What’s Cooking Up With Mozilla And Yahoo? Are They Over-Promise On Mobile

Posted on Mar 9 2012 - 11:00am by CONTRIBUTOR

Editor’s Note: Guest Author Pratibha is a technology enthusiast interested in analysing and reporting about different technologies.

Mozilla disclosed a plan last week to build a better mobile platform, attempting to influence its capability in Web browsers to compete with Android’s and iOS’ giant 77% market share. The program dubbed “Boot to Gecko” and announced at the big Mobile World Congress event in Barcelona. In essence, Mozilla is looking to make mobile app development more accessible to existing Web developers. Similarly, Yahoo announced its Web-standards based application platform called “Yahoo Cocktails.” these mobile application development and deployment platforms based on recent advancements in HTML5, JavaScript, and CSS – technologies that development teams and CIOs can use without either Mozilla’s or Yahoo’s input. While the propaganda around these platforms may sound compel, both platforms have a very long way to go to solve real-world mobile application challenges.

Now reality is that decisions technology leaders have to make now are much more dynamic that they were just five years ago. Our difficult decisions were about what browser version to support or whether we should build our web applications using Flash and also divergence of platforms and devices, along with the giants of the tech industry clamoring for us to use their development tools and deployment platforms. Many topics that come across with creating mobile applications are that the environment these applications have to live within is not simple, rather very complex. There are no good choices for enterprises needing to build across devices. Ironically, the world was a simpler place for developers when Microsoft owned 98% of the market

The prospective of Yahoo’s and Mozilla’s efforts are exciting– as well as those of Adobe, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Oracle, IBM and the open source communities.  But there is still a long way to go before we that promise turns into actual working enterprise software. Perchance one day, as an industry, we’ll finally fulfill that ideal of platform convergence while being able to respond to consumer divergence.

(Image Source: Firefox logo, Featured Image)

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