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Didn't they try this with HP web OS. That failed I wouldn't put money on this.

I had the original Palm Pre with WebOS. The OS itself was actually top notch. I absolutely loved it. I believe it failed because Palm just didn't have enough weight behind it (like Google or Apple have) to make it reach critical mass.

That said, this isn't the same as WebOS. WebOS ran javascript apps, but they ran on the device itself. From what I can gather, B2G is running everything on the actual web. It's very different.

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Edit: I may have been wrong there. Apparently it is running locally. This quote from the web page through me off:

"You don't have to pay the penalty of a big smart phone operating system if you're running directly on the web"

That's a bit misleading.

B2G runs apps from the web and locally cached for offline use. B2G apps are not required to use some non-standard library to get at the phone hardware like WebOS did. APIs for camera and telephony and vibrator and accelerometer and all that in B2G are proper DOM APIs that will be web standards.

I'm not sure why WebOS failed. Probably just because they couldn't attract as many developers, so there was a lot less software available. I really liked my TouchPad. Ironically the biggest weakness for me was the web browser - it was buggy and had almost no features.

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