Mozilla thinks the world needs yet another app store. But hey, if Google can have its Chrome Store, why wouldn’t there be one store for Firefox – Mozilla Marketplace. Guess that’s the reasoning behind their thinking and voila… they’re doing it, right from the floor of Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.
Interested developers will be able to submit their HTML5 and JavaScript-based apps, which should/will work across platforms and devices. Moreover, Mozilla will also provide its own set of APIs that will further enhance the capability of those apps. Speaking of which [APIs], they will be submitted to the W3C for standardization.
Finally, the Mozilla Web Apps platform comes with a new identity system for the Web that puts users in control of their content, tying apps to the user and not the device or platform.
Now this isn’t the first time we’re hearing about “write once, deploy everywhere” schemes (remember Java?), and even though this time it relies on the standard as open as HTML5, I’m not sure it will fly. For one thing, ever since I started using Google Chrome, I’m not firing-up Firefox that often. Not sure that counts for something, though…