Mozilla is continuing to push Firefox OS despite tough competition

While Apple was busy in San Francisco announcing a new set of features that will wow its fan boys, Mozilla’s Chairman Mitchell Baker was in Seattle discussing devices and tools that can that support a more broader and global community. “Humanity is smart. Sometime in the technology world we think we are smarter, but we are not smarter than you. Humanity has immense problems right now,” she said, adding that they won’t be solved from tech hubs, like Seattle and California. “We need to provide the tools not to give to people, but to have tools that will be enabling.”

Firefox OS is a tough project to evaluate. Mozilla’s phone operating system is meant for developing countries and first-time smartphone owners. To keep the price of the phones down, the hardware it comes on doesn’t really compare to today’s flagship phones, either. Instead of native apps, Firefox OS runs web apps written in HTML5 and JavaScript, which naturally incurs a performance penalty. Still, it’s a fascinating project and you can’t help but feel at least a little bit of admiration for Mozilla given the audaciousness of launching a new smartphone ecosystem into a market dominated by a few incumbents. Last week, Mozilla sent me a review unit of ZTE’s latest Firefox phone, the Open C. The phone is available through eBay in the U.S., U.K., Germany, Russia and many other European countries. In the U.S., the unlocked phone is going for $99. So far, however, it seems the interest is low, with the ZTE eBay store reporting just around 450 sold units so far.