell phone with FFOS I'll be a happy geek, equally with a TizenI'm one of those who bet on those operating systems. And you?