Brazil will be the first country to get Firefox OS devices next year, with Telefonica signed up to offer them through its Vivo brand. Mozilla is heavily promoting the new platform’s customization options, helped by the fact that there’s none of the pesky middleware that’s usually present on smartphones.
Fully open-source, Firefox OS is based on the underlying Linux kernel modified for Android, with a ‘Gonk’ hardware abstraction layer and then the multi-platform Gecko Web browser engine to actually run all the “local” apps. There’ll also be a ‘Gaia’ UI and app suite that’s hardware-independent.