Is Mozilla planning a Chromecast-style dongle running Firefox OS?
Images surfaced over the weekend of a prototype streaming dongle designed for TVs that runs on Mozilla’s Firefox OS – a device that would offer a “completely open” alternative to the likes of Chromecast, Roku and Apple TV.
Discovered by GigaOM, the stick appears to be compatible with a few existing apps in the video demo below. The above imagine was tweeted by Mozilla developer Christian Heilmann, which rather suggests this potential product is officially endorsed.
Perhaps most crucially though, it is totally open – which means that coders are able to replace the entire operating system on the stick if need be, or even the bootloader (the software that loads the OS). More practically, it means that the stick could eventually support standards like Chromecasting, Miracast and Apple screen mirroring at the same time – if the right software can be developed – which would make it the most useful stick on the market.
Sadly Mozilla were slightly reticent to comment on the existence of the stick, giving GigaOM this ambiguous statement:
“Firefox OS is an open platform freely available for any company to build on top of without restriction. This means companies can experiment with different form factors that run Firefox OS.”
So could we see a proper Firefox streaming stick in the future? Let’s hope so.
