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Comment by khuey | Hacker News Reader

Uh, where did you get that idea from? The rendering engine is even in the name ...

I would suggest using HP/Palm Luna if you want a webkit-based mobile OS. It's apparently using Qt and should be possible to run it on top of android the same as B2G. If Mozilla's work to standardize the APIs goes well the same apps should be usable on both platforms.

... if HP still exists by then :)

Can't find the specific reference now, but seen it mentioned a few times, here's one: http://paulrouget.com/e/b2gdemo/

Their idea is that it is an HTML5 standard with some additional Javascript hooks for hardware access, so any browser could be the 'core' with only a few tweaks.

From your link...

"Gecko on top of it. The same version you'll find on a regular Firefox;"

Maybe we're confusing web standards with rendering engines, but this is a product with only one rendering engine.

Afaict:

- Gaia, the top layer, is meant to be engine-agnostic;

- Boot-to-Gecko / Firefox OS, the complete project, is not.

Yes, that's correct.

Boot to Gecko / Firefox OS is a Gecko based mobile OS. However, the open apps platform we're building lets you run an HTML5 app on, well, any HTML5 device including Chrome, IE9, etc.

This mostly applies to the Marketplace in how it offers paid apps; we have a decentralized receipt format to let the paid app run on any platform. Unlike any other mobile player, Mozilla is truly making the web the platform. Our platform is not Firefox OS. That's just one device to support open web apps.

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