The Firefox OS-based Geeksphone. Image: Screenshot/Webmonkey.

For the average user that’s probably a good thing. Despite being a 1.0 release on real hardware these phones are not, according to Mozilla, ready for prime time.

Instead these devices are intended for developers looking to build and test applications for Firefox OS. And clearly there’s a lot of interested developers. That’s not terribly surprising given that apps for Firefox OS are built using web basics, like HTML, CSS and JavaScript, which means anyone who can build a website can build a Firefox OS app.

Indeed, thanks to the Firefox OS simulator there are already quite a few Firefox OS apps available. But while the simulator is helpful, it’s just not the same as testing on an actual device. Having actual hardware allows developers to “test the capabilities of Firefox OS in a real environment with a mobile network and true hardware characteristics like the accelerometer and camera,” writes Stormy Peters, Mozilla’s Director of Developer Engagement.

While Geeksphone may be the first company to produce an actual Firefox OS phone (albeit a “developer preview”), Mozilla has some more familiar hardware makers lined up to produce consumer devices, including Sony, LG and Alcatel, all of which have signed up to turn out Firefox OS mobile phones.

There’s still no official word on when these manufacturers will be joining the Firefox OS party, but Mozilla’s plan is to have a more polished version of its OS out in the next few months, with official releases in Brazil, Venezuela, Portugal, Spain and Poland over the next several months.

One of the Geeksphone devices is on its way to the Webmonkey lair, so we’ll give you the lowdown on what it’s like to develop for Firefox OS as soon as we get a chance to play with it. In the mean time, if you missed out on the Geeksphone today the company is hoping to have more available for sale later this week. Alternately, you can always install Firefox OS on your own device or just use the Firefox OS simulator.

WebRTC blasts off. Image: Tsahi Levent-Levi/Flickr.

WebRTC is a proposed standard — currently being refined by the W3C — with the goal of providing a web-based set of tools that any device can use to share audio, video and data in real time. It’s still in the early stages, but WebRTC has the potential to supplant Skype, Flash and many device-native apps with web-based alternatives that work in your browser.

WebRTC support is already baked into Firefox for Android. Both the getUserMedia API and the PeerConnection API — key components of WebRTC and the cornerstones of web-based voice chat — are already supported though you’ll need to enable them in the preferences. See the Mozilla hacks blog for more details.

The same APIs are also now part of desktop Firefox in both the Nightly and Aurora channels. Expect both to make the transition from Nightly to final release as part of Firefox 22 (due some 10 weeks from now).

As Adam Roach, who works on Mozilla’s WebRTC team, writes, with these tools landing and some impressive demos from both the Firefox and Chrome WebRTC teams, “it’s tempting to view WebRTC as ‘almost done,’ and easy to imagine that we’re just sanding down the rough edges right now. As much as I’d love that to be the case, there’s still a lot of work to be done.”

That’s part of why Mozilla is asking developers to start experimenting with WebRTC — to help discover what works, what doesn’t and what needs to be better.

“As long as you’re in a position to deal with minor disruptions and changes; if you can handle things not quite working as described; if you are ready to roll up your sleeves and influence the direction WebRTC is going, then we’re ready for you,” writes Roach.

But it isn’t just experimenters that Mozilla is interested in, “for those of you looking to deploy paid services, reliable channels to manage your customer relationships, mission critical applications: we want your feedback too,” says Roach. He goes on to caution that developers should “temper your launch plans.”

Still, while it’s perhaps too early to launch a serious business built around WebRTC, you won’t have to wait long. According to Roach, WebRTC will be “a stable platform that’s well and truly open for business some time next year.”

Google has pulled the popular Adblock Plus and other ad-blocking apps from the Google Play store.

To be clear, that means Adblock Plus and its ilk are no longer available for Android users. So far nothing has changed in the Chrome Web Store, which still hosts plenty of ad-blocking add-ons for Google’s web browser.

The move shouldn’t be surprising given that ad-blocking software cuts into Google’s bottom line, though that’s not exactly why Google says the apps were removed. The company says that such apps violate the Play Store’s terms of service, specifically that they cause “interference with another service or product in an unauthorized manner.”

Naturally if you’ve already installed AdBlock Plus — or any other affected ad-blocking app — it will continue to work, though there will be no more updates. For that reason, Wladimir Palant, creator of AdBlock Plus, suggests users “install our next release from our website once it is out.”

Palant calls the move “surprising” and wonders if it suggests “a course change at Google.” It doesn’t seem particularly surprising to me, but Palant’s thoughts on all the “for rooted phones only” apps currently available in Play seem well-founded:

Until recently the main distinction between Android and iPhone was that Android allowed you to install any app as long as it wasn’t malicious (meaning that it’s obvious what the app does). Google Play still allows apps stating “for rooted phones only” but I wonder whether these are next on the list to be removed — each of them performs “unauthorized actions”.

What’s really surprising is that Google ever allowed these apps in the first place.

Stop feeding your website donuts. Image: D. Sharon Pruitt/Flickr.

That’s bad for pretty much everyone, but doubly so for mobile users with constrained bandwidth.

Fortunately for mobile users, the network increasingly seems to see large page sizes as damage to route around.

Services like Instapaper, Pocket or Safari’s Reader have long offered an easy way to strip out extraneous content. Now mobile web browsers are increasingly taking it upon themselves to speed up the bloated web.

The recently unveiled WebKit-based Opera Mobile borrows Opera Mini’s proxy-based Turbo Mode, or “Off Road” mode as it’s known now. Once only deemed necessary for feature phones (Opera Mini’s primary market) proxy-based browsing will soon be available in all Opera browsers.

Google’s Chrome for Android browser is getting ready to follow suit.

The beta channel release of Chrome for Android recently introduced an experimental data compression feature which Google says will “yield substantial bandwidth savings.” Chrome’s compression is nowhere near the level of Opera’s, but it does roughly the same thing — puts a proxy server between the user and the bloated site in question and then applies various speed improvements like using the SPDY protocol and compressing images with WebP.

To turn on the compression head to chrome:flags and look for the “enable experimental data compression” option.

Here’s Google’s description of the various optimizations:

For an average web page, over 60% of the transferred bytes are images. The proxy optimizes and transcodes all images to the WebP format, which requires fewer bytes than other popular formats, such as JPEG and PNG. The proxy also performs intelligent compression and minification of HTML, JavaScript and CSS resources, which removes unnecessary whitespace, comments, and other metadata which are not essential to render the page. These optimizations, combined with mandatory gzip compression for all resources, can result in substantial bandwidth savings.

In other words, Google and Opera are doing what web developers ought to be doing but aren’t. Just like developers should have been making reader-friendly pages, but weren’t, so “reader” modes were born.

It works too. In the video embedded below Google’s Pete Le Page shows how Chrome’s new proxy options take a page from The Verge and reduce it from a husky 1.9MB to a still fat, but somewhat better 1.2MB.

Want to make sure the internet doesn’t see your site as damage it needs to route around? Check out developer Brad Frost’s article Prioritizing Performance in Responsive Design, which has a ton of great advice and links, including what I think is the most important thing developers can do: Treat Performance As Design. In other words, if your site isn’t svelte and fast, it’s not well designed no matter how pretty it might look.

[Note: It is not ironic to post about web page bloat on a page that is, arguably, pretty bloated.]

What if your web browser were also your phone? That’s a future being imagined by Mozilla, Ericsson and AT&T.

Mozilla has combined Firefox’s WebRTC support with Ericsson’s Web Communication Gateway and AT&T’s API Platform to put together a working demo of calls — both voice and video — and text messages all made from within Firefox.

Mozilla’s “WebPhone” is one part Skype, one part Apple’s Messages and all parts web.

The demo builds on previous Mozilla efforts like the recent WebRTC video calling demo with Google, as well as the Firefox Social API demo Mozilla showed off last year (the Social API provides the glue that brings your mobile contact info into Firefox in the video above).

Aside from the cool factor, web-based calling has a potentially huge benefit for users — no more need for your phone. Mozilla’s WebPhone concept would make it possible to call from any device and the person you’re calling would still see your info.

WebPhone also makes it easy to receive calls and messages anywhere. Anyone who’s ever used Apple’s Message app knows that it’s nice to get messages on the desktop, eliminating the need to track down your phone when you’re already in front of a screen. WebPhone would make it possible to not only get messages on whichever device you’re using, but take calls as well.

Indeed what’s most surprising about Mozilla’s WebPhone demo is that AT&T and Ericsson are involved since more than anything they’re participating in a vision of the future where they are little more than pipes for sending data.

If you happen to be in Barcelona Spain for the ongoing Mobile World Congress event you can check out a live demo of WebPhone at the Mozilla booth. For now the rest of us will have to settle for the demo video above.

Chrome for Android beta channel. Image: Scott Gilbertson

Starting today, you can install a beta channel release of Chrome for Android on any device running Android 4.0 or better. Note that it appears that you need to follow that link to get the beta channel release. Searching in the Google Play Store did not show the beta channel. The beta channel can be installed alongside the normal release channel.

The current release for the beta channel is Chrome 25, which is a significant update for the mobile version of Chrome, adding support for the new CSS Flexible Box Model syntax, dynamic viewport units (useful for responsive designs) and CSS calc(). The Android version of Chrome also gets the same updated IndexDB and CSS Filters support we looked at in the desktop release.

The beta channel release should also be a bit faster. The Chromium blog claims that improvements to the V8 JavaScript engine give the browser a 25 to 30 percent improvement on Google’s Octane benchmark tests.

The beta channel for Android offers some new tricks in Chrome’s developer tools, notably “big improvements in measuring your mobile performance with the Timeline’s frames mode.” Google also says it’s easier to navigate and edit your active scripts in the revamped Sources panel.

For more details on everything that’s new in the beta channel of Chrome for Android be sure to read through the Chromium blog’s announcement.

Image: Mozilla

To get the new year started Mozilla has released Firefox 18 for Android, which you can grab from the Google Play Store.

This release brings search suggestion to Firefox for Android, along with new phishing and malware protection. Once you opt-in to the new search suggestions, Firefox will — much like Google’s search page — start suggesting search terms as you type, making it faster to find what you’re after.

Like its desktop cousin, Firefox for Android will also now warn you whenever you visit a site that may be used for malware or phishing to protect users from malicious websites.

While Firefox 18 is a welcome upgrade for Android users, Mozilla has much more coming soon. The company recently posted a sneak peek at what’s in store for Firefox for Android in 2013.

The highlights include support for Private Browsing mode in the Android incarnation of Firefox. Private Browsing is getting an overhaul on the desktop side as well, with Firefox 20 expected to include a way to open Private Browsing tabs right alongside your normal tabs.

Presumably the new approach to Private Browsing will also ship with Firefox for Android, rather than the current, more cumbersome way of browsing privately, which requires hiding your current windows and opening an entirely new set of private windows.

Private Browsing is often dismissed as “porn mode,” but in truth there are plenty of uses beyond simply keeping your cookies and browsing history private. Think simultaneous logins, debugging with a “clean” visit to a site and anything else that requires separate cookies or sessions.

Next up on the Firefox for Android agenda is more device and language support. Unfortunately, the Mozilla blog doesn’t say which models might be added to the list of devices Firefox for Android supports, noting only that Mozilla is “bringing support for more devices all the time.”

The third sneak peek Mozilla is offering means more customization for Firefox on mobile — themes and more start page options will be coming soon.

Naturally, these three things aren’t the only changes due for Firefox for Android in 2013, but hopefully, now that the under-the-hood migration to native Android tools is done, Mozilla can focus its attention on new features and speed improvements.

Firefox OS’s lock screen, app screen and Twitter app. Image: Screenshot/Webmonkey

Mozilla has released version 1.0 of its Firefox OS Simulator, a new add-on for Firefox that makes it easy for web developers to start building apps for Mozilla’s coming mobile Firefox OS.

Despite the 1.0 status, Mozilla’s Hacks blog still refers to the Firefox OS Simulator as a “preview” — largely because Firefox OS itself is still in development. The Simulator, however, is much less buggy than the release I tested last month (and the problems with the Linux and Windows builds have been resolved).

If you’d like to get started building apps for Firefox OS, the Simulator now has an official page on Mozilla’s Add-Ons site. Once it’s installed and running you’ll get a preview of what Firefox OS will be like on a mobile device.

Locked out of Apple’s iOS due to the platform’s developer limitations and only recently beginning to create a truly competitive browser on Android, Mozilla’s long-term mobile plan is to create its own mobile operating system built entirely on open web technologies.

Although the company has since switched to the “Firefox OS” moniker, the original name, Boot2Gecko, neatly captures Mozilla’s take on the mobile operating system — essentially turning the Firefox web browser into an operating system.

That means building apps for Firefox OS is just like building apps for the web. HTML, CSS and JavaScript form the foundation and emerging web standards like WebRTC help bridge the gap between Firefox OS and device hardware.

To run the Simulator in Firefox open up the “Simulator Manager” by selecting the Firefox OS Simulator option in the Web Developer menu. Once the Simulator Manager is running you’ll see controls to start and stop the Simulator and a JS Console option to see any error messages as you build your app. If you need help getting started, this video from Mozilla walks you through the process step by step:

For more on how to get started using the Simulator and building apps for Firefox OS, see our earlier post as well as the Mozilla Hacks blog, especially the very thorough tutorial from Mozilla community member Luca Greco, who walks through nearly the entire process of building and testing an app on Firefox OS.

H.264 video in Firefox for Android. Image: Scott Gilbertson.

Mozilla has added support for the H.264 video codec to its Firefox for Android mobile web browser.

Right now support is limited to Android 4.1 (Jelly Bean) and Samsung phones running Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich). Mozilla is working to fix some bugs that currently prevent H.264 from working on other devices. Support for older Gingerbread and Honeycomb Android devices is still in the works.

This is the first time Mozilla has released a web browser with support for the popular H.264 codec. The company previously refused to support H.264, citing royalty and licensing concerns. Instead Mozilla touted Google’s WebM codec, which offers many of the benefits of H.264 in a royalty-free package. Unfortunately for Firefox fans WebM has failed to gain ground against H.264.

Adobe’s Flash Player plugin can also play H.264 video and, until Adobe decided to abandon Flash for Android, that was Mozilla’s solution for H.264 video in Firefox for Android.

With WebM adoption lagging and Flash for Android dead, Mozilla found itself in a bind. Some estimates claim up to 80 percent of video on the web is encoded in H.264, forcing Mozilla to choose between supporting H.264 on Android or leaving Firefox users with no way to watch video on mobile devices. Fortunately for Firefox users, Mozilla decided to be practical and support H.264.

Technically the new H.264 support is not a part of Firefox, rather the browser is tapping into Android’s underlying H.264 support to decode video. That means royalty payments are covered by hardware makers, not Mozilla.

I tested Firefox for Android’s H.264 on a Samsung Galaxy Nexus running Android 4.1 and for the most part H.264 video worked without issue. Some popular video sharing sites, however, appear to be doing OS/browser detection rather than feature detection — I’m looking at you Vimeo — which means that, even though your phone can play the video, Vimeo thinks it can’t.

Hopefully Vimeo and other sites doing the same thing will fix this soon because Mozilla is planning to bring the same H.264 support to the desktop. As with Firefox for Android, desktop Firefox won’t have its own decoder, but will rely on OS-level H.264 decoders. For end users though the result will be the same — video that just works.

Firefox OS’s home screen, dialer and web browser. Image: Screenshot/Webmonkey

Mozilla’s Firefox OS is still in the very early alpha stages, but if you’d like to test your apps in the latest version of the Simulator, head on over to the download page (note that there are known issues running the simulator on Linux and Windows XP).

Firefox OS is Mozilla’s answer to the question how does Firefox stay relevant in an increasingly mobile world? Locked out of Apple’s iOS due to the platform’s developer limitations and only recently beginning to create a truly competitive browser on Android, Mozilla’s long term mobile plan is to create its own mobile operating system built entirely on open web technologies.

Although the company has since switched to the “Firefox OS” moniker, the original name, Boot2Gecko, neatly captures Mozilla’s take on the mobile operating system — essentially turning the Firefox web browser into an operating system.

Applications built for Firefox OS use nothing more than web development tools — everything is made with HTML, CSS and JavaScript — which then run atop Firefox’s Gecko rendering engine.

To make it possible to create full-featured mobile apps with only HTML and other web tools, Mozilla is relying heavily on device-level APIs to tap into everything from dialing phone numbers to listing contacts, taking photos and getting Wi-Fi information. Not all of the APIs Firefox OS uses are web standards yet, though Mozilla has submitted most of them to the W3C for consideration.

Mozilla hardly has a monopoly on using web tools to build mobile apps; that was Apple’s original plan for iOS and it’s also exactly what tools like Phonegap or Cordova allow you to do for iOS, Android and other mobile platforms. The difference with Firefox OS is that you don’t need to package your app up in a native container — there’s no need for Phonegap and its ilk.

While Firefox OS may use familiar web development technologies and may run on the same Gecko engine that already powers the Firefox web browser, developers still need a way to test their apps in a mobile environment, which is where the Firefox OS Simulator comes in.

To get started with the Simulator, first open up the “Simulator Manager” by selecting the new Firefox OS Simulator option in the Firefox Web Developer menu. In the Simulator Manager you’ll find controls to start and stop the Simulator and a JS Console option to see any error messages as you develop.

For more on how to get started using the Simulator and building apps for Firefox OS, see the Mozilla Hacks blog, especially the very thorough tutorial from Mozilla community member Luca Greco, who walks through nearly the entire process of building and testing an app on Firefox OS.