Dan Rowinski has a story on ReadWriteWeb today about Mozilla's plan to put its Boot 2 Gecko platform on smartphones. Mozilla, the nonprofit best known for leading developing of the Firefox browser, will use HTML5 and Javascript as the basis for all applications. This is similar to what Palm attempted with webOS, but booting directly into what is essentially a browser environment will make Mozilla's implementation even easier for most developers.
I'm excited to see that the dominance of Apple in mindshare and usability, and of Google-led Android in sheer numbers of handsets sold, hasn't discouraged a new innovator like Mozilla from entering the fray. Palm's eventual failure and disappearance into the HP fold should serve as a stark warning, though: Mozilla needs to build and maintain a vision, and while they don't want any partnerships watering down the open source moniker (as some say Google has done with Android), they'll need buy-in from quality hardware designers at all consumer price levels to enter the market with a fighting chance.
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