2 Firefox OS

2.1 Overview

As said before, Firefox OS is the open-source operating system targeting mobile devices that is being developed by Mozilla and based on Web technologies [Moz5]. All the apps in Firefox OS are Web pages, provided by a server or stored on the device, built using only Web technologies and, except when some special Javascript API are required, can also run in a Web browser.

To create an app from a previous Web page you only need a manifest file that stores some metadata about the app and an image to use as icon. The files demos/app/manifest.webapp and demos/app/icon.png, respectively a manifest and an icon, show these extra files needed to create an app for demos/app/index.html, a very basic static HTML page.

Although the Web was invented to share knowledge, today it is also used as a platform to create knowledge (e.g. Wikipedia) and in a near future significant part of the content created on the Web will be done using mobile devices. For science there are some Web authoring tools for publication on papers focus on desktop users but only a small number deals with math and none are optimized for mobile devices.

This lack of tools to deal with math can be addressed by a “Math Suite” that we describe in the next section followed by some of the demos written by the Mozilla MathML community.